PROCOPIUS AND OTFIERS.*

IT is not for nothing that the classics are the classics, and that the merest handful of ancient writers holds a splendid monopoly in the schools. For if our " construes" cost us labour and sorrow in our Fifth Form days, we have at any rate read Virgil and Thucydides, Dot Silius and Appian, by the end. That is undoubtedly the right policy for Fifth Formers : " one quality only—the best." Yet Sixth Forms and the Universities should not perhaps have stuck to it as closely as they have. For one result of it is that we all grow up ignorant of some very good literature and of whole tracts of history. If we read Gibbon we can learn some of the history, but in every footnote we shall find references to ancient authors we have never read. These are just the gaps that the " Loeb Classical Library " so admirably fills. You can have Appian, Procopius or Die, Petronius, Seneca or Apuleius, in the handy " Loeb " volumes with their clear print and decorous exterior, for seven and sixpence a volume—it was five shillings before the war—and if your scholarship is rusty, you can help yourself along by the translation that fronts each page of text.

Procopius' is now at his third volume. He is to have siK in all, but one can begin upon him anywhere, and this one, about the Gothic War, makes excellent reading. As a writer, Procopius is far dawn in the second class ; his thinking is limp and his style without distinction ; but he lived among big events and he has a good story to tell of them. Gibbon tells it again in his forty-first chapter, but he has shortened it greatly and not improved it. Most of us learned of Belisarius first through Gibbon, but it is delightful to find how much more there is to be learned about him than Gibbon has room to tell. Gibbon has a way, too, of making the most simple and splendid of ancient heroes look like eighteenth-century noblemen, while. Procopius, who worked and perhaps fought under Belisarius, just tells you what he knows of hint an his impersonal and undistinguished way, and produces as a result a story that is almost an epic.

There could hardly be a better hero for an epic than this conqueror of three continents, the man who fought on the " bay horse with a white face " in the famous battle by the Mulvian Bridge, and could not get back into Rome because blood and dust made him unrecognizable to the men on the walls. Nor could there be a better hero for a tragedy than the victim of Justinian's weakness and two women's spite ; but the tragedy one can only get in Gibbon, and there the eighteenth-century manner seems to fit well enough.

For the story of the wars you will not better Procopius, and there is no more stirring incident in it than that siege of Rome in which Belisarius and 5,000 men beat off l50,000 Goths. All this you will find in the third volume. Procopius is amusing too, because one can see him following—very far off—Herodotus and Thucydides, who wrote nearly a thousand years earlier and quite immeasurably better. " Thus ended the first year of the war, the history of which Procopius has written," he says in this Fifth Book ; and he writes speeches for his soldiers and statesmen as an anaemic Thucydides might have written them, hill of dull generalizations and =illuminating antitheses. Herodotean tags are plentiful too, and stories of portents and wonders which Herodotus himself would never have believed if he had lived in the sixth century A.D. But Procopius -is a better geographer than Herodotus (as indeed he ought to be), and there is a good deal that is interesting in his description of places and peoples. Mr. Dewing's translation is readable and unpretentious—just indeed what the original is. It is scholarly too, and in the bay-horse passage Mr. Dewing is a good deal more careful than Gibbon seems to have been. The volume has a

full and accurate index atthe end, which makes special incidents or passages easy to locate.

Plutarch= is an author whose very great reputation -is due -to many things besides his merits. His " Lives " have been immensely useful to historians, and will always be read for the

sake of their subject-matter. In England they will be read, too, for the sake of their translator, North, and their most devoted student, Shakespeare. Whole passages of Coriolanus are just North's Plutarch versified, and when one reads in North " Caesar going into the Senate-house, and speaking merrily unto the soothsayer, told him ' the Ides of March -be come ' ' So they be,' softly answered the soothsayer, but yet are they not past' "—Plutarch cannot get all the credit for the pleasure one feels. Often he is merely a starting-point for Shakespeare : " and taking Caesar's gown all bloody in his hand, he laid it open to the sight of them ail, showing what a number of cuts and holes it had upon it." That is all Plutarch does.: the rest is -Shakespeare:— " Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through : See what a rent the envious Casea made : Through this the well-beloved Brutus atabb'd. . . . "

This translation by Mr. Bernadotte Perrin is a good one, but one sees.in reading it how much of the -charm in North's Plutarch is due to North and not to Plutarch. Mr. Perrin is very modern : " Caesar . . . noticed that Calpurnia was in a deep .slumber, but was uttering indistinct words and inarticulate groans in her sleep, for she dreamed as it proved. . . . "

Here is North on the same passage " He heard his wife Calpurnia, being fast asleep, weep and sigh, and put forth many fumbling lamentable speeches : for .she dreamed that Caesar was slain."

Of course the modern translation -is the nearer to the Greek, for indeed North never saw the Greek but translated Amyot's French ; yet none of it has the life and colour of North, nor of course the priceless and peculiar savour of -his Elizabethan prose. Perhaps North is a little too -old-fashioned and a little too free to have been adopted by the " Loeb " editors as their translator, but the eleven volumes would have been an unusually delightful possession if they had had Plutarch and North on alternate pages. Only of course such a confrontation might have been rather serious for Plutarch.

Another welcome volume in the new batch of " Loebs " is

Mr. Butterworth's Clement of AlexamIria.3 It is good to have such convenient access to the great Clement and all his learning. His pages are loaded with Euripides and Plato ; but all the time it is not his quotations that one cares about, but just the man himself, most provocative of pleaders and most earnest

and independent of seekers after truth. When Pope Benedict XIV.. erased his name from the Saintly Calendar, we know who was really condemned by that hasty act.

The " Loeb Library " includes of course the " Classics " proper as well as the "Poet-Classicals." In the new batch is a first volume of the Odyssey,* and a second is to follow shortly. The translator is Professor A. T. Murray, of Stanford University, California, and he has done his difficult work well. The tradition

of English Homeric translation is fixed, and unless one wants to be like Samuel Butler (which Heaven forbid), it is-only a question of how little or how much one differs from Butcher and Lang, Professor Murray does not differ very much, -but he is occasionally a trifle simpler or a trifle less archaic. He -thus avoids the danger of being precious, though when he makes Nausicaa say " Papa, dear " to Alcinous, one sees what the compensating danger is. But perhaps this is merely a Transatlanticism. On the whole •the translation is tasteful, and where it breaks away from tradition in the rendering of individual words the change is made in accordance with the findings of recent scholarship. Still, it is a little sad to read " unresting" for " the 'unharvested sea," and to find Athene is "grey-eyed " no more.

The Speeches of Aeschines5inake the fifth of the new quintet. They will be welcome to a generation which has heard for the most part only the Demosthenes side of the case. One always

felt at school that Demosthenes was too violent to be wholly in the right, though he did win-eventually in the Corona dispute ; but one seldom had a chance of hearing what was to be said on the other side. A satisfactory text—no easy matter with Aeschines—has been achieved by Mr C D Adams, of Dart mouth, whose translation makes a useful guide to the meaning, and avoids the fault, to which translators of ancient orators are specially liable, of being excessively modern-in style.

The " Leeh Classical _Library," begun in some sort as an act of

faith, has continued to issue new volumes throughout the war, though in the face of disheartening difficulties. It is one of the most interesting and valuable of modern publishing enterprises, and if the faith behind the venture is not now rewardedby success, the fault Neill lie not with the editors and publisher, but with those who have been responsible for educating, the kind of Englishman who can bay books at seven and sixpence apiece.