A tilted nose, long rather mysterious eyes, and a subtle mouth are the obvious characteristics of the little head which forms the subject of my first illustration. It is a small perfume-vase found in Rhodes and made about 550 b.c. We feel that we are in the presence of a lady of an inquiring turn of mind and a great appreciation of the joys of life. I hope that she is sufficiently interesting to justify an inquiry into her life and surroundings. Is this curiosity and enjoyment of life characteristic of Ionian art and literature in general?

There were various conceptions of the function of history current in the ancient world. There was always one school of so-called historians who wrote with the motive of giving pleasure uppermost in their minds. The absence of a novel from classical literature left romance to invade history and oratory, and writers of this school might often be more properly called historical novelists than historians. They were especially susceptible to the influence of declamation and the rhetorical worship of style. For this school, in brief, history was nothing but the raw material for the literary artist. A second school, of which Polybius is the most prominent representative, held that history should be the training-ground of politicians, statesmen, and soldiers, who may learn from the past how to discover the real significance of events. Polybius naturally attached more importance to truth (which, he says, is to history what the eye is to the human body) than did those who wrote only for entertainment. Thirdly, there was the view that it is the function of history to teach men of all stations the lessons of the past, and by so teaching form and strengthen the individual moral character. This last is the view of Tacitus, though his conception of the function of history is broad enough to embrace the other two in a properly subordinate measure.

I happened to be looking through one of the volumes of Lyra Graeca when I came across the fascinating account, in Pollux's Word-Book, of some of the games played by Greek children, the jingles that go with the different games, and their titles.

When this paper was first written, a few months ago, it was christened ‘Greek Tragedy and Modern Religious Worship’. But this name will not describe it properly. Its subject is not modern religious worship, but Greek tragedy. I hope to use what we know about modern religious worship to help our understanding of Greek tragedy, and not vice versa. And I wish, at the outset, to stress the word ‘worship‘—‘religious worship’, nor ‘religion’, not ‘religious belief’. We are to consider rather the outward form than the inward content of religion as we know it to-day. And the same is true of what is, as I have said, my real subject. I will not attempt any general account of Greek tragedy. I am concerned with one aspect of it only, its outward form. We have, preserved to us through twenty-three centuries and more, thirty-three specimens of it, all (with one possible exception) by one or other of the three great masters of tragic poetry. That is to say, the words of these plays have been preserved. We know less than we could wish, to be sure, of other things upon which the total effect of an ancient tragedy depended: the buildings and scenery, the dresses, the gestures, the dancing, the music, and much besides. Still, even of these things we know something and can safely guess more; we have the words, and may claim to understand their meaning fairly well; putting all together, we may say that we know what the form of a Greek tragedy was. That this form is interesting and beautiful, most of those who have been able to make its acquaintance are disposed to agree. But it is also a strange form. It does and must appear strange to those who have read modern plays, and seen modern plays performed, and then come to read Greek tragedies, whether in Greek or in English, and even, with luck, to see Greek tragedies performed. The feeling of strangeness wears off, like other things, with time and familiarity, to a great extent; but it seldom wears off completely. We may cease to wonder that an old Greek play is so unlike a modern play; we never quite cease to wonder that an old Greek play is what it is.

It is more than a hundred years since the walls of Athens were pulled down to the sound of the flute, since Euripides died, since the fresh, vigorous, political life of Athens passed into the era of orators and philosophers. And even the era of orators and philosophers has lost its power and originality, and no Greek city has taken the place of Athens. The Greek world is a scene of courts and kings, or of effete democracies where the orators cannot even talk as well as Demosthenes. The empire of Alexander has passed over the eastern Mediterranean. Alexandria is growing into a great capital, a civilized capital, a city with a great city population, with library, scholars, critics, and great learning, under the protection of a court. Its poets are elegant imitators, polished elegists, or epigrammatists, and there seems no prospect of a new birth of poetry. The Aegean islands are quiet. No more desperate struggles for liberty: no strains of Sappho or Archilochus. The most interesting island is perhaps Cos, an island fertile and beautiful, famous for its vines and weaving of fine stuffs. It has a close connexion with the Alexandrian court and forms a kind of ‘Villegiatura’ for it. There is in the island a famous school of medicine, and also a literary coterie, with Philetas as its leader, and Philetas is struck with the quaint idea of disguising himself and his friends as shepherds in the poems they write about each other. The idea seems an amusing device for escaping from the academic atmosphere of Alexandria.

The presentation of conditional clauses in Latin involves but little difficulty until we come to those that are expressed by a verb in the present subjunctive. It is easy to understand that the past tenses of the subjunctive convey an unreal or imaginary supposition, one contrary to the facts of the case, while with a verb in the indicative we have an open supposition, in which there is no implication as to the facts: but what of the present subjunctive? How does si quid habeam differ from si quid habebo, if both suppositions have regard to future time?

In volume iv, no. 10, of Greece and Rome, dated October 1934, appeared an article entitled ‘Latin by the Mason Gray Method’, from the pen of C. McEvoy. We were told that the Mason Gray method finds practical expression in the book Latin for To-day. This book is edited by C. McEvoy, and assuming that this is the same C. McEvoy who wrote the article in Greece and Rome, we cannot be surprised that the book appears there in a good light. It is the purpose of the present writer to put forward certain points which he believes to be important after an examination of Book I of Latin for To-day.