Anaxagoras was a man of one book; and that book, save for a few quotations in other authors and several summaries, is lost. A very potent and tantalizing book it must have been, to judge from all that we hear of it; the opinion of antiquity, preserved in Diogenes Laertius, was that its doctrines were expounded ‘in a pleasant and lofty style’, and the fragments which remain confirm this judgement. It was not merely a philosophical or scientific treatise; it was a work of art, in which the style rose and fell with the subject-matter.

It is now time to deal with the much-discussed and much-abused passage of Isidore, Orig. xviii. 60 ff. The account begins: ‘De Tabula. Alea, id est lusus tabulae, inventa a Graecis …; tabula luditur pyrgo, calculis tesserisque.’ After explaining the meaning of pyrgus (dice-box), calculi, and tesserae, Isidore continues with a section entitled De Figuris Aleae, a description of the board; then follow the names of the throws, remarks on the best way of throwing, and a description of the movement of pieces; the account ends with the statement that owing to its immoral tendencies the game was forbidden by law. Now, if this passage is read as a whole and without bias, it is clear that Isidore is giving a methodical account of one particular game, which he calls ‘Alea’ or ‘Tabula’.

Chaereas and Callirrhoe, the earliest extant Greek Romance, ascribed to Charito of Aphrodisia, is a melodrama of no slight vigour. Here is its plot.

A country so situated that its growth depends on sea-power and foreign trade heads an alliance against an emperor bent on adding a good part of Europe to his dominions. The emperor is defeated; and in an ample stretch of comparatively quiet years the champion of freedom finds opportunity to take the lead among its neighbours in the arts of peace. At home, democratic institutions are developed towards their logical completion; abroad, ambition is satisfied by consolidating an empire overseas. A golden age of prosperity and progress—or so it will seem when men look back upon it from the darker days that are to come. For an expanding prosperity has to reckon with the jealousy of commercial rivals; and an expanding empire is not always welcomed as a boon by the countries it penetrates and absorbs. There is a growing tension. A continental power, whose citizens are trained to the highest pitch of military efficiency, declares war. The States are grouped in two alliances, neither of which is strong enough to overpower the other or to inflict a fatal wound. No soldier of genius appears on either side, and the war drags on in a series of futile successes and futile defeats. The strain of anxiety and the release of those ugliest passions which, in time of war, assume the name of virtue, demoralize the combatants. The tacit conventions that lie at the base of civilized life are called in question or openly denied. Men lose faith in democracy, and even in freedom; they come near to losing faith in life itself. Somewhere at the heart of their being a nerve snaps; and when the war of exhaustion comes to a disastrous close, they are left disheartened and listless, unable to believe in a future worth the effort they lack the driving power to make.

If you take a walk round the exhibition of Greek and Roman Life in the British Museum, you will see there many fascinating domestic articles of antiquity, brooches, kylices, mirrors, lamps, and many of them you will find to be decorated with pictures of domestic life, of girls and boys, men and women in their natural happy surroundings. What more natural, then, that they should have with them the pets they loved and played with? Their dogs, their rabbits, their quails, cocks, sparrows, geese, their cats, their parrots, cranes, crows, and even their monkeys are all to be seen if we look with a discerning eye.

This report is not concerned with the teaching of classical specialists in public schools and grammar schools with an established classical tradition, but rather with the classical teaching in the type of school which has come into being since the Education Act of 1902; nor is our primary object to discuss the full Classical course of Greek and Latin studies in a school in which pupils normally stay till the age of 18 or so. It limits itself in the main to the problems of the suitability of Latin as a subject to be included in the curriculum of boys who may (not necessarily must) leave at 16. The larger question of full classical studies has been discussed elsewhere, as, e.g., in the Prime Minister's Report; R. W. Livingstone, A Defence of Classical Education; F. W. Kelsey, The Position of Greek and Latin in American Schools. The more limited question, the desirability of including Latin as a subject in a four or five years' course from the age of 11+ or 12+, is a matter which has engaged the attention of the Classical Association for some years; not only has the Association helped very materially towards the statement of the aims and methods of such a course (as, e.g., in such publications as J. W. Mackail, The Case for Latin; Recommendations of the Classical Association on the teaching of Latin and Greek), but it has been in constant touch with teachers engaged in the work of the schools and may claim first-hand acquaintance with the problem and real knowledge of the results already achieved in the schools towards a satisfactory solution.