It is always agreeable to offer congratulations to someone who is celebrating a jubilee. It is a particular pleasure to do so when the ‘child’ whose birthday it is can look back over 150 years of existence, and all those who have a share in the jubilee may reflect that the thanks for the achievements of the past and wishes for the future serve the cause of publicity. For no one who sets out to discuss the state of classical studies in Germany can, or should, fail to mention the Leipzig publishing firm of B. G. Teubner. Here publishing and scholarship have in the past century and a half formed an indissoluble partnership which has made it its duty to provide the best texts for use in the study of classical antiquity.

We were interested to read Dr. Bertha Tilly's recent article in Greeceand Rome. Such studies do much to infuse life into our ‘dead’ language, and help not only to bring reality to the student and throw light on Latin literature but to add interest to modern travel. We should like to add some further points on Terracina, which we recently visited. It provides a fascinating remnant of classical times, almost unaltered until this century, when the first truly successful draining of the Pomptine marshes took place.

In this paper I want to challenge a view of the Aeneid which I believe to be widespread, and indeed to have had the support of distinguished scholars. I could summarize it like this: The Aeneid has, of course, many great passages; indeed, over whole books, it reaches the heights of epic poetry—Bk. ii, The Fall of Troy; Bk. iv, Aeneas and Dido; Bk. vi, The Underworld; Bk. viii, Aeneas at the Site of Rome; Bk. xii, Aeneas and Turnus. But, on the whole, it is inferior in interest to the Iliad or the Odyssey; and the chief cause of this is the unsatisfactory nature of its hero. Aeneas, in short, ‘will not do’. Now it is no part of my purpose to try to set Virgil against Homer: that is a rash undertaking, and one against which we have a salutary warning. ‘It is easier’, we are told, ‘to take a cub from its she-bear than to take a single line from Homer.’ If that is so, what of the dangers of trying to take two whole poems? Instead, I wish to join issue on the character of Aeneas, while agreeing so far with his critics, that he is indeed vital to the whole poem—if you cannot understand and sympathize with Aeneas, you cannot understand the Aeneid. Virgil himself makes that clear in the first twenty lines, in which he strikes all the notes which are to be sustained throughout the poem.

To one nurtured on the pure and sustaining milk of Cicero and the Augustans, with an occasional dash of Tacitus and Juvenal for medicinal purposes, the writings of Apuleius come with something of the force of a knock-me-down. The very words are unfamiliar. Barrio is onomatopoeic enough to be guessed, but what does vispellio mean to anyone outside the legal profession? What of cambio? His is a strange language, highly artificial, with its borrowings from the Greek—myoparo, schedium, and naulum, which Juvenal took before him, for instance; with its echoes of Plautus—tuburdnor, scitulus, atticisso, capero, ientaculum, agaso, lurco, pollinctor, cincinnus, and examussim are all Plautine; with its diminutives, always a sign of artifice, as it was the sign of the Graecis-santes of Cicero's day—mellitula, tenella, centunculus, sdtulus spring to the mind; with comparatively unfamiliar literary words—tesca and blatero are both Horatian, but are very rare; and with his own occasional extensions of usage, as when he describes his horse as vector meus, or speaks of a kiss being given pressule, or seemingly coins subterlabere for ‘to slight’. But with this mannered artificiality goes the easy conversational idiom of the professional popular writer, evinced by his repeated use of commodum in the Metamorphoses to carry on the flow of ideas. Fuscis avibus or sinistro pede for ‘without luck’ are as artificial as the rest, but minimo minus for ‘almost’, or dicam an with the indicative for immo vero are surely conversational.

It is an axiom of modern linguistics that the form of any given word is much more constant than its meaning. It is true that linguistic communication would break down altogether unless it were accepted that some firm correlation existed between form and meaning. When the teacher uses the word chair all the listening pupils have some idea of what she means, so that the sound of the word is a meaningful linguistic signal to them all, yet the possible variation of the shades of meaning it can evoke is enormous, e.g. not only (to take a random, selection) can it refer to an article of household furniture of various types, shapes, sizes, and materials, but to the presiding over a meeting, a professorial appointment, a physical action, &c. When contrasted with the more or less constant form of the word chair, the variation and complexity of its meaning is staggering, for whereas the form of the word chair is subject to change only within a strictly limited phonetic, morphemic, and syntactical range, the range of variation in its meaning is as extensive as the variation in the situations in respect of which it is used.

In the Gallic War Caesar mentions rather less than fifty Roman soldiers by name. Naturally the names of his legati occur most frequently, though he does not always give the rank. Eight, possibly nine, are centurions, and one is the standard-bearer of the Fourteenth Legion. None is a legionary soldier, though we know the name of one, Lucanius, because his father, a senior centurion, Q. Lucanius, was killed trying to rescue him in the disaster at Atuatuca. There are certain surprising omissions. For example, we are not told the name of the standard-bearer of the Tenth Legion, whose gallantry rallied the faltering troops at the first landing in Britain. Surely Caesar knew the name of this distinguished man in his crack legion. One officer, P. Considius, receives an unenviable mention. He made a mistake. Perhaps in extenuation, or in regret, Caesar remarks that he had won a good reputation under Sulla and Crassus.

KhushhalKhan, hereditary Khan of the Khatak tribe of Pathans, lived from a.d. 1613 to 1689. For the first half of his long life Khushhal enjoyed the favour, and in some degree the friendship, of the Mogul Emperor Shah Jehan, whose feudatory he was and to whose state he did some service. But in 1658 Aurarigzeb succeeded to the throne, having defeated and deposed his father. With that Khushhal's fortunes began to decline, and in 1664 he was arrested, clapped in irons, and sent down into Hindustan, where he spent five weary years in captivity. Having somehow procured his release, he laid himself out for revenge, and began to play a part not unlike that of William Wallace or Owen Glendower. The rebellion which he fomented by his pen and furthered by his sword can be counted as not least among the causes which on the death of Aurangzeb brought about the dramatic downfall of the Great Moguls. This in turn opened the way for the East India Company to become the paramount power in India.

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.