You would do well to make a special thing of Homer. Read it in large lumps and get up Monro's ‘Homeric Grammar’ afterwards. I have been reading the Odyssey at the rate of four books a day since I came here. It is the only secret. It is so much easier to pick up the theories of modern scholars, so far as they are worth picking up, when you have a large first-hand acquaintance with the actual literature. That is the primary fact we have to deal with, and all the rest is ‘trimmings’. I never knew what scholarship meant till one lucky summer when I was inspired to read Plato from cover to cover.

Juvenal's sixth Satire begins with a prologue describing the Golden Age which, for the light it sheds both on ancient attitudes to the Saturnian myth and on the Juvenalian concept of satire, is sufficiently important to justify extended analysis, an analysis that may begin with a reference to a discussion by Professor W. S. Anderson, who sums up the meaning of the first twenty lines of the satire: ‘Juvenal represents man's degeneracy through a double withdrawal: that of mankind from direct relation with Nature, that of the goddess Pudicitia from the earth.’ The age of Saturn, therefore, represents a moral ideal from which civilized man has degenerated. However, Anderson sees a certain ambiguity in the satirist's attitude to the Golden Age, particularly to the women of the Golden Age: ‘The attitude toward the aboriginal woman was ambivalent. She was morally upright, physically uncouth.’ There is respect for her ‘stern moral attitudes’ but a realization that her ‘stern dishevelled aspect is not at all alluring’

The site of ancient Dystos in south-central Euboea deserves to be better known. The imposing circuit of the city wall with its main gate and eleven towers bears comparison with the fort at Eleutherae or the walls of Messene or Thasos. The numerous remains of private houses are of considerable interest for the history of Greek domestic architecture.

The First Punic War is a record of a dismal wastage of human life and of strategic ineptitude. Briefly the Roman mistakes may be summed up as follows. First, the popular assembly which accepted the alliance with Messana seems to have failed to realize that the Carthaginians were bound to try to eject them from Sicily; to fight Carthage Rome needed a navy; she had none of her own and even in the treaty with Hiero asked for no naval assistance. Secondly, Rome made her struggle in Sicily much harder because she alienated all the Greeks by her ungenerous treaty with Hiero and by the massacre of non-combatants at Agrigentum. Thirdly, she was very slow to realize that the only way to get the Carthaginians out of Sicily was to strike at Africa; Agathocles in 310 had already pointed the way. Fourthly, Regulus failed to enlist willing Numidians in his cavalry, although a strong cavalry was essential on the plains of Africa. Fifthly, Regulus was left with far too small a force. Lastly, Rome continued to change the command and appoint inexperienced men, though few were quite so incompetent as Regulus who, when faced by the elephants and phalanx of Xanthippus, massed his legionaries, thus making them an easy prey to the Carthaginian battering ram.

Field events are notoriously the Cinderellas of the athletic world, and this was as true in antiquity as in our own day. The Greeks practised three, long jump, discus, and javelin, and in their festivals did not accord them the status of separate events but grouped them, together with a foot race and wrestling, which were also solo events in their own right, in the pentathlon. This was first included in the Olympic programme in 708 b.c.; other festivals imitated Olympia, and, with the astonishing conservatism of the Greek athletic world, the pentathlon remained unchanged until the disappearance of the festivals a thousand years later.

The observations which follow will to some appear heretical and perhaps dangerous; but I believe that they are worth making, if only to draw attention to a tendency in the present teaching of Latin prose which seems more dangerous still. When the beginner, having covered the field of essential grammar and syntax, is first introduced to the writing of continuous prose, he is rightly reminded of the disjointed style which is often encountered in English. This, he is told, was foreign to the Roman, who preferred to express his ideas in the form of a ‘period’, that is to say, a complex, architectural sentence-structure in which several subordinate clauses are made to depend in various ways upon the main clause. This period, he learns, is central to Latin prose, and an example or two from Cicero and Livy will be given to illustrate its use; he is then advised to emulate these models. His first exercise may well be nine or ten lines of English, to be turned into a single Latin ‘period’. The result is rarely satisfactory. The unhappy learner, in his attempt to produce the required composite sentence, upsets the natural order of clauses, presses phrases into strained and alien constructions, and probably achieves confusion. Here, for instance, is one of the first exercises in Bradley's Aids to Latin Prose; the passage, it is stated, ‘should be fused into a single sentence by the aid of participles, relatives, and conjunctions’:

‘Both sides had exhausted their ammunition. The fight had raged at close quarters for three hours without any result. The carnage was horrible. The soldiers were suffocated with the heat and dust, and could scarcely keep their feet on the bloody and slippery soil; but no one could say that he had seen the back of a single foe, or heard a single voice asking for quarter. It seemed as though the gods of Mexico had inspired the nation with superhuman strength, and a courage proof against wounds or death.’

‘Omnes vero se Britanni vitro inficiunt, quod caeruleum efficit colorem, atque hoc horribiliores sunt in pugna aspectu.’ Every schoolboy is familiar with the passage, and the general accuracy of the statement is everywhere accepted; although the hypercritical might question the omnes. For Caesar cannot be speaking from his own knowledge, since his acquaintance with the British was limited; and the use of woad being a peculiarly British institution—I know of no evidence of its use on the Continent—it would not be surprising if some at least of the tribes in the south of Britain, who had been established there for not more than two or three generations, were slow to adopt what must have seemed to them a very barbarous habit.

The study of Egyptian personal religiosity during the third century ad presents an interesting opportunity to explore the processes of cultural encounters between Egypt and the Roman Empire. The religious situation was more complicated and variegated than the textual evidence seems to suggest; sometimes one becomes aware of the existence of certain beliefs only through their iconographic record. For this reason, decorated stelae, coffins, and mummy wrappings are crucial materials for research into questions of religious exchange. This article presents the case of a third-century ad shroud from Memphis painted with a woman's portrait and funerary scenes, along with a representation of Isis navigans.

We know very little for certain about the staging of plays in the Theatre of Dionysus at Athens in the fifth century B.C. The evidence of archaeological remains and contemporary vase painting is difficult to interpret with confidence, the reliability of ancient post-classical commentators is questionable, and the texts of the surviving plays, our chief source of evidence, often raise more problems than they solve. Among the plays which have occasioned most controversy in modern scholarship is the Prometheus Vinctus. What was the ‘rock’ to which the hero was bound? In what part of the theatre space was it positioned? How and where did the chorus of Oceanids make their entry? How was the ending of the play staged? Questions such as these continue to perplex students of the play who also have to face the vexed question of its date and indeed authorship.

One of Xenophon's chief aims in Memorabilia is to defend his beloved teacher from charges raised both during and after his trial. Some readers have thought that he has gone so far in whitewashing Socrates that the resulting portrait makes it impossible to explain the hostility he aroused: Socrates appears here merely as an innocuous friend offering good advice on all sorts of mundane subjects. But the apologetic strategies employed by Xenophon are more complex and subtle than that. The widespread view of him as a simple-minded defender of conventional attitudes blinds us to the places where he speaks with a different, more radical voice. We should not be surprised to find that the enthusiastic student of Socrates, one of the most radical and unconventional thinkers of ancient Greece, has some radical thoughts of his own.

The many-sided and lively-minded writer Samuel Butler (1835–1902) attended St John's College, Cambridge, from 1854 to 1858. There he penned a brief account of College rowing in the manner of Herodotean ethnography. It was preserved by a friend and published posthumously.

For the Greeks, athletics occupied the place in life which in the modern world is taken by football and cricket. Ball games were not unknown to the Greeks, as two famous reliefs in Athens show, but literature is silent about them, while it abounds in allusions and metaphors drawn from athletics—running, jumping, boxing, wrestling, and throwing the javelin and discus. Their popularity continued for many centuries: we read of them in Homer; even the unathletic St. Paul cannot avoid frequent metaphors drawn from the games; and the great athletic festivals were discontinued only when, in the fourth century a.d., the Christian Roman emperors put an end to them as pagan rites.

Artefact collections are a key means for many people to interact with classical antiquity. The physicality of objects easily appeals to the imagination, evoking associations between the object and the viewer's experiences. Reception of artefacts is thus multilayered, even regarding what may seem to be very simple objects, such as ancient glass vessels uncovered and collected around the middle of the nineteenth century. Drawing on research into the Damon Collection (Canterbury Museum, New Zealand) this study explores Victorian reception of Roman glass, demonstrating the many and often complex ways in which objects of utilitarian origin in classical antiquity gained new meaning and surprising popularity among a broad public. Glass vessels were receptacles for ideas and the imagination, from adventure to questions of religion and empire. In particular, vessels identified as ‘lachrymatories’ became a very personal empathetic link to the classical past, with influence on popular imagination enduring to the present day.

These notes were compiled for a lecture to the grocersapos; assistants and apprentices of Liverpool, early in 1910, but have been revised and somewhat elaborated.

Let us begin by defining our subject. What are Groceries? The con-tents of a grocerapos;s shop are various, and some are common to grocersapos; shops and more special establishments. Some of these (1) are perhaps not strictly ‘groceries’ at all, (2) are absent from early lists of groceries; e.g. tea and coffee, which formerly had their own ‘warehousemen’, and this process of encroachment and regrouping still goes on. What then are the sources and the purposes of all these? Every business of supply is a matter of adapting means to ends. The ends are not set by the business man, but by the public, the customers. The means also are not created by the business man; they exist, or are made, elsewhere and among other peoples. The business man is the middleman who organizes the supply to meet the demand for something which the consumer either cannot supply for himself or only at a disproportionate and therefore unbusiness-like effort.

In looking, therefore, at the early history of what was to become a ‘grocery’ business, we are asking three questions: as to the purposes which groceries serve, the sources which fulfil them, and the methods by which the ‘grocer’ adjusts supply to demand. In a modern grocer's shop, then, we may classify its contents in respect of the purposes which they serve, and the means which fulfil these ends.

Bycommunis is meant a syllable, not the last syllable of a word nor a prepositional prefix, which may in one context be short, in another long, because it contains a short vowel, this vowel being followed by a mute (which may be represented by more than one character) followed by a liquid. The first two syllables of quadruplicis are communes. In Cicero, Arati Phaenomena 334, this word is scanned with the first syllable long and the second short, and we may say that it contains a long communis followed by a short communis; but in another context the first syllable of this word might be short and the second long, or both might be long. For brevity we may use CR (CCR) to mean long communis (-es) in the rise of a foot (arsis, strong position), CF (CCF) to mean long communis (-es) in the fall of a foot (thesis, weak position).