Forty miles north-east of Shiraz, in the Mervdasht plain near the confluence of the Bandamir and Pulvar rivers, stand the palaces of Persepolis on a spur of the little mountain Kuh-i-Rahmet. Across the valley to the west at Husein Kuh are the tombs of the kings. Farther up the Pulvar, at Istakhr, are the barren ruins of the town of Persepolis; and at a spot twenty miles to the north-east (but forty by the windings of the Pulvar) Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire, built his residential capital, Pasargadae.

(a) Origin and Development. The public games at Rome had their origin in religion. Thus the earliest games of which we have any account, those distinguished for the rape of the Sabine women, were in honour of the god Consus, and another very ancient festival, the Equirria, was in honour of Mars. That something of their religious character was felt even in the last days of the Republic is shown by a passage of Cicero: ‘An, si ludius consistit aut tibicen repente conticuit … aut si aedilis verbo aut simpulo aberravit, ludi sunt non rite facti?’ For Roman religion was marked by a love of formality and ritual: if, therefore, the slightest hitch occurred in the ceremonial procedure, the games were regarded as having failed to satisfy the gods, and it was necessary to start them afresh. So we meet in Livy such notices as ludi in unum diem or in biduum instaurati: sometimes the second performance was no more successful than the first, in which case we find ludi ter, quater, or even septies instaurati. Claudius, suspecting that these hitches were occasionally manufactured in order that the games might be prolonged, decreed that at the second performance chariotand horse-races should be finished in one day.

To take a piece of simple narrative prose and render everything in it in another language, not only the words but the implications in them and in their order, is a difficult thing. To do the same thing for a piece of verse, when metre and perhaps rhyme have to be taken into account, is still more difficult; and if the verse has attained to that subtle dignity and magic which enables us to call it real poetry, the difficulties are again increased.

In the opening satire of his second book Horace makes a spirited reply to his contemporary critics. It is such an excellent example of his sprightly wit that I cannot do better than make use of a summary of this satire as the introduction to my paper. His published writings up to this date (29 b.c.) were the Epodes and the first book of the Satires, his earliest efforts, many of them composed in the grimmer period of his life when the poet had reason for depression, disillusionment, and anxiety, and before he had attained that philosophic calm which gives to the works of his maturity a mellow quality, dear to many subsequent generations of cultivated readers in all countries.