‘Here the prince held a review in the park and took a muster of our countrymen and they amounted all told to 11,000 heavy-armed and about 2,000 light-armed infantry. Thence he marched to—, a populous town, where he halted five days. More than three months’ pay was now owing to the troops and they came often to his gates and demanded it. He talked hopefully and tried to put them off, but was obviously worried. For it was not like him to withhold money when he had it. At this place the wife of a neighbouring king came to the prince and, it was said, gave him a large sum of money. At any rate he gave the troops four months' pay. This queen had a body-guard of her own men, but according to camp gossip the prince knew how to pass the sentries. Thence he proceeded another two marches further inland to another large town. There he halted three days and there, it was said, the queen asked him to show her his army. This was in accord with his own wishes. So he held a review of our countrymen and of his own troops. He ordered our men to draw up in their accustomed order of battle, each general in command of his own contingent. So they formed up four deep. The prince inspected his own forces first and they marched past, the horse by squadrons and the foot by companies.Then he inspected our men, driving up and down the lines in a chariot, and the queen following in an armoured wagon.

At the beginning of the fifth book of his Saturnalia Macrobius makes his characters all agree that Virgil is to be considered an orator no less than a poet; such is his mastery of eloquence and his careful observance of the rules of rhetoric. Are we to dismiss this as an example of a type of criticism now fortunately outmoded, or is there something in it? Was Virgil to any important extent influenced by rhetorical precept, and, if so, how did this influence work? These are the questions which I propose to discuss in this paper.

Let us begin with a comparison. Let us first imagine ourselves sitting in a village schoolroom eighty years or so ago. The occasion is a ‘penny reading’, and the rector has chosen for this evening's reading the poet laureate's recently published Enoch Arden. The tale draws to its close, and we reach the last three lines:

So past the strong heroic soul away.

And when they buried him the little port

Had seldom seen a costlier funeral.

Now we transfer ourselves to the year 23 B.C. and the palace of Augustus. Virgil himself is reciting, and the company includes Augustus and Octavia. The poet is reciting from his yet unfinished Aeneid, and he comes to the passage in the sixth book where Anchises shows Aeneas the young Marcellus among the souls yet to be born.

quantos ille virum magnam Mavortis ad urbem

campus aget gemitus! vel quae, Tiberine, videbis

funera, cum tumulum praeterlabere recentem.

A Striking development in recent years has been the rapidly increasing popularity of extempore addresses and discussions of various kinds. Although by no means confined to broadcasting, these are particularly prominent in the programmes of the B.B.C. Well-known men and women deliver impromptu speeches or improvise answers to questions on various points of political, ethical, social, literary, or scientific interest. Their audiences are generally large and appreciative, far larger than those commanded by the lecturer who has carefully prepared beforehand the substance and style of his address.

This cult of the impromptu speech has a close parallel in Greece of the sophistic era. A prominent member of the ‘Brains Trust’ in ancient Greece, had one existed, would undoubtedly have been Hippias of Elis. Aided by his vast knowledge, covering, it would seem, every branch of human activity, he used to appear before large audiences, such as the great Panhellenic Festival at Olympia, claiming to answer any question his hearers might put to him. He apparently fulfilled his promise, for he told Socrates that no one had yet got the better of him. However, his system of improvising answers broke down when confronted by Socrates’ inexorable cross-questioning on the nature of Beauty, and he had to ask Socrates for a few moments’ grace in order to think the question over quietly by himself.

A close rival of Hippias for ‘Brains Trust’ honours would have been Gorgias of Leontini. He, also, used to appear before large audiences professing his readiness to answer any questions, and once told Socrates it was many years since anyone had asked him anything new.

There is a similarity in the critical treatment that has been accorded to the Antigone and to Measure for Measure. The parallelisms help to illustrate the way in which errors of emphasis in one direction lead to compensatory distortions in another; and the plays themselves, widely though they differ in many ways, cast some light the one on the other.

Both plays have a heroine more obviously than they have a hero. Antigone gives Sophocles' play its name, and Shakespeare's is commonly; thought of as primarily the story of Isabella, though the title lays stress on the abstract theme rather than on any of the characters, and though we may if we choose remember that the source-play was called Promos and Cassandra (i.e. Angelo and Isabella). Both heroines, moreover, more clearly ‘stand for’ specific moral values than is usual in drama— which, as R. W. Chambers has pointed out for Isabella, is not to say; that they are allegorical. The difficulty comes when we ask how far each play is the story of the heroine, and both have been adversely criticized because of unguarded answers to this question. It was perhaps easier with Measure for Measure. It was a ‘problem play’, and Shakespeare could not be expected to write a well-constructed comedy while he was ‘in the depths’ and ought to have realized that he was in his Tragic Period. In dealing with, but it has been thought that he took an unconscionably long time to learn that a play should be one and not two, and that the Ajax and the Antigone (and probably the Trachiniae) are specimens of what he did before he learnt it.

One is pleasantly surprised and at the same time a little bit envious to find the Greek and Latin languages playing the important part they do in the Dutch educational system. For whereas, I suppose, in this country we can no longer boast a single school where every pupil learns Latin and Greek, every town in Holland has at least one gymnasium, as such schools are called. In the country as a whole there are 53 of them, containing 9,370 pupils, both girls and boys. Their prestige is high, and they pride themselves on being the repository of classical culture in the modern age. In a country where there are no class distinctions in education they number among their pupils the most intelligent children of all classes.

These pupils come to them at the age of twelve, having been selected by methods similar to those now generally used in this country, and all of them, girls as well as boys, start Latin in their first year and Greek in their second, not to mention three modern languages, English, French, and German. It is a formidable assignment, of which only the most intelligent pupils are capable, but there are plenty of these in Holland. The course lasts for six years. There is no specialization, and only during the last two years is a slight bias introduced in the direction of either Arts or Science: the Alphas, as they are called, drop physics and chemistry and do a little extra classics, while the Betas retain those subjects and do rather less classics.