Five years ago, in these pages, I ventured to suggest the ‘urgent need of a finely illustrated new book on Greek art before 460’. The new appreciation of the earlier Greek masters, so fervent among young people whose perceptions belong to their own age, and who have had the luck to see ‘archaic’ Greek sculpture at first hand, has long demanded some adequate presentment from the vastly enlarged resources of modern photography for the benefit of the general public. This aspiration is now being gradually realized. The remarkable work produced in Paris (1934) by Christian Zervos, and entitled L'Art en Gr`ce, laid stress on aspects of Greek sculpture which appeal to twentieth-century taste, and supplemented admirably what had already been done for Parthenon and Erectheum art by the Berlin publication, Die Akropolts. The photography of L'Art en Grèce was actually too good for some critics. I have heard it described as tendencious, and its producers have been charged with the serious crime of manipulating light and vision so successfully as to upset the still prevailing academic standards of judgement. They had the audacity to photograph, direct from Greek vases of the fifth century, large-scale details of drawing which might readily be mistaken for products of twentieth-century Paris, distortion and all. That Pericles and Picasso should kiss each other is a notion revolting to staid minds, and the indignation it caused is not surprising to those who know our universities.

A tilted nose, long rather mysterious eyes, and a subtle mouth are the obvious characteristics of the little head which forms the subject of my first illustration. It is a small perfume-vase found in Rhodes and made about 550 b.c. We feel that we are in the presence of a lady of an inquiring turn of mind and a great appreciation of the joys of life. I hope that she is sufficiently interesting to justify an inquiry into her life and surroundings. Is this curiosity and enjoyment of life characteristic of Ionian art and literature in general?

We read and hear so much about our debt to Greece and Rome in the worlds of literature, law, and language that we are apt to forget that included in the legacy of the Ancient World to us is, to mention only one instance, the problem of the Franco-German frontier. Ought we to be glad the Romans stopped at the Rhine? Would things be better if they had gone farther? It was the defeat of Varus at the Teutoberger Wood that settled the frontier for the Romans; and Augustus with his plaintive cry of ‘Varus, Varus, give me back my legions’ determined once and for all to stop at the Rhine, and so left the Romanized Gauls and Germans in France and the free Germans across the Rhine as a thorny problem for all future time. Where the future is unknown, the present so uncertain, it is to the past we must turn for some definite foundation on which to build.

The legend of Aeneas grew up in the fifth century b.c. among Greeks. In the fourth it was adopted at Rome, and developed. Then it remained static for a century, until the Julii further developed it in the interest of family policy.

This is roughly the result to which the criticism of the Italian foundation legends has led. No single early and original form of them can be defined. They are confused and self-contradictory. Archaeology gives little if any direct confirmation of them, as they stand. Before the end of the nineteenth century few believed that they represented any historical reality. They were supposed to be a poetic invention, by which Greeks in the west sought to adorn the history of their new homes by connecting it with the poetry of their old. At the end of the century a kind of principle could be stated: that peoples naturally tend to claim false origins in lands far from their historical home. Even now pre-historians of Italy can almost disregard the possibility that the legends may have truth in them; for much of the early archaeological evidence is coherent without assuming infiltrations by sea.

There were various conceptions of the function of history current in the ancient world. There was always one school of so-called historians who wrote with the motive of giving pleasure uppermost in their minds. The absence of a novel from classical literature left romance to invade history and oratory, and writers of this school might often be more properly called historical novelists than historians. They were especially susceptible to the influence of declamation and the rhetorical worship of style. For this school, in brief, history was nothing but the raw material for the literary artist. A second school, of which Polybius is the most prominent representative, held that history should be the training-ground of politicians, statesmen, and soldiers, who may learn from the past how to discover the real significance of events. Polybius naturally attached more importance to truth (which, he says, is to history what the eye is to the human body) than did those who wrote only for entertainment. Thirdly, there was the view that it is the function of history to teach men of all stations the lessons of the past, and by so teaching form and strengthen the individual moral character. This last is the view of Tacitus, though his conception of the function of history is broad enough to embrace the other two in a properly subordinate measure.

Theocritus sings of eighty-seven different trees, shrubs, flowers, grasses, and ferns. Practically all the references are in the Pastoral Idylls: that is to say, that in the small compass of about 1,200 lines he mentions nearly twice as many plants as Homer does in the whole Iliad and Odyssey. Many of these plants are mentioned several times, and some many times, so the number is impressively great, and implies a great interest: an interest not shown by any other Greek poet. The selection, too, is unprecedented. The Comic Poets may write of things to eat (kitchen-garden produce); the Tragic and Lyric poets, of ceremonial adjuncts; garlands for gods, athletes, feasters (nursery-garden produce). Theocritus' plants are none of these: they are the plants of the mountains, foot-hills, meadows, and shores of the place in which he lived:

αίγίπυρος καί κνύЗα καί εύώλης μελίτεια.

He Writes of plants for their own sakes, and it is this that makes his attitude modern and interesting. Fourteen hundred years before him Minoan painters looked at plants with his eyes: except for them he is unique in Greek history.

Perhaps we teachers of the Classics protest too much, and our habit of reading papers to one another on the importance of our subject awakens a suspicion that we talk to cover our uneasiness. But since our usual pleas are the discipline of Latin prose writing and the value of the study of Greek culture, it may strengthen our case to discuss instead the quality of Classical poetry, and fight the Battle of the Books once more.

I happened to be looking through one of the volumes of Lyra Graeca when I came across the fascinating account, in Pollux's Word-Book, of some of the games played by Greek children, the jingles that go with the different games, and their titles.

The rain was falling in torrents and there seemed to be no prospect of its stopping. Publius had already exhausted all his favourite wet-weather games and, after games, all his favourite forms of mischief. He had teased the slaves out of their lives. He had set Davus to look for Stichus and, at the same time, Stichus to look for Davus. If you started them in different parts of the house, you could get a good deal of fun out of their wasted exertions, before they met and discovered the trick. Then he had begged all the titbits from the cook that he was likely to get. Then he had played with the monkey, until it got tired of his exactions and escaped to the roof. And still the rain went on. What was he to do with himself? All amusements exhausted and still several hours to bedtime. A happy thought! He would find Syrus and get him to play their favourite game of story-telling. Syrus was a good listener and helped out Publius' own amateur efforts by his close attention. But when it came to his turn, he was a very prince of story-telling. He must have had a wonderful life before he came to Rome as a slave. He could tell you stories for hours of the life in the desert, of the raids of nomads who came and went so quickly on their camels; of the powerful genies, who would come to you out of a storm of sand and might either destroy you or become your devoted servants, according as you had or had not the word of power to tame them. Publius could never understand how, after such a life, Syrus could put up with being a slave as readily as he did. Rome, at the best, must be very dull after such an existence. Anyhow, Syrus was the man he wanted; the next thing must be to find him.

When this paper was first written, a few months ago, it was christened ‘Greek Tragedy and Modern Religious Worship’. But this name will not describe it properly. Its subject is not modern religious worship, but Greek tragedy. I hope to use what we know about modern religious worship to help our understanding of Greek tragedy, and not vice versa. And I wish, at the outset, to stress the word ‘worship‘—‘religious worship’, nor ‘religion’, not ‘religious belief’. We are to consider rather the outward form than the inward content of religion as we know it to-day. And the same is true of what is, as I have said, my real subject. I will not attempt any general account of Greek tragedy. I am concerned with one aspect of it only, its outward form. We have, preserved to us through twenty-three centuries and more, thirty-three specimens of it, all (with one possible exception) by one or other of the three great masters of tragic poetry. That is to say, the words of these plays have been preserved. We know less than we could wish, to be sure, of other things upon which the total effect of an ancient tragedy depended: the buildings and scenery, the dresses, the gestures, the dancing, the music, and much besides. Still, even of these things we know something and can safely guess more; we have the words, and may claim to understand their meaning fairly well; putting all together, we may say that we know what the form of a Greek tragedy was. That this form is interesting and beautiful, most of those who have been able to make its acquaintance are disposed to agree. But it is also a strange form. It does and must appear strange to those who have read modern plays, and seen modern plays performed, and then come to read Greek tragedies, whether in Greek or in English, and even, with luck, to see Greek tragedies performed. The feeling of strangeness wears off, like other things, with time and familiarity, to a great extent; but it seldom wears off completely. We may cease to wonder that an old Greek play is so unlike a modern play; we never quite cease to wonder that an old Greek play is what it is.

Among the most interesting of Euripides' plays are two of his latest, Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis, the first so often read, the second so seldom—far more rarely than it deserves. This last is incomplete, it is true, and full of difficulties in the text. But it is full too of the qualities most associated with Euripides, the man who depicted human beings as they really were. It is by now a commonplace to compare Euripides with Mr. Shaw, but in this play we have, if not a Shavian, at least a very modern treatment of a traditional theme. The men and women here are the old names, but they have not that quality—call it what you will—which a later writer named τὸ ὔΨος, and which in Shakespeare or in Sophocles deepens for us and universalizes the emotions, but at the same time sets the characters as it were far off, like lofty giants and princes in a tale which, sympathize as we may, is not quite on our earth. To-day we are more accustomed to characters we can see as men and women like ourselves, whom we can love, feel for, laugh at, and even despise. And when we see them in the stories of tradition or history, it is perhaps an added pleasure to feel that these men and women whose fame we know were really no less human than ourselves. It is perhaps this feeling which has popularized the modern school of biographers led by Lytton Strachey. And we find it in such plays as Caesar and Cleopatra, St. Joan, Richard of Bordeaux, or The Rose without a Thorn. It is here, too, in the Iphigenia in Aulis, perhaps the most modern of all Euripides' plays, and claimed as marking the transition to the Middle Comedy. The traditional form is still there, but little else of the Old Tragedy. The chorus with all its utterances could be deleted without the loss of anything essential to the play. There are rhetorical passages, particularly in the scene between Menelaus and Agamemnon, which leave us a little cold. But the play is full of real characters, real humour, and real pathos. And it will best be represented in English not in the traditional form of decasyllabic verse and archaic or Swinburnian diction, but in the realistic dialogue of a modern play. We may lose something of poetry and something of the atmosphere of the traditional which is still faintly discernible behind its forms. But we shall gain more of the real thing in it, the thing which reminds us of Shaw and the Realists, and which went farthest to endear Euripides to his contemporaries.

Since the character and achievement of Euripides form one of the most interesting studies in classical literature, it is not surprising to find that the most varied estimates have been made both of his poetic and dramatic ability, but whatever conclusion we may reach we cannot be blind to the great influence which he had on his successors. It was an influence which such shrewd critics as Aristophanes dreaded, but in spite of his censures and warnings the Euripidean outlook gained the day.

The constant inquiry of a backward boy in an ‘A’ form or an average boy in a ‘B’ form is ‘What's the good of Latin ?’ I even know of an overwrought master who rapped out: ‘It keeps me off the dole. Get on with your work!’ Colleagues, mostly those who never took it themselves at school, humorously hint at its uselessness as compared with the inestimable blessings of their own subject. Parents, too, though a few have a vague notion about a little Latin being part of the make-up of a gentleman, are often a hindrance. There is the authentic case at my old school where an irate mother challenged the headmaster with the query, ‘Why should my Tom learn Latin? To-day I asked him the Latin for tea-pot and he could not tell me.’

It is more than a hundred years since the walls of Athens were pulled down to the sound of the flute, since Euripides died, since the fresh, vigorous, political life of Athens passed into the era of orators and philosophers. And even the era of orators and philosophers has lost its power and originality, and no Greek city has taken the place of Athens. The Greek world is a scene of courts and kings, or of effete democracies where the orators cannot even talk as well as Demosthenes. The empire of Alexander has passed over the eastern Mediterranean. Alexandria is growing into a great capital, a civilized capital, a city with a great city population, with library, scholars, critics, and great learning, under the protection of a court. Its poets are elegant imitators, polished elegists, or epigrammatists, and there seems no prospect of a new birth of poetry. The Aegean islands are quiet. No more desperate struggles for liberty: no strains of Sappho or Archilochus. The most interesting island is perhaps Cos, an island fertile and beautiful, famous for its vines and weaving of fine stuffs. It has a close connexion with the Alexandrian court and forms a kind of ‘Villegiatura’ for it. There is in the island a famous school of medicine, and also a literary coterie, with Philetas as its leader, and Philetas is struck with the quaint idea of disguising himself and his friends as shepherds in the poems they write about each other. The idea seems an amusing device for escaping from the academic atmosphere of Alexandria.

The presentation of conditional clauses in Latin involves but little difficulty until we come to those that are expressed by a verb in the present subjunctive. It is easy to understand that the past tenses of the subjunctive convey an unreal or imaginary supposition, one contrary to the facts of the case, while with a verb in the indicative we have an open supposition, in which there is no implication as to the facts: but what of the present subjunctive? How does si quid habeam differ from si quid habebo, if both suppositions have regard to future time?

The attitude of an imperial government towards the religions of the different peoples whom it controls has always interested historians since it is one of the criteria by which empires are judged and since it also throws considerable light on the mentality, if not the religion, of the governing people itself. We have only to look at the British Empire to realize how complex and baffling the problem can sometimes be; take India as an example—there we find an inextricable medley of peoples and beliefs, with their daily life shot through and through with a religious system and philosophy alien to Western minds, and presenting a diversity of practice and outlook bewildering to officials who often like to have even religions arranged in a nice orderly manner. How was the problem tackled there? In the proclamation at the end of the Mutiny Queen Victoria's ministers stated: ‘… we disclaim alike the right and the desire to impose our convictions on any of our subjects. We declare it to be our royal will and pleasure that none be in any wise favoured, none molested or disquieted by their religious faith or observances, but that all shall alike enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law; and we do strictly charge and enjoin all those who may be in authority under us that they abstain from all interference with the religious belief or worship of any of our subjects on pain of our highest displeasure.’ That attitude of non-interference with religious belief or practice sounds simple enough, but it soon brought its own problems when faced with such practices as suttee and child-marriage which had the sanction of religion. It was a long time before the British Government could succeed in abolishing suttee, and its recently proposed legislation on child-marriage provoked more than a storm of protest. These are but two instances which may well illustrate the complexity of the problem; Rome found herself in somewhat similar situations when from time to time new religions as Christianity or Mithraism came into being, or when she brought under her sway races with beliefs and practices differing from her own.

The inversion, or, as I prefer to call it, the apparent inversion, of the order of events in time is a phenomenon frequently encountered in the reading of Greek and Latin authors. I suppose the case which is first encountered by most of us is the famous ‘moriamur et in media arma ruamus’ of Virgil, Aen. ii. 353.