A. E. H ousman was born a hundred years ago this year. Somewhat in advance of his centenary, several studies of his life and work have recently appeared, provoking their spreading ripples of criticism and discussion, reminiscence and speculation. Little of what has been written, one feels, would have been much to Housman's own taste, for the general tendency has been to probe with more enterprise than delicacy into experiences and emotions that he himself had chosen, for the most part, to conceal.

In modern times the rendering of treasured legend through the sung, as well as the spoken, word moved from biblical to classical sources during the fifteenth century. In 1472 a lyric drama on the Orpheus fable was so produced at Mantua, to a text by the poet Poliziano. The music is lost; it must have been in the madrigal style. But, rather more than a hundred years later, scholars and musicians gathered at the house of the Count of Vernio in Florence in an attempt to recover the supposed methods of Athenian tragedy (the musical details of which remain too imprecise to be cogent) in a new kind of declamatory stage-song. The subsequent, comprehensive, and altogether creative achievement of Monteverdi's Orfeo, produced at Mantua in 1608, established the first point in a fresh trickle of operas on classical subjects, which in the eighteenth century became a downpour. Operas that still hold a place on the public stage are mainly of Greek provenance. They range from Iphigénie en Tauride, the culmination of Gluck's late abandonment of light opera for ‘nature’ and classical librettos, and Mozart's exceptional, not at all comic, Idomeneo, to Strauss's equally exceptional Elektra, with Tippett's opera on the death of Priam on the way. (Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito (1791) appears to have been a reluctant struggle with a fresh version of Metastasio's text of 1734, which will become pertinent later. Mozart was preoccupied with Die Zauberflöte.)

The standard rendering of the prayer of Glaukos is: ‘For I have this grievous wound and my arm on this side and on that is shot through with sharp pangs.…’

In 1. 510 Χείρ is always correctly translated: ‘With his hand [Χειρὶ] he held his arm [βραΧίονχ]’ where he had been wounded, a little below the shoulder (xii. 389). Homer knew a lot about the results of arrow and other wounds. His translators do not. Failing to understand how a wound in the arm can cause pain in the hand, they have attempted to ‘correct’ what was written, and in so doing have destroyed the sense, the explanation why an apparently simple flesh wound was so crippling. This is an excellent description of injury to the median nerve in the (upper) arm, causing (1) sharp pain felt in the area—palm, thumb, and fingers—supplied by that nerve, (2) aching ‘referred’ to the region just below the shoulder supplied by the circumflex nerve (arising from the same spinal segments, cervical 5 and 6), and (3) paralysis of the flexor (‘grasping’) muscles of the wrist and hand. We should therefore translate: ‘For I have this grievous wound and my hand is pierced through with sharp pangs … and my shoulder is made heavy thereby, nor have I power to grasp my spear firmly.’

It was in Istanbul, shortly after the anti-Greek riots of 1955, that some of us, who had met there to attend the Congress of Byzantine Studies, or some other conference, fell to talking about Rome, the Roman record, the Roman civilization. There, among the melon-carts and the Cadillacs, we thought of the darker side of Roman rule—the lack of intellectual curiosity, the indifference to technological advance, the blight of rhetoric, the cruelty, the vulgarity, and everything summed up by Haverfield as ‘the heavy inevitable atmosphere of the Roman material civilization’. And, having said all that, we began to reflect that this was perhaps a partial and an unworthy view of a people who, to mention nothing else, had preserved for our world the Greek heritage. There we were in Istanbul, Constantinople, the New Rome created by the Old Rome to be a world capital, the city which had preserved its Graeco-Roman traditions through the thousand years that separate antiquity from the modern world, and at the last had handed them back to the West and so made possible the new birth of art and science and literature.

Since 1932 there have been available nearly a hundred fragmented lines of a single satyr-play of Aeschylus which require us to reconsider somewhat our image of the dramatist. Not that any revision of Aeschylus is suggested at this point. Such would be intolerable and untrue, for the Aeschylean portraits remain as magnificent as ever. But now there has been added a bright sketch reflecting a humorous and romantic side of the dramatist; as though, after possessing only a half dozen of only the tragedies of Shakespeare, we had found a small portion of A Midsummer-Night's Dream.

With the decipherment of the Linear B tablets found at Knossos in Crete (dated to c. 1400 B.c.) and on the Greek mainland at Mykenai and Pylos (dated to c. 1275 B.c. and c. 1200 B.c. respectively) which have been shown to be written in Mycenaean Greek, the attention of scholars has been drawn to the problem of the language of the earlier Linear A tablets which have been found in Crete alone.

A survey of Greek baths can hardly begin without a mention of Agamemnon. The murder of the victorious King of Men in his bath is one of the facts that make history ring true. In her trance before the house of the Atreidai Kassandra sees the deed done. False Klytaimestra has scrubbed her husband clean (λουτροῖσι φαιδρύνασα), and enveloping him in some sort of a net she stabs him to death. He falls down in the watery vessel (ἐνύδρῳ τεύχει). ‘That’, says the prophetess, ‘is the tale of the murderous cauldron’ Anyone who reads the passage carefully must begin to wonder: was Agamemnon really immersed in a bath? Or was he just standing with his feet in the sort of shallow basin that we see in vase-paintings? If we turn to Professor Fraenkel's great edition of the Agamemnon we find that he has his doubts: ‘Aeschylus is likely’, he writes, ‘to have left to his audience the choice between thinking either of the vessels for washing and bathing with which they were familiar themselves or of what they imagined the ἀσάμινθοι of the Homeric poems to be like.’ Our first step, then, must be back to the Homeric bath.

Many brilliant assumptions made for the first time by the Greeks have been for centuries part of European thought, and it requires a great deal of historical imagination to realize that much of what we tend to think obvious or inevitable has happened because of the Greeks and not by nature. So with the concept of ‘History’. The word conjures up certain thoughts and feelings which, I suggest, owe their origin to Thucydides when at the end of the fifth century B.c. he evolved a new literary form, a mixture of art and science.

There is a question relating to the gods of Homer which is obvious enough, when one thinks of it, and yet has never, so far as I know, been clearly answered, or even envisaged. Professor Nilsson, for instance, in his works on Homer and on Mycenaean and Minoan religion, has nothing definite to say about it. The question I mean is this: where did Homer get his gods? Or it would be better to say, where did he get his pantheon? The question I have in mind is not the origin of the individual gods. That has been discussed repeatedly. Nor is it the origin of the Olympian monarchy, for that, it is generally agreed, is modelled on the monarchies of early Greece. It is rather how all those deities came to be present in Olympos, or at least how Homer and his audience knew that they were there.

Animals on the stage are usually more trouble than they are worth, and producers are notoriously chary of using them. There are several instances in ancient drama, however, where they seem to be essential to the plot; and it may be worth while to consider the Greek approach to the problem, and see their stage technique for overcoming the difficulties involved.