desine fata deum flecti sperare precando.

My reference to triremes is anachronistic. As also, BTW, is the expression 'It's in the lap of the Gods', which people say when meaning there is nothing more they can do to affect the outcome. 'The multitudinous lauughter of the sea' is a quote from Euripedes. Sappho was a woman poet, who lived on the island of Lesbos, and wrote fine love-poetry to her girl-friend, Selene. Cicero was a lawyer, orator, and statesman. Virgil Martial and Horace were Latin poets. Sophocles and Aeschylus were Greek play-wrights. The Classcists among you will be thinking I should hearken to Virgil: 'Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando' - 'Do not hope to change the will og the gods by praying' the gods in this case being Ministers and bureaucrats. It is, I am told, greatly over-subscribed. Interestingly, there is one large, faairly rough, school in London where a majority of the pupils are from ethnic minorities, which started an extremely successful, after-school, Latin club. How these people would know is rather a mystery, but they are the same people who decided to phase out the teaching of Latin in state schools for the same fuzzy reasons, and we in the UK, now have vast numbers of pupils studying Media Studies, or Civic Studies and such-like. Yet she is having to teach one, of say nine, how to read and she is in striking fashion made to realise how little the children are actually learning, especially of that great mass of literature from the Roman and Greek periods, thought by many, in the education world, to be either 'old-fashioned', or 'too difficult' or 'irrelevant to our times'. I envisage a teacher, well-enough educated herself, and with a class of perfectly reasonable children. Was ready with a question, away they fadeĪnd 'Question!, Question!' echoes the hiss Which you yourself have had.' Just as Miss

To think, to learn, to know, to love, to look Through your prismatic mind, give them the ways

Now her hand is held, held by a hoary Plato, Virgil Maro, and Horace, and Martial -and me?' Yet as she drove to-wards the nice new school Miss knew she was the best of all the Misses

Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando.