New Housman Book

I received the Duckworth catalog for 2009 in the mail today, and I see that there is a new book on Housman as a classical scholar (as opposed to a study of Housman the poet or Housman's private life), edited by David Butterfield and Christopher Stray. It is scheduled for publication in the UK in August of this year, and in the US in November. I just did a quick search of their website and couldn't find anything about it there yet, but thought that, at the very least, Dennis and our 1-2 readers might want to know if they didn't already.

How to be a Classical Philologist

This is adapted from a passage in Laurand's Manuel des études grecques et latines (v. 3, VII 353-6). It's simple, commonsensical, and generally good advice. And classicists need to be reminded now and again to do the actual work of philology lest they be, as one old professor used to say, all hat and no cow.

1. The Reading of ancient texts.
• This is too often neglected. People read about but never read Plato, for example.
• How to read (different but indispensable approaches):
  
• In-depth, slow reading (lente, pace Nietzsche)
• understanding all of the questions
• produces much fruit
• one can never read all of Plato in this way, or can read Herodotus but misses the big picture
  
• Very rapid reading
• understanding the big picture, outside connections
• ensures that you never become too narrow-minded
• You need calm, privacy, tranquility if you are to be moved by reading the great works.
2. The Reading of Modern Works.
• These should be read in so far as they aid comprehension.
• Commentators, critics, historians, philologists, linguists, grammarians, etc. can offer many insights in your goal of understanding ancient texts.
3. Should you take notes?
• Often people take too many, then seeing the futility, never take enough.
• How you should take notes:
• Briefly give your general impression.
• Note the general value of a modern work and how it might be useful.
• Consider how useful your note will be.  Be economical and
  practical.
• If the index or some other reference will make it easy to find a reference, you're wasting time and effort in writing too much.
  
• Use notebooks.  Note cards are generally inefficient, inconvenient, and easily lost.  They have only limited use in organizing certain kinds of research.

The importance laid upon reading here is at the heart of Housman's famous remarks in the classic essay on The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism. This long quotation is well worth reading through (and gives context to the harshest of his words often viewed as pure invective):

[It] is only a minority of those who engage in this study who are sincerely bent upon the discovery of truth. We all know that the discovery of truth is seldom the sole object of political writers; and the world believes, justly or unjustly, that it is not always the sole object of theologians: but the amount of sub-conscious dishonesty which pervades the textual criticism of the Greek and Latin classics is little suspected except by those who have had occasion to analyse it. People come upon this field bringing with them prepossessions and preferences; they are not willing to look all facts in the face, nor to draw the most probable conclusion unless it is also the most agreeable conclusion. Most men are rather stupid, and most of those who are not stupid are, consequently, rather vain; and it is hardly possible to step aside from the pursuit of truth without falling a victim either to your stupidity or else to your vanity. Stupidity will then attach you to received opinions, and you will stick in the mud; or vanity will set you hunting for novelty, and you will find mare's-nests. Added to these snares and hindrances there are the various forms of partisanship: sectarianism, which handcuffs you to your own school and teachers and associates, and patriotism, which handcuffs you to your own country. Patriotism has a great name as a virtue, and in civic matters, at the present stage of the world's history, it possibly still does more good than harm; but in the sphere of intellect it is an unmitigated nuisance. I do not know which cuts the worse figure: a German scholar encouraging his countrymen to believe that "wir Deutsche" have nothing to learn from foreigners, or an Englishman demonstrating the unity of Homer by sneers at "Teutonic professors," who are supposed by his audience to have goggle eyes behind large spectacles, and ragged moustaches saturated in lager beer, and consequently to be incapable of forming literary judgments.

I've put the most oft-quoted passage in bold italics.

The essential point to my mind is that one should forgo all secondary considerations, such as traditional interpretations, faddish theories, and personal or national interests, and rather seek truth in the evidence. In the case of classical philology, the evidence is to be found in the remnants of the past aided by the proven methods of allied fields (such as archaeology and palaeography). There is a science to much of the study of antiquity, but there is also an art to the study of literature, and it is one that can not be mastered without reading the texts, as much as one can, now for the forest, now for the trees.

But read, damn it!

Housman's letters again

Another review of Archie Burnett's edition of Housman's letters has appeared, this time by Paul Johnson in the Literary Review. Johnson is wrong when he says that Last Poems was 'reluctantly published'. Housman had no desire to publish for decades because he had nothing to publish, but once Last Poems began to present itself to him he surprised his friends and his publisher with the news that he had something. Housman rarely did anything reluctantly. He did it of his own accord or he curtly explained why he would not.

But Johnson does appreciate Housman as an epistolographer, and excerpts this fine specimen for his readers:

When the meaning of a poem is obscure, it is due to one of three causes. Either the author through lack of skill has failed to express his meaning; or he has concealed it intentionally; or he has no meaning either to conceal or express. In none of these cases does he like to be asked about it. In the first case it makes him feel humiliated; in the second it makes him feel embarrassed; in the third it makes him feel found out. The real meaning of a poem is what it means to the reader.

Not bad. But overall there's nothing new in this review, and nothing that indicates any greater familiarity with the letters than one can get from a good biography (e.g., Housman, the Scholar-Poet by Richard Perceval Graves).

Now Frank Kermode's review in the London Review of Books (which I can't seem to access at the moment)--there's one worth reading.

Housman's Letters

I'm fairly certain that Dennis has already seen this, but just in case and for the benefit of other readers--David Butterfield has reviewed Archie Burnett's The Letters of A.E. Housman, a massive 960-page volume, in BMCR. Here is the lead paragraph:

The name of A. E. Housman (1859-1936) causes an instant reaction in the Classical community. The very intensity, and indeed variety, of sentiments that the letters 'A. E. H.' can evoke is startling when it is considered how few, whether scholars or not, have engaged directly with his Classical work. Housman has never lacked attention from both a deeply respectful following and a firm band, regrettably more numerous, of detractors. It is of course one of the wearying but unsurprising facts of Classical scholarship that each bold and revisionary scholar is met with a less than positive reception. Yet Housman's lot deserves particular attention: why should a man, reserved but polite in company, passionate for accuracy and excellence in print, inspire such strong feelings among academic circles even of the present day? A satisfactory answer to this question remains to be given.

Housman and the definition of a scholar

In his Cambridge Inaugural Lecture of 1911, published under the title The Confines of Criticism, A.E. Housman was concerned primarily with two common detriments to the true work of a scholar.

To Housman 'scholar' was really a technical term for a scientist whose provenance was literature, though he defined the term in Latin as vir bonus discendi peritus (a clever twist on Cato's definition of an orator: vir bonus dicendi peritus.)*

Scholars are afflicted by the twin serpents (not Housman's image) of emotion and method.

A scholar's emotional response to literature is no more valid than anyone else's, and he runs the risk of confusing aesthetic judgment with the pursuit of truth:

That a scholar should appreciate literature is good for his own pleasure and profit; but it is none of his business to communicate that appreciation to his audience. Appreciation of literature is just as likely to be found in his audience as in him, for it has no connection with scholarship. He has no right to presume that his own aesthetic perceptions are superior to those of anyone whom he addresses, or that in this respect he is better qualified to teach them than they to teach him.

And yet it is not only that scholars promote their own appreciation of literature, but that they are expected to while their colleagues are not:

The botanist and the astronomer have for their provinces two worlds of beauty and magnificence not inferior in their way to literature; but no one expects the botanist to throw up his hands and say 'how beautiful', nor the the astronomer to fall down flat and say 'how magnificent': no one would praise their taste if they did perform these ceremonies, and no one calls them unappreciative pedants because they do not. Why should the scholar alone indulge in public ecstasy?

It is sometimes assumed that those who try to leave the 'personal voice' out of scholarship today are pedants or worse, and that they approach too closely the maligned German philologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who are sometimes trumped up in modern publications as proto-Fascist bogeymen. And yet, though he doesn't vilify them in the same way, Housman sees in these same philologists the other chief affliction, which is a kind of mechanistic adherence to methodology.

For Housman, the 'laws' of criticism are rough guidelines meant to be challenged, broken, and reformed. They are never constant. The reason, then, why so many would-be scholars treat them instead as incontrovertible rules?

'Thinking is hard,' says Goethe, 'and acting according to thought is irksome' (Denken ist schwer, nach dem Gedachten handeln unbequem).

Housman's genius for textual criticism is still recognized and the key lies in 'the application of thought to textual criticism' (the title of a later and very instructive lecture). Not emotion. Not sets of rules akin to mathematical computations. The scholar must learn what he can of the author, the subject, the era, the dialect, and all the rest, and apart from his own feelings, and unfettered by arbitrary rules, use reason to determine the soundness of the texts we've received.

Then you're free privately to appreciate the texts that a disinterested intellect has processed in the pursuit of truth. No one can deny that the texts we appreciate today have been much improved by the work of such scholars.

----
* Housman apparently took the adapted phrase from Friedrich Leo who learned it from its originator, Wilamowitz. See William M. Calder III, Vir Bonus Discendi Peritus, AJP 108.1 (1987): 168-171.

DailyLit

Here's something for those of you who are glued to your monitors but would still like to take a break with a good book now and again: DailyLit. (This one comes courtesy the Seattle Times.)

I haven't looked it over extensively, but I did notice Jowett's translation of the Republic (part of the corpus that Housman called 'the best translation of a Greek philosopher which has ever been executed by a person who understood neither philosophy nor Greek').

The site, while offering nothing you can't get elsewhere, offers it in novel way, and I think I may actually find some use for it.

Housman's Ideas about Poetic Inspiration in Later Writers (1)

Since Dennis has such a great interest in Housman, I usually try to make a mental note when I come across references to him in other writers. This is the first in a series of (at the moment) only two passages that I have come across lately in reference to the source of poetic inspiration. From Auden's Letter to Lord Byron (p. 82 in the Vintage edition of his Collected Poems, which does not include line numbers):

Professor Housman was I think the first
To say in print how very stimulating
The little ills by which mankind is cursed,
The colds, the aches, the pains are to creating;
Indeed one hardly goes too far in stating
That many a flawless lyric may be due
Not to a lover's broken heart, but 'flu.

How's that for the deromanticization of the Muse?

Review: Letters of A.E. Housman

Frank Kermode in the London Review of Books reviews Archie Burnett's expensive new edition of Housman's letters. It's worth reading for many reason, including entertaining bits like this:

He declined all academic and national honours because to accept them would be to admit comparability with other classical scholars who had received them, admiring the attitude of the 17th-century Greek scholar Thomas Gataker who refused a Cambridge doctorate because ‘like Cato the censor he would rather have people ask why he had no statue than why he had one.’ When he came across some self-critical words of T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom – ‘there was a craving to be famous; and a horror of being known to like being known’ – he wrote in the margin: ‘This is me.’ So in the course of his life he turned down everything from the OM to the poet laureateship, not to speak of many honorary doctorates. And he refused all invitations to give lectures except for the ones that he conceived to be part of his job.

That's my guy. I'll leave it to you to find the bit about Wittgenstein and the bathroom.

Housman's humanity

I first encountered the story that Eric lately referred to in Gilbert Highet's The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature, but allusions crop up here and there, due in no small part to the contrast which it offers to Housman's published persona, which was powerfully polemical and often alienating. I think it's worth reading, so stick around through the set-up.

In chapter 21, "A Century of Scholarship," Professor Highet (who wrote elsewhere on The Art of Teaching) has some words for what he considered the worst possible teaching, namely that which views Greek and Latin as "a science, and nothing but a science."

His illustration is the life of A.E. Housman, who believed that his purpose as Professor of Latin was to be a textual critic, which is to say to work toward the reconstitution of ancient texts. Until that work was done, literary criticism was not possible.

It was admirable, and he was responsible for great advancements in philology best exemplified in his essay "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism" (available in The Name and Nature of Poetry, and some online versions may be found, though they often have corrupt Greek). I think we've gone too far in the opposite direction, producing generations of un-philological classicists who fancy themselves literary critics while acting under the false assumption that our texts are secure. But I digress.

Housman took his appointment so seriously that he abandoned Greek, an area in which he had previously received such high praise from the likes of Wilamowitz. And we should remember that Housman, who acknowledged himself a pedant, admired the legendary Richard Bentley, whose emendations are ubiquitous, often brilliant, and always instructive even when incorrect.

And in this pursuit of textual criticism, Highet believed, he became a bad teacher of poetry. This is a matter of perspective. Housman saw himself as a teacher of language and of texts, not of poems.

But here, then, comes the surprising moment when Housman revealed his appreciative, poetic soul. The following was recorded in a letter by one of his students, and reprinted by Highet:

'[O]ne morning in May, 1914, when the trees in Cambridge were covered with blossom, he reached...the seventh ode in the fourth book of Horace.... This ode he dissected with the usual display of brilliance, wit, and sarcasm. Then for the first time in two years he looked up at us, and in quite a different voice said: "I should like to spend the last few minutes considering this ode simply as poetry." Our previous experience of Professor Housman would have made us sure that he would regard such a proceeding as beneath contempt. He read the ode aloud with deep emotion, first in Latin and then in an English translation of his own (now the fifth in More Poems). "That," he said hurriedly, almost like a man betraying a secret, "I regard as the most beautiful poem in ancient literature," and walked quickly out of the room.'

One of the men who watched this said, 'I was afraid the old fellow was going to cry.' He was. In part because of the the extreme sensitivity which made it uncomfortable for him even to recall certain lines of poetry while shaving, because his skin bristled and turned the razor's edge; but in part also because of his embarrassment at feeling that he he had permitted personal emotion to escape, and invade what he held should be nothing but an objective field of thought, sterile as ice, bright as an operating table.

I think it's obvious that Highet is wrong on one point, which I've already mentioned above: it's not 'Greek and Latin' that Housman strove to keep sterile, but his very specific task as a textual critic. It was not his business, not his academic charge, to advocate for poets or to impose taste upon other men: his was simply to restore texts and teach others the skills necessary to do the same.

Outside his job, he was as human as the rest of us.

Diffugere nives, redeunt iam gramina campis arboribusque comae...

Color me excited. I just leard that the topic of our special seminar with Michael Putnam next Saturday (part of the annual Michels lecture events) is Horace Odes 1.4 and 4.7, two poems that we read in class this semester. Housman said that 4.7 was the most beautiful poem in the Latin language. Dennis has an even better Housman anecdote about the poem, if he would be so kind to share it with us and tell us where he learned of it :).

J.P. Postgate's 'Flaws in Classical Research'

I'm reading J.P Postgate's classic essay 'Flaws in Classical Research' (Proceedings of the British Academy, 1908, 161-211), which, by the way, should be tempered with Paul Shorey's review (Classical Philology 5.2 225-228) which attempts to 'guard against the impression which it will make upon the student or the hostile layman.' Shorey notes Postgate's 'impatience of human frailty,' which puts one in mind of A.E. Housman. Incidentally, Housman (cited approvingly in the essay) beat out Postgate for the Latin chair at Cambridge.

Currently what's interesting me is Postgate's criticsm of modern 'lineal' thinking which is prone to misunderstand the 'circular' thought behind utterances in classical languages.

I was reminded of a recent article in the Guardian (linked by ALDaily) that dealt with the difficulties caused by syntax in the translation of humor from English to German. This difficulty has led some Brits to the conclusion that Germans are humorless, and in the same way the divide betwee 'lineal' and 'circular' habits of mind has led modern readers of the Classics to mistranslation, misleading commentary, and the attribution to the ancients of convoluted metaphorical expression alien to their native sensibility:

One main principle which it takes some trouble to grasp, and still more to apply with precision, is that, within certain wide limits, order in modern sentences is syntactically essential and in ancient sentences syntactically indifferent. The modern sentence, to put it roughly, is an arrangement in line, the ancient one within a circle. Now the lineal habit of mind, if I may call it so, is often at a loss when it has to understand the circular; it is devoid of the sense of grouping; it has not been trained to the necessary attention. If the groups are small, the trouble thus caused is small; but it is not absent altogether.

Now comes a great but simple example, the kind I've seen belabored by would-be critical theorists in their first semesters seeking out the foul stench of patriarchy and cultural imperialism at every turn:

In the second half of the pentameter Tibullus writes vir mulierque (ii. 2. 2), Ovid femina virque. The difference of order is absolutely without significance. But the lineal mind is apt to imagine that some subtle distinction between the places of man and woman is intended, as though Ovid were a sort of pro- and Tibullus an anti-suffragette.

Come to think of it, I've probably seen that in some of our leading journals.

From here he recalls the views of T.E. Page (note: Page's commentary on the Eclogues and Georgics of Vergil is still a classic -- go get it!) who 'called attention to the irrationality of current views of the figure called hysteron proteron':

To the lineal mind these 'inversions' are nonsense; to the circular but legitmate variations. ... The real character of such arrangements is seen in passages like Ter. Ad. 917 'tu illas abi et traduce; and Lucan, viii. 342 sq. 'quem captos ducere reges | vidit ab Hyrcanis Indoque a litore siluis', which almost shriek at us the warning respice finem.

There's more, and I recommend that you seek it out (taking Shorey's reservations into consideration). This kind of criticism, taken properly, keeps critics alert.

Gow's Housman

Before Saranike and I head out to do a little book hunting I thought I'd recommend A.S.F. Gow's A.E. Housman: a sketch together with a list of his writing and indexes to his classical papers.

Why that long and odd subtitle? Because one condition of Housman's will was that no one ever collect his published papers into a single volume. He evidently didn't want his early work to stand beside what he considered his life's achievments (Manilius, for one).

Gow's sketch is brief (57 pages with the remainder taken by the bibliography and indexes), charming, and allows Housman to speak humbly about himself often. That would appear to some to be a paradox of his character, but it is perfectly reasonable that someone so well-known for his attacks on the intellectual failings and dishonesty of others would appraise himself as a pedant who counted only as one fourth a Bentley or roughly a Porson.

The harshest critic of other was his own harshest critic.

Next on my list is, appropriately, C.O. Brink's English Classical Scholarship: historical reflections on Bentley, Porson, and Housman. Stay tuned.

Spit and polish

I got tired of Athena so the Campus has undergone a very slight renovation.

As far as genuine content to add to the site, well, there really should be some, shouldn't there? We can chalk our lack of posts up to diligence in the execution of our scholarly obligations, but those activities should spawn posts, not prevent them.

I used a Borders gift which I'd gotten for Christmas to order C.O. Brink's English Classical Scholarship. This appears to argue that 19th century German philologists were following a British tradition which grew out of the Renaissance, but that, after a period of stagnation, came home again in the work of A.E. Housman. I haven't read it yet, but I'll post about it when I do. In addition to my thesis and tutoring I've been reading a number of things in and outside of classics, including the Iliad in Greek, Bonfire of the Humanities, some novels by the late Saul Bellow, Maurois's biography of Disraeli, and lots of Mark Twain.

For my thesis I've been reading on everything from ancient medicine to the history of Byzantine scholarship.

So I'll try to have something substantive to contribute here soon.

Some thoughts on modern linguistics

There is nothing more distracting in modern academic prose than the overuse of quotes, or what the Brits call inverted commas.

I'll demonstrate:

There is nothing more 'distracting' in modern 'academic' prose than the 'overuse' of quotes, or what the 'Brits' call 'inverted commas.'

John Lyons's Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics abounds with inverted commas as in this sentence:

But in both Greek and Latin there are 'exceptions' to the 'sound laws.'

More often than not the author's motivation is clear, and he deserves the wrath of Dr. Fowler:

superiority. Much misplaced ingenuity in finding forms of apology is shown by writers with a sense of their own superiority who wish to safeguard their dignity and yet be vivacious, to combine comfort with elegance, to touch pitch and not be defiled. Among them are: To use an expressive colloquialism—in the vernacular phrase—if the word may be permitted—so to speak—in homely phrase—not to put too fine a point upon it—if the word be not too vulgar—as they say—to call a spade a spade—not to mince matters—in the jargon of today—or the use of depreciatory inverted commas. Such writers should make up their minds whether their reputation or their style is such as to allow of their dismounting from the high horse now and again without compromising themselves.

Lyons, like so many other academics, is too busy being superior by avoiding language that might be perceived as authoritative that his book ends up a bland soup of non-committal nonsense in which the only accepted terminology is that of contemporary theory. This has something to do with the fact that most academics today view the world as a series of binary oppositions and choose the novelty of opposing tradition in some hyper-extended effort to challenge daddy's authority. Along with this there is often necessary the fallacy of ascribing to one's opponent positions he has never taken. The shadowy tradition that modern academics are always railing against is guilty most often of intellectual hubris and the sin of certainty, yet under the dimmest light it often becomes clear that our forebears had better command of their language than modern scholars who trump up false ambiguity as a weapon.

Philologists of the past published what they termed laws (e.g. Grassmann's Law, or Rask's, which is improperly called Grimm's Law), and Lyons faults them for the presumption of truth or certainty because they themselves didn't qualify law by inverted commas. Perhaps someone should buy Lyons and his friends a dictionary. A law is not a universal and eternal truth discovered by man, but a technical formulation imposed or a general principal agreed upon by men, and is always open to modification, retraction, and replacement. That is the definition of the term, that's what it meant to the men who published laws, and that's what it will always mean in their texts even if the popular sense of the term has shifted today. (It seems to me that the inability of modern academics to understand texts written in the past few centuries makes a case for the corruption of language. But I digress.)

Lyons writes as though his predecessors actually believed in laws as active forces working in the universe rather than as models serving to illuminate phenomena. Positivists and 19th century philologists knew that. It's time to strip away from relativists the monopoly they would claim for common sense.

This is why theorists (I shouldn't call them critics -- Housman would turn in his grave) are so fond of deflated terms like truth value and senseless plurals like knowledges (a necessary consequence of the faith of the church of relativism). For them, there is no truth, and all claims to knowledge are equally valid. What matters, then, is tolerance of the 'truth value' and 'knowledges' of others while being sure not to offend. This means qualifying one's own 'truth value' and 'knowledges' by constant appeals to relativism (and yes, those are inverted commas of superiority).

Lyons even has a hard time conceding that the Latin language has a case system, putting case in inverted commas as if to say that the bourgeois Western system of classifying language is an artificial construct that is hardly representative of language as a living thing (though I suppose it will have to do), and moreover it is hardly the only or the best system of classification. Doubtless the persons (or is it peoples?) of Papua New Guinea developed a more noble and equitable system, stamped out by Anglo-Saxon oppressors.

When Lyons asserts that speech does in fact precede writing he pretends that this is a revelation. But when he says that writing is an attempt to represent speech he is showinig his prejudice and lack of understanding. Writing is not an attempt to represent speech any more than speech is an attempt to emulate writing. Writing and speech are two modes of communication, one durable the other ephemeral (excepting sound recording, which requires advanced technology and has little to do with speech as such). Writing and speech take on widely different characteristics in literate culture, and writing admits of countless specialized uses restrictive of speech. It also requires different modes of communicating the same non-lexical information (i.e. emphasis, emotional interest, tone of voice, grammatical relations, etc.). Writing and speech are different things, and language may actually be better understood through traditional writing than through speech because the lack of performative cues and clues requires the writer to use the native grammar to its fullest capacity.

This prejudice in favor of speech becomes clear when we consider sign language, which has more in common with writing than speech, and actually forms the basis for the early pictograms of many written languages. The hearing-impaired may have limited to no speech capacity yet be fully able to process and create language. Further, the primacy of sound in the study of language ignores high-level reading, or what may be truly termed silent reading, in which there is no subvocalization and no mental reproduction of the sounds represented in speech. It is possible to read and to write rapidly without the crutch of the phonetic middleman, just as one easily understands speech without visualizing the written word. The mental reproduction of sound often slows our reading and muddles our comprehension.

The insistance on sound as central to an understanding of language is at the very least immature. Sound factors so heavily in language because of its adaptability and facility, but it has little to do with the fundamental mental processes that constitute language. A community of deaf-mute individuals would be no less capable of language than anyone else, though the mode of communication would of necessity be very different.

Housmania!

This is my new mantra:

"The prime requisite of a good emendation," said he, "is that it should start from the thought; it is only afterwards that other considerations, such as those of metre or possibilities, such as the interchange of letters, are taken into account."

Moritz Haupt, quoted by AE Housman in "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism."

the Dusty Old Textbook Spotlight

I'll pretend this is a recurring feature, like the Housman quotes that never show up.

L.L. Forman's A First Greek Book, published 1899, offered a very novel approach to the Greek textbook: lessons were comprised of headings (e.g. "Conjunction of Sentences") followed by references to the relevant sections in the chief grammars of the day (Goodwin and Hadley/Allen), and finally by Greek examples with few notes and no attempt to explain grammar.

He cautioned that only a teacher who really knows Greek should attempt to use the book, and that his goal was simply to help and not to hinder "the workers," both teacher and student.

What follows is a footnote from the Preface, which hints not only at the state of Greek education at the turn of the last century, but also at the richness of academic prose and the spirit of at least one educator.

Yet if Greek be swept utterly out of our education, the blame will lie not so much with the youth of the country as with us teachers, who yield to their importunities. Because the babe in the cradle cries, we permit it first Option of Study (or of No-Study), then Option of Method. These two Options were, I suspect, the two serpents carelessly allowed to invade the cradle of little Hercules, but strangled by that sensible young hero. Can we hope, however, for this happy issue now?

A text of this type has much to commend it. (I've heard recently about a course in Greek prose composition based on Smyth. Eric?) But this text in particular has many valuable notes in the appendix, "Hints For Teachers."

My only objection so far is his suggestion to omit the dual. It's so easy once you learn it, and only then can you say you have a command of all forms.

Tearing Down the Hous(e), Man

This is long overdue, but we finally have a new Housman quote. This one is drawn from memory (it preceded an article we'd read for some seminar, probably Vergil's Aeneid).

Housman was quoted as saying that whenever he read Vergil in translation he would say,

Out, hyperbolical fiend! how vexest thou this man!

This, of course, is a quote from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, act 4 scene 2.

Today is that day ... the suicide talk is coming.

The good news is that I've finished my work for the semester. The bad news is that today I get to tell the profs how I think I did, and then get their take.

I've got $10 that says I need to work on presentations.

More to come ... I've been saving up a juicy one from Housman, but now I've got to run.

waiting for dennis to turn over a new page...

is anybody else sad that dennis hasn't posted in a while?

good. i am too. i need my housman fix.

the western way of mawr

i thought dennis would appreciate the fact that a.e. housman is quoted at the beginning of chapter 2 of victor davis hanson's 'the western way of war':

Therefore, though the best is bad,
Stand and do the best, my lad;
Stand and fight and see your slain,
And take the bullet in your brain.