A poet born, an orator murdered—these are two events of the year after the death of Caesar. Neither, it is true, can be compared in significance with the Ides of March; but after 2,000 years both are still worth recalling. Ovid at any rate seems likely to receive his due share of attention. The modern inhabitants of his native town have instituted a whole Ovidian year to mark his bimillenary, thereby adroitly evading chronological controversy and ensuring that at least one end of their celebrations will fall on the right date. An international commemorative volume of essays has for some time been in preparation by Monsieur N. I. Herescu in France; and here we have two Ovidian articles in this number, while Mr. L. P. Wilkinson's lively appreciation of the poet in Ovid Recalled is already well known. Cicero's prospects seem at present rather more uncertain, but in this country the Summer Conference at Cambridge on ‘The Changing Face of Classical Studies’ will devote one of its study groups to him, and we hope that his death will not go altogether unnoticed in the October number of Greece & Rome.

We publish in this number a survey of recent developments in the field of Romano-British studies. As the author observes, our new knowledge of Roman Britain percolates only slowly, if at all, into the school-books. But what he says of archaeology, where progress is perhaps most rapid today, applies in some degree to all branches of classical studies; for in every field, as time goes on, the accepted ideas do change, and new, undisputed facts do emerge. Our books should take account of this, but in these days of high publishing costs are all too slow in doing so. Hence this ‘Progress Report’, which is intended to be the first of a series, and which we hope will prove useful to our readers. Their comments, and suggestions of topics for future reports, will be welcome.

In a book that is commonly presented to boys and girls in recognition of their progress in classical languages and literature, the studious recipient will read of Ovid that ‘he may fairly be called the wickedest writer on the world's bookshelves’. This was in 1912. The opinion of a critic who was at little pains to read the authors (Plautus, for example) whom he was so ready to dismiss with cursory jibes is not in itself worthy of citation. Allowing, however, for gross exaggeration, we can no doubt regard his judgement as consistent with the prevailing opinion of that time. We know too much about ‘wicked writers’ now to give Ovid the prize for wickedness, or even, what he might have aspired to, a very high mark for ‘naughtiness’. Such knowledge was not, indeed, outside the reach of Stobart's contemporaries, but the classical scholars of those days seem to have confined their improper reading to the classics and to have reacted, publicly at least, with expressions of shocked disapproval. The combined romanticism and puritanism of the nineteenth century in England were disastrous to what remained of the popularity that Ovid had enjoyed from Chaucer onwards, and, as usually happens, moral censure was reinforced by aesthetic depreciation. The worthy Sellar did not live long enough to put together the chapter on Ovid in his Roman Poets of the Augustan Age. The chapter we have, concocted from his posthumous notes by W. P. Ker, makes rather depressing reading. We are reminded that Ovid is, in his love poetry, ‘the poet of pleasure and intrigue’, Tibullus and Propertius poets ‘of serious sentiment or passion’.

No author is more helpful than Ovid to anyone whose task it is to express modern ideas in Latin or to sum up in a brief and memorable way the achievements of distinguished men and women. Here I have gratefully brought together some examples of the help he has given me during the last twelve years in presentations for honorary degrees at Oxford. My hope is that this form of bimillenary tribute will not seem out of place in Greece & Rome. The Editors will know that the revival of spoken Latin is much in the air at the moment—there was a conference on the subject at Avignon in 1956—and they themselves not long ago invited suggestions for a Latin rendering of ‘television’. Ovid's own prophetic shot at this word is listed among the other examples of his foresight given below. All my borrowings from him have been actually used in public orations; but I have not thought it necessary to name the honorands concerned, nor have I sometimes scrupled to adapt to present purposes the Latin used to introduce the borrowed quotation.

One of the difficulties facing the teacher of Classics is that of trying to keep abreast of the growing spate of new information. The same problem exists for teachers of other subjects, but in scientific fields it is possible, though arduous, to keep in touch through the several excellent periodicals like Discovery.For the classical scholar there are few such aids apart from the yearly summary in The Journal of Roman Studies, and one can easily refuse to acknowledge any advance at all and rely on texts and commentaries absorbed in one's own school and undergraduate days.

This paper is a warmed-up dish, crambe repetita, but devoid, I trust, of lethal after-effects. I had hoped to serve it up without much re-cooking. Vain hope—for in the interval since its first appearance Denys Page, Regius Professor of Greek in this University, has delivered a course of lectures on the Odyssey, and subsequently polished them up into book form. The book came out only last year; and after I had read it and then reverted to my own paper, I felt rather like a man peering about with a candle after switching off the electric light. At first I thought it my duty to attempt some analysis of Professor Page's book, or at least of its conclusions, but after some struggles I abandoned the idea. For, after all, Professor Page's line of approach does not cross mine. He is a scholar of a high order, full of theories about how, when, and where the Odyssey was composed, and in search of evidence to support his theories he puts the poem under a microscope and is constrained to devote much of his attention to its defects, to the holes in its fabric, so to speak, and the patches, rather than to its merits. So it comes as something of a surprise when, at the end of his book, he ranks the Odyssey as K 2 among the peaks of literature, second only to Everest in the form of Shakespeare.

There are features in both the logical and the dramatic structure of the Crito the interest of which has not, I think, been sufficiently appreciated. They are worth discussion; and this will lead further to a consideration of the dialogue as μίμησις in the sense in which Aristotle uses the word in the Poetics.

Physiognomy (φυσιογνωμονία), the systematic diagnosis of a man's character from his bodily features, originated as a branch of Greek medicine. True, it had antecedents in Babylonia, but the Babylonian science was more concerned with the prediction of the vicissitudes of a man's life than with deciphering his mental and moral qualities, and even deliverances dealing with such qualities were couched in the omen form. Prophetic physiognomists or metoposcopi held their ground throughout classical antiquity, but it was recognized that there were two classes of physiognomist, the seers and the physicians. The medical science of physiognomy was an attempt to extend the idea of treating a man's visible conditions as signs or symptoms of his invisible state, and to produce a list of signs such that the mind's construction could be inferred when it was not transparent. According to Galen this science was invented by Hippocrates himself, which is likely enough, for physiognomical observations occur in probably authentic Hippo-cratic treatises, and there seem to be none in earlier Greek authors. It was introduced into Athens about the time of Socrates, for the philosopher Antisthenes devoted a treatise to it, and there was a story of a visiting expert's diagnosing Socrates as stupid and fond of women.

The present vogue for prisoners' escape stories gives rise quite naturally to an inquiry about the ancient world: has Greek and Roman history or literature any comparable stories to offer? One might expect their pages to be crowded with such stories; escapes are usually made in time of wars and tyrannies, of upheavals and rapid changes of fortune; and heaven knows there were enough of all these in the history of Greece and Rome.

The question of cognomina tends to be over-simplified in the elementary textbooks, where one meets such statements as: ‘Most Romans had three names … of which the third defines the familia within the gens.’ Such brevity is doubtless pedagogically convenient, but it has its dangers, particularly in respect of one of the most important periods in Roman history and literature, the late Republican; for there exceptions to this rule are so numerous and important as to make it almost meaningless. To demand greater accuracy in this matter is not mere pedantry; already a tradition is being established powerful enough to influence those whose business it is to know better, even leading, as I shall show later, to the misinterpretation of texts.

In his charming essay on ‘Jardins d'Humanité’ Pierre Grimal says that gardens are inseparable from the humanism of Europe; ‘the groves were God's first temples’, wrote the poet Bryant; and there is abundant testimony to these statements in classical antiquity. Sir Archibald Geikie, who, like Sir D'Arcy Thompson, belonged to those grand old Scottish scientists who added to their science a deep humanism, Geikie from whose books I learned geology forty years ago, wrote:

From the infancy of mankind, trees have been regarded with mingled feelings of admiration and awe. The combined majesty and grace wherewith they tower above the soil that supports them; their infinite variety of individual forms and colours, whether carrying their foliage all the year or at one season clothing themselves with tender leaf and blossom, at another flaming in the varied glories of autumn, and, thereafter, bare and leafless, stretching their giant arms and delicate branches to all the winds of heaven; their immemorial age; their calm endurance and seeming defiance of the vicissitudes of time, in pathetic contrast to the short and troubled span of human life; their varied music under the changeful moods of the weather, from the faint whisper awakened by the gentlest breath of summer to the loud roar or moaning wail aroused by the fury of a wintry tempest; the grateful shelter which under their canopy of leafy boughs they provide for man and beast; the endless services which they render to man's daily life in their yield of timber or leaves or fruit—these features give to trees a high place among the charms and bounties wherewith Nature teems.

TheAb Vrbe Condita of Livy has been on many counts justly criticized as defective. The inaccuracy of his battle accounts, the vagueness of his geography, the occasional confusion caused by his failure to reconcile divergent accounts in his sources, the distortion of history through the excessive partiality shown to one or other of his ‘heroes’, and in general the highly rhetorical nature not only of his speeches but also of his dramatic narrations, which inevitably causes distortion—all these are formidable and justifiable criticisms. Some of these faults are, of course, attributable to the conventions of rhetorical history initiated by Isocrates, which dominated Roman historiography. Others have their cause in the fact that Livy was a book-scholar pure and simple; he seems not to have understood fully the tactics employed on the battlefield or the manifold devices used in sieges, nor to have visited many of the sites he describes. Now it is essential to expose these limitations, but in a sense it is unfair to condemn Livy for them, since they arise from human defects which would have required a heroic determination to repair.

When an observer on land watches a receding ship, the hull is the first part to sink below the horizon, and the masthead is last (conversely, when a ship is approaching, the masthead is first to rise over the horizon). The fact was familiar to Roman poets. Ovid insists on it at length in the Metamorphoses (xi. 466–71), in the story of Alcyone and Ceÿx. Valerius Flaccus puts it very neatly in the Argonautica (i. 494–7), where the women gaze at the departing sails till the sea overtops the mast, donec iam celsior arbore pontus immensusque ratem spectantibus abstulit aer.