Latin and Greek text-books have changed much in recent years, but perhaps in no respect has there been so great improvement as in their illustrations. It is now well understood that ancient literature and history, if they are to make their appeal to boys and girls, must be made ‘real’. One approach to ‘reality’ is through the eye. For, while it is true that the study of the Classics fosters imagination by presenting a world which is far removed from our own, still imagination cannot be stimulated and guided only by the printed or spoken word; the word will be more ‘real’ if light is thrown upon it by pictures of all kinds.

There is a quarter of the eastern Mediterranean which has been singularly fertile in the history of thought. Place yourself, in time, in the four centuries from 300 b.c. to a.d. 100: place yourself, in space, on the island of Cyprus, and look northwards to Cilicia, eastwards to northern Syria, and south-eastwards to Phoenicia; and then so placed and so looking, you will find a constellation of many stars. From Citium in Cyprus came Zeno, a Hellenized Phoenician, as Mr. Bevan has called him, who founded the Stoic school. From Soli, in Cilicia, to the north, came Chrysippus, the systematizer of Stoicism. From the neighbouring city of Tarsus came Zeno the Second, the successor to Chrysippus as master of the Porch; and from Tarsus there also came a Hellenized Hebrew (again I quote Mr. Bevan), whom we call St. Paul, and who visited Athens three and a half centuries after the Hellenized Phoenician from Cyprus, and preached in terms of Stoic philosophy, as it is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, in the midst of Mars' Hill. These are not the only sons of Tarsus. There was also Antipater, who was next successor but one to Zeno the Second as the head of the Stoic school; and many centuries afterwards, about a.d. 650, there was also Theodore of Tarsus, the founder of the English Church, who had studied at Athens, was well versed in literature, Greek as well as Latin, and was called ‘the philosopher’.

From about the fourth century b.c. Rome had a long-standing alliance with the Greek colony of Massilia (Marseilles) whose territory was constantly raided by southern Gallic tribes; these incursions called for military intervention from the Romans from the middle of the second century, culminating in a series of successful campaigns, the enlargement of Massilia's territory, the founding of the colony of Aquae Sextiae (Aix, 30 miles north of Marseilles), and the annexation of southern Gaul in 121 b.c. after the defeat of the Allobroges and Arverni. The province stretched from the Pyrenees up to Tolosa (Toulouse), then the frontier skirted the Cevennes to the Jura Mountains and the south-west corner of Lacus Lemannus (Lake Geneva); then it came in a south-south-easterly line to the Mediterranean coasts, by the Maritime Alps. It formed a very valuable corridor from Italy to Spain, and through it ran the Via Domitia beyond the Rhone; in 118 b.c. Narbo Martius (Narbonne) was founded, and so flourishing a Roman civilization grew up that Pliny later described it as ‘Italia verius quam provincia’.

C. gargilius haemon read his own epitaph. He read slowly, sitting on the stairs beside the tablet, moving his lamp from line to line, and watching the words leap into clarity and fade again. It was a beautiful epitaph. Its warm phrases comforted him; its rhythms from the poets sang in his head. There was a whole line of verse to end it. He chanted it softly.

On two sides productive work for the understanding of Aeschylean tragedy has lately been done. Cambridge scholars have made useful progress in the elucidation of Aeschylus, and recent new interpretations of the symbolic and prophetic meaning of later poetry, including the New Testament, have produced results which can be applied with caution to tragic poetry in general. A combination of the methods of these investigators, which yet does not abandon all the estimates of older criticism, may, by a slight change of perspective, enable further progress in the interpretation of Aeschylus to be made.

Parallels between ancient and modern, when drawn with the knowledge and skill of Mr. Cornford, are fascinating: they give new life to antiquity and help us to stand away from the pressure of our own days and to note their form. It would be pedantic to ask more of them; but there is a dangerous temptation to make more of them.

Opinion seems to be growing among teachers of Roman history that the Empire should be more extensively studied in schools. The feeling was expressed by more than one speaker in a discussion held not so long ago by the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, and this ‘boom’ in the Empire is likely to be fostered by Robert Graves' I, Claudius and Claudius the God, and by Mr. Stevenson's text-book The Roman Empire—surely one of the first school text-books on this period.

It falls to the lot of every teacher of Latin at some time to enunciate the rule, ‘If a question expects the answer “yes”, use nonne; if it expects “no”, use num’; and then, unless he is teaching a class of dummies, the trouble begins. ‘What if you don't expect any particular answer?’ ‘Why, if there are only two possible answers to a question, should there be three ways of asking one?’ ‘What if you don't get the answer you expect? Do you have to go back and amend the question?’