CLASSICS IN TRANSLATION

The ancient authors examinations in the Department of Ancient and Modern Languages and in the Department of History and Literature have counterbalanced in some measure the diminished interest in Latin and Greek which is indicated by the declining concentration in Classics. But, ideally, before studying works of modern literature which have been modelled on the Classics, a student should have a broader knowledge than the required study of two ancient authors can give him. To derive the most from his study of English drama, a man should have read in the original Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca, and to appreciate to the full his English satire he should know Horace, Ovid, and Persius. If, because of the ill-adjustment of the curricula of secondary schools, men cannot get their grounding in grammar of Classical languages there, and if because of pressing requirements of concentration and distribution, men cannot begin this elementary study in college, the alternative is to read the classics in English.

A single course in the Classics in translation would supply the need. Such a survey, covering the principal writers of ancient Greece and Rome, could, if conducted in a proper manner, avoid many of the defects of survey courses in literature. It should not consist merely in memorizing the literary and stylistic characteristics of the men considered, and it would be devoted to the matter and method rather than to the language of the writers. The authors might be considered as an expression of classic civilization, or they might be read with principal attention to their affect on modern writers. The translations in English, moreover, are often of definite literary value themselves; the English of Jowett is not only a facile medium for conveying ancient culture to the modern mind, but has real intrinsic interest.

Such a course might in some cases foster dilettantism; a few men might be deterred from studying the writers in the original, and might be lured into the new course by the promise of easily acquiring a superficial knowledge of a great many authors of both Greek and Latin. But there is little doubt that a single year spent in an intelligently guided survey of classical literature as a whole would be of greater ultimate value than an equivalent length of time spent in getting the syntactical elements of any one language. For from decreasing the already dwindling interests in the Classics, the general effect of a course in the Classics in translation might be to interest many men and to encourage them to go further themselves.