goddesses to witness that, according to my ability and judgment, I will keep this Oath and this Bond

-to reckon him who taught me this Art equally dear to me as my parents, to share my substance with him, and in the hour of his need impart what he requires, to look upon his offspring in the same footing as my own brothers, and to teach them this art if they wish to learn it, without fee or stipulation. I will follow the system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine if asked, nor suggest any such plan; so too, I will not produce abortion. With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practise my Art. . . . Into whatever houses. I enter I will go into them for the benefit of the sick, and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption. . Whatever in my professional practice or outside it in the life of the world I see or hear, which ought not to be spoken of abroad, I will not divulge, considering that such things should be kept secret. While I continue to keep this Oath unviolated, may I be allowed to enjoy life and the practice of the art, respected by all men, in all times. But should I

trespass and violate this Oath, may the reverse be my lot." It is with men like the writer of this that we shall live if we study Greek; can we wish for or find better company in the world of the intellect?

We shall come back to the Greeks later; meanwhile we have glanced at some of the arguments for their place in education. We have seen that modern Europe is rooted in the culture of the classical world; that in studying this we become at the same time acquainted with a superb literature and a brilliant national life, and that, in particular, we are immersing ourselves in that spirit of free enquiry and rational explanation which is the oxygen in the air of the modern world, and yet never has been purer and more concentrated than in Greece. Perhaps too much stress has been laid on this point and too little said of Greek literature. But the outside world, while willing to admit the merits of the latter, is apt to think, illogically enough, that otherwise Greece is out of date. I have tried to show how false this view is, how living is her spirit, and how potent those

1 Ed. Littré, vol. iv. p. 628 f. Sydenham Society translation, with some changes.

'rigorous teachers,' of whom Matthew Arnold

writes, that they

Seized my youth,

And purged its faith and trimmed its fire,
Showed me the high white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.

Of course it is quite possible to dispense with the Greeks. It is quite possible to go through life without reading Shakespeare. It is possible even to go through it without reading the Bible; there have been great religious books since it was written, and great saints who have caught and in some measure reproduced its spirit. Yet the knowledge of all of them would not really replace the great fount and original of our religion. Something the same may be said of Greek literature, which is the Bible of the world of thought.1

1 A fuller discussion of our debt to the Greeks will be found in my book, The Greek Genius and its Meaning to us.

CHAPTER IV

THE CASE FOR LATIN

Graeci praeceptis valent, Romani exemplis. QUINTILIAN.

Now let us turn to Latin, and demand the credentials which have gained it admittance to our education. At first we are puzzled to find them. There is no intellectual supremacy here; no spirit of living reason moving through and ordering human life. It is a fine literature, but there are finer in languages yet spoken. It has three poets who are in the first rank, and it would be difficult to match Horace's literary art and genial commonsense; but the rest of Latin poetry is rarely more than excellent verse. "If we were without the four supreme poets, we should rise from the reading of Latin Poetry with the sense that a puissant and energetic people had deliberately, for six centuries, set themselves to prove that poets could be made as well made as well as born-and had

2

just failed." Rome has no philosophy worth the name, no first-hand original thought; and except Caesar, her historians, though great writers, are partisan and somewhat uncritical. If we have not read Tacitus and Cicero, we hardly realise what man can achieve both in concentrated epigram and close-packed thought, and in ample, rich rhetoric, "like a spreading conflagration enveloping and devouring the land"; but the other Roman prose writers may be matched in more recent literatures. It would be a literary loss never to know that gift of throwing a thought into a few words, which is the peculiar property of Latin, and which has made it the great language for inscriptions. Monumental phrases like the following are typical: Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant (an unfair description of Roman dealings with subject races). Feminis lugere honestum est, viris meminisse. Principes mortales, rempublicam aeternam esse. Breves et infaustos populi Romani amores (on the death of Germanicus). Deorum iniurias dis curae (Tacitus' reply to an obsequious senator who wished a contemporary to be prosecuted for taking in vain the name of the deified 1H. W. Garrod, A Book of Latin Verse, p. 24. 3 περὶ ὕψους, c. 12.