in which other spirits now forgotten or dimly remembered still live and move and have their being, fulfilling the work which, while still their names were named, they initiated or advanced.  Not in pious gratitude only must we labour to rescue their memory from fast-coming oblivion, but because only so can we reach that knowledge of ourselves and our world which is to us as living men all and alone important.  Nor will such study deny to us the reward we seek.  So approaching the labours of the historian, we shall not be jealous because he comes before us with a tale, or as we call it, with a ’story’—­a narrative of ‘old unhappy things and battles long ago’.  For though he so puts it, spacing it out in sections, half-concealing, half-revealing its logical connexions and ultimate unity, its real meaning, its ultimate—­which is also its present—­import is an account of what we now are and the situation in which we now stand; and unless somehow for each of us its message comes into such an account, distils and sublimates into such a quintessential judgement on the present, History remains but ’a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing’.  It is in the profoundest sense useless to us unless in the end we can say ’De nobis fabula narratur’—­it is our history to which we have been listening.

This is especially true of the history of the Ancient World—­the world of classical antiquity.  It is not a dead world; its deeds and thoughts are not past but still live, still ‘breathe and burn’ in us.  They are largely the stuff of which our present selves and our present world are made.  Not merely, I repeat, in the sense that then were the foundations of both laid, not merely in the sense that we are heirs to the labours of our ancestors.  We are the Greeks and the Romans, made what we now are by their deeds and thoughts and experiences, our world their world, at a later stage of an evolution never interrupted but always one and single.  Our births and deaths are but a sleep and a forgetting in the unbroken biography of a spirit, not above but in us all, which is the hero of the history of European civilization, itself a part of the history of Humanity.  Thus the history of Antiquity, and especially of Classical Antiquity, is the record of the thoughts and deeds of our own youth.

    Our deeds (and also our thoughts) still travel with us from afar,
    And what we have been makes us what we are.

This is the spirit and the conviction in which I would invite you to approach the study of Classical Antiquity—­not merely in that of gratitude and reverence, not certainly in that of idle and futile curiosity, but as seekers for knowledge of yourselves and your world.  For what other knowledge matters?