Art, Archaeology, and the Classics. II

Extract

We now turn to more advanced work, after the stage of the School Certificate. In Sixth Form work the same general advantages hold for the study of art and of archaeology (and the same distinction must be kept between their provinces) as were urged in the first article. But the work can be taken farther, and more detail can be both given and expected. Most Sixth Forms doing classical work will have five periods a week for ancient history; this allows elbow-room, and history can be widely interpreted. It must be admitted that in most Higher School Certificate ancient history papers, and even in the Oxford and Cambridge ‘general’ papers, questions bearing directly upon the arts, other than literature, are not exactly common. This, however, may be thought by some to make for the easier handling of the subject; and on the other hand there are few ancient history papers, however ‘orthodox’, in which a knowledge of archaeology cannot be put to good and profitable use— Solon‘s coinage, the rebuilding of the Acropolis, the tribute lists, the Damareteion, the temples of Ephesus, Augustus’ new city of Rome, inscribed milestones from Rhine and Danube, Trajan's Column, Hadrian's Wall. It may be pointed out that there are two very important periods of ancient history, of which no proper understanding is possible at all without some knowledge of ‘sources’ other than literary. One of these, of course, is the Pentekontaetea: pupils ought to be given interest in the surprising fact that for perhaps the greatest period of Greek civilization, that between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, there are no literary sources, except scraps and patches, behind the text-book which is being used in class; and they ought (within limits, for they are still at school and not at the University) to know what these non-literary sources in fact are, and where their text-book had its origins. The other period for which some archaeology is essential covers the first 150 years of the Roman Empire, and it is to be regretted that so little work is done at school on this formative and interesting period in the history of civilization: indeed a knowledge of the period is definitely discouraged by the syllabus of some examining bodies (some examiners themselves, perhaps, are ill-adapted for it); but if sufficiently numerous demands were made by schools for a specially prepared paper on this period, it would soon find itself included in the normal syllabus. English history has now temerariously advanced its frontiers from 1815 to 1914; Waterloo is no longer the final and satisfying crown of the student's bliss: why then should so many Roman history books praise and bury Julius, and then stop ? Rome's greatness is just beginning, and we should go on. But the chronique scandaleuse of Tacitus, though it often makes exhilarating masters of Latin prose, does not make historians: coins, inscriptions, roads, camps, here claim their rights, with Palmyra, Baalbek and Timgad, Trèves, Chester, and the volume on Roman London of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments. Architecture (throughout the whole extent of the Empire), portrait sculpture, and the very considerable amount which there is of commemorative and narrative sculpture, is throughout this period highly important in the history of art, and for the ways of life of large urban populations; and though the subject is less easily manageable for study than is the art of fifth- and fourth-century Greece, because less closely localized and concentrated, yet it has a greatness of scale which stirs the imagination, and a nearness of style and quality to our own times which makes it easily assimilable.