In the Greek papyri from Egypt we meet a little band of schoolboys. They are a remnant of their kin. The tousled heads which bowed over the clay tablets laboriously incised with wedge-shaped tables in the Sumeria of Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar are gone. No one even thought of carving them on a temple wall. Gone, too, are the lads of Egypt's temple schools. They had no free milk at school by the Nile, but each morning their mothers appeared with three rolls of bread and two jugs of beer to be consumed during lessons. ‘A boy who wanted more’, says the document which supplies the information, ‘is a gluttonous creature.’ Were there brown Oliver Twists among the budding scribes in the days when Tahutmes III was setting up ‘Cleopatra's’ needle ? The sturdy scribe who sits cross-legged in limestone in the Louvre looks as if he might have merry tales to tell of schooldays in his century. It was the twenty-seventh before Christ.

Every young man in Greece during the fifth and fourth centuries b.c. had to be a soldier or a sailor, whether he liked it or not, for the greater part of his life; we may recall that Socrates ‘trailed a pike’ when he was forty-five at the battle of Delium, and the records of those times certainly show that anyone to whom the life of soldiering appealed had ample opportunity to indulge his taste to the full. If he did not like it, there was little remedy, and no provision for conscientious objection in the city-state. There were some, however, who found an outlet for their surplus energies not in the army of their own city but in that of a foreign overseas power, or even of a neighbouring and rival state, sometimes from choice, often compelled by a variety of causes which we shall shortly mention. It was with the Carians of southern Asia Minor that mercenary service of this sort traditionally originated in the eighth and early part of the seventh centuries b.c.—with their neighbours from Ionia they had long been troubling the shores of the Nile Delta by their freebooting expeditions until Psammetichus I actually took them into his service in his successful attempt to gain the throne of Egypt, and then formally incorporated them in his army, stationing them at Daphnae on the eastern frontier of the Delta. From that time onward Egypt also knew other large bodies of Greek soldiers, still mainly from Asia Minor; in return for their help the Egyptian kings on various occasions sent gifts to the great shrine of Apollo at Branchidae. Later on we find that this habit of mercenary service spread to, and grew in, mainland Greece.

A stone thrown into a still pool radiates ripple upon ripple in an ever widening circle. So the ripples caused by the irruption of Christian society into the early Roman empire radiated an ever widening influence, destined to assist in the overthrow of an old order, and to promote the building of a new order of European society. When the disciples received the command ‘Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, … teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you’, they were faced with a tremendous social and political problem. This was, in a word, to create a Christian society, irrespective of race, creed, or colour, within the existing framework of the imperial Roman world.

There are arid patches in Livy, as in most historians, but for these there is ample compensation in passages of brilliant description and characterization.

When Julian reached the Gallic armies at Rheims in the summer of a.d. 356 and laid his plans with the commanders for the coming campaign, it is not likely that he gave much attention to Ammianus Marcellinus, a young staff officer who was present at the discussions. Yet most of our information about the Apostate and about the years on either side of his brief and tragic career—from the aftermath of Magnentius' rebellion in 353 to the battle of Adrianople in 378—is derived from the work of that Antiochene Greek who had arrived at the army only a few months before the Caesar and who was later to become his admirer and friend.

It is not generally know that a striking parallel to the second verse of Ben Jonson's To Celia (‘I sent thee late a rosy wreath …’) occurs in the Greek Anthology. An epigram there by an anonymous poet is briefer than Jonson's verse, but the thought is precisely the same:

Πέμπω σοι μύρον ἡύ, μύρῳ παρέΧων Χάριν, οὐ σοί αὐτή γάρ μυρίσαι καὶ τὸ μύρον ύνασαι.

‘I send thee sweet perfume, granting a favour to the perfume, not to thee; for thou thyself canst perfume even the perfume.’

An ἀγών between the dignity and aspiration of man and the apparently overwhelming power of the gods or of circumstance recurs frequently as a theme in the Greek tragedies. The solution proposed by the Greek writers was always positive and encouraging to man. The same theme is found in the Aeneid, and the answer is not dissimilar to the solution offered in some of his plays by Aeschylus. Virgil views the struggle historically and he makes his hero the embodiment of past, present, and future. He is Aeneas the founder of the Roman race, he is Augustus the inaugurator of the new Rome, and he is also what Augustus and his successors in the poet's opinion should be. That is to say, he is the tradition of the past, the actuality of the present, and an ideal for the future. Above all he is the Roman people then, now, and to come; and the ideal for the future is a social ideal. The tragic idea of the Aeneid is made plain at the beginning of the poem by means of the celestial machinery. The first scene is the storm (i, 34–156) when all the powers of heaven seem to be trying to wreck the already ruined Trojans. We might indulge in a misapplication of words and choose as a motto for this passage

tantaene animis caelestibus irae? (l. 11)

The gods are cruel and unjust as in Prometheus Vinctus. The second scene shows the effect of this ‘persecution’ upon the Trojans. They are fessi rerum (178), ‘weary of the world’. But from Aeneas suffering evokes a confession of faith—

per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum tendimus in Latium, sedes ubi fata quietas ostendunt; illic fas regna resurgere Troiae. Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis. (204–7)