When Carthage had been destroyed and Greece made captive, what power was left to challenge the might of Rome? This question comes to mind just now, for this year, if arithmetic is any guide, is a centenary of the two Roman acts of destruction in 146 B.c. at Carthage and at Corinth. The date is of some significance: these actions, in effect, inaugurated a pax Romana that was to last, despite all upheavals, for half a millennium. What the world gained when Rome conquered Greece, and was conquered in turn by her captive, the world knows. What was lost by the overthrow of Carthage is more a matter of speculation; but the calcined infant skeletons of Salammbô and the dearth of art and literature worthy of a great nation do not encourage much regret for what might have been.

The student of anniversaries who is not particular to a year or two will recall that some two thousand years ago this year Corinth was refounded by Julius Caesar, following its destruction a little more than a hundred years before by Mummius. ‘Non cuivis homini contingit adire Corinthum’, said Horace, translating what seems to have been a Greek proverb. Whether or not this means that a merchant and his money were soon parted amid the less respectable joys of Corinth, it seems to turn on the wealth and luxury of what was once the second city of Greece: a city, despite the fact that she suffers in our ideas from having played second fiddle politically and culturally to Athens and Sparta, of exceptional importance in the history of Greece. Thus is justified an effort to outline her history on this anniversary occasion.

This very great play was first produced in 415 B.c. and must have been a favourite from the beginning, for it was chosen, with eight others from the same author, to be broadcast as one of the world's masterpieces. In spite of such a good start, however, it has been largely misunderstood in modern times, and the interpretation I am about to give must, unfortunately, be regarded as something new. Yet, of course, if it is the correct explanation, it is not new at all but exactly as old as the play itself. The author was Euripides—the youngest of the three great tragedians who were producing plays at the same time in one town—not as big as Newcastle-under-Lyme. Think of it—three Shakespeares at once. The construction of the play is brilliant, and that means, among other things, that it will contain its own explanation; we shall look for it and probably find it in the prologue. The scene displayed on the stage is one of desolation—much like a bombed site on the morning after a heavy raid. In the background we see smoking ruins and some rather poor tents or sheds evidently knocked up on the spur of the moment to accommodate a few desolate and homeless survivors.

It is a well-known fact that the Trojan legend provided Augustus, as it had provided Julius Caesar before him, with a means of claiming divine ancestry. Likewise the Roman people were made the descendants of a nation renowned for its former greatness and celebrated by Homer. While much attention is paid to these facts, certain implications of the legend, for which apologies were sometimes felt (especially by Virgil) to be necessary, tend to pass unnoticed. One of these is that if the gens Iulia was descended from Aeneas, it possessed in him an ancestor whose birth was admittedly divine, but whose feats of valour were decidedly overshadowed in the Iliad by those of Hector. The other implication which I wish to discuss here is that if the Romans were descendants of the Trojans, it was from a defeated nation that the conquerors of the Mediterranean world had arisen. Was the Trojan heritage, in fact, despite its obvious value as propaganda, something of which the Romans and the emperor himself could justifiably be proud?

Styx—river of Hell! Why, there is magic in the very name. What memories of our childhood it conjures up! Charon, the grim ferryman, his fearful eyes aglare. Shades of men and heroes thronging the phantom shores. Ghosts and monsters, and yet more ghosts. Aye, and older legends too. Silver-footed Thetis dipping her babe, and the gods themselves swearing dread oaths on its waters. But how many of you, I wonder, when you read those stories at school, realized that the Styx actually existed? Well, it does; and I decided that if ever I had the good fortune to go to Greece, I would endeavour to visit it.

In 1948 the Oxford University Press published a new Classical Dictionary, the combined effort of many scholars and embodying the fruits of the latest research. About the same time another publisher issued a new edition of another classical dictionary, that of John Lemprière. This was the work of a young man, begun when he was an undergraduate at Oxford and completed when he was 23, and it was first published over a century and a half ago, in 1788.