We read and hear so much about our debt to Greece and Rome in the worlds of literature, law, and language that we are apt to forget that included in the legacy of the Ancient World to us is, to mention only one instance, the problem of the Franco-German frontier. Ought we to be glad the Romans stopped at the Rhine? Would things be better if they had gone farther? It was the defeat of Varus at the Teutoberger Wood that settled the frontier for the Romans; and Augustus with his plaintive cry of ‘Varus, Varus, give me back my legions’ determined once and for all to stop at the Rhine, and so left the Romanized Gauls and Germans in France and the free Germans across the Rhine as a thorny problem for all future time. Where the future is unknown, the present so uncertain, it is to the past we must turn for some definite foundation on which to build.

Perhaps we teachers of the Classics protest too much, and our habit of reading papers to one another on the importance of our subject awakens a suspicion that we talk to cover our uneasiness. But since our usual pleas are the discipline of Latin prose writing and the value of the study of Greek culture, it may strengthen our case to discuss instead the quality of Classical poetry, and fight the Battle of the Books once more.

Among the most interesting of Euripides' plays are two of his latest, Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis, the first so often read, the second so seldom—far more rarely than it deserves. This last is incomplete, it is true, and full of difficulties in the text. But it is full too of the qualities most associated with Euripides, the man who depicted human beings as they really were. It is by now a commonplace to compare Euripides with Mr. Shaw, but in this play we have, if not a Shavian, at least a very modern treatment of a traditional theme. The men and women here are the old names, but they have not that quality—call it what you will—which a later writer named τὸ ὔΨος, and which in Shakespeare or in Sophocles deepens for us and universalizes the emotions, but at the same time sets the characters as it were far off, like lofty giants and princes in a tale which, sympathize as we may, is not quite on our earth. To-day we are more accustomed to characters we can see as men and women like ourselves, whom we can love, feel for, laugh at, and even despise. And when we see them in the stories of tradition or history, it is perhaps an added pleasure to feel that these men and women whose fame we know were really no less human than ourselves. It is perhaps this feeling which has popularized the modern school of biographers led by Lytton Strachey. And we find it in such plays as Caesar and Cleopatra, St. Joan, Richard of Bordeaux, or The Rose without a Thorn. It is here, too, in the Iphigenia in Aulis, perhaps the most modern of all Euripides' plays, and claimed as marking the transition to the Middle Comedy. The traditional form is still there, but little else of the Old Tragedy. The chorus with all its utterances could be deleted without the loss of anything essential to the play. There are rhetorical passages, particularly in the scene between Menelaus and Agamemnon, which leave us a little cold. But the play is full of real characters, real humour, and real pathos. And it will best be represented in English not in the traditional form of decasyllabic verse and archaic or Swinburnian diction, but in the realistic dialogue of a modern play. We may lose something of poetry and something of the atmosphere of the traditional which is still faintly discernible behind its forms. But we shall gain more of the real thing in it, the thing which reminds us of Shaw and the Realists, and which went farthest to endear Euripides to his contemporaries.

The constant inquiry of a backward boy in an ‘A’ form or an average boy in a ‘B’ form is ‘What's the good of Latin ?’ I even know of an overwrought master who rapped out: ‘It keeps me off the dole. Get on with your work!’ Colleagues, mostly those who never took it themselves at school, humorously hint at its uselessness as compared with the inestimable blessings of their own subject. Parents, too, though a few have a vague notion about a little Latin being part of the make-up of a gentleman, are often a hindrance. There is the authentic case at my old school where an irate mother challenged the headmaster with the query, ‘Why should my Tom learn Latin? To-day I asked him the Latin for tea-pot and he could not tell me.’

The attitude of an imperial government towards the religions of the different peoples whom it controls has always interested historians since it is one of the criteria by which empires are judged and since it also throws considerable light on the mentality, if not the religion, of the governing people itself. We have only to look at the British Empire to realize how complex and baffling the problem can sometimes be; take India as an example—there we find an inextricable medley of peoples and beliefs, with their daily life shot through and through with a religious system and philosophy alien to Western minds, and presenting a diversity of practice and outlook bewildering to officials who often like to have even religions arranged in a nice orderly manner. How was the problem tackled there? In the proclamation at the end of the Mutiny Queen Victoria's ministers stated: ‘… we disclaim alike the right and the desire to impose our convictions on any of our subjects. We declare it to be our royal will and pleasure that none be in any wise favoured, none molested or disquieted by their religious faith or observances, but that all shall alike enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law; and we do strictly charge and enjoin all those who may be in authority under us that they abstain from all interference with the religious belief or worship of any of our subjects on pain of our highest displeasure.’ That attitude of non-interference with religious belief or practice sounds simple enough, but it soon brought its own problems when faced with such practices as suttee and child-marriage which had the sanction of religion. It was a long time before the British Government could succeed in abolishing suttee, and its recently proposed legislation on child-marriage provoked more than a storm of protest. These are but two instances which may well illustrate the complexity of the problem; Rome found herself in somewhat similar situations when from time to time new religions as Christianity or Mithraism came into being, or when she brought under her sway races with beliefs and practices differing from her own.

The inversion, or, as I prefer to call it, the apparent inversion, of the order of events in time is a phenomenon frequently encountered in the reading of Greek and Latin authors. I suppose the case which is first encountered by most of us is the famous ‘moriamur et in media arma ruamus’ of Virgil, Aen. ii. 353.