Autun stands on the left bank of the Arroux, in the north-western corner of the département of Saône-et-Loire. Mont Beuvray, about fifteen miles away, roughly to the west, preserves the name of Bibracte, the capital of the Aedui. About forty years after the meeting at Bibracte of the assembly which, to the annoyance of the Aedui, conferred the command of the Gallic forces upon Vercingetorix (Caesar, B.G. vii. 63), the ancient capital was abolished. Its inhabitants were transferred to the newly established Augustodunum, a specimen of bureaucratic town-planning on an ambitious scale, perpetuating the name of the ruler under whom it was conceived. The Aedui had long been on specially friendly terms with Rome. Caesar (B.G. i. 33. 2) and Tacitus (Ann. xi. 25. 2.) refer to the ‘bond of brotherhood’ between the two states, and Tacitus (ibid.) mentions an ‘ancient treaty’, which must have been in existence as early as 121 B.C. (Livy, Epit. 61, ‘Aeduorum … sociorum populi Romani’). This ‘fraternity’ was still remembered in the fourth century A.D. (see Panegyrici Latini, viii (W. Baehrens, v), 2, ‘plurimis senatusconsultis fratres populi Romani appellati sunt’). That an anti-Roman party, however, existed is shown by the activities of Dumnorix (Caesar, B.G. i. 9. 16–20 and v. 6–7), and an Aeduan, Iulius Sacrouir, was one of the leaders in the Gallic revolt against Tiberius in A.D. 21 (Tacitus, Ann. iii. 40–46). Nothing in Tacitus' account of this event is more interesting than his evidence for the fact that in A.D. 21 Augustodunum was already what we should call a University town—‘Augustodunum caput gentis armatis cohortibus Sacrouir occupauerat ut nobilissimam Galliarum subolem, liberalibus studiis ibi operatam, et eo pignore parentes propinquosque eorum adiungeret; simul arma occulte fabricata iuuentuti dispertit’ (ibid. 43).

The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poetts, Translated according to the Greeke, by Geo Chapman, was published in 1611, though parts of it had appeared as early as 1598. The Odysses [sic] came out in 1614 and The Crozone of All Homers Workes (i.e. Hymns, Batrachomyomachia, etc.) about 1624. Chapman's position as the greatest translator of Homer lasted for a century. His work was then superseded by Pope's. It came into fashion again in the nineteenth century with the enthusirastic advocacy of Keats, Coleridge, and Lamb, and was reprinted or edited several times. But now it is little read, and that is a pity. I propose to indicate its value both as an English poem and as a document in the history of the classics.

The Odysses and most of Chapman's other translations were written in rhymed decasyllables; but the metre of the Iliads is rhymed fourteeners, the Common Measure, as it is called in hymn-books. It had been used by other translators before Chapman; by Phaer for Vergil, by Turberville and by Golding for Ovid, and by one Arthur Hall for a bad translation of Iliad i-x.1 It had the practical advantage that rhymes were not too frequent, and to my mind it has dignity; but it was going out of fashion, and the Iliads was the last great work in which it was used. Neither in the decasyllables nor in the fourteeners does the metre bound the sense, as it does in, say, John Gilpin or Pope's Homer: frequent enjambement and variations of pause and of stress permit an effect (so far as metre is concerned) as free as Homer's unrhymed hexameters.

Although the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79 overwhelmed both Pompeii and Herculaneum, the importance of Herculaneum has today been eclipsed by the comparative ease of excavation and the size of Pompeii. Ten years ago it was estimated that for every one visitor to Herculaneum there were four to Pompeii. This was not always so: from 1709, when Prince d'Elbœuf, excavating an old well, accidentally struck a part of the theatre at Herculaneum, until 1781, when one of his successors, La Vega, was ordered to turn to Pompeii, Herculaneum was considered to be the more important find. Under Charles III of Naples, the engineers Alcubierre, Weber, and La Vega worked there.

The importance of Pompeii, as compared with Herculaneum, in the eyes of archaeologists and scholars, is reflected in the literature on the subject: while there has been much detailed and recent research on Pompeii, Herculaneum has attracted the attention of few scholars.1 Now that most of the interesting districts of Pompeii have been uncovered, archaeologists with modern equipment may concentrate on Herculaneum.

The early history of Herculaneum is obscure. Strabo sums up its first inhabitants in the sentence: ‘The Oscans used to possess both Herculaneum and her neighbour Pompeii, which lies on the river Sarno; next came the Etruscans and Pelasgians, and thereafter the Samnites; but these also were expelled from the places.’ Yet its inhabitants of later days were proud to trace back their origin to the Greek god Heracles, and there is no doubt that this town shows more evidence of Greek influence in its works of art than Pompeii.

Roman literature of the classical period abounds in references to the difficulties and dangers of a voyage by sea. Indeed both in Greece and Rome the indignant complaint against seafaring was a recognized rhetorical theme, of which we possess a most interesting specimen in the Trogymnasmata' or ‘Preparatory Exercises’ of Nicolaus the Sophist (viii. 6), to be found in the first volume of Walz's Rhetores Graeci. The two Senecas also have treated this topic in a formal way. In verse the theme is extremely common, though the thought is often compressed to a few lines. It occurs in Epic poetry (for every epic must have its storm), in comedy and tragedy, in lyric, elegiac, and didactic verse. History, epistolography, and philosophical prose furnish further examples. From this wealth of material I have selected what seem to me to be the salient features.

In the numerous accounts of the Golden Age, when primitive man lived a life uncomplicated by civic developments and international relations, when he confined himself to his proper element the earth, and had neither inclination nor facilities for trespassing on the unknown expanse of Neptune's ‘second realm’, the invention of the ship is regarded as the source of many evils. Man sails the seas to reach lands which God in His wisdom has set apart as beyond His province. The course of a ship over the waves involves not merely insult to the outraged sea-god, whose supremacy is thereby challenged and whose permission has not been sought, but physical discomfort to the Ocean from the weight of the vessel, the furrow driven by the keel, and the strokes of the oar-blades.

It is perhaps worth while to collect three striking cases where the history of music impinges on that of classical scholarship. My sources are not recondite, but I find that, for I the obvious source, the ‘Bach Reader’, is misleading; for II the evidence is mostly to be found in Grove; for III the only fairly detailed account I know is in Nieck's Robert Schumann (1923, pp. 47 ff.), now difficult to find, which I supplement from the preface to the 1828 Forcellini.

I. From a (Latin) note on Quintilian (i. 12.3, ed. 1738: not in the later editions) by Gesner, a first-rate scholar and lexicographer, who was Rector of the Thomasschule when Bach was Cantor. It is interesting to contrast Gesner's enthusiastic appreciation with his successor Ernesti's contemptuous indifference—which suggests that there is more to be said for Bach in his quarrel with Ernesti than we are sometimes led to suppose.

Quintilian is speaking of the brilliant performances of musicians; Gesner comments: ‘All this you (sc. Quintilian) would think of little consequence if you could return from the other world and see Bach playing with both hands and all his fingers, on an instrument which seems to combine many citharas in one—the organum organorum, running over it hither and thither with both hands and swiftest motion of the feet, eliciting many varied passages and sounds diverse yet unified—if you could see him, I say, doing a thing which several citharists and innumerable tibicines could not do, and not, like a citharoedus, playing only his own part, but equally watchful of all the symphoniaci, to the number of 30 or 40; calling this one to attention by a nod, another by a stamp of the foot, a third by a warning finger; giving the right note to one from the top of his voice, to another from the bottom, and to a third from the middle of it.

The nineteen volumes of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri have contributed so much to classical studies over the last fifty years that it is surprising how little has been written on the town of Oxyrhynchus. There is no monograph from which the layman can obtain a balanced picture.2 No doubt scholars have been deterred from the task of compiling one by the thought of the enormous number of papyri still awaiting publication. In 1920 B. P. Grenfell estimated that of the material in the possession of the Egypt Exploration Society a little over half of the literary finds but ‘not nearly half’ of the documents had been published. The progress made since that date scarcely alters the figures. I shall try to show what sort of place Oxyrhynchus was so that its papyri may be related to their background. The layman, whose picture of the papyrologist is often that of a ‘back-room’ wizard producing something out of nothing, may thereby be helped to see these documents and texts as the expression of the life of a community, and as a result to understand both what is likely to be forthcoming from papyrological work and to assess the value of published texts. Because the quantity of material is so overwhelming, I have found it essential to restrict myself to the second and third centuries after Christ.

Since the contrary is often asserted, I begin by emphasizing that Oxyrhynchus was an important place. This importance was recognized in A.D. 272, when the phrase λαμπρἀ καì λαμπρωτἀτπ ‘illustrious and most illustrious’ found a place in the town's official title, perhaps in direct connexion with the first occasion (namely in the following year A.D. 273) when the world-games, the Iso-Capitolia, were held in Oxyrhynchus.