‘You know, sir—you're absolutely right!’ This heartening remark, accompanied by the ingenuous smile of intellectual discovery (or was it just kindly encouragement?) came from a member of the Classical Sixth in response to a five-minute impromptu discourse of mine in which I had said something like this:

In the Fourth Form we show you, two or three times a week, how to set about translating a complex Latin period. We ask you, ‘What verb is introduced by ut?’ You say, ‘Esset’. We say, ‘Look again’; and you say, ‘Oh, no, esset is introduced by quod; ut goes with perciperent’. ‘Right; then what clause comes before the ut-clause?’ ‘An Ablative Absolute.’

‘M. Tvllivs … etiam in hoc opere [i.e. philosophia] Platonis aemulus exstitit.’ There is a fallacy underlying Quintilian's judgement here—he is not by any means at his best in this famous chapter—which is interesting in that, with very different consequences, it also underlies the almost total neglect of Cicero's philosophical works prevalent in this country in our own day. (That Cicero's philosophical works were once popular everyone knows; but many would, I fancy, be surprised to learn how much serious and scholarly attention they are still receiving in America, France, and Germany.) The fallacy which is the common basis of Quintilian's approbation and our neglect is the belief, explicit or implicit in much modern criticism, that Roman literature is to be assessed by comparison, man for man and genre for genre, with Greek. Some such comparisons can be made, and with profit for those who do not prejudge the issue of the investigation and, since the Roman writers often seem deliberately to invite such comparisons, for those who are equipped with the necessary understanding of what ‘imitation’ means in the context of ancient literature. But these comparisons are silly and fruitless when conducted with the kind of naïveté which can see in Cicero's philosophical writings only a ‘poor man's Plato’. To compare Cicero and Plato in this field is to compare incomparables. This becomes clear if we forget our presuppositions and ask, as I propose to do, (1) what was Cicero in his philosophical writings trying to do and was it worth doing, and (2) how did he set about his task, and were his methods the right ones ? Only then can we attempt, as I shall do briefly in concluding, an estimate of his achievement.

In recent discussions among classical teachers about the advisability of alterations in the ‘O’ level Latin syllabus the deepest division of opinion seemed to be on the comparative value of set books and unseen translation. Many are reluctant to abandon set books, declaring that, even for those pupils who make a poor examination showing, the careful attempt to master some portion of Latin literature has been of value. On the other hand, it is said that set books may lead to parrot-like memorizing of inferior translations and that the direct experience of Latin literature which they give is generally very limited. It is possible to exaggerate the danger from poor translations. It can be assumed nowadays that boys and girls approaching an examination will use some translation or other; time might usefully be spent in the classroom comparing their accuracy and quality. Versions of a passage of Virgil by Conington, Day Lewis, Jackson Knight, and the modern equivalent of Kelly's Key might at any rate set a standard.

Latin is a wedding-garment no longer de rigueur for those entering Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Utility English jeans will in future be permissible wear. Whether this will herald a uniform change throughout the schools of the country it is early yet to say. The Crowther Committee was sure that Latin was taught in many cases merely as an insurance against possible debarment from the older universities. Whatever the truth of that, Latin will stand or continue to stand in the future by its own merits. Like Justice in the early part of the Republic, stripped of its adventitious rewards it may now lend itself to an impartial reappraisal. This seems to be the occasion for another stocktaking. Hard as it is to love gadflies, we perhaps should be grateful to those who stung us into these agonies of self-examination, so essential a condition of the good life. Stirrings indeed there have been. An impartial observer might comment that if Latin is a dead language, like Virgil's ox it appears to be the centre of a good deal of activity.

It is curious that so little has been written in English about the Roman land surveyors and their work. Most of the nineteenth-century study of the subject was carried out by German scholars. In 1812 Niebuhr stressed the importance of the extant writings of the agrimensores and suggested that field-work in Italy would contribute to our understanding of them. In 1833 a Dane, Captain Falbe, noticed that the squares into which the land round Carthage was divided had sides corresponding to 2,400 feet and thus equalled a normal centuria. The standard edition of the agrimensores, edited by Blume, Lachmann, and others, appeared in 1848 and 1852. Mommsen contributed to this work, and he and other German scholars extended the study of Roman surveying. Before the First World War it was a Swede, Thulin, who furthered research on the ancient writings. Apart from that in German the bulk of the work on the subject is in Italian.

We have most of us been surprised when, after reading the history of the late Republic, we first discovered that in the year 50 a motion was proposed in the Senate that Pompey and Caesar should both lay down their commands, that it was passed by 370 votes to 22, and that it was disregarded in the interests of the optimate leaders. Who were these 370 men, and why do we not hear more of them? We have read, of course, that the Senate consisted of this or that number at this or that time; and then we read all about the Claudii and Metelli, with scarcely a word about the massed ranks behind them. Yet there they are, and the picture is incomplete without them. It is likely that we shall never complete it satisfactorily—there are so many of them we do not know, and the few we do know are quite likely to be exceptional in some way—but we can at least make a start by considering the numbers involved and the likely divergence as well as the unity of their interests.

In the preface to his third volume of Thucydides, dated January 1835, Thomas Arnold referred to ‘what is miscalled ancient history, the really modern history of Greece and Rome’. The great headmaster went on to express the hope that ‘these volumes may contribute to the conviction that history is to be studied as a whole and according to philosophical divisions, not such as are merely geographical and chronological; that the history of Greece and Rome is not an idle inquiry about remote ages and forgotten institutions, but a living picture of things present, fitted not so much for the curiosity of the scholar, as for the instruction of the statesman and the citizen’. Today, with education so subject to the demands of utility, it is a vital duty for us to stress these claims. If we are to preserve in our schools the study of antiquity we must show how it can help us to face the problems of modern life.

It may seem odd at first glance to include Picasso among those who have taken the torch from Greece. What, it will be asked, have these cruelly distorted images to do with the serenity of classicism? The question is ill conceived. Hellenistic art sought to explore the range of human experience as Picasso has done, and to respond to the violence of the world around as he has responded. The Laocoon or Skopas' Maenads were as shocking to their day as The Charnel-House or The Weeping Woman were to our fathers. Picasso has never been able to limit himself to the confines of one style. His restless, Alexander-like genius has always sought for new worlds to conquer. The man who at fourteen could paint The Girl with Bare Feet or the portrait of Don Ramón Perez Costales was not going to spend sixty years repeating what he had already achieved. Speaking of a contemporary who was trying to find a single solution to the problem of depicting forms he said: ‘There is no such thing as a solution.

Many people wish that they had learned Latin or are sorry to have forgotten it; but, being past school age, they shrink from beginning over again. How can we help or encourage these doubters?—Let us say:

1. Latin is not such a hard language as most people think. The belief in its difficulty has grown up from several causes, (1) In many schools Latin is the first subject that calls for serious effort. The approach to Mathematics is much more gradual nowadays than it was about 1900. The newer methods of teaching modern languages disguise or postpone many of the difficulties. (2) In many schools only three or four schoolhours a week are given to Latin, so that the pupil forgets his grammar in the intervals. (3) Pupils are made to read authors far too advanced for them, e.g. Caesar or Livy in the third year's course. This leads to discouragement. (4) Latin texts are nearly always cramped and awkward to read. The disuse of j and v adds to the beginner's confusion. (5) In many girls' schools Latin is taught as an odd subject by ill-informed teachers. Yet as a language Latin is not much harder than German: only the strangeness of an ancient tongue and the different way of thinking make progress slower.

It is over fifty years now since the formation of the Joint Committee on Grammatical Terminology, and the presentation of its Report and it seems to be high time that teachers of languages considered, first, how successful they have been in carrying out its recommendations, and secondly, what modifications are called for in the light of more recent knowledge. The Committee was a strong one, with E. A. Sonnenschein in the chair and R. S. Conway as the original secretary, both representing the Classical Association; the Modern Language Association, the English Association, and various educational bodies sent equally distinguished representatives. Their recommendations, apart from a few reservations by individuals on comparatively minor points, were unanimous, and have on the whole won fairly general neglect, not as a rule through disagreement with them, but simply because it was less trouble to go on using whatever terms one had been in the habit of using before, however inconvenient, confusing, or inexact they might be. Before discussing the recommendations it seems desirable to glance at the history of the ‘old’ terminology in order to see what was unsatisfactory about it and why it needed to be changed.