To reach Cherchell from Tipasa you must leave the sea and go inland round the flanks of Djebel Chénoua. Just beyond the first mile you come upon a strongly built Roman farm on the left of the road. The main gate is well preserved; it appears to have given en trance to the courtyard, round which were grouped living-rooms and farm-buildings, the whole forming a quadrilateral which would offer stout resistance to any band of raiding Berbers. The excellence of the masonry suggests that the farm dates back to the early days of Roman occupation of the littoral, but it may well have played its part in resisting Firmus and his Moors in the fourth century when they swept eastward down the Taza corridor to raid the fertile fields of Caesariensis.

Some excellent people there are who hate digging things up, hate things dug up, and hate people who dig them up. It takes many sorts to make a world and I would not pick a quarrel with any such; but it is not primarily to them that I would direct my remarks—unless indeed in any case the heart is not too hardened to admit of softening. To put the point more directly, coins are undeniably a part of archaeology and, tempted though I am to secure an easier approach to your attention, I cannot pretend that they are primarily a literary source.

It was not till the sixth century B.C. that geography was recognized by the Greeks as a distinct branch of study. But Strabo was right in regarding Homer as the first Greek geographer, inasmuch as the Homeric poems provide the earliest literary evidence about the content of the Greek world. From Homer onwards the known world was continually enlarging its boundaries, and by the end of the Roman period very little, except the New World discovered by Columbus and his contemporaries, remained unknown. The progress of geographical knowledge may be divided into four stages—Homeric, Ionian, Hellenistic, Roman–in each of which the acquisition of data led on to an attempt at systematization, when the information provided by travellers was used as material for scientific theory. This process was unconscious in the Homeric stage, but deliberate in the others. Thus in the Ionian age the spread of colonization enabled Anaximander to make the first map and Hecataeus to write his Περίολος Γη~ς, the first systematic account of the world; these in their turn produced Herodotus, who brought to geography and ethnography the rudiments of a critical standpoint ( , vii. 152). In the Hellenistic and Roman ages the factors were not so much colonial as military and mercantile. Hellenistic knowledge of the world was enlarged by the campaigns of Alexander and by the enterprises of Alexandrian traders, which the scholars of Alexandria, notably Eratosthenes, the first truly critical geographer, turned to scientific use: similarly the progress of the Roman arms and the expansion of Roman trade brought grist to the mill of Strabo and Ptolemy, the most careful, respectively, of descriptive and scientific geographers. In the period which follows these, no longer ancient but medieval, the wheel comes full circle in a new Homeric stage of feudalism and fable, and starts its revolution once more; the next stage, the renascence Age of Discovery, is Ionia again on a larger scale.

Many teachers must have found that it is far easier to awake interest in Greek history than in the history of Rome. Greek history affords much greater variety; it is full of the doings of men who stand out as clear-cut individualities, while those who fashioned the Republic of Rome are all surprisingly similar each to the other: they remind one of the portraits of the early Scottish kings of Holyrood. But perhaps an even greater difficulty lies in the fact that our text-books of Roman history are, naturally enough, planned chronologically, and thus the writers are forced to relate the whole contemporaneous development in many spheres of the nation's life. Constitutional, economic, military, and social history must all advance together as parts of a single narrative. The student's interest is distracted, and he is prevented from following up a single line of thought. Divide et impera is a good Roman maxim, and I feel that we should do well to follow Roman practice in our teaching of Roman history. Mr. Maurice Baring within the covers of a single book has recently four times recounted the history of Mary Queen of Scots: the four Maries attendant on the queen tell, each in her own way, of the same series of events. It would be an interesting experiment to narrate the history of Rome in one and the same book in several different ways, regarding that history in each case from a single standpoint. Thus would be secured that unity of view which it is impossible for the ordinary text-book to maintain. What, we may ask ourselves, would be our varied angles from which successively to approach the history of the Roman Republic? Here there is wide scope for the expression of a teacher's personality; my own chapters would be written round some such headings as:1. The Roman and the land.2. The Roman army.

In discussing popular verse we may note, first, that speaking generally it is originally rhythmical rather than metrical, usually only becoming metrical under literary influence—as was probably the case in Greek and Latin; secondly, that it tends to be strongly accentual, being very often (and perhaps by origin) connected with dancing or rhythmical movement (spinning, grinding, &c.); and thirdly, that therefore the number of accents is more important than the number of syllables. These considerations are of almost universal application, many languages, indeed, never developing any precise metrical rules at all—as Old English and Hebrew.

We now turn to more advanced work, after the stage of the School Certificate. In Sixth Form work the same general advantages hold for the study of art and of archaeology (and the same distinction must be kept between their provinces) as were urged in the first article. But the work can be taken farther, and more detail can be both given and expected. Most Sixth Forms doing classical work will have five periods a week for ancient history; this allows elbow-room, and history can be widely interpreted. It must be admitted that in most Higher School Certificate ancient history papers, and even in the Oxford and Cambridge ‘general’ papers, questions bearing directly upon the arts, other than literature, are not exactly common. This, however, may be thought by some to make for the easier handling of the subject; and on the other hand there are few ancient history papers, however ‘orthodox’, in which a knowledge of archaeology cannot be put to good and profitable use— Solon‘s coinage, the rebuilding of the Acropolis, the tribute lists, the Damareteion, the temples of Ephesus, Augustus’ new city of Rome, inscribed milestones from Rhine and Danube, Trajan's Column, Hadrian's Wall. It may be pointed out that there are two very important periods of ancient history, of which no proper understanding is possible at all without some knowledge of ‘sources’ other than literary. One of these, of course, is the Pentekontaetea: pupils ought to be given interest in the surprising fact that for perhaps the greatest period of Greek civilization, that between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, there are no literary sources, except scraps and patches, behind the text-book which is being used in class; and they ought (within limits, for they are still at school and not at the University) to know what these non-literary sources in fact are, and where their text-book had its origins. The other period for which some archaeology is essential covers the first 150 years of the Roman Empire, and it is to be regretted that so little work is done at school on this formative and interesting period in the history of civilization: indeed a knowledge of the period is definitely discouraged by the syllabus of some examining bodies (some examiners themselves, perhaps, are ill-adapted for it); but if sufficiently numerous demands were made by schools for a specially prepared paper on this period, it would soon find itself included in the normal syllabus. English history has now temerariously advanced its frontiers from 1815 to 1914; Waterloo is no longer the final and satisfying crown of the student's bliss: why then should so many Roman history books praise and bury Julius, and then stop ? Rome's greatness is just beginning, and we should go on. But the chronique scandaleuse of Tacitus, though it often makes exhilarating masters of Latin prose, does not make historians: coins, inscriptions, roads, camps, here claim their rights, with Palmyra, Baalbek and Timgad, Trèves, Chester, and the volume on Roman London of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments. Architecture (throughout the whole extent of the Empire), portrait sculpture, and the very considerable amount which there is of commemorative and narrative sculpture, is throughout this period highly important in the history of art, and for the ways of life of large urban populations; and though the subject is less easily manageable for study than is the art of fifth- and fourth-century Greece, because less closely localized and concentrated, yet it has a greatness of scale which stirs the imagination, and a nearness of style and quality to our own times which makes it easily assimilable.

I have been invited by the editors of Greece and Rome to contribute to its pages a series of notes on recently discovered Greek inscriptions, indicating briefly their significance for classical studies but avoiding technicalities. I gladly accept the invitation, alike because of the fascination which inscriptions exercise for myself, in common with many teachers and students of the classics, and also because of the value of the epigraphical evidence for every aspect of the thought, the speech, and the activities of the ancient world. I shall select for this purpose inscriptions short enough to be transcribed in full and shall prefer those which are published in periodicals or books not everywhere accessible in this country. For the sake of those, and I hope they may be not a few, who wish to pursue the study further, I shall add to each note a select bibliography.