Yesterday was my seventy-fifth birthday, and I saw the Herakles of Euripides. Where are the gods, Euclides? Euripides, they say, worships gods of his own, and strange divinities too, if stories are true; but Athens is a city of gossip. He certainly has scant respect for the gods of his fathers; and the audience, but for us few older men, who almost go back to the generation of Marathon, the audience, in the main, was with him. It was the same theatre, my old friend, where you and I, as boys, sat nearly sixty years ago and watched the Persae of Aeschylus. What a day that was! There stood Salamis, where we were taken by our mothers to live in that anxious, waiting crowd for those long weeks while the Persians sacked the city and were at last defeated on that blue strait which glittered in the sun before our eyes while the poet told its story on the stage. Then shortly afterwards you went away and found a home on the shores of the Euxine, and since then you have known Athens, you say, only by my letters. You went away before the work of restoring the Akropolis had advanced very far. I have told you of the temples built upon it in honour of the gods who saved Greece, so men said then. They rose above our heads yesterday, dazzling white against deepest blue; but what are their gods to Athens now?

In an age like the present which is sceptical of untutored inspiration and sets a high value on style, it is not surprising that the Aeneid should have regained some of the prestige it held in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The hostility which the nineteenth century felt for its deliberate and self-conscious progress has abated, and Virgil is again regarded as the poet of unfaltering taste in emotions as in words. But the reviving admiration for the Aeneid has no word of praise for Aeneas. He is either neglected or dismissed with a few disparaging sentences. Even so generous a critic as Professor Garrod calls him ‘the wrong man in the wrong place’, and the hero of the Aeneid seems relegated to that undistinguished limbo which contains so many heroes of great epics. It seems that he is no better and no worse than Tennyson's King Arthur or Milton's Jehovah or the indistinguishable heroes of the different books of The Faerie Queene. He is as lifeless as they are, and for the same reason. His appeal is not to the imagination, but to the conscience, and the conscience has changed its ideals and left him and them behind. Perhaps to the Romans he was a symbol of much inspiring morality, but he means nothing to us. So far as he has any personality, he is a prig and a bore.

Many a traveller sailing up the Rhine gorge must have wondered what lies beyond the noble cliffs on either hand. Not all perhaps have realized that if they could scale the heights on their left, leave the ruined castles and flourishing vineyards behind them, and walk some ten or fifteen miles to the north-east, they would cross the great earthen mound and ditch which still remain to mark the boudary of the Roman Empire. This barrier, part of a system more than three hundred miles in length, stretching from Rhine to Danube, is well worth the attention of those who are interested in the British frontier walls.

Nine years the Achaeans lay encamped beside the sea. Toll was taken of the wealth of Priam and the lives of men in forays, raids, and skirmishes, but no pitched battle fought, until a time of pestilence and disaffection in the Greek camp culminated in the quarrel with Achilles and in Agamemnon's preparation for a general attack.

Greek history began with the epic and genealogical writers like Homer and Hesiod; Herodotus followed with his prose epic of the Persian Wars. Greek history became scientific and critical with Thucydides but did not remain so after him: from Xenophon onwards it lapsed into rhetoric and romance. Roman historians followed Greek principles and methods, and the earliest wrote in Greek. Polybius alone cared much for scientific criticism in his work; the rest held, with Cicero, that history is a branch of the art of rhetoric. Livy and Tacitus produced works of great literary merit at the expense of historical accuracy. Julius Caesar's account of his conquest of Gaul was the military report of a general written to the people who had given him his commission, to justify his unconstitutional action in conquering Gaul without instructions. These are only the foremost names, but of all Greek and Roman historians only Thucydides and Polybius used in writing the scientific and critical standards of modern historians. The others wrote to please the public taste for rhetoric, to grind some axe, to edify their readers, to relate anecdotes, to praise or blame, to express personal opinions, to display their literary powers, to make digressions, and not many were saved by literary skill from the mediocrity to which their critical weakness doomed them.