Augustus). Magis alii homines quam alii mores. Volunt reprehendi dum conspici (on fashionable people). Ecce res magna habere imbecillitatem hominis, securitatem dei1 (of the Stoic). No other literature can shew language cut in such high relief, and to be ignorant of Latin is not to know what the human mind can achieve in expression. Still, this by itself could not justify the place of Latin in education.

German critics have said that the value of Roman literature is that it has been the vehicle which conveyed Greek ideas to the world; and though this statement is more discreditable to the critics than to the Romans, it contains a particle of truth. The Romans themselves are quite frank in the matter. All their literary forms and metres' come from Greece, large masses of their poetry are translations or close imitations of Greek originals. They took their thought, art, and, as far as civilisa

1"They make a solitude and call it peace." "Women should mourn, men remember." Emperors are mortal, the state is eternal." "The darlings of the Roman people are brief-lived and ill-starred." "Wrongs to heaven are heaven's affair." "A change of men but not of morals.” "Indifferent to blame, if they can attract attention." "It is a great thing to be weak as man, as secure as God."

Except Saturnian and the Versus populares.

tion rests on these, their civilisation from Greece: and in the golden age of Rome, when Horace is asked advice by some young tragic poets, he says:

My friends, make Greece your model when you write, And turn her volumes over day and night.1

It is as though all English art came from France, while English literature was either a translation or an imitation of French.

Why, then, do we study Latin? Some of the reasons are given by Cicero in a passage where he sums up the excellences of Greece and Rome, and declares the grounds on which his country has a claim to be considered great. "Our mastery of character and of national life, of the family and of the home is far higher and nobler than theirs; our ancestors devised for the state an indubitably better system of laws and institutions. Or again, take the art of war: and think what Rome has achieved in individual heroism and even more in collective discipline. In these achievements which depend not on literary gifts but on character, neither Greece nor any other people can be com1 4.P. 268-9 (tr. Conington).

Vos exemplaria Graeca

Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna.

pared to us. Where will you find a sense of dignity, a resolution of purpose, a loftiness of spirit, a feeling of truth and honour which can be matched with those of old Rome? In learning, in every branch of literature the Greeks are our masters; and victory is easy in an undefended field." In fact he allows intellect to Greece, but claims character for Rome. Shelley has expressed the same thought with a poet's imagination: "The true poetry of Rome lived in its institutions; for whatever of beautiful, true and majestic, they contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which creates the order in which they consist." It is just here where Greece differs from Rome. When we think of Greece, we think of Socrates, Plato, Thucydides, Euripides, not of Alcibiades, Themistocles or Eubulus; and of Pericles himself less as a statesman than as a political thinker. When we think of Rome we think of Cato or Augustus or Pompey or Caesar--and of the last rather as a statesman than as a writer; only in the second place do we think of Horace or Vergil or Livy. What we value in the achievements of Greece is what is written in her literature; what we value in the achievements of Rome is what was Defence of Poetry.

1 Tusc. I. 1. 2.

done outside her literature. For that literature is not directly concerned with the big problems which Rome had to solve; only at times do its poets complain of their pressure or triumph in their solution, whereas in Greece the poet is as much in the fighting line as the statesman. It is not the fault of Vergil and Horace; the difficulties of their age were material rather than spiritual, and the business of poetry is not with material things. But the fact deprives Roman literature of the peculiar interest of the literature of Greece.

If either Greek or Latin had to disappear from education, every lover of literature would prefer that Latin should go. For its literary masterpieces, for its sane and steady view of life, for its intellectual inspiration and stimulus, Greece is unmatched and unmatchable: the Greek temper is so necessary to us, yet so alien from us, that we require it as constitutions of a certain habit require iron. "Greek," as Mr. J. W. Headlam says, "is a medicine, it is not something that belongs to us, it is something to which we go to supplement, correct, and change what is native and indigenous.” But to drop either Greek or Latin would be to lame classical education, to cut off one of its two legs. They are complementary; each has, a

deficiency, and each supplies the other's deficiency; as the Romans knew, who took their civilisation from Greece, and the Greeks knew, who glorified the stability of the Roman empire in which they were content to live. If nothing moves in the world but what is Greek, it is almost true to say that nothing stands but what is Roman. Combine the two and you have the strength of Rome without its hardness, the glory of Greece without its instability, and (what is important for education), you have perfect models of two sides of human nature, which in union go to make the perfect man and state.

Before Rome became mistress of the world, Europe had never found a way of combining liberty with order. Greece had propounded a theory of politics, but had been singularly unsuccessful in creating a stable, large-scale state-the imperial power of Athens lasted sixty years, that of Sparta and of Thebes even less. Such is the record of Greek political achievement. The empires of Alexander's successors were equally unable to discover the secret of permanence. But while these empires and monarchies successively formed and broke up, as rapidly as the eddies in a weir pool come into being and dissolve, a small town in