For months alarming reports had been coming in, telling of the gathering cloud in the east. Now the spring had come, the Athos canal was finally cut, and the Hellespont bridged. As though in fulfilment of some riddling oracle, Xerxes marched his army over the water and sailed his fleet through dry land. The Persian steamroller began to move westwards, and the petty states of Greece faced it in a precarious alliance.

In choosing a subject which—to me at least—sounds at the same time simple and vague, I feel I have to start with a few explanations. It goes without saying that by Greek history I mean only ancient Greek history. But what are epochs? To distinguish various periods in history is an ordinary, though recently disputed, thing to do. They may be artificial, but they seem necessary to enable us to find a way within the limitless spread of our historical material. Epochs are periods too, but they may be not quite the same. We naturally look first at the original Greek words. 'Εпοχή, deriving from ἐпέχειν, indicates, according to Liddell and Scott, a check, a cessation, a stoppage. In terms of time, and that is to say, of history, it may mean a fixed or turning point. Still, that meaning only appears as late as the astronomer Ptolemaios, i.e. the second century A.d. The other word, пερίοδος, means a cycle within space or time. Pindar speaks of the seasons as ἐτέων пερίοδοι, as the recurring sections of the years; hence it is also used simply as an extent of time. It could be said (and has been said) that the two concepts together, the epochs forming the transitions between every two periods, mark a definite rhythm, a sort of short-long, short-long metre, of the course of history. That may be so; but the Greeks were never aware of it. Modern use, anyway, is different: epoch and period seem to be more or less interchangeable. This occurs, for instance, in Ranke's famous book Über die Epochen der neueren Geschichte. He was chiefly concerned with discussing the possibility of human progress. In his view it consisted in the fact that in each historical period a certain movement of the human mind is displayed, stressing now one and then another tendency. No generation is superior to the preceding one in every respect, each epoch has its own immediate bond with God (‘jede Epoche ist unmittelbar zu Gott’), or to put it more profanely: each epoch or period has its own character, its own achievements, its own faults, its own significance. In Mr. Eliot's words: ‘History is a pattern of timeless moments.’

Any attentive reader of the Iliad and the Odyssey will have been struck by some very odd features of Homer's religion—the sudden shift from reverence to frivolity, for example. What I want to glance at in this article is something rather different. The gods and goddesses worshipped by the Trojans are called by Greek names. Some deities are definitely partisan—Hera and Poseidon, for example, for the Greeks; Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, and Ares for the Trojans—while Zeus is strictly impartial. But, if the Trojans were, as we are always told, of a race distinct from the Greeks, Trojan gods will have been translated out of a native idiom into a Greek. Whenever you translate, mistakes in rendering are possible; I want to suggest one particular mistranslation here.

When Fielding fathered the modern English novel in 1742, he left his readers in no doubt about his intentions. The Preface to Joseph Andrews states clearly enough that his purpose was to ridicule affectation. The ancient Greek novelists were generally less explicit about their aims: of the five novels which survive complete, four are without any sort of preface, and we can only guess from the text what the authors were trying to do. Probably their sole object was to entertain. But the man who wrote the fifth, Daphnis and Chloe, was evidently a highly conscious artist with clear ideas about the purpose of his art, and he has left us a preface explaining them—or rather hinting at them, for the full meaning of his words is not immediately apparent. The aim of this article is to bring out the deeper implications of the preface, and to interpret the text in the light of them.

A question which occurs frequently to classical students and others concerns the relation between ancient and modern Greek. It is the purpose of the present article to indicate in as brief a fashion as possible the lines on which the question might be approached.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Greek is that in the period over which our written records extend—in over three millennia, since the decipherment of Linear B—it has changed so little. Whereas a student of Latin would be ill-equipped to read a modern Italian newspaper, a person with a good working knowledge of classical Greek would not only find an Athenian newspaper intelligible for the most part, but would be amazed at the remarkable likenesses between the ancient and the modern languages. For the vocabulary of a Greek newspaper is probably 99 per cent, of classical origin and modern Greek has retained much of the cumbersome grammar of the ancient language—and ancient Greek has got a cumbersome grammar, when we consider that its verb has over four hundred forms as compared to sixty or so in French and two in Afrikaans. Thus the declension of φίλος is precisely the same now (except for the absence of the dual, which was obsolescent in Xenophon's day, and of the dative) as it was in the fifth century B.c. The conjugation of the present of ἒχω is identical with that of the classical verb, although the third plural ending -ουσι occurs mostly dialectically, e.g. in Cypriot, and has been largely replaced by -ουν.

The strategy of the Carthaginians, in the writer's opinion, must be regarded as an aggressive one that had been devised long before the outbreak of the war in 218 B.c. The view that their operations in Spain did not have an attack on Italy as their ultimate object is naïve. The truth is that they went to Spain after their defeat in the First Punic War precisely in order to build up a base. They hoped to make it the point d'appui for their planned war of revenge against Rome: the Iberian peninsula was to be for them a springboard for attack.

This, then, was the state of the theatre when the Romans first came into direct contact with the Greeks in the middle of the third century: revivals of fifth-century melodramas and romantic tragedies, especially those of Euripides, and revivals of the New Comedy of the late fourth and early third centuries, especially the plays of Menander, held the stage. The Romans themselves had nothing quite like this in their own popular entertainment. They had stage-shows of a sort, of course. Their own native form of entertainment was the satura, which seems to have been some sort of variety show; and they had imported Etruscan ludi, consisting mainly of music and dancing, and the Campanian Atellane farce, which was something rather similar to a harlequinade. The Greek theatre, which at this period was outwardly more splendid than ever before, was to the Romans an impressive and fascinating novelty; and, when Livius Andronicus in 240 B.c. translated a Greek tragedy and a Greek comedy for the Roman stage, he achieved an immediate success and started a vogue for drama in the Greek style at Rome which ousted the old satura from the stage. It is sometimes regarded as a reflection on Roman taste that the Roman theatre in the third and second centuries B.c. should have concentrated on Euripidean melodrama and Menandrean New Comedy to the exclusion of the greater works of the fifth-century Greek dramatists. But this is an unjustified conclusion. The choice of models represents not the taste of the Romans—for in fact Greek-style drama failed to achieve lasting popularity at Rome—but that of the contemporary Greek theatre, which was the only guide that the Romans had at that date. At this period Rome imitated the literature which was currently fashionable in the Greek world. It was not until the time of Catullus and the ‘learned’ poets that the Romans, following the lead of the Alexandrine scholars, made a systematic study of Greek literature. It was only then that the Romans made the acquaintance of those works which had become the province of the scholar, and so were able to draw upon the whole range of Greek literature for their models. The inspiration derived from studying Greek poetry of the finest periods was to lead to great developments in lyric and elegy and in pastoral and didactic poetry, but it came too late for drama, which was by that time fast disappearing from the Roman theatre.

‘And so,’ said Appius, in Varro's De Re Rustica, ‘in the matter of farmyard-feeding we come to the third act, which is about fishponds.’ ‘Third act be hanged!’ said Axius; ‘do you suppose that, because you were so very economical when a young man as not to drink wine and honey at home, we are going to neglect honey ?’

Conington, after duly reporting that this is a solitary instance in Virgil of a hemistich where the sense is incomplete, concludes a lengthy comment as follows: ‘On the whole, there seems no good reason to doubt that we have the passage as Virgil left it. If we cannot complete the hemistich satisfactorily, we may console ourselves with thinking that he could not either.’ But why should we be so ready to limit the poetic invention of Virgil? Have we learnt nothing from ‘sic uos non uobis’? Consider the situation. Andromache has met Aeneas unexpectedly, and asks about his son Ascanius. ‘Is he still alive?’ The question brings back to her mind the terrible fate of her own son, Astyanax, and her emotion chokes her. Virgil could not complete the line, because its speaker could not.

In 1695, in the last decade of his literary activity, Dryden borrowed (as he tells us) two months from his Virgil, and published a prose translation of the Latin poem De Arte Graphicâ by the Frenchman, Charles Dufresnoy; and to it he prefixed his well-known essay, ‘A Parallel betwixt Painting and Poetry’. Among Dryden's critical writings, this may justly be regarded as the worst. Here Swift's jibe about the Prefaces seems to be justified—how they were

meerly writ at first for filling,

To raise the Volume's Price, a Shilling.