The Classical Association held its annual general meeting in Cambridge on Tuesday, 13 April 1943, and the two following days: that is a statement of Fact. But, as we were reminded one morning, Facts and Truth are not synonymous; and at any rate to those who were present at this particular meeting there was a significance about the time and place alone which would have been enough to make it memorable.
One member, at least, having booked his railway ticket underneath the question ‘Is your journey really necessary?’ (ΓNΩΘI ΣEAYTON must sometimes have produced similar reactions), returned to London with something of a feeling of having dreamed it all, but of conscience not a tremor. Could a Cambridge translated into the poet's Arcady, where the warm sunshine of June shone from a cloudless sky upon faery woodlands carpeted with all the flowers of springtime blossoming at once, and which was inhabited, it seemed, almost entirely by American soldiers, indeed be real ? One could sit out in the moonlight among the narcissus thinking of garlands for Heliodora's brow; but to the accompaniment of what sounded like several million heavy bombers. Surely in this place, as nowhere else, To-day stood confronted by Eternity; and that was just what we had come here to witness.
One has often on previous occasions had an uncomfortable impression that meetings of the Classical Association (and no doubt, of other similar bodies) would be the healthier for a Devil's Advocate. They are apt to be a paradise with a notice to the effect that serpents will be prosecuted.
