This salutary series got off to a flying start with W. F. Witton's article upon a subject in bad need of treatment—the gerund and gerundive. Textbooks and grammars, when discussing the use of ‘gerundive attraction’, waver, through many shades of loosely expressed opinion, from a prudent silence to a complete prohibition of the use of this construction when it involves a genitive plural with nouns of the first and second (or sometimes all) declensions. The basis of this prohibition is the allegedly ugly sound of -arum -arum and -orum -orum. In connexion with this construction Witton not only perpetuated a heresy but confirmed it in clear and forthright language. He concludes his discussion with this statement: ‘Thus we arrive at the rule that in normal Latin the gerund does not govern an accusative unless for the purpose of retaining the distinctive neuter termination, as in aliquid agendo, or to avoid a sequence of genitive plurals: consiliorum tuorum cognoscendorum causa was too much of a mouthful even for Cicero.’ Let us now see what is Cicero's practice in reality.

The Aeneid, like the Iliad, opens with a seven-line paragraph. The question arises: is this paragraph also a single sentence, consisting of the first three words arma uirumlque cano as main sentence, with all the rest forming one long relative clause of six and a half lines, introduced by qui in line 1, and organized round the one indicative verb apart from cano, namely, uenit in line 2? A glance at the editions confirms that we have a problem here. Everyone agrees on commas after cano, superum, iram, passus and of course on a full stop after Romae. The uncertainties arise after litora and after Latio. Whereas Sidgwick (1890) and Page (1894) put commas at both these points, Mynors (1969), followed both by Austin (1971) and R. D. Williams (1972) puts a comma after litora, but a semicolon after Latio, while Hirtzel (1900) puts a dash at both points. What difference does it make?

In 1695, in the last decade of his literary activity, Dryden borrowed (as he tells us) two months from his Virgil, and published a prose translation of the Latin poem De Arte Graphicâ by the Frenchman, Charles Dufresnoy; and to it he prefixed his well-known essay, ‘A Parallel betwixt Painting and Poetry’. Among Dryden's critical writings, this may justly be regarded as the worst. Here Swift's jibe about the Prefaces seems to be justified—how they were

meerly writ at first for filling,

To raise the Volume's Price, a Shilling.

Every literary language differs more or less from the spoken language. Most of the ancient Greek that is studied today is written in a literary language. Yet the student should not ignore pronunciation. In a society that did not practise silent reading sound mattered for prose as well as for verse. Accentuation deserves as much attention as any other feature, if the attempt is made to accustom the ear to the sound of a language. Blass, Postgate, and others have discovered a great deal about the accentuation of ancient Greek. More recently the evidence has been collected and the main conclusions stated by E. H. Sturtevant in The Pronunciation of Greek and Latin.

Pindos, the mountain range between Thessaly and Epeiros, is not without renown. It appears first in Pindar (Pythian ix. 15), where in its ‘storied dells’ Kreousa gave birth to Hypseus by the love of the river-god Peneios. It, or more likely the town of the same name in Doris, was known to Pindar (Pythian i. 66) as the home of the Dorians, and it appears in Aeschylus and Sophokles—in the former (Supp. 257) as the north-western boundary of Pelasgos' realm, in the latter (Fr. 249) as the source of the Acheloos. Kallimachos, Theokritos, and Orpheus refer to it, and in Latin it is at least as old as Virgil. We find it in Horace, Propertius, Ovid, Lucan, Silius, and Valerius Flaccus,3 and in the course of antiquity it acquired a reputation as a lofty, wooded mountain which persists in Claudian and through the Dark Ages. Once more it is the setting for an amour of Apollo; Paion's mother, Liagore, receives leech-craft as the price of her favours (Faerie Queene, iii. 4. 41); and the same Spenser praised the whiteness of its snow (Prothalamian, 40). Wordsworth, as he wondered at the torrent at the Devil's Bridge, asked:

‘Hath not Pindus fed thee, where the band Of Patriots scoop their freedom out, with hand Desperate as thine?’

and it was about the Pindos range that, in 1940, another band of patriots repelled the Italian invasion of their country and won the first Allied victory of World War II.

‘He is always enthusiastic, almost invariably cheerful, and amiable, and quite correct. One can well imagine how a sunny-tempered man of elegant tastes and universal humanity must have won easily the regard of a great number of friends’; so E. T. Merrill wrote of Pliny over a century ago. Such sentiments on the ebullient style and sunny personality of Pliny have perdured for decades, even up to the present. And why not? A reputation for optimism and even naiveté should not be so easily overcome for one who admits to a weakness for praising his friends too excessively (Ep. 7.28) and writes an entire letter for the sole purpose of demonstrating his unwillingness to say anything negative about someone (8.22.4). The Panegyricus, with its periods of fulsome praise and hopefulness, presents no reason to alter Pliny's image as a cheerful optimist.

The fourth Eclogue presents itself explicitly as a political poem, a loftier intervention in the humble world of pastoral poetry (4.1–3). This grander type of pastoral, moreover, is singled out as possessing a specifically Roman political significance: these ‘woods’ are to be ‘worthy of a consul’ (silvae sint consule dignae, 3), and the coming Golden Age is set within a precisely identifiable political context, the consulship of C. Asinius Pollio in 40 bc (te consule, 4.11). Beyond that, however, the details of the relationship between the miraculous child, whose growth to maturity will be accompanied by the fabulous portents of the new era, and the contemporary political setting at Rome are left tantalizingly, perhaps prudently, vague. It was no doubt with a view to promoting his own political interests that Pollio's son, ‘the rash and ambitious Asinius Gallus’, claimed to have been the original puer of Virgil's poem. If so, he was very far from being the last public figure to appropriate the resounding cadences of the fourth Eclogue to endorse his own position: it was not long before (in Harry Levin's words) ‘The Pollio eclogue had virtually created a minor genre, a means for the court poet to flatter his sovereign, as well as a device for balancing the moderns against the ancients.’ But even before the opportunistic assertions of Pollio's son, the poem's prophecies of a new age had already been re-appropriated to tie down the oracular generalities of the eclogue to a particular individual and a definite set of political circumstances, in a move that was to have significant repercussions for the later fortunes of Virgil's essay in pastoral panegyric.

Most of us are aware that Rome possessed a harbour town at the mouth of the Tiber and that the ruins of the town are well worth a visit; but how many of us know the story of Ostia, the extraordinary interest attaching to it, the information it supplies on the economic life of Rome, and the great difficulties the Roman engineers had to face in constructing a really serviceable harbour ? Ostia lies about 20 miles from Rome, and for us, thinking in terms of motor-cars and trains, it is far from easy to imagine and to realize how long and difficult this journey must have seemed in the earliest times when the Romans first sought to establish connexion with the coast—not to speak of the dangers to which a traveller in those days must have been exposed. On arrival, we see the far-stretching ruins of the city lying before us in deep silence, for not merely its inhabitants have left Ostia but the sea and the river as well. The tawny Tiber, carrying down sand from the mountains, is the chief cause of the coastline shifting yearly no less than nine yards farther away; the river too has changed its bed and, in doing so, deprived Ostia of the last vestiges of her former greatness.

It was towards the close of his life in 43 B.c. that Cicero wrote the three books of the de Officiis. The attractions of a philosophical treatise whose theme is moral duty are likely to appear slight to the modern reader, especially if that reader thinks its author to be merely the purveyor of second-hand ideas borrowed from Greek sources. Yet the de Officiis epitomizes, in an intensely Roman way, the political beliefs and ideals of the Senatorial order at Rome as the Republic finally succumbed to autocracy. The political philosophy of the ancients may be more immediately relevant today than their ethical speculation, for, while it is folly to interpret political activity as if the Roman Republic enjoyed a two-party system composed of left-wing populates and right-wing optimates, it is true that much of the turmoil generated during the last century of the Republic was related to proposals for agrarian reform and the redistribution of land; similarly, much of the debate currently being conducted between supporters of the rival ideologies is centred about the ownership of property and assets. Perhaps we may be encouraged to survey the de Officiis more sympathetically if we approach it as political scientists and as students of this subject mindful of the writings of another ancient, the historian Thucydides, and his opinion that, human nature being a constant, situations will repeat themselves in the same or a very similar form.

Stage properties in Greek tragedy are used economically, a fact which enhances the significance of their dramatic function. Oliver Taplin has amply demonstrated how their appearance on stage is not an adventitious means of lending life to a character or situation but rather a device by which the dramatist underlines some essential aspect of the scene in which they occur or theme in the play as a whole. Economy of props in tragedy is in marked contrast with their multiplicity in Aristophanic comedy. When it comes, therefore, to interpreting the poet's artistic intention in a particular tragedy, the props list may prove a useful critical instrument, as I hope will be evident from this study of their use in Euripides' Electra.

It has long been fashionable to believe that the Romans had little conception of natural beauty, and to assume that any sympathetic awareness of nature which they displayed could be accounted for in terms of their moral or utilitarian preconceptions. The moral relationship which in much of classical Greek literature was assumed to exist between man and nature had been reflected in and strengthened by the philosophical theories of Plato and, later, the Stoics. Yet this conception was already an anachronism by the time of the appearance of Lucretius' theory of Voluptas, and appears to have been progressively weakened in the later Republic and early Empire until in Ovid natural processes become the mere backcloth of human activity and emotion. Professor Segal has recently illustrated the employment of nature by Ovid as a literary symbol for the reflection of human emotion, and earlier work had revealed the emotional and moral attitudes to nature of Virgil and other poets, but it is questionable whether awareness of natural beauty as such, unalloyed by moral or emotional symbolism, is to be detected in Roman poetry, much less in Roman prose writing. This view may be supported by a careful scrutiny of Roman literature, where the reader will find it difficult to locate any obvious similarity to some of the commonest modern reactions to natural beauty; and further practical confirmation of this attitude may perhaps be derived from the apparent disdain of the Roman road-builders for any of those concessions to natural contours made by twentieth-century rural conservationists.

One might easily say that the Tale of Troy was the most famous in the Western world. Already in the days of the earliest European literature it furnishes the background of half its drama and poetry. Homer alone would confer immortality on his epic theme, and all through ancient and medieval times Troy provided motives for every kind of art. And yet can one to-day say that the legend and the way in which literature has handled it are familiar to the general reader? Is even the Iliad, whether in the original Greek or in translation, known at first hand to more than a small minority? Perhaps, then, it is not superfluous to look back over the literary history of some 3,000 years and see by what channels this celebrated theme has come down to us.

It is probably still true to say that the satires of Juvenal's last two books, apart from the tenth, continue to suffer an undeserved popular neglect (using that phrase in a somewhat special sense by virtue of which it may permissible to suggest that, say, the Odes of Horace or the Amoves of Ovid do not suffer ‘popular neglect'). Certainly, one recent critical work on Roman satire contains no analysis of any of the Juvenal satires later than the sixth. Satires 11–15, and obviously not 16, do not generally receive the supreme accolade of being ‘set’ by the examiners for the Advanced level of the G.C.E.; they occasionally do not feature even in university examinations. There has indeed been no lack of recent scholarly interest in the later satires, but it would be optimistic to believe that that interest is good evidence for the poems’ actually being more generally, or more attentively, read.

Peter Bruegel's The Fall of Icarus—his only painting with a mythological subject—has long been seen as an allegory: Charles de Tolnay has shown how Bruegel took the details which he found in Ovid and used them, contrary to the accepted tradition of his time, to contrast the futility of Icarus' venture with the solid worth of the peasant labourer's life. Ovid, like Bruegel's contemporaries (for the most part), emphasized the wonder and novelty of the flight: the people in his landscape stopped in the middle of their tasks to wonder at the god-like beings who flew so effortlessly above them:

hos aliquis tremula dum captat harundine pisces aut pastor baculo stivave innixus arator vidit et obstipuit, quique aethera carpere possent credidit esse deos.