In the first half of the nineteenth century, when the Barbary corsairs were finally laid low, a great impetus was given to North African research, and numerous scholars visited and wrote about Carthage. Valiant efforts were made at that time to correlate the statements of ancient authors, chiefly Appian, Diodorus, Justin, Polybius, and Strabo, both with each other and with the existing topography of the peninsula, but the theories propounded had usually little virtue save that of originality and imagination. If excavation was undertaken at all (as it was by Davis, for instance, and Beulé), Roman buildings were often mistaken for Punic, so that elaborate plans of Carthage like Davis's2—to mention but one—are no longer of much consequence.

Every creative age in history, since Greek times, has held some belief on the nature and purpose of poetry, and the results have varied from song for the joy of singing to verse as a medium for the propagation of Communist propaganda. The short and splendid flower of Greek lyric in Sappho and Alc-man, the Homeric epic, Greek drama, Alexandrian pastoral, the love lyrics of Catullus, the imperial self-consciousness of Virgil, and the indignant satires of Juvenal, all these reflect some deep-rooted conviction of the true form and purpose of the poet's craft. Some people have thought of poetry as an ‘accomplishment’ like those of a polished young Victorian lady who had learnt deportment and a repertoire of sentimental drawing-room songs. Others, perhaps more profoundly, conceive of poetry as the hidden elixir of a mind aware of life, the reaction of a feeling, thinking person to the world of nature, human life, and the vast concourse of ‘rebel powers that thee array’. These reactions, being concerned with the significance and enchantment of what the poet sees, can only find adequate expression in words so ordered and grouped in a significant form as to transfuse into the reader something of the poet's vision and emotion, 'to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer’.

A brief survey of the indebtedness of the modern languages of Europe, and in particular our own, to the Latin word caput may be not without interest.

The French did not adopt the classical meaning of caput, but, by way of the slang of the Roman soldiers in all probability, preferred the Latin testa = a tile, French tête. But caput did enter Gaul as the early French chief and modern chef (e.g. chef d'orchestre, chef de cuisine, whence, by the way, the English ‘chef’). English borrowed this word from French under the guise of chief, and from the early French word chevetaine formed the English chieftain. But in one word the French did adopt the classical meaning of caput, and that was in the word couvre-chef (modelled presumably upon the Vulgar Latin capitegium), meaning a covering for the head. This was adopted in Middle English as curchef (kerchief) and signified originally a cloth to cover a woman's head. It was an easy step from this to the modern ‘handkerchief’. Further, Vulgar Latin had a phrase ad caput venire, ‘to come to an end’, ‘to accomplish’. This was taken over into early French as a chief venir: later the verb venir was lost and the phrase a chief was made into the verb achever. Our English word achieve was the inevitable offspring.

This year has been noteworthy for the number of Classical plays which have been presented upon the stage, and for those of us who are sometimes asked to justify the pursuit of Classical studies they are a welcome sign that Classical thought and technique is contributing in the most vital of all ways to modern appreciation. For it is only by constant reinterpretation in each generation that a cultural influence is maintained; and if it is confined to the study it stagnates only too quickly, till it joins the limbo of ‘dead’ literature and art.

The position of the Classics in the United States has been determined very largely by the development of the public school system. Between the founding of the first Latin grammar-school in Boston in 1635, or of Harvard University in 1638, and the numerous public (free), State-directed schools of the present day, vast changes have come about in the student body and in the curriculum—changes which have decidedly affected the study of the Classics.

Pservilius spongia threw back the coverlet and drew himself up on the narrow pallet that was his bed. It was cold—cold and dark; the first rays of daylight were only just beginning to creep in through the small slit of a window. Yes, cold and dark; but there was a patron to be visited before the first hour, and it would take a full hour's walk to get to his house. Spongia sprang out of bed, poured a little cold water into his basin and washed in haste. Then he opened the window and tilted the dirty water out into the street below. An answering cry suggested that the chance shot had found a mark. ‘Better wait a few minutes before I start,’ thought Spongia, ‘it sounds as if I had hit some one; it is possible that he may be annoyed.’