On two sides productive work for the understanding of Aeschylean tragedy has lately been done. Cambridge scholars have made useful progress in the elucidation of Aeschylus, and recent new interpretations of the symbolic and prophetic meaning of later poetry, including the New Testament, have produced results which can be applied with caution to tragic poetry in general. A combination of the methods of these investigators, which yet does not abandon all the estimates of older criticism, may, by a slight change of perspective, enable further progress in the interpretation of Aeschylus to be made.

Juvenal's sixth Satire begins with a prologue describing the Golden Age which, for the light it sheds both on ancient attitudes to the Saturnian myth and on the Juvenalian concept of satire, is sufficiently important to justify extended analysis, an analysis that may begin with a reference to a discussion by Professor W. S. Anderson, who sums up the meaning of the first twenty lines of the satire: ‘Juvenal represents man's degeneracy through a double withdrawal: that of mankind from direct relation with Nature, that of the goddess Pudicitia from the earth.’ The age of Saturn, therefore, represents a moral ideal from which civilized man has degenerated. However, Anderson sees a certain ambiguity in the satirist's attitude to the Golden Age, particularly to the women of the Golden Age: ‘The attitude toward the aboriginal woman was ambivalent. She was morally upright, physically uncouth.’ There is respect for her ‘stern moral attitudes’ but a realization that her ‘stern dishevelled aspect is not at all alluring’

Arma virumque cano Virgil sang, or professed to sing, at the start of his epic, and one may reformulate the import of his programmatic words to fit a new context. Obtaining weapons he can call his own is very often a key moment near the start of the career of a folk-tale hero. And very often it is the hero's mother who equips him with them. Paradoxically, this truth may be confirmed, e contrario, by reference to the Welsh story of Lleu Llaw Gyffes from the Mabinogion, for, in that narrative, the hero's mother Aranhry seeks to thwart at its inception the career of her son – whom she had exposed, since his very existence causes her so much embarrassment – by placing a Destiny or interdiction upon him: he will never bear arms unless and until she herself bestows them. The ban is circumvented by a cunning ruse: the magician Gwydion disguises her son and himself as peripatetic bards, in which capacity they are entertained in Aranhry's castle. When Gwydion conjures up a phantom army and fleet to besiege the citadel, the alarmed Aranhry is all too ready to bestow weapon and armour on the younger of her two guests – only to find the army vanished and her own son in possession of the arms she had sworn he would not bear.

Aristotle's Poetics has centuries of tradition behind it as a substitute for first-hand appreciation in dramatic criticism, and this work has lent colour to the old view that the characters of Greek tragedy were all ‘idealized types’ in a performance in which the plot was the thing. This is because Aristotle explicitly puts plot above character in his list of the essentials of a tragedy, and when he comes to treat of character has little to say which appeals to us. But the pure tragic drama of human feeling depends entirely on its success in eliciting sympathy with its characters. Of this art Sophocles, like Shakespeare, is the acknowledged champion. Aeschylus is inspired to ‘justify the ways of God to man’, Euripides is concerned to question the ways of man to his neighbour. When Aeschylus added characterization to his loftier qualities, he produced in the Agamemnon the greatest play ever written, but we do not suspect his ‘Prometheus’ of character drawing any more than Shelley's. And in Euripides, as sometimes in Shaw, the characters are so under the thumb of the theories that we forget to take much personal interest in them. But in Sophocles we are not distracted by the prophet or the propagandist, and we can let his pathetic, human people stir in us their own hopes and sorrows.

One of Xenophon's chief aims in Memorabilia is to defend his beloved teacher from charges raised both during and after his trial. Some readers have thought that he has gone so far in whitewashing Socrates that the resulting portrait makes it impossible to explain the hostility he aroused: Socrates appears here merely as an innocuous friend offering good advice on all sorts of mundane subjects. But the apologetic strategies employed by Xenophon are more complex and subtle than that. The widespread view of him as a simple-minded defender of conventional attitudes blinds us to the places where he speaks with a different, more radical voice. We should not be surprised to find that the enthusiastic student of Socrates, one of the most radical and unconventional thinkers of ancient Greece, has some radical thoughts of his own.

These notes were compiled for a lecture to the grocersapos; assistants and apprentices of Liverpool, early in 1910, but have been revised and somewhat elaborated.

Let us begin by defining our subject. What are Groceries? The con-tents of a grocerapos;s shop are various, and some are common to grocersapos; shops and more special establishments. Some of these (1) are perhaps not strictly ‘groceries’ at all, (2) are absent from early lists of groceries; e.g. tea and coffee, which formerly had their own ‘warehousemen’, and this process of encroachment and regrouping still goes on. What then are the sources and the purposes of all these? Every business of supply is a matter of adapting means to ends. The ends are not set by the business man, but by the public, the customers. The means also are not created by the business man; they exist, or are made, elsewhere and among other peoples. The business man is the middleman who organizes the supply to meet the demand for something which the consumer either cannot supply for himself or only at a disproportionate and therefore unbusiness-like effort.

In looking, therefore, at the early history of what was to become a ‘grocery’ business, we are asking three questions: as to the purposes which groceries serve, the sources which fulfil them, and the methods by which the ‘grocer’ adjusts supply to demand. In a modern grocer's shop, then, we may classify its contents in respect of the purposes which they serve, and the means which fulfil these ends.

In view of the prominence given to different versions of the Helen legend in Greek literature, it is not out of place to look once more at Homer's presentation of Helen. For a fresh analysis may serve to explain more fully the way in which the tradition developed out of the subtle characterization that Homer had created in the Iliad and Odyssey. Homer describes Helen partly by introducing her directly into the action and letting her speak on the scene, partly by recording remarks and opinions about her, and partly by drawing contrasts with other characters.

Apollonius' Jason has been variously described by scholars as a ‘weak and insignificant hero’, a ‘tame and insipid’ character compared with that of Medea, ‘discreet, proper, quite weak, and somewhat colourless’, ‘never quite equal to the emergency, and can never rise above his immediate troubles’, ‘cold and selfish’, ‘uninteresting when he is not repellent’, an anti-hero, and a love-hero. But, with the exception of R. Hunter's view of Jason as a human being forced by necessity to carry out tasks which no Homeric hero was ever called upon to do, most scholars have erred in comparing the Hellenistic hero Jason with the archetypal hero of epic tradition.

Cicero's grandfather is credited with the observation that the better a Roman knew Greek the bigger a scoundrel he was. Nevertheless one of his sons, Lucius, belonged to a circle that knew quite a lot of Greek and another, Marcus, certainly gave his own children a Greek education. Marcus, the father of the orator, seems to have shared the prevailing view that one had either a Greek education or none at all. Indeed, in 92, when Cicero was fourteen years old, the newly established Roman schools of rhetoric were closed down by the censors Crassus and Domitius, Crassus' reason, according to Cicero, being that the Roman schools were a travesty of their Greek exemplars: ‘nam apud Graecos, cuicui modi essent, uidebam tamen esse praeter hanc exercitationem linguae doctrinam aliquam et humanitate dignam scientiam, hos uero nouos magistros nihil intellegebam posse docere, nisi ut auderent.’ Amongst these schools was that of L. Plotius Gallus, who seems before the closure to have attracted a fair number of pupils.

For the Greeks, athletics occupied the place in life which in the modern world is taken by football and cricket. Ball games were not unknown to the Greeks, as two famous reliefs in Athens show, but literature is silent about them, while it abounds in allusions and metaphors drawn from athletics—running, jumping, boxing, wrestling, and throwing the javelin and discus. Their popularity continued for many centuries: we read of them in Homer; even the unathletic St. Paul cannot avoid frequent metaphors drawn from the games; and the great athletic festivals were discontinued only when, in the fourth century a.d., the Christian Roman emperors put an end to them as pagan rites.

It was Minoan writing that led Arthur Evans to Crete. In Greek antique shops and elsewhere he had seen certain stone signets, each with three or four facets inscribed with what he felt sure were characters of some prehistoric system of writing (cf. Suppl. PL CLXXVII (a)); they were alleged to come from Crete. After a visit to that island in 1894 to collect further evidence he was able to recognize, besides these ‘hieroglyphs’, a later and more linear type of writing occasionally scratched on vessels of pottery or stone from prehistoric sites in Greece and Crete. In a long article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies for 1894 he hazarded some remarkable conclusions from this scanty evidence: that although the ‘hieroglyphs’ probably concealed a pre-Greek language, the later, linear script might have been used for writing Greek; and that this linear script was a syllabary somehow related to the syllabary used in Cyprus in historical times as an alternative to the Greek alphabet. He was right on both points; but paradoxically his excavations at Knossos, begun in 1900 in pursuit of the origins and history of these scripts, led him gradually farther from the truth. Within the first week of digging he had begun to unearth clay tablets written in what he later dubbed ‘Linear B’ script (cf. Suppl. Pis. CLXXVIII (a), (b), CLXXIX and CLXXX (a)); and they were associated with objects at once identified as belonging to the Mycenaean civilization known from mainland Greece since Schliemann's excavations in the 1870'8. Further exploration, however, revealing the earlier stages of the civilization of Knossos, made it necessary to distinguish a distinct ‘Minoan’ civilization, in many ways a parent of the Mycenaean. Evans saw this civilization more and more as continuous, and as non-Greek. The corollary of this would be that the hieroglyphic script and the two linear scripts that succeeded it (for he now recognized an intermediate stage—‘Linear A’ (cf. Suppl. PI. CLXXVII (cj)—as well as the Linear B of his Knossos tablets)—all represented one non-Greek ‘Minoan’ language.

Field events are notoriously the Cinderellas of the athletic world, and this was as true in antiquity as in our own day. The Greeks practised three, long jump, discus, and javelin, and in their festivals did not accord them the status of separate events but grouped them, together with a foot race and wrestling, which were also solo events in their own right, in the pentathlon. This was first included in the Olympic programme in 708 b.c.; other festivals imitated Olympia, and, with the astonishing conservatism of the Greek athletic world, the pentathlon remained unchanged until the disappearance of the festivals a thousand years later.

Anaxagoras was a man of one book; and that book, save for a few quotations in other authors and several summaries, is lost. A very potent and tantalizing book it must have been, to judge from all that we hear of it; the opinion of antiquity, preserved in Diogenes Laertius, was that its doctrines were expounded ‘in a pleasant and lofty style’, and the fragments which remain confirm this judgement. It was not merely a philosophical or scientific treatise; it was a work of art, in which the style rose and fell with the subject-matter.

I

We are often told nowadays that the whole business of war, especially command and administration, is becoming increasingly difficult and complicated as more and more different weapons, each more highly specialized than the last, are brought into service. But the undoubted truth of this contention must not lead us into the error of supposing that ancient warfare was a simple matter between forces composed of nothing but infantry and cavalry. Many of the battles of antiquity, indeed, are made more interesting by the presence of unusual and intriguing armaments; and though some of these may now seem largely obsolete, it does not do to be too sure—was not the Home Guard armed with pikes in its early infancy?

Let us consider, then, the parade state of Antiochus’ army at the battle of Magnesia. After his defeat at Thermopylae in April 191, it will be remembered, he had fled to Ephesus, and by the end of the following year he was ready for the Scipios with an army of 70,000 men. ‘Most of the peoples of the Empire were represented, from Dahae horse-archers of the Caspian to Arabs mounted on dromedaries. It was strong in cavalry—at least 12,000 horse, light or “cataphract”—in light-armed infantry … archers, slingers and javelin men; it included, besides 54 elephants, that engine of war dear to the Ancient East, the dreaded scythed-chariots.’

Here, surely, is a sufficiently varied assortment of nationalities and armaments to show that manifold alliances and specialized equipments are not peculiar to the twentieth century.