Classical Languages as 'Delicate Instruments of Communication'

'The ancient paideia was founded upon the literary classics. School-boys did not merely read them, they studied them with the utmost intensity, they savored in them the more recondite allusions, and they committed great portions of them to memory, with lastingly beneficial consequences, both for their own Greek and Latin style, and for the maintenance of the classical languages as uncommonly delicate instruments of communication among men.'

Arthur F. Stocker, 'Servius Servus Magistrorum' (Vergilius 9 (1963) 9-15), p. 9