The modern miss will sometimes ask, ‘Did the ladies in ancient Greece and Rome use “make-up”?’ They most certainly did. It would, indeed, be true to say that nearly all modern artificial aids to beauty had their counterparts in classical antiquity: hair, eyebrows, eyelids, eyelashes, and cheeks all had their own ‘preparations’ guaranteed to enhance woman's natural charms.

In Homer, both sexes after washing anoint themselves with oil, but of cosmetics in the usual sense of the word there is no trace. Soon, however, the Greek ladies, finding, we are told, that the sedentary life imposed upon them by convention caused their complexions to fade, eagerly adopted those devices that the Eastern races had so long employed to add to their charms; and it is clear that the ladies of Rome became even more enthusiastic than their sisters in Athens in their endeavours to improve upon nature.

Frequently my lady did not bother to use cosmetics when at home—Quando videri vult formosa domi? Juvenal asks in disgust—but on special occasions, or when going to meet an admirer, she appeared in all her brilliance. The aid of white lead (Ψרμύθιοѵ, cerussa) was often called upon to produce a fair complexion, although its use cannot have been wholly free from risk; or a chalky powder (creta) was employed. Means of reddening the cheeks were obtained from the alkanet root (ἂγχoυνσα)—a dye which is still used to-day; from the crushed fruit of the mulberry (συκἁμινoν, morum) or the elderberry(acinus ebuli); from the poppy (papaver); and from a plant which we cannot identify (παιέρως) but which was guaranteed to give ‘that schoolgirl complexion’ a darker tint could be obtained from a composite preparation known as purpurissum.

‘As I battled with this wind, miserable and blue-nosed, I reflected that if—which heaven forfend—I had had to write a copy of verses about it, I should have called it Eurus, coupled with the most horrific epithet to be found in the Gradus; further, that it was a pity that no one had ever thought of names for the golfing winds. The names of the winds, that one used in doing Latin Verses, gave one a distinct picture of their different personalities, even if it were not quite the same picture that a Roman young gentleman would have had. One thought of them, I am afraid, not as blowing from any particular quarter, but as fitting into a particular part of those jig-saw puzzles called Hexameters and Pentameters. Thus those two entirely opposite characters, Boreas and Zephyrus, seemed to me rather like one another in that they were both sulky, disagreeable creatures who declined to help one in one's utmost need, namely, in getting the end of the line first. They would do no more than fill some position in the middle. That is to be a fair weather friend indeed, since every one knows that when once you have got your tag for the end the deuce is in it if you cannot fit in the rest somehow. Eurus and Auster were far more obliging; they were good, willing fellows, who would lend a hand anywhere in reason if you were not too fussily particular about the sense. Favonius was not trustworthy. As long as he was only wanted to serve in a hexameter he was friendly and useful, but try to use him in a pentameter, and he would plant his four feet firmly on the ground like an obstinate mule so that nothing could be done with him.’

As an ethical principle, philia represents a continuum of attachment that extends in a stable system of relationships from the self to one's immediate family and friends and then outwards to one's polis and one's race. Furthermore, shared attachment or philia also involves shared hostility or echthra, which can be as permanent as philia. But already in Sophocles' Ajax the idea of such fixed relationships is seen as old-fashioned and incompatible with practical life. In his pretended transformation from a rigid adherence to the principles of permanent philia and permanent echthra (particularly the latter) to the flexible morality of an ‘organization man’, the hero realizes that ‘we must hate our echthros only so far, since he may become our philos again later, and I am only ready to do so much to aid and assist aphilos, since he may not remain a philos forever…’ (672–81).

Most of us are aware that Rome possessed a harbour town at the mouth of the Tiber and that the ruins of the town are well worth a visit; but how many of us know the story of Ostia, the extraordinary interest attaching to it, the information it supplies on the economic life of Rome, and the great difficulties the Roman engineers had to face in constructing a really serviceable harbour ? Ostia lies about 20 miles from Rome, and for us, thinking in terms of motor-cars and trains, it is far from easy to imagine and to realize how long and difficult this journey must have seemed in the earliest times when the Romans first sought to establish connexion with the coast—not to speak of the dangers to which a traveller in those days must have been exposed. On arrival, we see the far-stretching ruins of the city lying before us in deep silence, for not merely its inhabitants have left Ostia but the sea and the river as well. The tawny Tiber, carrying down sand from the mountains, is the chief cause of the coastline shifting yearly no less than nine yards farther away; the river too has changed its bed and, in doing so, deprived Ostia of the last vestiges of her former greatness.

A small volume has come down to us from the Imperial Roman period entitled De Re Coquinaria. It is attributed to Apicius, the notorious gourmand of the first century a.d., who paid the equivalent of £50 for a particularly large red mullet. This fish had been presented to Tiberius, but he thought it too luxurious for himself, and sent it to the market in Rome, saying, ‘It is too much of a dainty for me. If I am not out in my reckoning, either Apicius or Octavius will have it.’

A brief survey of the indebtedness of the modern languages of Europe, and in particular our own, to the Latin word caput may be not without interest.

The French did not adopt the classical meaning of caput, but, by way of the slang of the Roman soldiers in all probability, preferred the Latin testa = a tile, French tête. But caput did enter Gaul as the early French chief and modern chef (e.g. chef d'orchestre, chef de cuisine, whence, by the way, the English ‘chef’). English borrowed this word from French under the guise of chief, and from the early French word chevetaine formed the English chieftain. But in one word the French did adopt the classical meaning of caput, and that was in the word couvre-chef (modelled presumably upon the Vulgar Latin capitegium), meaning a covering for the head. This was adopted in Middle English as curchef (kerchief) and signified originally a cloth to cover a woman's head. It was an easy step from this to the modern ‘handkerchief’. Further, Vulgar Latin had a phrase ad caput venire, ‘to come to an end’, ‘to accomplish’. This was taken over into early French as a chief venir: later the verb venir was lost and the phrase a chief was made into the verb achever. Our English word achieve was the inevitable offspring.

Pindos, the mountain range between Thessaly and Epeiros, is not without renown. It appears first in Pindar (Pythian ix. 15), where in its ‘storied dells’ Kreousa gave birth to Hypseus by the love of the river-god Peneios. It, or more likely the town of the same name in Doris, was known to Pindar (Pythian i. 66) as the home of the Dorians, and it appears in Aeschylus and Sophokles—in the former (Supp. 257) as the north-western boundary of Pelasgos' realm, in the latter (Fr. 249) as the source of the Acheloos. Kallimachos, Theokritos, and Orpheus refer to it, and in Latin it is at least as old as Virgil. We find it in Horace, Propertius, Ovid, Lucan, Silius, and Valerius Flaccus,3 and in the course of antiquity it acquired a reputation as a lofty, wooded mountain which persists in Claudian and through the Dark Ages. Once more it is the setting for an amour of Apollo; Paion's mother, Liagore, receives leech-craft as the price of her favours (Faerie Queene, iii. 4. 41); and the same Spenser praised the whiteness of its snow (Prothalamian, 40). Wordsworth, as he wondered at the torrent at the Devil's Bridge, asked:

‘Hath not Pindus fed thee, where the band Of Patriots scoop their freedom out, with hand Desperate as thine?’

and it was about the Pindos range that, in 1940, another band of patriots repelled the Italian invasion of their country and won the first Allied victory of World War II.

This salutary series got off to a flying start with W. F. Witton's article upon a subject in bad need of treatment—the gerund and gerundive. Textbooks and grammars, when discussing the use of ‘gerundive attraction’, waver, through many shades of loosely expressed opinion, from a prudent silence to a complete prohibition of the use of this construction when it involves a genitive plural with nouns of the first and second (or sometimes all) declensions. The basis of this prohibition is the allegedly ugly sound of -arum -arum and -orum -orum. In connexion with this construction Witton not only perpetuated a heresy but confirmed it in clear and forthright language. He concludes his discussion with this statement: ‘Thus we arrive at the rule that in normal Latin the gerund does not govern an accusative unless for the purpose of retaining the distinctive neuter termination, as in aliquid agendo, or to avoid a sequence of genitive plurals: consiliorum tuorum cognoscendorum causa was too much of a mouthful even for Cicero.’ Let us now see what is Cicero's practice in reality.

It was towards the close of his life in 43 B.c. that Cicero wrote the three books of the de Officiis. The attractions of a philosophical treatise whose theme is moral duty are likely to appear slight to the modern reader, especially if that reader thinks its author to be merely the purveyor of second-hand ideas borrowed from Greek sources. Yet the de Officiis epitomizes, in an intensely Roman way, the political beliefs and ideals of the Senatorial order at Rome as the Republic finally succumbed to autocracy. The political philosophy of the ancients may be more immediately relevant today than their ethical speculation, for, while it is folly to interpret political activity as if the Roman Republic enjoyed a two-party system composed of left-wing populates and right-wing optimates, it is true that much of the turmoil generated during the last century of the Republic was related to proposals for agrarian reform and the redistribution of land; similarly, much of the debate currently being conducted between supporters of the rival ideologies is centred about the ownership of property and assets. Perhaps we may be encouraged to survey the de Officiis more sympathetically if we approach it as political scientists and as students of this subject mindful of the writings of another ancient, the historian Thucydides, and his opinion that, human nature being a constant, situations will repeat themselves in the same or a very similar form.

In September ad 1, on the occasion of his birthday, Augustus wrote to Gaius, his adopted son and grandson by Julia and Agrippa, complaining about his age, stating that he had

The attitude of an imperial government towards the religions of the different peoples whom it controls has always interested historians since it is one of the criteria by which empires are judged and since it also throws considerable light on the mentality, if not the religion, of the governing people itself. We have only to look at the British Empire to realize how complex and baffling the problem can sometimes be; take India as an example—there we find an inextricable medley of peoples and beliefs, with their daily life shot through and through with a religious system and philosophy alien to Western minds, and presenting a diversity of practice and outlook bewildering to officials who often like to have even religions arranged in a nice orderly manner. How was the problem tackled there? In the proclamation at the end of the Mutiny Queen Victoria's ministers stated: ‘… we disclaim alike the right and the desire to impose our convictions on any of our subjects. We declare it to be our royal will and pleasure that none be in any wise favoured, none molested or disquieted by their religious faith or observances, but that all shall alike enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law; and we do strictly charge and enjoin all those who may be in authority under us that they abstain from all interference with the religious belief or worship of any of our subjects on pain of our highest displeasure.’ That attitude of non-interference with religious belief or practice sounds simple enough, but it soon brought its own problems when faced with such practices as suttee and child-marriage which had the sanction of religion. It was a long time before the British Government could succeed in abolishing suttee, and its recently proposed legislation on child-marriage provoked more than a storm of protest. These are but two instances which may well illustrate the complexity of the problem; Rome found herself in somewhat similar situations when from time to time new religions as Christianity or Mithraism came into being, or when she brought under her sway races with beliefs and practices differing from her own.

Suppose a class set to put into Latin ‘I think I have said enough to show why this war is necessary’. How many teachers would accept esset in the subordinate clause? Not, I venture to affirm, one in a hundred. Yet that is what was written by Cicero, who had of course the advantage of not knowing the above ‘rule’, in the De Imperio Cn. Pompei, 10. 27: ‘satis mihi multa verba fecisse videor, quare esset hoc bellum … necessarium; … restat ut de imperatore … dicendum esse videatur.’ He uses the same construction later in the speech (19.57): ‘quo mihi etiam indignius videtur obtrectatum esse adhuc, Gabinio dicam anne Pompeio an utrique, id quod est verius, ne legaretur A. Gabinius Cn. Pompeio expetenti ac postulanti’ And a fairly careful reading of the speeches against Catiline gives eleven examples of historic sequence after a pure perfect against six of primary. I quote some of them: ii. 4. 6, ‘quod exspectavi, iam sum adsecutus, ut vos omnes factam esse aperte coniurationem contra rem publicam esse videretis’; 12. 26, ‘vos … vestra tecta … defendite; mihi ut urbi … satis esset praesidii consultum atque provisum est’; iii. 12. 27, ‘mentes hominum audacissimorum sceleratae … ne vobis nocere possent ego providi; ne mihi noceant vestrum est providere’; iv. I. I, ‘mihi si haec condicio consulatus data est ut omnes acerbitates … perferrem, feram non solum fortiter verum etiam lubenter’; 2, ‘si hunc exitum consulatus mei di immortales esse voluerunt ut vos … ex caede … eriperem, quaecunque mihi uni proponetur fortuna, subeatur’; 5. 9, ‘habemus a Caesare … sententiam.… intellectum est quid interesset inter levitatem contionatorum et animum vere popularem’; 7. 14, ‘causa est … haec inventa sola in qua omnes sentirent unum atque idem’; 9. 19, ‘atque haec non ut vos … excitarem locutus sum’.

There can be little doubt that the extant remains of Persius form the whole of his writings. In his boyhood he had indulged in the literary exercises of the classroom, and these immature efforts included a tragedy, a book of travels, and some lines on the elder Arria, whose Non dolet1 was an appropriate subject for a young Stoic to commemorate. These experiments had little merit, otherwise they would not have been destroyed on the advice of Cornutus, his friend and teacher and literary executor.

In the Classical Review of March 1957 a request was made that some New Zealand scholar would confirm and amplify for future editors of Pliny, H.N. ix. 24 ff., and Pliny, Ep. ix. 33, a brief report printed in The Times of 10 March 1956 about a dolphin ‘which allowed children at the Opononi beach to ride on its back … frolicked among the bathers in the shallow water and balanced balls on its nose’. I record most gratefully the substance of two replies to this request, one from Mr. L. G. Pocock, formerly (1928–55) Professor of Classics in Canterbury University College; and the other from Professor H. A. Murray, M.A., F.R.N.S., N.Z., of the Victoria University of Wellington. I am further indebted to Mr. Pocock for obtaining the photographs reproduced in this number of Greece & Rome (Plate V). They were taken by Mr. Eric Lee-Johnson, (Box 5, Waimamaku, Hokianga, N.Z.), who has most generously waived reproduction fees, on condition that none of the prints is handed on for reproduction elsewhere.