There they stand on the shelves, weary veterans with the marks of long service upon them: the school and college editions of Greek classics, rank upon rank, mostly in the sombre uniform of their period. For period pieces many of them are, as a glance at the date of original publication, with the long tale of subsequent reprints, will show. Their print has lost some of its early sharpness; the commentaries refer to grammars and the like that have long since passed into oblivion; and the occasional prefatory note, touching briefly on the principles of bowdlerization, brings back an echo of another age.

A Few words first to explain the origin of this paper, and to excuse its rather forbidding title. Those responsible are your Hon. Treasurer and Hon. Secretary. They had come across some remarks on Virgil in my History of Ancient Geography, and they suggested that a fuller treatment on these lines might be of interest to this Society. I accepted the task willingly, not quite knowing then how it would work out, but hoping that it might at least throw some sidelights on Virgil. Will you bear with me if I pursue the matter where it leads, though well aware that this is not the only or the best way of studying a very great poet?

‘You read in books’, Suliman said to me; ‘our book is the sand’. In the course of many long and fascinating journeys with the Arabs in the Eastern desert of Egypt, not a day—hardly an hour—passed in which I did not witness their powers of observation or listen to their comments on the footprints of man or bird or animal beneath us in the sand. From childhood to the grave the ground at their feet is an ever-open book, the reading of which is second nature with them, a constant occupation of vital importance to their desert lives. What would they think of the recognition scene in the Choephori? The few paragraphs that follow, extracts from the journal I made of a threemonth walk with three or four men of the Ma'asa tribe in the summer of 1949, are a record of my conversations with two of them on this subject.

The recent revival of interest in the Athenian Plague suggested to us that it would be worth while re-examining the evidence. The very fact that it has troubled so many scholars in the last hundred years lends it a certain distinction, but their conclusions are so contradictory and unsatisfactory that many have agreed with Poppo ‘eam rem diiudicare non grammaticorum atque interpretum est, sed medicorum’. Yet it is clear that the inquiry can hardly be effective without co-operation between classical and medical men.

Metapoetics—the name given by Aristotle's editors to his works on Publishing (either because they came after, or because they went beyond, and transcended, his Poetics)—deals with literary activity not qua itself but qua its product (ἔργον), the Book (ὥσπερ γὰρ τῆς οἰκοδομικῆς τέχνης ἐστὶν ἔργον ὁ οἶκος, ὁμοίως τῆς ποιητικῆς τὸ βιβλίον), and considers how this product is brought to the notice of the reader–or, rather, readers (μία γὰρ χελιδὼν ἔαρ οὐ ποιεῖ).

The second implication of the Trojan legend may be stated briefly by saying that the Romans were descended from the vanquished, and not the victors, in the Trojan war. Most writers completely ignored this implication. Some rode majestically above it and pointed to the contemporary greatness of Rome, which they regarded as Troy's final triumph. Other writers, meditating, as was frequent in the ancient world, on the rise and fall of great cities, contrasted the rise of Trojan Rome with the fall of Greece, as though the balance disturbed by the sack of Troy had been restored by a consequent reversal of fortunes. In certain cases one feels that the author is simply reflecting as a philosopher, and citing Greece and Troy as examples of the fulfilment of a natural law; but usually the tone is not disinterested, and one has the impression that Roman writers are primarily concerned in extolling Rome, while Greeks lament the wretchedness of Greece. Typical of the latter are the poems of the Greek Anthology which speak of the deserted place where Mycenae once stood. Alpheios of Mytilene, for example, writes thus:

Ἄργος, Ὁμηρικὲ μῦθε, καὶ Ἑλλάδος ἱερὸν οὖδας,

καὶ χρυσέη τὸ πάλαι Περσέος ἀκρόπολι,

ἔσβεσαθ' ἡρώων κείνων κλέος οἵ ποτε Τροίης

ἤρειψαν κατὰ γῆς θειόδομον στέφανον.

ἀλλ' ἡ μὲν κρείσσων ἐστὶν πόλις' αἱ δὲ πεσοῦσαι

δείκνυσθ' εὐμύκων αὔλια βουκολίων.

When the B.B.C. were about to broadcast excerpts from Euripides' Electra spoken by a Greek actress, they judged it advisable to warn listeners that ‘the modern Greek pronunciation of the ancient language is somewhat different from that prevailing elsewhere’ (Radio Times, 19 September 1952). Listening to that broadcast, I wondered how any man could find it in his heart to exchange for the exquisite delicacy of the native pronunciation of that most poetic of languages the clumsy makeshift which we call our ‘reformed’ pronunciation.