DIXISTI, PUERI

Out of the dignified quiet and semi-obscurity in which it has been thriving, the Classical Club stalks majestically to the center of the stage with mask in place and haughty eye fixed on a spell bound audience. In these happy days of celebration the voice that was the voice of Rome sounds a proper and pleasing note, and in presenting Mostellaria sincerely and accurately the present pays fitting tribute to the past which has given it so much.

When the curtain rises in Sanders Theatre on April 15, those in the audience will soon realize it is the rare wine, the sparkling champague of other days that is being tasted, rather than the heavy bodied liqueurs which are usually expected from classicists. Indeed, the presentation for wide-spread attention of the lighter, the more pleasant, the human side of those who strolled by the Tiber is a laudable endeavor, "quo quiddem opere quid potest esse pracclarius?"

In publicising its presentation this year, the Classical Club is serving a double purpose with particular fitness. It celebrates three hundred years of academic effort and achievement, and it also points a compelling finger at a vigorous previous flower on the tree of drama when apparently a new bud is struggling to open its petals. Several original undergraduate plays have been produced at Harvard this year, the New York Dramatic Critic's Circle is formed, creating an intelligent board to hand laurels to dramatic artists for the first time in America, and the Harvard Classical Club revives Plautus' Mostellaria; there is indeed a year to make Aristotle chuckle, and the Harvard under-graduate mutter a prayer of thanksgiving that he was in college in 1936.

When Maxwell Anderson, and Eugene O'Neill, and Clifford Odets are forgotten, and the Empire State Building is one with the Coliseum, and Beacon Hill is of no more consequence than the Palatine, Plautus will still be a name that is known by a favoured few, and the man of the future will look back to a couple of days after the Ides of April, A.D. 1936, and call it a glimmering of light in an age that was dark with a complex gloom.