MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
y AM glad to see that Messrs. Routledge and Kegan Paul are this week publishing .a revised edition of Dr. Lempriere's'Bibilotheca Classica or Classical Dictionary. This new edition has been super- vised by Professor Wright, who has corrected the chronological table, modernised some of the spelling and omitted the long list of eighteenth-century editions in favour of the short but very useful word "Loeb." Professor Wright tells us that "a few verbal altera- tions have been made here and there in the interests of clarity and style, but Lempriere's often quaint wording is generally left un- changed." The small' print, which so distressed the readers of the original edition of 1788, has not been retained: the present volume is legible and light. It is a curious thing that this Channel Islander, who was not by temperament either very industrious or very precise, and who as headmaster did much damage to Abingdon School, should have produced a dictionary which had such influence with the-writers of three successive generations. He had little sense of proportion, and his entries cannot, I am ,told, compare for accuracy with those that one finds in Sir W. Smith or Seyffert. Yet it was not only the schoolboys of the time who pored over the pages of Lempriere's dictionary ; the book became a quarry of information and suggestion for the poets of the first four decades of the nineteenth century. If one wishes, for instance, to explain why Byron, who was a poor scholar, should be so fertile in classical allusions, one can suggest that he had his Lempriere conveniently upon his table. He had only to look up Thrasybulus and Phyle and the great stanza swung into his mind. Professor Wright, in the short memoir which he appends to this edition, gives us an interesting clue to the connection between Keats and Lempriere. The latter's definition of the Hyacinthia was undoubtedly the inspiration of the " Ode on a Grecian Urn." We have the garlands, the green altar and the mysterious priest. " All," writes Lempriere, " were eager to be present at the games, and the city was left almost without inhabitants." " What little town," writes Keats, "is emptied of its folk this pious morn ? " Clearly Lempriere, in an age when classical allusions were a sign of culture, was of the greatest help to the indolent and the unlearned.
* * * *
Dr Lempriere, I suspect, was too imaginative a man to make a reliable lexicographer. He was always apt to indulge in bright ideas for which there was little foundation beyond his own inventiveness. His entry respecting the Thracian poet Sotades (who was a disreput- able, person and therefore thrown into the sea in a cage of lead) leads him to suggest an interesting emendation in one of Juvenal's satires ; again and again we find him straying, not without charm, from the point. He had a pleasant gift, moreover, of under- statements, as when he informs us that Alcibiades "died in the forty- sixth year of his age after a life of perpetual difficulties." There are few books more suitable to be kept beside the bed to be read in moments of lassitude when the imagination flags. The Nymphs, the Harnadryads and the Nereids dance through his pages with their 'arms interlaced, and lovely names spring out at us from his catalogue twirling in and out of lapidary Roman words. Or is it that the poets, with their rapid powers of selection, ignored the heavy entries and noticed only the lovely and the light, passing by Sextus Julius Frontinus, the celebrated geometrician, skipping the bits about Aufidianus Pontius, the austere parent, and dwelling only on the Hyacinthia :— "serti hanno al capo, in man, rami di lauro,
tendon le braccia e cantano."
* * * What puzzles me about the ancients, and especially the Athenians, is the vast amount of information which they were expected to carry in their heads. Take a young man like Theaetetus, for instance, a promising mathematician of eighteen years and extreme ugliness. It was taken for granted that he would know, and regularly recognise, not merely the whole corpus of mythology, not merely the whole of Homer, not merely the main tenets of the existing schools of philo- sophy, but also Hesiod, and the lyric and dramatic poets. His teachers would have snubbed him soundly if he did not remember a line from Pindar or was unable to distinguish Nephele from Atalanta, daughter of Schoeneus. It is as if we were obliged to hold available in conversation the whole of the Old and New Testa- ment, plus the whole of Shakespeare and the greater poets and novelists. The invention of printing has, I suppose, destroyed this habit of acute oral memory, and there are many of us who, when we read a novel, merely get to know the names of the characters by sight without being able thereafter to repeat them accurately. In the schools of Athens, I imagine, one would have seen rows of little boys sitting upon the sand, swaying up and down, rhythmically, intoning the Iliad or the Odyssey while the master kept time with a rod and the paedagogues lolled idly in the background. Even to this day in the East one can pass an open-air school-room in which the children sway up and down intoning in high voices the verses of the Koran. Such, I imagine, was the early education that Theaetetus obtained, acquiring thereby the whole music of Homer, and in the evenings being told by his nurse and mother all the gay myths which told that illusioned age that at any moment, down in the orchard or at the street corner on the way to school, the miraculous might easily occur. Little boys and girls today are so inured to the miracles of science that they may lose their sense of wonder and cease properly to exercise the muscles of their imagination.
* * For the Ancients there must have existed the same conflict between myth and logic as we experience today between science and religion. It does not seem, however, to have caused them the same spiritual disturbance as afflicted our fathers of the later nineteenth century. It must have been difficult indeed to remember all those intricate stories and characters ; it must have been even more difficult to take them seriously, in that they conflicted so flagrantly with reason and morality. Yet somehow they were able (most of them, most of the time) to take the whole thing for granted, to extract from their legends all that was most profitable, exciting or beautiful, and not to worry over-much regarding the fear and cruelty which was so often implied, or even to question the gross unfairness and self- indulgence (the utter meanness) of their gods. Or was it that they were so frightened by it all (and in truth it could be most alarming) that they forbore even in intimate conversation to mention the Erinnyes, calling them, when forced to do so, the Eumenides instead? When one reads about these calm, self-assured, reserved striplings, one cannot help wondering whether they were really so serene when they found themselves upon their little pallets in the dark. Did Charmides, when he went to bed, tremble with terror at the evil spirits that surrounded him and quake in horror at the dim eternity which stretched beyond the tomb ? Did Theaetetus forget all about mathematics and hide his snub nose beneath the rug ? Did they feel, even in hot sunshine, that there was something uncanny about old Socrates and shrink away from him when he relapsed into one of his trances or mumbled about the daemons who whispered in his ear ? We are not told much about all this ; the whole dark side remains as secret as the mysteries of Eleusis.
* * Thus when we turn the pages of Lempriere we see with Keats the dales of Arcady, and in our minds there echoes his evocation of the Attic shape, the fair attitude, the pipes and timbrels, the wild ecstasy. Certainly this is an error on our part, but an error that does no harm. I should not have liked to live in Athens during the. fifth century ; I should have preferred the age of Hadrian. But it is an agreeable illusion to imagine that eternal summer, to sup- pose that Theaetetus, until he was wounded at the siege of Corinth, enjoyed his mathematics more than any senior wrangler, and to imagine that Charmides was never frightened at night. It is surely important in this machine-made age not to allow oneself to get dull: and somehow Lempriere brings us the alleviation and the smile.
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