authors. Last year a writer[1] said that it was about time to recover again the real authors, Virgil, Horace, etc., who were almost lost in a mass of archaeological, historical, and critical details. In fact, the "Homeric Question" absorbed the interests of some teachers to such a degree that the grand poems themselves were nearly lost sight of. Antiquities should not be taught in high schools and colleges ex professo, for this belongs to the university, but incidentally, as some antiquarian subject occurs in the reading. Thus, while reading Caesar, Roman military antiquities are explained: the legion, weapons, military roads, etc. Xenophon's Anabasis affords an opportunity for giving details on Greek and Persian warfare. Cicero's various works will call for explanations of the Roman constitution, courts, elections, of the different offices of Consul, Praetor, Tribune, Aedile, Pontifex; for descriptions of the forum, villas, family life, etc. Plato's Dialogues demand a fair knowledge of Athenian life and manners; Homer's epics can be made interesting by details of the life and customs of the heroic age of the Greeks, which may be compared with similar traits found in the epics of other nations: the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and the German Nibelungenlied (a good translation should be read).
The practical method of teaching antiquities in Jesuit schools we learn from Jouvancy. Thus speaking of the word fatum, which occurs in a sentence, he says: explain the meaning which this word had with the ancients, and what we Christians have to think of it. Bellum indixerit. Explain the manner in which
- ↑ Professor Plüss, in Neue Jahrbücher, 1901, vol. VII, page 74.
