When the Virgil Society did me the very high honour of asking me to lecture to-day, there was little doubt in my mind as to what my subject should be. For Mr. Jackson Knight had been constantly spurring me to develop three ideas which he saw in embryo in my notes to The Singing Farmer—the sources of Virgil's agricultural lore, how he used them, and points in Roman farming which might be of scientific interest to-day. To deal adequately with these subjects would require a volume of imposing proportions: all that can be done in the short space of an hour is to state, and attempt to solve, a few of the problems, and thereby to indicate lines on which further profitable research may proceed. A good deal of accurate research work on Virgil's botany, animal husbandry, and natural history has already been done by the late John Sargeaunt and by Canon Royds; and Professor T. J. Haarhoff has done much to demonstrate the modernity of our poet in his searching study, Vergil in the Experience of South Africa, and will, I understand, be doing still more in a forthcoming volume, to be entitled Vergil the Universal. I can only pray, therefore, that my exiguous mouse, born to-day after mountains of labour, will not abstract anything from your grain-heaps of knowledge but add to them; for it is in this hope that I have tried to be, during the two and a half years since my release from captivity, a picker-up, not merely of learning's crumbs, but of unconsidered trifles.

In explaining to Memmius his purpose in writing De Rerum Natura Lucretius wrote:

nec me animi fallit Graiorum obscura reperta

difficile inlustrare Latinis vxsersibus esse

multa novis verbis praesertim cum sit agendum

propter egestatem linguae et rerum novitatem.

He thus showed that he realized the difficulty of his task in making the Latin tongue express what it had never expressed before. But in spite of the poverty of Latin and the apparently unpoetic nature of his subject, he has proclaimed his philosophy in language that shows him a poet. For the ancient word ‘poet’ has truth in its root (πoıητής); a poet is a maker who, by using words in new ways, makes a new world; he is also, as the Romans knew, a seer, not one who foretells the future, but one who tells forth truths that lie hidden behind appearances.

‘IS that the villa up there?’ said Makarion, ‘like a star on top of the A cliff fronting the sunset?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, getting a grip of the reins, ‘and we take a sharp right turn directly. … Now. Hold tight to the bar.’

I whistled to Phloxy and pulled hard over. The car whirled round the corner crab-wise and then straightened up well to take the hill.

‘Holy Castor!’ screamed Makarion (nervous fellows, these Greeks) —‘Have a heart, Lucius. You'll have the wheel off. Why the speed?’

‘I told you this car could take anything and I want to prove it. Besides, we are behind time. Watch these two breast the hill.’

As we rose above the sea Makarion forgot his nerves and became absorbed in the view. I tapped the axle-gauge: it was pretty hot and the horses began to labour, so I eased them down to a walk.

‘What a view!’ he said suddenly. ‘Certainly Italy has something that Greece lacks. This long stretch of coastline, curving like a scimitar, the edge tempered silver with the surf. And all these splendid villas, pro-claiming wealth and comfort. Poor little Greece!’

‘The home of lost causes, perhaps,’ I replied; ‘still, it's very useful for education. The governor's got sense. I bless him for sending me to Athens. And I bless him no less for his choice of villas. It's good to be home.’

We now approached the level towards the drive, so I whipped up to a smart pace again and we were soon bowling for the gates and made for the house.

It is well known that the Greek accent from about the Christian era gradually changed from pitch to stress, and that by about the fourth century stress had become so powerful that, if necessary, quantity was overridden—as in Modern Greek: e.g. νθρωπος came to be pronounced ánthrǒpus, and Xenophon's εЗωνοι are now éfzǒni.

This fact has had some interesting consequences. The influence of Greek was not confined to the Byzantine Empire; even in the West the majority of slaves and freedmen would be Greek-speaking: St. Paul writes to the Christians at Rome in Greek: the Epistle of Clement in the next generation is in Greek, and all the men's names in Petronius are Greek (or Oriental). Vulgar Latin became infiltrated with Greek words, which sometimes assumed characteristic Vulgar Latin forms: e.g. μθοσ > muttus > mot; χωλόπος (stressed on the second syllable) > cloppus > clocker, clopin—forms only explicable by assuming a strong stress accent.1

As popular influence became ever more overwhelming, we find that even those who must have known better scanned Greek words as they pronounced them: e.g. Ausonius trigǒnus, tetragǒnus, Prudentius Asclepiādem. Sidonius Apollinaris has been much ridiculed for assumed ignorance in scanning Euripīdis: it was not ignorance (we know, for instance, that he read Menander with his son), but the actual pronunciation of his day, both Latin and Greek.

Christians normally scanned abssus, erěmus, idǒlum: even in the time of Plautus we regularly find Phílppus (the coin). Similarly būtrum (βούτρον) > Fr. beurre: Eng. butter seems to have come straight from Vulgar Latin (via Vulgate ?).