Lucretius is not only one of the most inspired but he is also surely the most modern of the ancient poets. In what breast of all those that love the Camenae did not the news of three volumes of the poet from the hand of Cyril Bailey awaken something of the divina voluptas atque horror? When the reader rises from the study of this new edition he will certainly have concluded that his notitia, as the poet calls it, of what was to be there has been far surpassed by the reality; but he will say too that the deed is a timely one, for Lucretius alone has the scientific outlook of the present age. Possessed of the theories of Democritus and Empedocles he looked out on a world which in many important respects was much the same as our own, with this outstanding difference, that science for him was wedded with great poetry and for us it is not. He is modern then, but he is unique among the moderns, and no thoughtful man who reads Latin can afford to be without him. Scholarship has reaped the field and brought in a rich harvest, but there still remains one corner of the corn uncut. Physicians, as their art requires, assess character and motive in their patients. To some extent their methods can be applied to poetry, and it is due to Lucretius to make the attempt with him. The similarity of his view of the world to ours makes him seem like one of ourselves, but in the divergence all the advantage lies with him.

It used to be said that, as far as schools were concerned, Roman history ended at 31 b.c. Nowadays it ends at a.d. 180. No doubt that date is a convenient stopping-point; but the later centuries have in them just as much as the earlier to instruct our generation and to thrill the imagination. The events which this paper describes justify, I think, that contention.

This scene constitutes the first meeting between Antigone and her sister Ismene since their dramatic parting at the end of the first scene, in which, as Jebb says (Antig. Introd., p. xxix), there has been shown to be ‘a spiritual division which no emotional after-impulse can cancel’. It is plainly seen that Ismene can never rise to taking part with Antigone in Polyneices’ burial; Antigone realizes this; so do the spectators, and no further scene should be required to emphasize it.

My father, like perhaps most of his generation, despised the commentary added to a text as an unnecessary aid meant for bad scholars and lazy schoolboys; and as for translations he regarded them simply as dishonest. But in these days, when classical learning has once again become a pleasure rather than a duty or a way of life, an expensive but a delightful luxury, we are no longer prepared to admit even Euripides in the rags of a bare and ill-printed text. Only the Muses of Homer and perhaps Virgil need hope for a seat on our laps by the fireside, unless they have put on all their attractive best. The rivalry of good publishing houses has made us Epicureans (or do I mean Eclectics?), whose favouritism towards this writer or that is at least in some part dependent on the charm of his commentator and the skill of his printer.

‘A participle of a verb of knowing and perceiving governs an infinitive, not a participle.’

The Sixth Aeneid rises like a dome above the rest of the poem, uniting past, present, and future. It goes beyond the visible world and gives an interpretation not only of Rome's destiny but of the meaning of life. The vision of Aeneas touches the deepest things in Virgil in his conception of the Roman Fate. Is it conceivable, then, that the poet could have made a mockery of it all by representing that revelation, which was to inspire Aeneas for his great task, as false and misleading in the concluding lines of the book?