When your friends within and without the A.S.C.S. were invited to contribute to the Festschrift planned in your honour, my Hellenistic Muse blanched at the fields chosen, Cicero and Vergil. It was, moreover, not enough to have new thoughts; they must, at least if the thinker had profited from your guidance at Melbourne both as student and colleague, make an effort to measure up to the quality of that guidance. Now in more co-operative mood my Muse, quae sera tamen respexit inertem, offers you some methodological comments, speculative in the nature of things, but I hope not too remote from a poetic application of your oft-voiced injunction to ‘Follow the argument’, which stood me in good stead from the Phaedo to the De Officiis.