'appointment in Samarra' fable, and 'Spain 1809', the story of a village woman's courage during the French occupation in the Peninsular War. His most ambitious poem was Ariadne (1932), an epic re-working of the Labyrinth myth, extracts from which were read on the BBC Home Service in 1934. Plays Lucas's most successful play was the thriller Land's End (1935), set in Cornwall in the mid-1930s (Westminster Theatre, February–March 1938, 29 performances, with Cathleen Nesbitt, Cecil Trouncer and Alan Napier among the cast). One of Paul Scofield's earliest roles was in the Birmingham Rep's revival of the play in March–April 1945. Lucas's radio play The Siren was first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in 1948, with Catherine Lacey, Frith Banbury and Deryck Guyler in the cast; a second production followed on the Home Service in 1949, with Cathleen Nesbitt and Hugh Burden. The play dramatises George Sand's amorous escapades in Paris and Italy with Alfred de Musset and Dr. Pietro Pagello – the subject of the 1999 film Les Enfants du Siècle. His political drama The Bear Dances: A Play in Three Acts was the first dramatisation of the Soviets on London's West-end stage (Garrick Theatre, 1932, with Elena Miramova, Abraham Sofaer and Olga Lindo). This play, though it closed early in London, was revived by various repertory theatres in the North of England in the later 1930s. It was an attempt at ideological disinfectant, written at a time when Cambridge University (in Lucas's words) "grew full of very green young men going very Red". History, politics and society Pharsalus Outside literature, Lucas is remembered for his solution to one of the more contentious problems of ancient topography. His "north-bank" thesis on the location of the Battle of Pharsalus (48 B.C.), based on his 1921 solo field-trip to Thessaly and on a re-examination of the sources, dismissed a dozen previous theories and is now widely accepted by historians. John D. Morgan in his definitive 'Palae-pharsalus – the Battle and the Town' writes: "My reconstruction is similar to Lucas's, and in fact I borrow one of his alternatives for the line of the Pompeian retreat. Lucas's theory has been subjected to many criticisms, but has remained essentially unshaken." Appeasement In the 1930s Lucas was widely known for his political letters to the British Press with their outspoken attacks on the policy that came to be known as appeasement. Following the inaction