‘The last two centuries of the second millennium saw the disappearance of the highly developed civilisations which had, up to then, been flourishing in several lands in the near East, including Egypt, the Aegean area, and Anatolia. Their place was taken by other cultures, none of which seems to have been on the high level which had been maintained previously, and it would be far from the truth to suggest that the peoples who had been dominant earlier in the eastern Mediterranean area merely lost ground culturally. For they did, in fact, do much more. They almost faded out of sight, at least for a time. Such a deep change, simultaneous in several lands, is not likely to have been due to purely local causes. Consequently, the presence of some overriding factor may be suspected, a political event of such magnitude that it could affect a vast area.’

It has been said: ‘The Classics can be scrapped because of the advance of modern science.’ But, apart from the timeless values in the aesthetic and the moral spheres, we now have the amazing fact that in the realm of science itself, Nobel Prizewinners like Heisenberg and Schrödinger have been pleading for a return to the ancient Greeks; and that, too, in the most modern of scientific fields—atomic physics.

Since the Second World War we have been subjected to a flood of memoirs and counter-memoirs by generals, admirals, air marshals, and politicians. One of the direct results of this is that our vocabulary has been increased—if not enriched—by a military jargon. Most of the latter's terms have in fact very specialized meanings, and if they are used out of their proper context they can present a highly coloured view of a rather simple situation. Can these terms be applied with validity to historical situations of antiquity ? At first sight there is an attraction in theirvery modernity, for they seem to give a freshness of approach; but Professor Salmon's use of them in his recent article, ‘The Strategy of the Second Punic War’, has made the dangers of their use manifestly clear. By his use of these anachronisms—for that is surely what they are—Professor Salmon has given nothing new in the way of interpretation, but merely provided confirmation of Oman's dictum ‘Historians may have the most divergent views according to their predispositions’, and has exaggerated the capabilities of both sides beyond belief.

Cicero's grandfather is credited with the observation that the better a Roman knew Greek the bigger a scoundrel he was. Nevertheless one of his sons, Lucius, belonged to a circle that knew quite a lot of Greek and another, Marcus, certainly gave his own children a Greek education. Marcus, the father of the orator, seems to have shared the prevailing view that one had either a Greek education or none at all. Indeed, in 92, when Cicero was fourteen years old, the newly established Roman schools of rhetoric were closed down by the censors Crassus and Domitius, Crassus' reason, according to Cicero, being that the Roman schools were a travesty of their Greek exemplars: ‘nam apud Graecos, cuicui modi essent, uidebam tamen esse praeter hanc exercitationem linguae doctrinam aliquam et humanitate dignam scientiam, hos uero nouos magistros nihil intellegebam posse docere, nisi ut auderent.’ Amongst these schools was that of L. Plotius Gallus, who seems before the closure to have attracted a fair number of pupils.

The Pliny who is known to us from his letters has too often been dismissed as a conscientious but timid administrator, a pedant aspiring to literary fame, and a generous patron whose uncritical support of promising young men ends by becoming a bore. The answer would be that the Roman conception of friendship was one of mutual aid and reciprocal obligations on the part of cliens and patronus; that desire for gloria is marked in almost every Roman we know about and is closely associated with the hope non omnis moriar; and that when Pliny was sent out as an administrator with special powers as legatus Augusti propraetore consulari potestate to inquire into the financial and administrative confusion in the affairs of Bithynia and Pontus, he had considerable legal experience from his work in the Chancery court of Rome as well as expert knowledge of Bithynia from his handling of the defence in the cases brought by the province against the senatorial governors Iulius Bassus and Rufus Varenus.

It is curious that so little has been written in English about the Roman land surveyors and their work. Most of the nineteenth-century study of the subject was carried out by German scholars. In 1812 Niebuhr stressed the importance of the extant writings of the agrimensores and suggested that field-work in Italy would contribute to our understanding of them. In 1833 a Dane, Captain Falbe, noticed that the squares into which the land round Carthage was divided had sides corresponding to 2,400 feet and thus equalled a normal centuria. The standard edition of the agrimensores, edited by Blume, Lachmann, and others, appeared in 1848 and 1852. Mommsen contributed to this work, and he and other German scholars extended the study of Roman surveying. Before the First World War it was a Swede, Thulin, who furthered research on the ancient writings. Apart from that in German the bulk of the work on the subject is in Italian.

It may seem odd at first glance to include Picasso among those who have taken the torch from Greece. What, it will be asked, have these cruelly distorted images to do with the serenity of classicism? The question is ill conceived. Hellenistic art sought to explore the range of human experience as Picasso has done, and to respond to the violence of the world around as he has responded. The Laocoon or Skopas' Maenads were as shocking to their day as The Charnel-House or The Weeping Woman were to our fathers. Picasso has never been able to limit himself to the confines of one style. His restless, Alexander-like genius has always sought for new worlds to conquer. The man who at fourteen could paint The Girl with Bare Feet or the portrait of Don Ramón Perez Costales was not going to spend sixty years repeating what he had already achieved. Speaking of a contemporary who was trying to find a single solution to the problem of depicting forms he said: ‘There is no such thing as a solution.