Seneca has long been regarded as one of the supreme—one might say notorious—examples of the way in which the human personality can be divided and compartmentalized. To live in two entirely different worlds at the same time can never be easy: to combine the contrasts present in Seneca without outward sign of strain is almost miraculous. Seneca took a leading part in Nero's education and training, both before and after he became Emperor; he lived for eleven years during his reign and then committed suicide at his behest; he played a central role as chief counsellor in his administration. At the same time he wrote treatises on the perfectibility of the human race under the flag of liberty, equality, and fraternity, not as a vision of the future, but associating its realization with Nero himself; he discussed the moral duty of the philosopher in terms which were completely inconsistent with his own mode of life, and composed ten (or is it nine?) tragedies which have as one of their main themes the rule of moral chaos in human affairs, often under a tyrant. In these plays there is a vision much less pleasant, that of the coming disintegration of the world, expressed in terms like ‘In nos ultima aetas uenit?’

Much of the imagery of Aeschylus' plays is vivid and startling. It runs through his tragedies like a thread of bright colour, setting the mood and atmosphere of the drama. Yet often the playwright creates his effects by hints, by a subtle use of a pictorial word here or an unusual verb there. His words are like the quick close-ups of a film which stimulate the imagination to see more, and often it is by a series of visual ideas that he creates the effects he is aiming at.

Modern philhellenes often show an impatience with the relations that existed between the city-states, suicidally quarrelsome, in Perikles' or Demosthenes' day. The inability of the polis to get along with its neighbour, and of all poleis together to shape some rational permanent peace, is all too clear. But to the excuses usually offered—to fierce local pride, to the love of independence, to the divisions imposed by geography—still another consideration should be added. The foreign statesman of fifth- or fourth-century Greece had to reckon with a peculiar fact.

Having been associated with a recent production of Euripides' Cyclops in the original Greek at Ibadan, I feel prompted to reply to Peter Arnott's charges against Euripides' adaptation of the well-known episode in Homer's Odyssey, ix. We know very little about the origin and nature of satyric drama, and it seems unfair to discuss the structure of the Cyclops on a priori grounds or to compare it with the form of Greek tragedy. We do not subject Old Comedy to this kind of treatment because we are aware in this case of the dissimilar elements which came together to produce the disjointed articulation that Old Comedy displays. It may well be that ‘the pattern of decline’ in the composition of the choruses and episodes noted by Arnott is not the result of hasty composition and overwork but is merely indicative of a looser structure allowed by the conventions of the satyr play. On the other hand, the intervention of the chorus in the Cyclops is always eminently dramatic— not too long-drawn-out or too brief—and gives a life and impetus to the play which modern audiences, unfamiliar with the choral tradition of Greek tragedy, miss in more regularly constructed plays. The ‘miserable couplet’ which serves as exodos is not unparalleled even in tragedy, although the iambics in place of the more usual anapaests are certainly unexpected. In general, the choral odes are admirably suited to the grotesque personalities of the satyrs; they include two haunting lyrics, lines 495–502 and 511–18 (unfortunately somewhat mutilated) which rank in rhythm and imagery with some of the best of Euripides, and at the moment of greatest tension, in the third and fourth stasima, are commendably brief and onomatopoeic.

Every schoolboy knows that Ennius was the first Roman poet to use the hexameter. This series of articles is an attempt to put his action into its literary and social context.

There can have been few more intellectually exciting periods than that which in Rome followed the successful conclusion of the Second Punic War. By their victory over Carthage the tough, brutal, superstitious, conservative peasants who formed the Roman people and most of its rulers had forced their way into the arena of Mediterranean politics. In unmistakable terms they had made it plain to the Hellenistic monarchies of the East that their country was no longer the negligible training-ground on which a Pyrrhos might try his skill, their troops no longer the ignorant levies so easily put in their place by a Xanthippos. Like Peter the Great, when he burst into the England of William and Mary; like Tom Paine, had he lived to see the baroque splendours and know the world-weary diplomats of the Congress of Vienna; perhaps indeed, if we allow ourselves a little hindsight, like the self-confident Oedipus before the Sphinx, the Romans, ambitious, lusty, cunning, and doomed, now encountered for the first time the full impact of a mature civilization.

In a recent number of Greece and Rome Dr. T. A. Dorey has criticized those scholars who call the concluding scenes of the Adelphoe ‘a masterpiece of dramatic construction’. Arguing that at the end of the play the treatment of Micio is unsatisfactory or at least unsatisfying, the change in attitude of Aeschinus and Demea insufficiently motivated, and the transition from comedy to satire unnatural and excessively abrupt, Dorey seeks to explain these alleged flaws by reference to two passages of Donatus' commentary on the play: the note on v. 938, ‘apud Menandrum senex de nuptiis non gravatur: ergo Terentius ερετικ⋯ς’, and part of the praefatio (iii. 5), where Donatus observes that Demea is the means whereby ‘multa in comoedia nova’ are introduced into the final scenes of the play. Dorey's interpretation of these passages leads him to suggest that ‘the last scenes of the play were not in the original comedy of Menander, but were invented by Terence himself.’

The essence of the adventure story is, above all, travel. If the author is to indulge his reader's taste for the wonderful and the marvellous, he must, if he is dealing with anyone but the most sophisticated reader of science-fiction, do it in a way that provides a scale against which the wonders may stand out. A strange being may be brought to familiar surroundings, or alternatively, and much more commonly, a neighbour, as it were, may be projected into a foreign environment, about which he later gives us his account.

Today, so we are told, there are two main views, held in Moscow and Peking, concerning the way in which the West will ultimately meet its fate; the one view that Western society can and should be overthrown by military force, the other that because of its own internal contradictions and weaknesses Western society will destroy itself without needing to be subjected, at any rate in any large degree, to external force—it will inevitably give way to the superior organization of society as revealed by the gospel of Karl Marx. This difference of opinion illustrates once again the topical relevance of the problem of the decline of the Roman Empire which has been well emphasized by F. W. Walbank, for it is paralleled by contrasting explanations of the fate which overtook the Roman world. Naturally the orthodox Marxist has not failed to emphasize the internal causes of the decline of Rome, thus providing himself, deliberately or otherwise, with an admirable historical basis for his belief as to the eventual outcome of contemporary events. But it is by no means, of course, only historians of Marxist outlook who have placed the emphasis on internal rather than external factors. Even Edward Gibbon, whose view, summed up in the famous words ‘I have described the triumph of Barbarism and Religion’, is regarded by Toynbee as a classic exposition of the view that civilizations lose their lives as the result of successful assaults upon them by external powers, recognized what might more properly be regarded as internal causes; as when he speaks of the decline of Rome as ‘the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness’ or in his approval of the judgement that Septimius Severus was ‘the principal author of the decline of the Roman Empire’.

The basilisk, or cockatrice, is no longer a familiar animal. It was, however, well known in the Middle Ages from St. Isidore's alarming account, which was very widely quoted in the bestiaries:

basiliscus graece, latine interpretatur regulus, eo quod rex serpentium sit, adeo ut eum videntes fugiant, quia olfactu suo eos necat; nam et hominem vel si aspiciat interimit. siquidem et eius aspectu nulla avis volans inlaesa transit, sed quam procul sit, eius ore conbusta devoratur. a mustelis tamen vincitur, quas illic homines inferunt cavernis in quibus delitescit; itaque eo visu fugit, quem ilia persequitur et occidit. nihil enim parens ille rerum sine remedio constituit. est autem longitudine semipedalis; albis maculis lineatus. reguli autem, sicut scorpiones, arentia quaeque sectantur, et postquam ad aquas venerint, δροφ⋯ βους et lymphaticos faciunt. sibilus idem est qui et regulus. sibilo enim occidit, antequam mordeat vel exurat.

As a teacher of Classics in West Africa I was often questioned about the value of ‘highly academic studies’ to people who had apparently only just emerged from their own primitive society and who had many other and more important things to learn. It is perhaps significant that no criticism of the teaching of Latin, at least, has been heard by me from Africans themselves, and certainly not from those most concerned, the pupils in secondary schools. This may, of course, be due to material reasons; young Africans have notoriously good memories, which are of considerable help in the lower reaches of Latin teaching and in the presentation of set books at examinations, and therefore Latin is considered a reasonably safe option at School Certificate level (or its equivalent). I do not, however, believe that this is the whole story; Latin, if competently taught, has a great deal more to offer to an African child, for there are considerable similarities between (early) Roman and African religious, social, and domestic customs—those, in fact, common to tribal societies.