If the critical re-evaluation of classical authors in recent years has brought nothing else, it has given us a humbling awareness of how difficult it is to arrive at a fully satisfactory reading of ancient pastoral poetry. The poet of the Eclogues, seen less and less as merely a painter of dreamy landscapes or a contriver of political allegories, has emerged increasingly as a self-conscious artist whose conventional, but highly symbolic and allusive language embraces questions of man's relation to art and imagination, to passion and work, to the potential for order and violence in his own being. Is it valid to look at Theocritus in similar terms? Is there more in the Idylls than keenly etched portraits of shepherds among verdant hills singing of love in dulcet hexameters and in an atmosphere of easeful sensuousness? Or should we merely enjoy the surface felicities and depart sated and content, like Horace's well-fed guest? The rhythms and resonances of Theocritus will continue to give pleasure as long as Greek is read. Yet recent work in both ancient and later pastoral suggests that the Idylls will sustain and reward a critical reading which looks beneath this charming surface.

Greek plays were made in the theatre. We must watch our language when we talk about them, for we too are in the theatre. Most of us receive our critical training with works of art that are constructed and exist on the written page. We study word generating word, images interacting. And when we apply these techniques to plays we learn much; the way a playwright uses language, all the hidden things that make a play what it is. And some plays, an Ajax, or a Trojan Women, read so well that we are tempted to forget, or at least disregard that they were not in the first place made for reading. Not that the words are unimportant, but they point beyond themselves to realization in performance. They are as blueprints to a finished building.

This does not mean that the critic must spend his time filling the gap between text and production. He will too soon find himself lost in speculation or tangled in archaeological problems. Rather, whatever we say of the words of a play must be conditioned by the fact that they are words for the theatre. A play cannot be something that it could not be on the stage. A sense of what it was in performance is at the same time the starting point and the final criterion of our criticism.

In the darkness of these times, it may well prove that we are the last generation to pursue the study of classics at all seriously, whether we are hewing squarely to the philological, or more modern, approaches to classical literature. The rights and wrongs of this particular ideological struggle will be settled, I suspect, by time and our students. One may, however, take for granted the perceptible erosion of anything like a real inwardness with Latin as a language among the protevangelists of either school. The gentlemanly dilettante stuck to his familiar authors, such as Virgil and Horace, ignoring their Alexandrian complexities for their human values; the supposedly serious scholar adopted such a scientific attitude to Latin that it would sometimes seem that his main pleasure consisted in correcting Lewis and Short, while putting together prose and verse compositions for his peers or pupils.

Certainly ignorance on the one hand and pedantry on the other are logical culprits, along with time, for this loss of inwardness with Latin as a language. One would like to think that Dr. Johnson (and some of his contemporaries) had something close to the careless familiarity with Latin displayed by Dante or Poggio: unfortunately a glance at the frigid exercises to Ms Thrale or to his Highland hosts, written during his tour of the Hebrides, quickly dispels this illusion.

It is a commonplace of literary criticism that the criteria to be used in the understanding of a poem are internal. What counts as evidential in respect of poetic intent and meaning is what the poet actually says in the poem, and the only methodology worth serious attention is a careful, detailed and critical analysis of the poem itself. Despite this platitude biographical assumptions and postulates have exerted, and are still exerting, a disconcerting influence upon the criticism of ancient literature, most notoriously, perhaps, in the case of Virgil's epic, the Aeneid. All too frequently Virgil's life has been taken as the datum, the fact, to which his epic has had to be accommodated. This is not the occasion to take up arms against the biographical approach to Roman poets; I wish only to assert that, while it is important to place a poem such as the Aeneid in its historical context, it is equally important (indeed, more important) not to allow the historical context to dictate the interpretation of the poem. The poem, after all, is not a postulate; it is a determinate thing, present in a way in which a historical context is not. It must be given primacy, and any attempt to supplant this primacy with biographical hypotheses about the working of a poet's mind during the third decade B.C. based upon ambiguous external criteria would be the antithesis of the procedures of serious (that is to say, intelligent and relevant) criticism.