The Department of Classics of the University of Melbourne held a special course for beginners in Greek throughout February 1946. The idea first came from discussion with the Professor of Philosophy: he felt that there was a real demand for Greek among students in Philosophy and other Arts departments who had not done it at school. The course was therefore offered without cost to present and intending members of the University, both staff and students. Seventeen were accepted, including five University teachers: History and Philosophy were both strongly represented; we had a number of men, including a high proportion of ex-servicemen, who were about to do Arts courses leading to Theology; and we had several students of a highly commendable type, namely those who, while fully committed to other courses, felt that a month's work in Greek would at least give them a worth-while experience. There were other applicants whom we could not fit in. It seems quite clear then that there does exist among adults a demand for opportunities to find out something about Greek. The sincerity of this demand is shown all the more by the fact that the applicants were required to undertake to give their whole time to Greek for a month, working all day and six days a week.

The conception of a full-time course was suggested by observation of the success of the Australian Army and Air Force schools in Japanese and by reports of similar courses in America, which by working at high pressure achieved results never dreamed of in the leisurely methods of peace.

Apologists for the Classics are apt to concentrate on the excellence of their matter and the perfection of their form. Much has been done, and notably in these latter days by Dr. Gilbert Murray and Sir Richard Livingstone, to enable English readers to appreciate the content of Greek and Latin literature by translations of the highest merit. But no translation can reproduce the perfection of the form, and nowadays there appears to be a tendency to accept this loss.

The reader of a translation may be compared with a man who flies in an aeroplane over a mountain. True, he gets the view; but without the peculiar satisfaction that comes to one who has climbed the mountain itself. The view may even be a wider one, but it is robbed of the detail that the climber has been able to enjoy at every stage of his climb. Indeed, the detail is distorted, and often false. Still, the aviator gets a splendid view, and it is pointless to minimize its splendour. All I would maintain is that it is a different view. This is recognized by the climber if he flies over the heights he has climbed, or by the man who has read the Odyssey in the original if he reads it again in ‘Butcher and Lang’.

But what of those who never get beyond the foot-hills, those from whose eyes the mountain tops, and even their lower eminences, are concealed by huge walls of rock, which none but experts can scale? These humble strivers often wonder whether they are not wasting their time in plunging about on the nursery slopes; and their instructors must often wonder too whether they are doing any good by dragging often unwilling pupils through the declensions and conjugations, and by getting them somehow or other up to the standard of the School Certificate.

An apology is needed for taking up this well-worn theme. My reason is that in discussions and in reading works on Greek literature I have often felt that Aristophanes' antipathy to Euripides is still as a rule too strongly stated, and his sympathy wholly or partly ignored. It is said that Aristophanes attacked Euripides mercilessly in the Frogs, or even throughout his career; that he condemns Euripides entirely, or counts him with Cleon and the sophists amongst his worst enemies. Others agree that he thought Euripides a great poet, and even felt a curious fascination in his poetry, but insist that from a moral standpoint he condemned Euripides' work uncompromisingly. I feel increasingly convinced that Aristophanes had a finer and more complete appreciation of Euripides' greatness. Professor Gilbert Murray gives a juster estimate of his feelings: Aristophanes, he says, loved Euripides with all his faults, and was inevitably drawn towards him. I should like to go a little further in the same direction, and try to show that in some important things Aristophanes must have been actively and strongly in sympathy with Euripides.

Let me say at once that I am still prepared to believe that Aristophanes preferred Aeschylus (I am not sure about Sophocles; Aristophanes no doubt loved and admired the man and his work, but perhaps his feelings were not so strongly aroused in either direction by Sophocles); and of course Aristophanes found many things great and small in the art of Euripides, in his morality and above all in his influence, which exasperated him beyond endurance and which he whole-heartedly condemned; he recognized the symptoms of great changes which he deplored, though he was by no means out of touch with the new spirit and perhaps not so completely out of sympathy.

When the American bombardment of Belgrade in 1944 drove me to take refuge in Rušanj, a village only twelve miles to the south but so inaccessible that the Germans had never occupied it, I noticed that my hostess, Savka Nikolitch, used to clean her mud floor by sprinkling it with water and sweeping it every day, though any exceptional mess had to be scraped off with a mattock (cf. Odyssey xx. 149: αἱ μ༐νμα koρήσατε πoıπνσασαı ῤὰσσατέ τ and xxii. 455 f.: Λíστρoıσıνὰπεὰoν… ξoν). In the course of conversation she told me that her father-in-law had paid her father a deposit for her (cf. Od. i. 277, ii. 196 ενα). This had been spent on her trousseau. She had brought it to her father-in-law's home in a chest which still contained precisely ‘ʒσατρά τε kαí πέπΛovς kαí ῥήγεα σıγαλóεντα’ (Od. vi. 38). Both her husband and father-in-law had failed to return from the war in 1918. ‘This house lost two oxen’, she said, ‘in the last war—and two men too.’ This was all so Homeric that I looked round to see whether there was anything else about the house which might illustrate the Odyssey. I offer the following observations in all humility to the scholars from whose ranks circumstances have excluded me.

Savka's house is the oldest in the village and reckoned by an expert from Belgrade to be at least two hundred years old. The population of those parts is believed to have migrated from Macedonia during the Turkish rule.

Mr. melluish's vigorous plea for the restoration of Latin to an honoured place in the school curriculum cuts through the mists of apologetic defeatism and loose thinking which have in recent years befogged discussion of pre-certificate Latin. The Four-Year Course was imposed on classical teachers by the fact that the majority of boys and girls in secondary schools left at the age of sixteen, or at any rate dropped Latin after taking the School Certificate Examination. What was really an evil to be fought against has been erected into a sort of permanent educational article of faith, and would-be reformers have been trying in various ways to put the quart of Latin (or substitutes and dilutions thereof) into the pint pot of the pre-certificate curriculum.

There were those (and the writer confesses he has been one of them) who would have tried to teach their pupils to run before they could walk. Less formal grammar and less English into Latin, it was argued, would leave more time for the reading of Latin authors, that is, for the enjoyment of Latin literature and an understanding of Roman culture. Herein lay two fallacies. In the first place, Latin authors cannot be read with any facility or, indeed, at all, until the pupil has mastered the elements of Latin accidence and syntax. This, in spite of modern methods, remains a formidable task for the average boy or girl, calling for a great deal of hard work. It is, therefore, misleading to suggest that up to the School Certificate stage much more is possible than the acquisition of the essential preliminaries.

If, as Colonel Lawrence claimed, his own was the twenty-eighth translation of the Odyssey, Mr. Rieu's must be at least the twenty-ninth, and it is a tribute to the eternal fascination of the poem. As Butcher and Lang remarked many years ago, there can be no final translation of Homer; translator after translator, whether he chooses verse or prose, will continue to render him in a manner which he considers to be most faithful to the original text, or in one which he thinks most congenial to the taste of his own day. Mr. Rieu has set out to fulfil both purposes. ‘It has been my aim’, he says, ‘to present the modern reader with a rendering of the Odyssey which he may understand with care and read with appreciation.… In the very attempt to preserve some semblance of the original effect I have often found it necessary—in fact my duty, as a translator—to abandon, or rather to transform, the idiom and syntax of the Greek. Too faithful a rendering defeats its own purpose; and, if we put Homer straight into English words, neither meaning nor manner survives.’ He disparages Butcher and Lang, whom he finds ‘turgid’, and appears to aim at a style with as contemporary a flavour as possible. He does not, however, hail as a predecessor Samuel Butler, who, as we know, likewise reacted against Butcher and Lang, and gave the world a translation of the Odyssey of which the diction was to display the same benevo-lent leaning towards the Tottenham Court Road as theirs had done to-wards Wardour Street.