‘If a man were a good painter, he could deceive children and fools by painting a carpenter and showing it from a long way off, because it would seem really to be a carpenter.’ Plato here (Republic, 598c) is undoubtedly describing realistic painting, perhaps not so photographically realistic as the paintings in Pompeii or the painting that we know to-day, but painting which aimed at producing a likeness and rendering the appearance of the original. Such pictures can be seen on the vases of the fourth century and of the late fifth century b.c., for instance the two women on a red-figured perfume vase in the Manchester School of Art, which was painted about the time of the dramatic date of the Republic (Pl. I). But if we go back rather over a hundred years to the black-figure vase reproduced by Mr. Austin in Greece and Rome, vol. vii, we are in a completely different world of flat figures in conventional poses, and if we go further back still to the Geometric vase (Fig. I) which forms the subject of Mr. Austin's article, we are yet further from the world of ‘likeness’. These early Greek painters cannot have wanted to produce likenesses; but what was their aim ?

The historical evidence yielded by the coins of Greece and Rome is abundant, concise, essentially practical, and easily assimilated. Comparison of this evidence with what is provided by other branches of historical research is out of place, and seldom profitable: it is enough to point out the fundamental difference between coin-evidence and that which is furnished, for example, by works of art or inscriptions. A people's artistic or literary achievement is mainly a free expression of individual tendencies: though Phrynichus offended an influential section of public opinion with his play on the Sack of Miletus, and though Pericles was able to yoke Pheidias to his imperialist policy, it is true to say that such achievement was generally the result of free minds working their will. Artistic evidence for history is therefore ‘unofficial’, or informal. It is, of course, all the better for that; yet it must lack the precision which we look for in inscriptions—let us say, in an Athenian list of tribute-payments, or in a municipal charter under the Roman Empire. Inscriptions, indeed, are very often the product of private enterprise—the wish to record family honours, to mourn the dead parent, wife, or child, or to bless the emperor of the day; but they include a large class in which the information given is official in its purpose, and therefore full and accurate.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, when the Barbary corsairs were finally laid low, a great impetus was given to North African research, and numerous scholars visited and wrote about Carthage. Valiant efforts were made at that time to correlate the statements of ancient authors, chiefly Appian, Diodorus, Justin, Polybius, and Strabo, both with each other and with the existing topography of the peninsula, but the theories propounded had usually little virtue save that of originality and imagination. If excavation was undertaken at all (as it was by Davis, for instance, and Beulé), Roman buildings were often mistaken for Punic, so that elaborate plans of Carthage like Davis's2—to mention but one—are no longer of much consequence.

Every creative age in history, since Greek times, has held some belief on the nature and purpose of poetry, and the results have varied from song for the joy of singing to verse as a medium for the propagation of Communist propaganda. The short and splendid flower of Greek lyric in Sappho and Alc-man, the Homeric epic, Greek drama, Alexandrian pastoral, the love lyrics of Catullus, the imperial self-consciousness of Virgil, and the indignant satires of Juvenal, all these reflect some deep-rooted conviction of the true form and purpose of the poet's craft. Some people have thought of poetry as an ‘accomplishment’ like those of a polished young Victorian lady who had learnt deportment and a repertoire of sentimental drawing-room songs. Others, perhaps more profoundly, conceive of poetry as the hidden elixir of a mind aware of life, the reaction of a feeling, thinking person to the world of nature, human life, and the vast concourse of ‘rebel powers that thee array’. These reactions, being concerned with the significance and enchantment of what the poet sees, can only find adequate expression in words so ordered and grouped in a significant form as to transfuse into the reader something of the poet's vision and emotion, 'to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer’.

Few figures in our political history have aroused such affectionate admiration among posterity as Charles James Fox. Not the least attractive feature of his personality is his love of classical literature. He is the supreme example of the scholarly statesman. Some may suspect that the legendary scholarship of our eighteenth-century statesmen did not extend beyond a few tags from Horace and Virgil, relics of a rigorous public school education. Of Fox at any rate this was not true. A study of his notes on the Classics shows him as a true lover of ancient literature and a fine scholar. It is not inappropriate that his bust should stand next to that of Porson in the Upper School at Eton.

It is curious that one of the strongest attacks ever made on poetry and artistic inspiration was made by Plato. Plato was not only a great thinker, but also a peerless literary artist. It is therefore disconcerting to read a dialogue like the Ion, in which he first sets up, and then belabours, a ‘man of inspiration’, with all the resources of his ironic wit.

The Old Comedy, says Plutarch, is unsuitable for reading to a dinner-party taking their wine; it is ill regulated, violent, and sometimes indecent; moreover, it would require a commentator to explain the personal allusions and we should be in school again. These allusions are perhaps even more obscure to us; yet we read our Aristophanes, and what we have of Menander would not make us agree with Plutarch's decided preference for the New Comedy. And they have an interest of their own in giving us glimpses of some of the prominent figures in Athenian life and of the objects of public mockery or reprobation; for Aristophanes would make sure that his personal references were such as to secure applause, and most of them occur in the other comedians of the time.

A brief survey of the indebtedness of the modern languages of Europe, and in particular our own, to the Latin word caput may be not without interest.

The French did not adopt the classical meaning of caput, but, by way of the slang of the Roman soldiers in all probability, preferred the Latin testa = a tile, French tête. But caput did enter Gaul as the early French chief and modern chef (e.g. chef d'orchestre, chef de cuisine, whence, by the way, the English ‘chef’). English borrowed this word from French under the guise of chief, and from the early French word chevetaine formed the English chieftain. But in one word the French did adopt the classical meaning of caput, and that was in the word couvre-chef (modelled presumably upon the Vulgar Latin capitegium), meaning a covering for the head. This was adopted in Middle English as curchef (kerchief) and signified originally a cloth to cover a woman's head. It was an easy step from this to the modern ‘handkerchief’. Further, Vulgar Latin had a phrase ad caput venire, ‘to come to an end’, ‘to accomplish’. This was taken over into early French as a chief venir: later the verb venir was lost and the phrase a chief was made into the verb achever. Our English word achieve was the inevitable offspring.

A study of the personality of Cato Censorius is both interesting and instructive because of the times in which he lived, a period which began with the Hannibalic War and included those fateful fifty years of the second century which ordered the destiny of Rome herself and indirectly of the whole world. In the shaping of that destiny Cato played a not unimportant part, and the interest of the man lies both in what he did and in his reactions to the events which confronted him. Such a study also throws light on ancient biographical methods. To the ancient mind the personal element was by far the most important for the understanding of history; the individual acquired a correspondingly higher value and importance in the interpretation of movements and events; and in a time when the State was confronted with many problems, the men who strove to deal with them in different ways assumed importance in men's minds as provoking those very problems which they were only trying to solve.

The Isle of Man was left untouched by the Romans. It was a stronghold of Celtic culture until in the Dark Ages the Scandinavian sea adventurers made it a naval base. The two races lived side by side and no influence other than theirs showed itself until the seventeenth century, when the English fashions in architecture and social life began to reproduce themselves in the island. Thus the contribution made to the British heritage by those two strains is more easily recognizable here than perhaps in any other part of the British Isles. In this paper I deal only with the Celts, our knowledge of whom (apart from archaeology) is based almost entirely on the records of Greece and Rome. I confine myself to two authors universally read in schools—Caesar, a competent observer at first hand, and Tacitus, a reliable conveyer of borrowed information. All quotations from the former are from the Gallic War, those from Books IV and V referring to Celts in Britain, the others referring to Celts in Gaul. All quotations from Tacitus are from the Agricola. There were really three types of Celts, but their culture was at the time of these writers fairly homogeneous. It is not to be wondered at that illustrations can be found in the Isle of Man for statements made about Celts in Britain and Gaul, for the whole of the Celtic world seems to have enjoyed free intercourse and to have shared the same religious organization.

This year has been noteworthy for the number of Classical plays which have been presented upon the stage, and for those of us who are sometimes asked to justify the pursuit of Classical studies they are a welcome sign that Classical thought and technique is contributing in the most vital of all ways to modern appreciation. For it is only by constant reinterpretation in each generation that a cultural influence is maintained; and if it is confined to the study it stagnates only too quickly, till it joins the limbo of ‘dead’ literature and art.

Isaac vossius, scholar and Canon of Windsor in the seventeenth century, regretted ‘that the whole human race did not banish the plague and confusion of so many tongues and adopt an universal and self-evident system of signs and pantomimic expression’. Imago animi vultus est, says Cicero, and again, vultus … qui sermo quidam tacitus est; and finally, in the de Oratore (iii. 216), ‘every passion of the heart has its appropriate look and tone and gesture, and the whole body of man and his whole countenance and every voice he utters re-echo like the strings of a harp to the touch of every emotion in his soul’.

Fourth-century Athens was the scene of heated professional jealousy between the exponents of different systems of education. One of the most distinguished educational figures of the age was the rhetorician Isocrates, who in the early years of this century opened a school at Athens which attracted pupils from the most illustrious families throughout the Greek world. His father had owned a flute-factory and a moderate income had enabled him to give his son an excellent education. But during or shortly after the Peloponnesian War the family property was lost, and when in 403 the democracy was restored, Isocrates found himself compelled to put his education to some practical use. Physical disabilities, we are told, prevented his taking an active part in public life, and for some years he followed the career of a λογογράφος, one who composed speeches for his clients to deliver in the law-courts. It is a period of his life to which he makes no allusion in his works and we may assume that he was glad to abandon this profession for one better suited to his talents.

The position of the Classics in the United States has been determined very largely by the development of the public school system. Between the founding of the first Latin grammar-school in Boston in 1635, or of Harvard University in 1638, and the numerous public (free), State-directed schools of the present day, vast changes have come about in the student body and in the curriculum—changes which have decidedly affected the study of the Classics.

Pservilius spongia threw back the coverlet and drew himself up on the narrow pallet that was his bed. It was cold—cold and dark; the first rays of daylight were only just beginning to creep in through the small slit of a window. Yes, cold and dark; but there was a patron to be visited before the first hour, and it would take a full hour's walk to get to his house. Spongia sprang out of bed, poured a little cold water into his basin and washed in haste. Then he opened the window and tilted the dirty water out into the street below. An answering cry suggested that the chance shot had found a mark. ‘Better wait a few minutes before I start,’ thought Spongia, ‘it sounds as if I had hit some one; it is possible that he may be annoyed.’