This article is chiefly concerned with a well-known passage of that extraordinary miscellany, the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus, in which the author follows his usual habit of illustrating a thesis by quoting from comedy. In the pages considered here (vi. 267e–270a) he draws his examples from a series of plays now lost—the Plutuses of Cratinus, the Beasts of Crates, the Amphictyons of Telecleides, the Miners and Persians attributed to Pherecrates, the Sirens of Nicophon, and the Thurio-Persians of Metagenes. This string of quotations, full of cookery-book vocabulary, constitutes our main evidence about the comic poets' treatment of the theme of the land of Cockaigne, Schlaraffenland, the idler's or glutton's paradise. On the basis of this evidence many sweeping generalizations on this subject have been made, some of them so wide of the mark that it may perhaps be worth while to attempt one more review of a passage already often discussed, in the hope of arriving at a fresh assessment of its true significance.

Discussion of such a passage usually involves study of the extracts cited, and leads on to the hazardous business of trying to form some conception of the plays from which they are drawn. But before one follows this well-trodden path there is a more general question to be considered, the answer to which may give some guidance on the way. What is it that Athenaeus' quotations illustrate? The speaker in this part of the symposium, the philosopher Democritus of Nicomedia, has been discoursing about servants, and has already cited the Savages of Pherecrates to show that there was a time when people had no slaves, but did all their own work (263 b).

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.

The Classical Association was founded in December 1903 in the Botany Lecture Theatre of University College, London. University College has invited the Association to celebrate its Jubilee there from 7 to 10 April 1954. Invitations have been received from the University, King's College, and Westminster School to hold part of the functions in their buildings and a special exhibition of new books is being arranged by the University Library. In connexion with the Jubilee an appeal is being issued to members with the object of raising a small working capital to avoid the necessity of increasing the subscription, which in spite of growing membership no longer produces enough to cover the increased cost of printing and provides no margin for extra activities.

It is hoped that the Hon. Secretary, Professor L. J. D. Richardson, will give the opening lecture on the history of the Association. Headings will clearly be: the foundation of local branches in this country and of parallel associations in the Commonwealth, the establishment of the Association's three journals, the institution of school reading competitions, and the excellent work done by the Education Sub-Committee. During its fifty years of life the Association has endeavoured to fulfil the objects laid down in the rules. Two recent activities are designed particularly ‘to encourage investigation and call attention to new discoveries’ and ‘to create opportunities for friendly intercourse’, viz. participation in the Joint Committee of Greek and Roman Societies, which runs the successful triennial meetings at Oxford and Cambridge, and membership of the International Federation of Classical Studies, whose next conference will be in Copenhagen in August 1954.

Servius in his note on Aeneid iv. 92 comments that Virgil uses the epithet Saturnia of Iuno only ‘when she is about to do mischief, for he knows that the planet Saturn has a baleful influence’. An astrological interpretation of Virgil is doubtless interesting, but if, as none will question, Virgil is a poet before he is an astrologer, the only satisfactory explanation of an epithet is one that elucidates its poetic significance. An examination of Virgil's use of the epithet Saturnia does, I think, make it clear both that the epithet has poetic significance and that its significance is intimately bound up with Iuno's role in the poem. Her intervention in the action of the Aeneid determines that action in a way that distinguishes it from the interventions of the various gods and goddesses in the actions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and even from the interventions of other gods in the Aeneid itself. Venus behaves in the Aeneid in much the same way as the Homeric gods and goddesses do. She is at hand to perform little miracles for her son, as Athena was at hand to help Odysseus or Telemachus. Now it is a striking fact that the epithets used of Venus in the Aeneid have no special significance. On twenty-one occasions she is referred to as Venus without an epithet, once she is Venus aurea, and four times she is Cytherea. These are all conventional, and agree well with the conventional nature of Venus' intervention in the action.

Although the last phase of Republican Rome is so familiar to us, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus remains a figure rather than a man. His was the statue beneath which the murdered Caesar fell, and he is still for most of us the figure in the background: Shakespeare passed him by. His vast fame has left the man himself remote.

It was his tragedy that he could not read the writing on the wall. It was partly clouded for him, as all things gradually became clouded, by the deepening shadow of his own portentous greatness. With his solid abilities, too, he had not a streak of genius or political insight. History can show few worse statesmen. He became the chief agent of the doomed Republic without realizing that it was doomed, and lived quite uninspired by that republican idea which animated men so different as Cicero and the younger Cato.

If he had not been outclassed, and defeated in battle, and finally eclipsed, by Julius Caesar, he could have lived in history as the Roman Empire's mightiest architect. He claimed with some reason to have subdued three continents. If not a great general, he was certainly a very good one, and in his younger days he could always get the best out of his soldiers. He was, above all, a good organizer. His campaign against the Mediterranean pirates, whom he swept from the seas in three months, was an unqualified triumph.

He was stabbed to death at Pelusium by hangers-on of the Egyptian court 2,000 years ago on 29 September.

AT the beginning of the twentieth century in Denmark, as in many other countries, the secondary school (since 1903 called ‘gymnasium’) underwent a fundamental reform. Until that time the secondary-school period had been six years, and Latin had been a subject in it. All pupils had to learn Latin for four years. The last two school-years the pupils could choose between two sides: a linguistic-historical one, with much Latin and Greek (the Greek course being of four years), and a scientific one, a division which was due to J. N. Madvig, the famous Danish latinist, whose influence on the practical organization of Danish schools was enormous through the greater part of the nineteenth century (he was for many years Inspector of Schools and for some years also Minister of Education). By the new law of 1903 the teaching of Latin and Greek was greatly reduced. The gymnasium got at that time the structure which it retains to this day: after a four years' middle school there is a three years' gymnasium, divided into three sides: classics (with Latin and Greek), modern languages (with English and German culture and language), and scientific (with mathematics and science). At the time when this organization of the gymnasium was carried through, the leading spirits of the reform (among whom again a well-known latinist, M. Cl. Gertz, was a primus motor) clearly saw that it would be an irreparable loss if the university men of the future were without the slightest knowledge of antiquity and its importance to modern European culture. Therefore, when they planned the scheme of the gymnasium, they introduced for all pupils of the secondary school one lesson a week throughout the three years which was to be consecrated to Greek literature and art. It was at once made an independent subject in the gymnasium, with marks, examinations, etc., as all other subjects.

From the Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century the teaching of Latin in England emphasized grammar and the formal aspects of language at the expense of subject-matter and of the general background of civilization. The tradition continued into the twentieth century and is still not dead. Protests against this formalizing and grammaticizing of a potentially liberal subject have been made regularly, at least from Elyot onwards. ‘By what time he [the pupil] cometh to the most sweet and pleasant reading of old authors, the spark of fervent desire of learning is extinct with the burthen of grammar’ (Governour, Book I. x). Milton, in the Tractate, writes: ‘Language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known.… We do amiss to spend seven or eight years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek as might be learnt easily and delightfully in one year’ (ed. Morris, p. 5). Locke makes a similar complaint (Thoughts, para. 165 ff.). During England's classical age protests were fewer; for the end—familiarity with Latin and Greek literature (or rather with a fairly narrow selection of it)—was so desirable that it justified the means, however unpleasant. In the nineteenth century the volume of protest grew again and was reinforced by the partisans of science; notably Spencer and Huxley. But the linguistic tradition was strengthened rather than weakened, at least for the time being; for its supporters, rationalizing their prejudices in the face of attack, conjured up the various mental-training arguments which ever since have confused the whole issue of the value of Latin in education.

The medical literature of the Greeks from the classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods is very full and of inexhaustible interest for the history of science, but its public, even among scholars, is small, particularly in Great Britain. On the theoretical and technical side independent study is likely to remain the preoccupation of a few, but on the practical and human side there is abundant material of historical and social interest that deserves to be more widely known. Among that material the present article is concerned only with the evidence from the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., the first age of scientific medicine among the Greeks. Some is to be found in commonly read authors, such as Plato, but for fuller details the only contemporary source of much value is the Corpus Hippocraticum, the mixed collection of medical writings from these centuries which has reached us under the name of Hippocrates, but in fact contains treatises, essays, pamphlets, and notes by the most various authors, as their styles and contents show.

For English readers by far the most useful edition of any large part of the Corpus is the four volumes of the Loeb Hippocrates—i, ii, and iv by Dr. W. H. S. Jones, and iii by Dr. E. T. Withington, containing the surgical books. But this is not exhaustive; for the complete Corpus the most recent edition is still the ten volumes of Émile Littré, Œuvres complètes d'Hippocrate (Paris, 1839–61). This, like the Loeb, has translations opposite the text, introductions, and a few illustrations; it is now a rare book and still valuable in spite of its age.

Every country has its heroes, legendary or historical, who are remembered for some noble action that has caught the popular imagination and made their names immortal. Among the Romans, just as Fabricius was the type of incorruptibility, Decius Mus of devotion to country, Regulus of faith to the pledged word, so the name of Lucretia was proverbial for chastity. The story of her suicide after she had been violated by Sextus Tarquin is recounted by the historians Livy, Dionysius, and Diodorus, and alluded to by many Roman poets and prose-writers. But apart from such allusions, it is curious that of all the Roman poets whose works have come down to us none save Ovid has treated her story at any length; moreover, there is apparently no representation of her among the extant remains of Roman art. To painters and poets of later times, however, she made a strong appeal. In the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, for example, there is the famous painting by Titian; and in our own literature Chaucer sang the praise of ‘the verray wyf, the verray trewe Lucresse’ in his Legend of Good Women, Gower included her in the seventh book of his Confessio Amantis, Shakespeare in his youth composed that highly coloured arabesque The Rape of Lucrece, Thomas Heywood turned the story into a tragic drama, and most recently Benjamin Britten has made it the subject of an opera.

That Ovid found in Lucretia an attractive figure is evident from the detailed manner in which he treats her story in the second book of his Fasti.

L'impérialisme athénien, by Jacqueline de Romilly, recently published, is an important contribution to Thucydidean studies; and as foreign books usually not only cost more but take longer to read, it may save time and money to give here a summary of the argument.

The authoress intends her discussion of the main theme to throw light on the vexed question of the genesis of the History; but with this part of the work we are less concerned. It will be enough to say that she believes Thucydides to have been aware of the ἀληθ∊στἁτη πρóφασıς right from the start (roughly, because the events narrated at the beginning of Bk. II, obviously pre-415, exactly correspond to the phraseology of the speeches at the end of Bk. I, which imply that πρóφασıς); that the subsequent insertions are the Pentekontaetia, the second part of the Athenian's speech at Sparta, the Funeral Oration, Pericles' last speech and obituary notice, details of Brasidas (clearly post-Lysander) in Bk. IV, the personality of Alcibiades, and the Melian Dialogue; and that these insertions were made after 404, when the disastrous end of the war unloosed attacks on the Periclean régime.

Her main argument, however, is that Thucydides' real subject was the Athenian Empire; because (i) the ‘real cause’ was Athenian imperialism, which alarmed Sparta; (ii) it is the background to every major event described (e.g. Plataea, Mytilene, Pylos, Sicily); (iii) the speeches fall into two classes: attack on or defence of the Empire; (iv) he ignores home-politics, because in fact party-differences were only one of degree between extreme and moderate imperialists; (v) the work is a homogeneous unit, whereas many never came to regard the war as one (e.g. Andocides, Pax 9; Aeschines, de F.L. 176); and (vi) the two factors which Pericles selected as guaranteeing victory—the fleet and the treasury—are the same as those on which her empire rested.

‘In the last lines of the poem he [Aeneas] killed Turnus, after relenting, just for revenge, in memory of Pallas, whom Turnus had killed, and because he saw the belt of Pallas, which Turnus was wearing. It was sheer vindictive vengeance. At the end of the Aeneid, Rome is sure; but we do not know that Dido would have liked the new Aeneas as much as the old.’ (Jackson Knight, Roman Vergil, p. 142.)

If the death of Turnus is an act of sheer vindictive vengeance which assures the foundation of Rome, then the Aeneid is, ultimately, a national epic, no less, but no more. Is this interpretation valid?

It is true that, after a moment of relenting in which the life of Turnus hangs in the balance, Aeneas sees the belt of Pallas, and, overcome with fury, kills Turnus. This is an act of vengeance, but what for?

The reference to the belt of Pallas leads us back to the tenth book. The death of Pallas at the hands of Turnus is described, not as an event of importance in itself, but in close parallelism and contrast to the death of young Lausus at the hands of Aeneas. These two deaths, which are the first outstanding events of the war, are carefully introduced: the book opens with a council of the gods, the return of Aeneas, a catalogue of the Etruscan forces which he is bringing with him, his encounter with the nymphs who warn him of the situation, and finally his landing.

It is difficult to define exactly the difference between the early work of a poet (or of a dramatist in verse) and his later work. In fact any general definition is impossible, for poets vary. Some merely dry up and go on writing from habit; others change their style consciously and deliberately, others unconsciously—but all change. Anyone who has thought about and read poetry will agree that if a poet lives long enough, his work is bound to change. Any Shakespeare scholar can distinguish by style alone, not to mention other evidence, Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona from his Tempest. Similarly, any competent critic will admit that Milton could not have written Lycidas or his Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity after he wrote Paradise Lost. Again Dante could not have written the poems in his Vita Nuova after he finished the Divine Comedy. In both cases some people prefer the earlier poems. A poet does not always improve with years, but his mind changes gradually and his work reflects that.

Poets differ so much that we are usually content to enjoy their works without noticing their order. But it is not always possible to ignore it. A fragmentary papyrus has lately been discovered which appears to be the remains of an extract from the Didascaliae prefixed to a play of Aeschylus. It states that Aeschylus was victorious with a group of plays which contained the Danaides and Amymone, and that Sophocles was second. As it is generally agreed that the Supplices belonged to the same group as the plays mentioned it can be assumed with confidence that this name was to be found on the part of the papyrus now missing.

According to Elliot Smith, the dragon ‘is most intimately associated with the earliest stratum of divinities, for it has been homologized with each of the members of the earliest Trinity, the Great Mother, the Water God, and the Warrior Sun God, both individually and collectively. To add to the complexities of the story, the dragon-slayer is also represented by the same deities, either individually or collectively; and the weapon with which the hero slays the dragon is also homologous both with him and his victim, for it is animated by him who wields it, and its powers of destruction make it a symbol of the same power of evil which it itself destroys.’

Wherever it is found the dragon displays a special partiality for water. It dwells in pools or wells or in the clouds on the tops of mountains, or at the bottom of the sea where it guards vast treasures, or even on the top of a high mountain. It has the same characteristics everywhere, for the dragon of the North is essentially the same as that of the South and the East, an evil power, guarding hoards and withholding good things from men. ‘The slaying of a dragon is the achievement of heroes—of Siegmund, of Beowulf, of Sigurd, of Arthur, of Tristram…But if in the West the dragon is usually a “power of evil”, in the far East he is equally emphatically a symbol of beneficence. He is identified with emperors and kings; he is the son of heaven, the bestower of all bounties.’

My first attempts at rendering ancient lyric metres in English quantity were made with Greek choruses. I was trying in this way to give boys some idea of the run of the Greek patterns. I found the experiment profitable at least to myself; I began to study and enjoy the shape of the strophes with a new liveliness of interest.

I had used E. A. Sonnenschein's book What is Rhythm? in the teaching of English for some years before it occurred to me that here was the key to the old problem of writing quantitative verse in English. Of all the experiments made by poets and scholars, from the Elizabethans down to Robinson Ellis's Catullus and Robert Bridges's Ibant Obscuri, though some have been read with pleasure, none succeed in keeping the shape and balance of the ancient lines. Sonnenschein used a kymograph, and with most laborious care measured the length of English syllables as they are pronounced, counting the hundredths of a second taken in the pronunciation of each syllable. I have not tested him on any machine, because my ear accepts as valid the rules which emerge from his experiments. To show how this works I give a rendering of Horace, Odes, i. II:

Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quern mihi, quern tibi ….

Ask not thou what the end gods have assigned either to me or thee, Things not lawful to know, Leuconoe. Let Babylonian signs Rest unsearched; better far, just to endure all that shall come to pass.

The Polish nation adopted Christianity in A.D. 966, but the new faith was very slow in reaching the people, as the services were all in Latin and the clergy were unacquainted with the language of the country. Even the elementary schools were conducted in Latin. The pupils sat in a hut on the bare earthen floor in summer and on bundles of straw in winter.

Except in the institutions in which the instructors were immigrant Germans, where the instruction was given in German, Latin was the only language used in the schools of Poland. The Latin Psalter was the only book in the whole school; the pupils had no exercise books; but they managed to learn some grammar and arithmetic and sang the Latin songs used in the services of the Church. In these circumstances education could make but little progress. Before the end of the thirteenth century the higher clergy issued an edict forbidding the appointment of any person who did not know the Polish language, and enforced the decree with all the authority of the Church; but, as in other European countries, Latin was the official language of the Polish University. The Academy of Cracow was founded by Casimir the Great and raised to the status of a University in 1400, richly endowed by the young Queen Jadwiga, who at her death bequeathed to it all her jewels.

In the sixteenth century the University attained great fame, and Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, and Swiss came in numbers to hear the lectures of the professors, especially the great astronomer Copernicus.

‘Wir wollen ja mehr oder anderes als die Thatsachen classificieren; wir wollen sie erklären’ is the cry of a neglected linguist of the last century which it would not be idle to echo today, especially in the matter of syntactical oddities in the Greek and Latin authors. The immensely valuable work of those who have collected and classified instances of ‘aberrant’ syntax in the classical languages has the inherent disadvantage that lists and categories are made up according to the resultant form of the aberration rather than the underlying mental process which can itself often be analysed with profit. The result is a division of the phenomena into anacoluthon, contamination, pleonasm, ellipse, constructio ad sensum, and so on, a convenient but somewhat barren method, lessening the possibility of explaining and illuminating one example from another. Indeed to do thus cuts across the scientific method, putting together forms or uses which result from different thought- or speech-habits and separating many which owe their origin to identical or similar tendencies but have moved on somewhat divergent paths. Löfstedt, though he deals with the oddities of usage under conventional headings, pays no little regard to the psychological aspect and admits that a clear-cut division into conventional classes is not always free from considerable difficulty and is not particularly important for the scholar who would explain these things on a psychological basis.* Contamination in particular has been used rather to excess. The much quoted English oddity ‘I am friends with him’ is consistently stated to be a contamination of ‘I am friendly with him’ and ‘we are friendsür Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, 1860, 1.97.

It has been a commonplace for centuries that there is much more in Martial than scurrility. Yet to those who do not read him his name is probably still synonymous with a certain type of crude and monotonous jesting: to that extent at least he has been unfortunate. The jests, brilliantly phrased and pointed, are plain enough, but (quite apart from the reasonable assumption that he had to make them or starve) it is not mere wishful thinking which compels his admirers to maintain that the true man is not to be found there. For to many he is one of the most human and companionable of Latin authors, and they return with perennial delight to his descriptions of country life, his friends and amusements, his troubles and disappointments, his whole lively picture of the world of his day. Critics have remarked at length on his perpetual brilliance, his complete mastery of language, and it would be pointless to draw attention once again to the superb craftsmanship and exquisite polish which characterize every line of his best work.

‘No other poet in any language has the same never-failing grace and charm and brilliance, the same arresting ingenuity, an equal facility and finish.’ So Mr. H. W. Garrod in a well-known essay. And it is a verdict from which few will dissent.

For all that, it may be argued that there is still one further aspect of Martial's genius, or character, which has received something less than its rightful share of attention; a quality of mind difficult to define in set terms, but which perhaps may be tentatively described as tenderness; a sensitive and warm sympathy; above all, an almost painful awareness of the swiftly passing beauty of childhood and the bitterness of the death which comes too soon.

The men of the Renaissance looked to classical antiquity for models not only of literary elegance but also of conduct to imitate and outrival. Even Hernán Cortés and his companions were heartened in their struggles by the examples of the classical world, as is clear from the account of one of them, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who was not a literary man and wrote his True History of the Events of the Conquest of New Spain in protest against the conventional distortions of the professional historians.

When Cortés proposed to his followers the burning of their boats, which would prevent anyone from slinking back to Cuba and secure the additional strength of the sailors but at the same time meant throwing off the authority of the Governor of Cuba, he first emphasized that his company must look for aid to God alone and then ‘drew many comparisons with the heroic deeds of the Romans’. They replied in the words of Julius Caesar when he crossed the Rubicon,1 that the die was cast (ch. 59). The comparison with antiquity was later used against Cortés by seven fainthearts who complained that not even the Romans or Alexander of Macedon or any other famous captains whom the world had known had ventured to advance with so small an army against such vast populations. Cortés admitted this, but retorted that with God's help the history books would say far more about them than about their predecessors (ch. 69). His fondness for comparisons with the Romans was parodied when he overcame the forces of Narvaéez sent after him by the Governor, for a negro jester cried out that the Romans had never done such a feat (ch. 122).