When it was first proposed that an Association of Classical Teachers should be formed, there were some who feared that it might, if successful, become either a rival to the Classical Association or, at least, a force to divide and weaken it. The activities of J.A.C.T. and the appearance of its excellent journal, Didaskalos, have now made it quite clear that these fears were groundless. Both organizations can and should exist together and their co-operation has already produced considerable mutual benefits. Indeed, now that so many of our schools are suddenly subject to Protean transformation, it seems almost providential that there should be a responsible and representative association able to speak with an expert voice for classical teachers.

Of the many reasons, religious, aesthetic, and technical, generally adduced to explain the apparent reluctance of Greek tragedians to represent the moment of death on the stage, none seems to me to give sufficient weight to certain dramatic exigencies internal to the context of the plays themselves in which such deaths occur. The issue has too often been obscured by tenuous assumptions about the scarcity of professional actors (as if the total pool of professionals which the dramatist could draw upon was restricted to three), religious taboos associated with the celebration of the Great Dionysia and other festivals, the squeamishness of Greek theatre audiences, or the practical difficulties of stage management. It is not my intention to discuss these assumptions in detail. Some of them have already been effectively refuted, others may in fact have influenced consciously or unconsciously the presentation of particular death scenes. For no one denies that there are many problems connected with the presentation of death on the stage, and even the modern playwright, in spite of all the illusionist resources of the modern theatre, may well boggle at the attempt. Further, the passage from life to death must seem at a certain level a trivial activity in comparison with the tremendous impact it has on the dead person's immediate circle of friends and relations. Violent death and its gory accompaniments may well appeal to sensational melodrama but the Greek dramatist could justly have considered its representation per se as μιαρόν and ἀτεχνότατον τῆς ποιητικῆς. However, the real point at issue is whether the Greek tragedian went out of his way to get round the presentation of the moment of death for reasons external to the dramatic context. I shall try to show in this paper that whenever a character is apparently hustled out of sight for the purpose of being killed, some internal dramatic consideration was in fact uppermost in the playwright's mind.

Book iv is Virgil's masterpiece. It can stand comparison with the other great books in the qualities where they excel. It has the narrative power of Book ii, the imaginative power of vi, the tragic intensity and truth of the finest scenes in x and xii. But it overshadows these by its perfectly contrived synthesis of tragedy and epic. The book is the shortest of the twelve and the most dramatic in form: a tripartite structure is more clearly marked than in the other books and for once seems consciously present in the poet's mind, for each of the three sections has its own clearly marked internal unity and each begins with the entry of the queen and the same key phrase at regina: lines 1–295, the beginning of the affair; lines 296–503, the alienation; lines 504–705, the end of the affair—Aeneas' departure and Dido's suicide. But Virgil's narrative technique also reaches in this book its highest level of perfection and variety—the passage 74–89, for example, in which a close-packed succession of images suggests the compulsive, irresistible impetus of Dido's wild infatuation; or the serene, colourful, carefully organized narrative of the hunting episode (129–72), with its happy, relaxed realism and the terrifying, penetrating, ironic symbolism with which that episode concludes; or the awful simplicity and sublimity of the death scene (630–92).

Although most authorities now agree in identifying Priam's Troy with level VIIa at Hissarlik, arguments are still advanced from time to time for reverting to the earlier identification with VI [h?]. Since it is accepted that VI was destroyed by an earthquake and not (or not primarily) by armed force, this means proposing theories to account for the discrepancy with Greek tradition. Either the Greeks never took Troy at all, and simply invented the legend that they did—in which case there seems little point in trying to identify Priam's Troy; or else the earthquake is symbolized by the Wooden Horse, under cover of which the Greeks finally entered Troy.

TheCopa in the Virgilian Appendix is a fascinating but baffling piece. It has verbal connexions with the Eclogues, notably the second, and with Propertius' last book of elegies, notably iv. 2 (Vertumnus). Wilamowitz took it to be an expansion of an epigram, composed by some follower of Propertius. He thought the speaker to be the poet throughout. Büchner interprets the poem quite differently. He considers lines 18–19 and 21–22 to be interpolations. To begin with, they mix autumn fruits with summer (though by the same token the lines in Lycidas ordering various flowers for the ‘laureate hearse’ would be an interpolation: botanical purists have protested that they do not bloom simultaneously). They also contain the connexions with Propertius. Remove them and the poem is certainly a little more consistent; and Büchner is then able to argue that the poem was composed between Catullus and the Eclogues and known to Virgil. But who would want to interpolate in such a poem? At any rate, more evidence would be needed if the lines are to be discredited.

Ennius was brought to Rome in the first place by Cato. How soon he came under the influence of Scipio we do not know, but it is clear that to a poet acquainted with Greek thought the austerely Italian doctrines of his first patron cannot have had much appeal. The partiality which he displays for Euripides, that most sophisticated and troubled of poets, does not harmonize well with the utilitarian views which find their place in the De Agricultura and elsewhere in Cato. (It is interesting to compare the spirit of μὴ ῴην μετ' ἀμουσίας from the well-known chorus of the Hercules Furens with that of ‘poeticae artis honos non erat…’.) Eventually Ennius was to eulogize Scipio in a separate volume of that name, and to shock the Censor with his gourmet's handbook, the Hedyphagetica. But the work with which he most commended himself to fame was of course the Annales, for which he introduced the hexameter.

It used to be supposed that the Ode (Horace i. 28) was a dialogue between Archytas and a sailor, the nauta of verse 23, but considerable difficulties arise in assigning the various verses to the two speakers. It is therefore now the generally accepted view that the Ode is a dramatic monologue by the ghost of a drowned man whose corpse lies unburied on the Marine shore near the grave of Archytas.

The story of Medea as pieced together from the numerous references in both Greek and Latin literature represents to my mind a most fascinating picture, both because of the enormity of the crimes she commits and the impunity with which she commits them. She is not the only wicked character in Greek mythology: there are others who are distinguished for their atrocious crimes; but while in almost every other instance the guilty character pays the penalty for his or her crimes, ultimately either with his or her life, like Clytemnestra, or wins release from punishment through the ritual of purification or the intervention of some divine personality, like Orestes, Medea seems to be the one possible exception, whose life history presents an unbroken series of murders, including the most heinous of crimes, child murder, coupled with a constant triumph over her enemies, so much so that her Nurse can confidently assert: ‘Not easily will anyone who clashes with her in hatred carry off the palm of victory’ (44–45). In fact so successfully does she get away with her deeds of wickedness that Aristotle might well have chosen her to exemplify the type of successful villain least suitable as the hero of Greek tragedy.

The punctuation of a classical text cannot by the nature of things be sacrosanct. There has been opportunity enough for errors; and it is the purpose of this brief note to suggest with great temerity that one such may have found its way into Catullus' poem of farewell to his dead brother (Catullus ci.).

When we compare Virgil's Georgics with Varro's textbook of farming, we find that what is cast in the form of a book of instruction in the prose work is transformed into a series of pictures in the Georgics. Virgil is not content with teaching his readers how to farm, he also sets before their eyes a panorama of country life. An example of this procedure is provided by the lines on animal husbandry found in Book iii. Following the framework of Varro, by leaving out certain of Varro's categories, Virgil transforms a schematic textbook arrangement into a life story, and tells this life story with the sympathy of a poet.

Diffugere Nives is not a political poem, and the echoes which link it to the mythology of the Augustan Age are to our ears imperceptible. Yet they do not deserve to be ignored, for in the intellectual climate of the time, used to the images of spring and rebirth for the Augustan restoration and the praise of pietas and the old Roman virtues, this poem must have sounded with a peculiar note of disillusion and regret rather different from the mood modern editors attribute to it. For it is Horace's last statement about the ideals of a new order, for which, despite occasional Epicurean fits of indifference, he had devoted most of his literary effort.

‘Moral idealism in pre-Christian Rome’ will strike many as an unpromising topic, and two preliminary doubts may well arise. Was there any moral idealism? And, if so, is it worth talking about? To the first of these questions the answer is an emphatic yes. For in the literature of the first century B.c. the proportion of moralizing is remarkable and perhaps unique. Historians such as Sallust and Livy moralized explicitly in their prefaces and implicitly on every other page. Cicero, whether as philosopher or politician, moralized at every opportunity. And poets for the most part accepted their traditional role as preachers with enthusiasm, Lucretius with his thundered message of hope through despair, Horace with his more sophisticated poetic sermons, and Virgil his monumental moral epic. Every branch of Roman literature had moralizing as an accepted part of its function. Now the ‘message’ differed in detail from author to author, and was in some cases highly individual: Lucretius, for instance, preached an ideal which bore little relation to that of any other writer and aroused as little reaction in the Roman public. But it remains true that numerous common features are discernible in the moral thinking of Rome's writers, and to these we may give the label ‘Roman morality’.