Snt,—Mr. R. A. Henderson appears to have misread some parts
of my article, and misapplied others. My main concern was with research work, not teaching; with the development, not the application in
schools, of classical studies. On the latter subject, indeed, a whole fresh article could be written, pillorying, inter alio, such corrosive elements as rose-tinted Hellenic cruises, Professor Murray's Swinburne- and-water -translations of Euripides and the unctuous tag from the Pro Archia (so beloved of sixth-form ushers and Cheltenham school- girls) with which Mr. Henderson triumphantly, if inevitably, concludes his letter. My concern is the fountain-head, not the stream.
It is true, as Mr. Henderson points out (and as I stated in my article), that much has happened in the last hundred years; but it has been achieved at university level in the teeth of bitter opposition. So recently as 1950 a scholar of Professor E. R. Dodds' standing could write, in his preface to The Greeks and the Irrational:
" To my fellow-professionals I perhaps owe some defence of the use which I have made in several places of recent anthropo- logical and psychological observations and theories. In a world of specialists, such borrowings from unfamiliar disciplines are, I know, generally received by the learned with apprehension and often with active distaste."
In Cambridge the ghosts of Bentley and Housman still loom large and all-pervasive; I have even heard prominent scholars decrying
purely classical archaeology as "unsound"—that ultimate condemnation —let alone external techniques. I agree with Mr. Henderson (and also with Mr. Highet, in The Classical Tradition, who worded it more
strongly) that the " textual specialist is no more a classicist than a laboratory assistant is a scientist "; but in Cambridge, at any rate, he holds the field. Yet in this respect Mr. Henderson will probably be delighted (as I was) to find that the recently-elected Professor of Ancient Philosophy spent his Inaugural Lecture (a most moving occasion) pleading for students of Greek philosophy at research level to apply themselves to Arabic, to mediaeval philosophy, to—most important of all—the theory of modern physics, in order to make a more positive contribution to the science of philosophy and the philosophy of science. The tide seems to be on the turn.
Lastly, the original writers that Mr. Henderson quite rightly cites owe little or nothing to scholars. Mr. MacNeice has written the finest extant translation of the Agamemnon; but he sees the other side of the penny only too clearly:
" So the humanist in his room with Jacobean panels Chewing his pipe and looking on a lazy quad Will chop the ancient world to turn a sermon To the greater glory of God."
Mr. Henderson would, I feel, profit from reading the whole satirical pas- sage in Autumn Journal describing both Greece and Rome and the modern interpretation of them. And apropos of his doubtful antithesis betWeen " the mummified grammarian " (butied, no doubt, but still alarmingly in evidence) and " the rich personalities," one can only quote a Cambridge don's recent remark that classical scholars today can be divided into the high and dry and the low and wet; and leave Mr. Henderson to decide which is which.—Yours faithfully,
14 Brunswick Walk, Cambridge.
PETER GREEN.
Previous page
