The writer of what we may call, for want of a better name, vers de société, usually wins a popularity that is merely fleeting; he must be in touch with the thought of his own generation, and in his poems reflect its sentiments, express its humour, and satirize its manners: but his subjects often fail to interest posterity, and in a few decades the poems are apt to be forgotten unless they contain a divine spark of intrinsic excellence. In like manner, the claim to a lasting reputation of the moral essayist is no less hazardous unless he can avoid, above all things, what a recent writer has termed ‘the dull insolence of technicality’. The Satires and Epistles still live after nineteen centuries, and require no apologist. They have earned immortality because of their influence both on the Roman world that Horace knew and on the minds of men, particularly Englishmen, for centuries afterwards. His world was not a very serious world, and he wrote of it as he found it, with his inimitable touches of half-cynical, but never unkindly moralizing; and yet, as these poems and the Odes show, he found it a pleasant enough place for those who knew where true joy was to be found. The Satires and Epistles would be interesting enough if only for the facts that Horace discloses about himself: his freedman father (a coactor), his own personal appearance (Epist. i. 20. 24), the simplicity of his early home (ib. 20, ‘me libertino natum patre, et in tenui re’), and his intense affection for his equally devoted father. He must have been more than thirty years of age when he wrote Satire i. 6, which, in lines 58–100, is one long tribute to his father, and expresses his gratitude for the sacrifices made by a father who was not too well-off; no snob could have written as sincerely as this about his humble family, and no man with any false pride would frankly confess that, in the reverse inflicted on the Republican army at Philippi, he was forced to leave his shield on the field of battle (Carm. ii. 7. 10: ‘relicta non bene parmula’). The disastrous war shattered any illusions he had of rising to eminence in the army, and left him a poor man; but it gave us the poet (Epist. ii. 2. 51, ‘paupertas impulit audax ut versus facerem’), and his subsequent introduction to Maecenas resulted in his fortune being assured.

Yesterday was my seventy-fifth birthday, and I saw the Herakles of Euripides. Where are the gods, Euclides? Euripides, they say, worships gods of his own, and strange divinities too, if stories are true; but Athens is a city of gossip. He certainly has scant respect for the gods of his fathers; and the audience, but for us few older men, who almost go back to the generation of Marathon, the audience, in the main, was with him. It was the same theatre, my old friend, where you and I, as boys, sat nearly sixty years ago and watched the Persae of Aeschylus. What a day that was! There stood Salamis, where we were taken by our mothers to live in that anxious, waiting crowd for those long weeks while the Persians sacked the city and were at last defeated on that blue strait which glittered in the sun before our eyes while the poet told its story on the stage. Then shortly afterwards you went away and found a home on the shores of the Euxine, and since then you have known Athens, you say, only by my letters. You went away before the work of restoring the Akropolis had advanced very far. I have told you of the temples built upon it in honour of the gods who saved Greece, so men said then. They rose above our heads yesterday, dazzling white against deepest blue; but what are their gods to Athens now?

A country probably gets the system of education it deserves. But lucky is that country where education is a natural growth and a tradition rather than the clean-cut system of an expert. Sparta very clearly followed a very ancient tradition—very ancient and very novel, as Xenophon says: παλαιοὶ ὄντες ἔτι καὶ νυ̃ν τοι̃ς ἄλλοις καινότατοί εἰσι—‘new ideals’ in education are usually the oldest.

In an age like the present which is sceptical of untutored inspiration and sets a high value on style, it is not surprising that the Aeneid should have regained some of the prestige it held in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The hostility which the nineteenth century felt for its deliberate and self-conscious progress has abated, and Virgil is again regarded as the poet of unfaltering taste in emotions as in words. But the reviving admiration for the Aeneid has no word of praise for Aeneas. He is either neglected or dismissed with a few disparaging sentences. Even so generous a critic as Professor Garrod calls him ‘the wrong man in the wrong place’, and the hero of the Aeneid seems relegated to that undistinguished limbo which contains so many heroes of great epics. It seems that he is no better and no worse than Tennyson's King Arthur or Milton's Jehovah or the indistinguishable heroes of the different books of The Faerie Queene. He is as lifeless as they are, and for the same reason. His appeal is not to the imagination, but to the conscience, and the conscience has changed its ideals and left him and them behind. Perhaps to the Romans he was a symbol of much inspiring morality, but he means nothing to us. So far as he has any personality, he is a prig and a bore.

It is not long since it was commonly thought that the art of blowing glass was known for several thousand years before Christ. Certain Egyptian tomb-paintings of the twelfth dynasty (c. 2OOO b.c.) and later, which really depict metal-workers blowing the flames of their furnace, were thought to represent glass-blowers. As a corollary, it has been said that not a few of the vessels of blown glass found on ancient sites in Greece and other Mediterranean countries belong to the Greek period. Such beliefs are quite incorrect. There is no evidence that the process of blowing glass was invented until about the time of Christ. Scientific excavation in Greece has proved beyond question that any fragments of glass vessels found there belong to Roman or later times; the tombs in Cyprus that contain Hellenistic or earlier pottery contain no blown glass, whereas in tombs of Roman date blown glass tends to displace pottery as funerary furniture; and similar observations have been made during scientific excavations in the other Mediterranean countries.

Between Celtic and Graeco-Roman art there existed an irreconcilable antagonism. Celtic art, the art of pre-Roman Gaul, was essentially decorative and abstract, loving geometric motifs and the stylization of living forms for purposes of ornamentation; whereas Graeco-Roman art favoured naturalism and anthropomorphism. No real synthesis of these two opposed artistic doctrines was possible; so that Gallo-Roman art, the result of an attempt at an impossible synthesis, forced upon the Celtic artist by his Roman conqueror, is, judged by a purely aesthetic criterion, a very mediocre product. Its interest, therefore, is not primarily aesthetic, but historically its importance is paramount; for the extant sculptures, in all their diversity and extent, throw a flood of light on the religious cults, social customs, and economic conditions of Roman Gaul. Confining ourselves to Gallo-Roman religious sculpture, our object here is to give a general survey of the iconography of peculiarly Celtic deities which survived in the Roman province, as represented in sculptures of stone and bronze. Our concern, then, is not with Celtic religion as a whole, but only with its artistic aspect in the Roman era; but even so, literary and epigraphical evidence will frequently prove illuminating in the interpretation of the works of art. We must, clearly, exclude from our scope all purely Graeco-Roman divinities imported into Gaul, together with the Oriental and Egyptian deities of the second and third centuries a.d., and the later Christian monuments. Out of this sentina numinum, this kitchen-midden of all sorts of cults, we select for discussion here only the religious imagery of Celtic divinities which survived the Roman domination. But, before embarking on this venture, a brief sketch of the salient features of Celtic religion will be relevant.

The fable as a form of story is characteristically Greek. It is true that fables are also found in early Oriental literature; but these are either imitations (and very feeble imitations) or parallel growths, which never reached the fine flower of the Greek versions. And from the earliest times fables have been associated with the name of one man: Aesop the slave.

Many a traveller sailing up the Rhine gorge must have wondered what lies beyond the noble cliffs on either hand. Not all perhaps have realized that if they could scale the heights on their left, leave the ruined castles and flourishing vineyards behind them, and walk some ten or fifteen miles to the north-east, they would cross the great earthen mound and ditch which still remain to mark the boudary of the Roman Empire. This barrier, part of a system more than three hundred miles in length, stretching from Rhine to Danube, is well worth the attention of those who are interested in the British frontier walls.

Nine years the Achaeans lay encamped beside the sea. Toll was taken of the wealth of Priam and the lives of men in forays, raids, and skirmishes, but no pitched battle fought, until a time of pestilence and disaffection in the Greek camp culminated in the quarrel with Achilles and in Agamemnon's preparation for a general attack.

The following paper (based on a lecture given fairly recently to the members of one of the Board of Education's ‘Short Courses’ for teachers in secondary schools) is largely the result of some twenty-five years' experience as an inspector. If in places it seems to be elaborating the obvious, I can only plead for forgiveness. So much by way of preface.

Our greatest thoughts occur to us at quite unexpected times and in quite unexpected places. We wish to share them with posterity, but we have nothing with us on which to write them down, and by the time we reach home we shall have forgotten all about them. Sometimes indeed in such circumstances we make use of a tree-trunk or blank wall, but the practice has an obvious disadvantage: it is not easy to convey our manuscript to the publisher, and our manuscript may have to wait many centuries before a publisher comes to it.

The physical theories of Democritus were and are profoundly interesting as an attempt to answer some of the great questions of natural science—how to account for growth and change, for the fact that earth turns into corn, corn into men, and men again into earth. The early Ionic philosophers had seen that some necessary common basis must be found, and had sought it in water or fire or some other supposed element. The inadequacy of these explanations soon became evident to the rapidly growing Greek intellect, and Democritus found the common basis in atoms, indestructible and indivisible; an infinite number of these were moving through space, differing in shape and hardness; the movement of the atoms had a certain swerve which enabled them to meet, and the meeting of infinite numbers enabled those of the right shape and texture to join and form the things we see (res in Lucretius). Atoms and void—there was nothing else, and nothing else was needed to produce the world we know. This is a purely physical theory and might be held by Napoleon, Cleopatra, or Charles Peace, nor is it capable of being made the subject of a great poem

In 1844 G. J. Pennington, in An Essay on the Pronunciation of the Greek Language, wrote: ‘And this is the great difficulty which I have always found in discussing the point with my own countrymen, that they are prejudiced, not by theory, for that may be stated and refuted, but by a matter of taste, though mistaken taste, from which it is not easy to obtain a fair hearing.’

Greek history began with the epic and genealogical writers like Homer and Hesiod; Herodotus followed with his prose epic of the Persian Wars. Greek history became scientific and critical with Thucydides but did not remain so after him: from Xenophon onwards it lapsed into rhetoric and romance. Roman historians followed Greek principles and methods, and the earliest wrote in Greek. Polybius alone cared much for scientific criticism in his work; the rest held, with Cicero, that history is a branch of the art of rhetoric. Livy and Tacitus produced works of great literary merit at the expense of historical accuracy. Julius Caesar's account of his conquest of Gaul was the military report of a general written to the people who had given him his commission, to justify his unconstitutional action in conquering Gaul without instructions. These are only the foremost names, but of all Greek and Roman historians only Thucydides and Polybius used in writing the scientific and critical standards of modern historians. The others wrote to please the public taste for rhetoric, to grind some axe, to edify their readers, to relate anecdotes, to praise or blame, to express personal opinions, to display their literary powers, to make digressions, and not many were saved by literary skill from the mediocrity to which their critical weakness doomed them.

One of the greatest historical achievements of the last century was the gathering together of the Latin inscriptions scattered over the various countries of Europe and the Mediterranean. The scheme was originated by Kellermann of Copenhagen (1805–37), who spent the last nine years of his life collecting inscriptions in Italy. It was taken up by members of the French Academy and finally carried through by the Berlin Academy. Many scholars, French, German, and Italian, had prepared the way by publishing collections of inscriptions; and the plan of the two scholars Zumpt, uncle and nephew, who were entrusted with the early preparations did not embrace much more than the rearranging of the published inscriptions. In 1847 a comprehensive scheme—the compilation of a corpus of inscriptions whether already published or not—was submitted to the Berlin Academy by Theodor Mommsen. In 1853 final approval was given and in 1863 appeared the first volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, consilio et auctoritate Academiae litterarum regiae Borussicae editum.

The English are a nation of shopkeepers—Napoleon has said it—and as good commercials we travel. Of all those who at one time or another visit Marseilles, our gateway to the South and East, how many, I wonder, even of those who have received a classical education, remember that they are after all but paying the compliment of a return call, since from that port sailed over 2,200 years ago the first Greek expedition τω̃ν ἡμει̃ς ἴδμεν to explore the North and West and visit the British Isles, under the command of Pytheas.

If one may judge by the numerous ‘First Latin Courses’ that have appeared in the last twenty years, it is still the belief of many teachers of Latin that if you wish to render in Latin ‘Don't do it’, you may say either Noli facere, or, at the risk of seeming familiar, Ne feceris; but that the corresponding formula, Ne facias, though good enough for the old comedians, is to be avoided entirely, as conveying merely a ‘general’ prohibition—presumably of the type ‘Do not walk on the grass’—and not a ‘particular’ one.