Autumn brings the new season's travel brochures thick and fast upon us, glossy and alluring; and none more enticing than those which invite us to cruise to classical lands. With word and picture they set us day-dreaming of a thousand sights to be seen, of picnic lunch among spring flowers and fallen columns, of bathing in azure waters, exotic local dishes, and the final, farewell dinner at sea. They wield the magic of place-names with almost Miltonic skill: Tarquinia and Paestum, Palermo and Tripoli; Athens, of course—Athens above all; and Delphi, too, and the Cyclades, Samos, and Troy; even Jerusalem and Baalbek.

It was Minoan writing that led Arthur Evans to Crete. In Greek antique shops and elsewhere he had seen certain stone signets, each with three or four facets inscribed with what he felt sure were characters of some prehistoric system of writing (cf. Suppl. PL CLXXVII (a)); they were alleged to come from Crete. After a visit to that island in 1894 to collect further evidence he was able to recognize, besides these ‘hieroglyphs’, a later and more linear type of writing occasionally scratched on vessels of pottery or stone from prehistoric sites in Greece and Crete. In a long article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies for 1894 he hazarded some remarkable conclusions from this scanty evidence: that although the ‘hieroglyphs’ probably concealed a pre-Greek language, the later, linear script might have been used for writing Greek; and that this linear script was a syllabary somehow related to the syllabary used in Cyprus in historical times as an alternative to the Greek alphabet. He was right on both points; but paradoxically his excavations at Knossos, begun in 1900 in pursuit of the origins and history of these scripts, led him gradually farther from the truth. Within the first week of digging he had begun to unearth clay tablets written in what he later dubbed ‘Linear B’ script (cf. Suppl. Pis. CLXXVIII (a), (b), CLXXIX and CLXXX (a)); and they were associated with objects at once identified as belonging to the Mycenaean civilization known from mainland Greece since Schliemann's excavations in the 1870'8. Further exploration, however, revealing the earlier stages of the civilization of Knossos, made it necessary to distinguish a distinct ‘Minoan’ civilization, in many ways a parent of the Mycenaean. Evans saw this civilization more and more as continuous, and as non-Greek. The corollary of this would be that the hieroglyphic script and the two linear scripts that succeeded it (for he now recognized an intermediate stage—‘Linear A’ (cf. Suppl. PI. CLXXVII (cj)—as well as the Linear B of his Knossos tablets)—all represented one non-Greek ‘Minoan’ language.

In all European literature there is nothing more justly famous than Odysseus' meeting with Nausicaa in Bk. vi of the Odyssey. Editors of the Odyssey from antiquity to the present day have agreed in regarding the land of the Phaeacians and Scheria, their city, as an imaginary place, although it is remarked from time to time that it may be drawn from some real place and the Phaeacians from a real people. But there is in fact sufficient internal evidence in the poem to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Scheria is to be identified with Trapani in northwestern Sicily. The extraordinary thing is that no one ever realized this seemingly obvious fact or sought to make the identification until Samuel Butler did so some sixty years ago. His book, The Authoress of the Odyssey, published in 1897, was, however, so badly received that all its contents, good and bad alike, were rejected as so much rubbish. The only informed consideration his theories have ever received came from Professor Farrington (recently retired from the University College of Swansea), who wrote in general support of them in 1929, when lecturer at Cape Town University. No one, so far as the author of this article has been able to ascertain, has ever so much as paid a visit to Trapani in order to see Butler's country and to check his facts, until he and his son did so in the summer of 1952.

When Juvenal's friend Umbricius is enumerating the manifold occupations which will furnish a livelihood for a starving Greek, he places the practice of medicine between the skill of the tightrope-walker and the black art of the wizard. Though in this outburst he is stressing particularly the versatility of the race of Ulysses, we are entitled to give a liberal interpretation to the contemptuous diminutive Graeculus and to assume that the term is loosely used to comprehend all Greek-speaking aliens in Rome. The readiness of the Greeks to set up as doctors, the exaggerated respect they commanded, and the unsuitability of such a profession for the serious-minded Roman are set forth in a speech of that arch-enemy of Hellenism, Cato, preserved for us in Pliny's Natural History Certainly the doctors whose names appear in the poems of Juvenal, Martial, and Ausonius sound unmistakably Greek —Alcon, Diaulus, Dasius, Eunomus, Heras, Hermocrates, Herodes, Symmachus, and Themison. The low status of the physician is well brought out in those epigrams of Martial in which, with no appreciable difference in the modus vivendi, a doctor becomes an undertaker and an eye-specialist a gladiator. Phaedrus too has told us the instructive tale of the worthless cobbler who turned doctor. We are reminded of the facility with which the hero of Mr. Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, who has, by becoming an assistant at a pets’ cemetery in the U.S.A., lost face with the English community, seeks a living as a non-sectarian minister. This comparison carries with it the implication that professional training was sometimes lacking; and indeed, if we exclude the medical handbooks, references to the student are as rare as Juvenal's black swan. But we all know Martial's complaint that, when as yet he was merely poorly, the imposition of a hundred chilly hands (the hands of Dr. Symmachus' apprentices) precipitated a genuine fever.5 Not merely financial success but a certain degree of respectability were of course acquired by many doctors who practised in Rome. In this connexion should first be mentioned Julius Caesar's gift of the citizenship to encourage practitioners to settle permanently in the City. Pliny importuned Trajan with a request that citizenship should be granted to the relatives of his physician. At the top of the profession were such men as Antonius Musa, the physician of Augustus, to whose medical skill and deserved imperial distinction adequate reference is made by the Emperor's biographer. Employment was clearly conditional upon satisfactory treatment. Cicero in a letter to Atticus uses a simile of the transfer of a patient from one consultant to another. The more affluent invalid could, as in a much later age Sidonius shows us, seek safety in numbers and health in the multiplication of remedies. For Sidonius alludes bitterly to the bedside wrangles of rival physicians. We should dearly love to know what happened at a ‘sick-parade’ in the medical quarters of a legionary camp but, our evidence being scanty and not of a personal nature, the subject must reluctantly be dismissed. Undoubtedly the epic treatment of Mago's spear-wound by the ancient Synhalus bears no resemblance to sober fact; nor are Punic practices a guide to Roman. Seneca, a more sober authority, contrasts the noisy outcries of recruits, albeit their wounds are merely superficial, with the quiet and patient endurance of veterans into whom the steel has gone deep. The latter, he says, behaved as if the affected limbs belonged to other people. Two uncongenial duties, which fell to the lot of certain doctors, call for brief mention. The first is their attendance on condemned criminals who were ordered to perform the happy dispatch with their own hands. In Nero's reign, Suetonius tells us, the expert would sever the veins of any who dawdled. The second assignment is connected with the business of the slave markets. The pitiable creatures, conspicuously placed on a wooden scaffold, naked and (if newly arrived from abroad) with whitened feet, bore suspended from their necks a certificate recording not merely name and aptitudes but imperfections both moral and physical. The discriminating buyer would, if he suspected significant omissions from the health sheet of the slave he fancied, supplement the testimony of eye and hand (for the men, women, and children were prodded like beasts at a cattle-mart) by taking medical opinion. The grisly scene is painted with great relish by Claudian in his onslaught on the eunuchconsul Eutropius.

It is a very remarkable fact that, in the register of Chinese cities and counties for the year a.d. 5, there should appear a city and county with the most ancient Chinese name for Rome. The Chinese, then as now, did not give foreign names to their cities. In that list, with its over 1,500 cities, there are only two other Chinese places with foreign names. We know that both those localities were populated by immigrants who came from those places outside China. It follows that people from the Roman Empire must have emigrated to China and founded this city.

The first 150 years of the Roman Empire, from the settlement of Augustus in 27 b.c. to the death of Hadrian in a.d. 138, saw the emergence of Rome as a power which in various ways was to influence the future of Europe, the Near East, and the whole civilized world for many centuries. Among other aspects too numerous to mention, a new system of government emerged, and a new theory of the place of the ruler in the state. On the emperor depended all prosperity, from him alone came the blessing of peace, and he was the sole source of victory. It is a period, therefore, in which the emotional and psychological relationship between ruler and ruled is of interest and importance, as it was in Elizabethan England.

It is a question worth the asking, at what season in his life a man comes to the writing of history, with what equipment for the task, and under what impulsion. Cornelius Tacitus did not discover his vocation until he had passed the age of forty. Was that late or early? Late, in the opinion of some scholars, late and almost anomalous. Gaston Boissier avowed his surprise on the first page of his Tacite, a book published just over fifty years ago, and held in merited esteem for its combination of elegance and judgement. And, more recently (in 1947), Ernst Kornemann, the last survivor of that notable company, the pupils of Theodor Mommsen, affirmed it as an axiom that Tacitus came late to history.

Vniversa iam plebs vias implebat dissono clamore poscens Seiani caedem velut si in circo aut theatre ludicrum postularent. quem orto die ad curiam acclamationibus et studio inani secuti1, nunc pari laetitia in carcerem tractum spectavere. agebatur hue illuc Seianus vario turbae fluctuantis impulsu; derisus, contumeliae omnium subiectus, vidit suas statuas afflictas calcatasque a vulgo effrenato, mox talia passurus ipse. eodem die patres convenerunt et, popularis assensus haud inscii et quod aberant Praetoriani, nullis indicibus, nullo teste damnatum morti Seianum tradiderunt. apud senatum omnes gaudere, multi ex animo, qui conscii fuissent tanto effusius laetitiam significavere quanto indicium conspirationis timuerunt. credo et providentioribus curam subisse rei publicae quae, non omnino a Sciano eversa, rursus tradrebatur irae imperatoris nunc inveteratae.

One morning of early summer (Pedieus being Archon)—the weather was as lovely as Athens ever knew it—Pheidias was at work in his shop when there was a knock at the door, and presently a slow-moving, deliberate man was shown in.