‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ cries Tertullian of Carthage when the Christian Church was barely two centuries old, ‘what harmony is there between Plato's Academy and the Church?’ Then, with all the mastery of eloquence that he had learned in the school of classical rhetoric, he denounces non-Christian literature as pernicious—‘We have no need of curiosity going beyond Christ Jesus, nor of inquiry beyond the Gospel.’

The question might still be crudely asked to-day—Why teach pagan literature in Christian countries and Christian schools? Some may answer that the problem and the conflict are past; none of the greater Christian churches opposes classical education now; on the contrary the clergy mostly encourage it, while it is the scientists that object. But Christianity and the classics meet each other with different facets in different epochs. Sometimes these facets seem less adjustable than those before them. And some of the defences made for pre-Christian literature by Christians, and some of the uses they recommend for it, deserve attention still.

What follows here is mainly an historical survey, and necessarily a very sketchy one. It must begin long before our Lord's time, at the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. By that time Palestine and Egypt, the two great centres of Judaism, had come under Greek rule. After Alexander's death both these regions were taken over by Ptolemy. He and his namesake successors were enlightened and tolerant monarchs. Under their rule Hellenism gained ground among the Jews both at Jerusalem and at Alexandria.

Increase in knowledge of the psychology of ordinary people, and still more of poets, added to recent progress in scholarship, has affected our necessary approach to old critical problems more than we fully realize yet. In trying to understand ancient poets old questions, such as how to make sense of a passage, how to prove that a poet is consistent with himself, and what the intention of the poet was, are coming to seem more and more insufficient and sometimeseven the wrong questions to ask. Further, it is dangerous to make a solution to a problem depend on answers to such questions, especially when the problem concerns a great and most authentic poet such as Aeschylus or Virgil. Again and again the text of Virgil has been emended for in- sufficient reasons; for example, to make sense, or to agree with the assumed intentions of the poet. The truth is that Virgil, like other great poets, wrote down sometimes not the precise, prosaic result of inten- tions, or any proposition accurate and coherent at some particular moment, but words that symbolized some long mental history, with reference to different meanings actual at different times, or else something that was true all at the same time, but ambiguous and complex, with meanings outreaching syntax, grammar, and words.

When Virgil wrote rapidum cretae or Cretae ueniemus Oaxen he invented the name Oaxes. It was partly a town in Crete, and partly several different rivers in Asia. In so far as it was in Crete, Cretae must be understood, and rapidum translated ‘swift’.

The origins of Athenian class distinctions lie far back in the days of the synoecism, and it is tantalizing that so little is known of this process. Yet much of the interest of the question depends on differences of time and circumstance, so that, although the Athenian social atmosphere was something very unlike our own, the dissimilarity is partly due to conditions which were general in the ancient world and not peculiar to the case under consideration. It is true that, like us, the ancients were distinguished by the fact of belonging to classes. Not all were wealthy; not all were celebrated. Neither were they all skilled, humble, virtuous, or unscrupulous. As now, wealth was not infrequently the accident of birth, and the example of Democedes the physician, who won affluence by his personal capacity, is a rather rare one. On the other hand, many factors which emphasize class distinction to-day were absent. There was no large-scale industry in our sense of the word. Indeed, if we wished to speak of industry in Greek, we should use the term χειρουργία—something performed manually. Again, there was not available a large multiplicity of goods, the acquisition of which would stamp the obviously wealthy. Consider the simple items mentioned in the inscription which gives the inventory of Alcibiades’ bedroom furniture and compare them with those of a later age, with the multa et lauta supellex which Cicero tells us belonged to Pompey. Or compare Cicero's own villas and portrait galleries with the homely domesticity of Ischomachos as we see it in Xenophon's Oeconomica.