Introductory

In his preface to Some Oxford Compositions (Oxford University Press, 1949) Mr. T. F. Higham quotes with apparent approval the statement that ‘Mr. H. M. Butler was constantly haunted by the conviction that each metre had, more or less, a personality of its own’. Many years of Sixth-form teaching, and more recently the privilege of examining for the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board's Higher Certificate, have led the writer of this article not only to share Mr. Butler's conviction but also to realize that far too many pupils labour at verse composition without that sufficient knowledge of the underlying principles by which verse-making can become so fascinating a pursuit. It is believed that with this knowledge boys would not only maintain their deep interest in versification, on which they almost invariably enter with enthusiasm, but also—and this is far more important—would find, as the seven authors of Some Oxford Compositions have found, that they were not merely engaged in an elegant accomplishment but using one of the best means to a higher standard of scholarship.

This essay is written with the further conviction that the boy who has gained some knowledge of the inner ‘personality’ of Vergil's hexameter line—a personality that determines, as Mr. Butler claimed, both its spirit and its form—will have very little difficulty in learning to appreciate more fully all except the more recondite metres both in Latin and in Greek.

In the following paragraphs the majority of the quotations from Vergil have been taken from Aeneid, book iv; it is hoped that this will simplify the task of looking up the references; will encourage a closer study of a book which is not greatly dependent on the other books of the Aeneid for its full appreciation; and, most of all, will lead pupils to make a similar close study of one or more of those other books.

We come now to the signs of fair weather; and the first five lines are important:

nec minus ex imbri soles et aperta serena prospicere et certis poteris cognoscere signis. nam neque tum stellis acies obtunsa videtur, nec fratris radiis obnoxia surgere luna, tenuia nec lanae per caelum vellera ferri.

By definite signs no less will you be able To forecast sunny, clear, and rainless days After the rain, or know it has set fair. Then seen, the stars' keen brilliance is not dulled; Rises no sunlit moon; no woolly cloudlets Flock over heav'n.

Much has been written about the origin of the Homeric Poems, and the processes, more or less long, by which they were given eventual literary form. The archaeological discoveries of Schliemann and his successors, from 1870 to about 1910, lengthened the perspective and changed the point of view, diverting attention from the latest to the earlier phases, from an ‘Ionian’ to an ‘Aeolic’, ‘Achaean’, and even Mycenaean epic or saga or folk-tale. But not only was there no recovery of early literary texts related to the Minoan scripts, but the decline and fall of the Minoan régime revealed even more clearly the wide interval between the traditional date for the ‘Fall of Troy’ and the emergence of the ‘Ionian’ epic. Political circumstances unfortunately terminated the American excavation of Hissarlik before the questions asked by M. Charles de Vellay about the north side of the fortress could be completely answered; but it seems certain that there was a north wall, and that this was deliberately destroyed at a rather late date, as in the story of the foundation of Achilleum. In Aeolis and Ionia, too, no large excavation is possible yet; so attempts to find archaeological equivalents for the latest indications of material culture in the poems are still conjectural.

It is frequently remarked of the κοινή Greek of the Gospels that it bears distinct traces of Hebrew and Aramaic influence, conscious or unconscious. The average reader of the Gospels may often wonder just which of the many linguistic oddities he encounters are common to all or most forms of κοινή and which are the genuine Hebraisms or Aramaisms; he can, if of a heroic cast of mind, learn Hebrew for this one purpose (a plan which will commend itself to few), or he can read various weighty tomes, from those of Wellhausen and Burney, who see Aramaic influence everywhere, to those of Moulton and Milligan, who minimize that influence wherever possible, to that of Lagrange, who placidly pursues a via media. But he would probably prefer a brief essay which tries to sum up the main facts without a footnote, without an appendix, and without an axe to grind.

First, influence on syntax. Every κοινή scholar would agree that one of the commonest Semitisms in the Gospels is the initial position of the verb in the sentence. In both Hebrew and Aramaic the verb almost invariably appears first: ‘the king saw the man’ would (though in the Hebrew right-to-left order in which the first becomes last and the last becomes first) be expressed as ra'ah (verb) hammelech (subject) 'eth (sign of the accusative) ha'ish (object). Obviously the average Aramaic-speaking Jew would write εἶεν ὁ βασιλεύς τòν ἄνλpα. Now it is perfectly true that there is nothing un-Greek in the position of ενεν here; but it is the frequency of the occurrence, not the fact, which is significant; the initially placed verb meets us on every page of the Gospels—examples are unnecessary.

Galen was born at Pergamum in a.d. 130 or, more likely, 129. His father Nicon, a man of means, was well educated and kindly, but his mother ‘was most irascible, so much so that she would sometimes bite her servants, and was always shouting and always battling with my father, even more so than Xanthippe with Socrates’ (5 K. 40). This was a difficult home, particularly for an only son, as we must suppose Galen to have been. But his father attended carefully to his upbringing. At 14 he began to study logic, and a little later the philosophy of all the chief sects. His choice of a profession he also owed to his father, who was prompted by a dream to let him study medicine. There were dangers, as Galen later saw (19 K. 59), in studying medicine and philosophy together, as he now at 17 proceeded to do. But he did not succumb, and the following hypothetical description may be taken as true of himself at this time (De nat. fac. III. x. 179, Loeb Classical Library, ed. A. J. Brock, 2 K 179): ‘A man who wishes to gain more than ordinary knowledge of his subject must at the outset be exceptional both in his natural gifts and in his early training. And when he reaches adolescence, he must have a frenzied enthusiasm for the truth, like one possessed; neither by day nor by night must he cease straining and striving to master all that has been said by the most famous of the ancients.’ His first medical instructor was Satyrus, with whom he studied for four years.

It is just 2,000 years since two boys complained that their schoolmaster furenter irasci. He, however, as such people will, had anticipated their complaint with a report of ambiguously qualified praise, and managed to retain parental confidence in his moral and intellectual qualifications. But the boys probably felt that lessons were out of place. They were abroad for the first time. There had been two grand feasts, a round of sightseeing, a voyage in open boats, a stay on an island, sleeping in tents, and six months at the court of a native prince. A story might have been written about this, but it was Cicero's proconsular year and he had other fish to fry. His was a province already subjugated more Romano with pilum and syngrapha, yet his anxieties were manifold: to meet the outgoing proconsul and tidy up the mess which that gentleman had made; to face a Parthian invasion; to catch a brigand; to square the legal and the economic rates of interest; to restrain his staff from making requisitions, and to dun the bankrupt king of Cappadocia. Then, at Rome, seven weeks' journey away, the republic was tottering, his daughter Tullia was on the marriage-market for the third time, water was being laid on at his suburban villa, and no—he really couldn't supply leopards for the arena, but please, please, would everyone see that his term of office in that dreadful province wasn't extended to a second year.

So Cicero only really noticed his son Marcus and his nephew Quintus when they were a nuisance.

The Gracchi in literature as in all else mark a turning-point in Roman history; they brought one epoch to a close and inaugurated a fresh one; and by their choice of means to effect their end they unwittingly determined the direction of events for the following century. In order to be able to appreciate the literature as a reflection and a phenomenon of its society, we must first briefly consider the effects of the Gracchi upon political life, and then the effects of that political life upon Roman society. The Gracchi set out to solve certain problems; but owing to the twist that they gave to Roman history, those problems fell into the background, to be supplanted by a problem of politics which absorbed all the energies of the governing class to the exclusion of the problems which should have been their main concern and responsibility.

The problems that confronted the State at the time of the Gracchi were many; they were social, economic, political, and administrative problems of vast complexity that required wisdom, patience, and, above all, goodwill for their solution. By this time real political power was wielded by a comparatively small number of families, grouped round leading men; they had come to believe that they governed by divine right, and while the better among them were aware of their responsibilities, there were many to whom the emoluments of government were reason enough for restricting the profits of empire among the smallest number. During the second century the attitude of the governing class had become conservative, opposed to any change which might alter the existing organization or deprive them of some of their great power.

These few reflections were suggested by a recent coastwise voyage with the Odyssey as only book-companion, and the sea is the main theme.

The sea, of course, figures largely in the Odyssey, and how true it all is! Clearly Homer was thoroughly familiar with every aspect of sealife, and we may be sure that his Greek audiences down the years found in him a satisfying interpreter of their own experience as members of a seafaring race.

Homer's stock adjectives and verbs are the quintessence of observation, but observation coloured with artistic imagination. His sea-pictures, with all their vividness, are not photographic, or scientific—if that means abstracting and explaining. Let me illustrate.

A net, to anyone who has made or used one, is a perpetual source of wonder. He knows its knots and its changing shapes, but how is he to describe it—universally? Not, certainly, in the terms of Dr. Johnson's dictionary definition: ‘anything reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.’ In the last resort he hails with delight Homer's childlike, invincible, πoλνωπóχ (xxii. 386), for, after all, ‘many holes’ sums up to the eye of imagination the idea of net. True, these ‘holes’ are regularly bounded, but why insist on that when the reader knows it perfectly well and only likes to be re-minded of the general impression? Even Johnson had a glimmering notion that ‘holes’ had something to do with it, for he defines ‘reticulated’ as ‘formed with interstitial vacuities’.

PART 1

Collecting of weather-signs must have been a practice of considerable antiquity, for man has always drawn his sustenance from the land or from beasts that convert vegetable into animal protein. A hunter must know the best times for hunting; and for the agriculturist it is essential not only to know when the average seasonal changes of weather occur but to have some means of forecasting variations from the normal. We know two Greek collections of weather-signs, and there may have been a third which was older than either of these. Eudoxus of Cnidus, a pupil of Plato and a distinguished mathematician who lived about 390–337 b.c., had written a prose work on astronomy, entitled Phaenomena. This, at the request of Antigonus of Macedon, was put into verse, under the same title, by Aratus of Soli somewhere between 276 and 274 b.c. The Phaenomena of Aratus is a dull, pretentious piece of versification, of interest to us only because it contains a number of seasonal signs which Virgil has scattered about the Georgics. But the astronomical piece is followed by a passage of 422 lines, which has been given the independent title of Diosemiai or Diosemeiai, on the signs of less normal weather. This is undoubtedly the principal source of Virgil's main collection; and from it, therefore, I shall chiefly be quoting. But there does exist another work, Concerning the Signs of Rain, Wind, Storm, and Fair Weather, a prose work in the form of some twenty pages of notes.

A Recurrent motif in Latin poets is the assertion that somebody would follow somebody else anywhere, to the world's end if need be. This mannerism is worth notice for its curious persistence over a long period, and it is amusing to observe the details, the places which suggest themselves to the writers as dangerous or remote.

The series seems to begin with Catullus (II. 1–4): he has two cronies who will follow him wherever he goes, whether east to Parthia or Hyrcania and the Sacae beyond, or—presumably on another line, by sea—to the Arabs and the uttermost Indians, litus ut longe resonante Eoa tunditur unda, or south to the Nile, or north over the high Alps to the Rhine and the far-western Britons, just then being invaded by Julius Caesar. In fact the poet went east only to Bithynia, and nothing is known of journeys in other directions. (One scholar has even questioned whether he really came home all the way on his ‘yacht’, as poem 4 is generally understood to say.)1

Propertius is extravagant: with his friend he would scale the fabulous mountains of the north wind or go south to Ethiopia and beyond, whatever he may conceive to be there— cum quo Rhipaeos possim conscendere montes ulteriusque domo vadere Memnonia.2 With his lady he would go mare per longum and endure anything (iii. 22. 9). A love-sick girl is made to write to her soldier, who is supposed to have seen the world from Britain and the wintry Getae to a generously large and elastic eastern frontier: if service regulations allowed, she would be with him, and Scythian mountains and frozen waters would not stop her: as it is, she can only look for his whereabouts on a map, e tabula pictos ediscere mundos.

Latin inscriptions are among the most revealing and valuable remains from ancient Rome and its Empire. They have been found in the hundreds of thousands—and are still being found—in all parts of the Empire, ranging in date from early times to the fall of the Western Empire and beyond. The earliest are few and of unknown date—perhaps of the regal period, perhaps of the early Republic—and the latest are of yesterday, such as the ones put up to mark the new excavations and discoveries under St. Peter's in Rome. The stories they have to tell are infinite in variety, and the information they give as varied in value. From the city of Rome alone we have the names of more than 50,000 persons recorded in inscriptions, not counting the many more whose cognomina only are given.

Thus was Dante welcomed by Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, and invited to become a member of the select circle in Limbo, the upper section of Hell containing the souls of unbaptized infants and distinguished pagans. The commentators tell us that this account of himself has been adduced as a proof of Dante's modesty; I have never been able to discover who proposed this idea. The poets entered the Palace of Wisdom and later on took their stand on an eminence from which Dante had a good view of the noble souls on the green sward in front of him, and he was told who many of them were.

Owing to lack of space I must confine myself to the literary figures seen by Dante, although there were many other notable inmates of Limbo, e.g. Aeneas, Caesar, and Saladin in spite of his adherence to the religion of the renegade Christian Mahomet who was sent down to the circle allotted to the Schismatics.

This list, with its supplement in Purg. xxii, deserves study; both should, however, be used with caution: the omission of well-known names should not be taken to imply ignorance on the poet's part. As Dante had but little Greek, it is obvious that he had not read the works of all the authors named.

The writers and philosophers in the first list are: the five poets already mentioned, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Democritus, Diogenes, Anaxagoras, Thales, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Zeno, Dioscorides, Orpheus, Cicero, Linus (v.l. Livy), Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and Galen (Inf. iv. 131 ff.).