The results of epigraphy are not so immediately attractive to the eye as those of most other branches of archaeology. Certainly the fascination of extracting the tale of history from contemporary records on stone, and the wealth and variety of the material available from this source, are coming to be more and more generally recognized. The fact remains that a collection of inscriptions published in the modern manner, consisting of little more than a list of dimensions and a series of battered-looking texts, cannot invite attention in the compelling way of a bronze, a vase, or some everyday implement of ancient life.

Dr. Alington's golden darts are, as usual, exquisitely fashioned, but they are poor things in a desperate defence and ensure victory to the enemy all along the line.

The town of Gadara, on the eastern shores of Galilee, was as famous in the Hellenistic Age for its culture as it afterwards became for its swine. Among its sons were Menippus the Cynic, hero of Lucian and model of Petronius, Meleager, also a satirist but better known as the charming weaver of the Garland, Theodorus, the candid tutor of Tiberius, and lastly, Philodemus. If these four have any quality in common, it is nothing oriental, but rather a certain realism and common sense—Cynicism purged of Cynic squalor by contact with the Seleucid courts.

It is good for the schoolmaster who considers himself up-to-date to research occasionally among old school-books, and to discover how many of his ‘modern’ ideas are not modern at all; and a few evenings spent in the library of an old country house may be an enlightening and humbling experience. The pioneer will find that he is just an antiquary, the innovator that he is a reactionary. But if he can stomach the blow to his pride, he may find himself amused as well as enlightened, though the source of amusement will vary with the type of book. An eighteenth-century Greek Grammar will rely for its entertainment on the drawings and manuscript glosses of the pupil; but pleasure less crude is afforded by such a book as Familiarium Colloquiorum Libellus Graece et Latine, which was published in London in the year 1667, autore Johanne Posselio.

Many of us have attended performances of Greek plays; a smaller number have themselves acted in one or more. To all these the question of the production of any play that is being read becomes of great interest, an interest which is not always adequately catered for by commentators in their editions. When I read a Greek play, I always like to imagine myself as ‘producing’ it, and try to visualize it on the stage, as Aristotle tells budding playwrights they should, when they are composing tragedies. I have taken here as giving examples of the kinds of point to be raised what is probably the best known of all Greek plays; but several of the kind of questions that it compels us to ask ourselves can be asked equally well in many other plays.

JuliusCaesar was murdered not because he abused his autocratic powers but because the Roman nobility was not prepared to stomach an autocrat at all. Octavian, therefore, made fair profession of restoring the Republic and watched over the establishment of a new constitution in which the functions of government were divided between the Princeps, First Citizen of Rome, and the Senate, a constitution in which, in the last resort, although the fact was ingeniously concealed, supreme power lay with the Princeps. When, towards the end of his life, Augustus wrote: ‘Of power I had no more than my colleagues in each several magistracy’, he expressed no more than an ingenious half-truth. The Senate might console itself with the reflection that it voted the Emperor his imperium for limited periods of five or ten years, and that it reserved the right to refuse to extend this imperium or, after the death of Augustus, to elect a successor to him. These were vain thoughts, but they were entertained none the less. In the background was the army, strong enough and ready enough to see that the empire which had been established by the legions should not be destroyed by the politicians.

Few readers of the Bacchae will disagree with Professor Gilbert Murray's statement that ‘for excitement, for mere thrill, there is absolutely nothing like it in ancient literature’. Most readers will probably also feel that the whole thing is cruel and barbarous, and that it is difficult to suppose that Euripides had much real sympathy with the wild revellings and orgies so beautifully depicted, or that he thought it a good thing for women to get into a state in which they mistook men for animals, and deserted their own babies to suckle the offspring of wild beasts. Such being the results at Thebes of the new ritual, it is hard not to feel from the first that Pentheus is right in trying to suppress it, and right in denying the divinity of Dionysus. It is not easy to agree with Tyrrell in finding in all this the marks of an ‘ethical contentment and speculative calm’. The man who should be ethically contented with that would not be worth reading.

In most branches of classical study, in the interpretation of history, in criticism, whether textual or literary, and most noticeably in archaeology, the present generation knows more than its parents did; that a similar advance has not been made in the strictly linguistic studies is perhaps due partly to an unexpressed assumption that we already know all that we are likely to know about the classical languages, but is certainly due even more to a love of tradition for its ownsake; what was good enough for Kennedy is good enough for us.

The inscriptions to which I have called attention in previous issues of this journal have all been ‘historical’ in the sense that they relate to men whose names are well known to us from the literary records of Greece and Rome. But it must constantly be borne in mind that, of the many services rendered by inscriptions to classical studies, not the least is that of illuminating certain obscure tracts of ancient life, on which the extant literature sheds little or no light, and of recalling to our minds some of its aspects which we are in danger of overlooking. For historical literature tends to concentrate our thought upon the city rather than upon the countryside, upon rulers and governments to the neglect of the common people, upon wars and abnormal occurrences to the exclusion of the everyday occupations and interests of the average citizen. And so no apology is, I hope, needed if, out of the mass of recent epigraphical discoveries, I select one which, at first sight, can claim but little importance, one which, found in an obscure sanctuary, records the concerns not of a people but of a parish, and affords a glimpse of a local temple, priest and festival, suggesting the opportunities of ambition and distinction open to men who, maybe, rarely attended the meetings of the Athenian ecclesia and played little or no part in the public life of the State.