Byron’s Single Difference with Homer and Virgil

PREFACE

“The learning of Latin and Greek, I am told, is going into disuse in Europe,” declared Thomas Jefferson in 1782, then serving as ambassador to France.  “I know not what their manners and occupations may call for,” he remarked, “but it would be ill-judged in us to follow their example.  Jefferson boasted, with some hyperbole, that every American farmer could read Homer in the original.  Indeed, Professor Meyer Reinhold,  author of  The Classick Pages,   declares that “it is...probable that never since antiquity were the Classics...read by a greater  proportion of a population” than in the United States  during the latter half of the eighteenth century.

As early as 1702, defining the entrance requirements for  Harvard College, Cotton Mather announced:  “When scholars had so far  profited at the grammar schools, that they could read any classical author into English, and readily make and speak true Latin and write it in  verse, as  well  as prose; and perfectly decline the paradigms of  nouns  and verbs  in the Greek tongue, they were judged capable of  admission  to Harvard-Collidge.”  Classical learning in the United States during the 18^th and 19^th centuries was more than adornment for an educated elite,  but, as Reinhold notes:

their reading in and meditation upon the Classics was eminently practical and purposeful; and it contributed substantially to the development and motivation of an unparalleled concentration of political giants in world history.

Indeed, the Founding Fathers exemplified in their lives and writings an assimilation of the ideals of Classical humanism: the Greek emphasis on the examined life, on the fullest exploitation of an individual’s capacities and on the application of reason to the achievement of happiness; along with the Roman affirmation of gravitas and civic responsibility. The remarks of Professor H. Rackham of Cambridge  University  in the introduction to his translation of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics could be applied to the many other works of Classical literature that shaped the character and thinking of cultivated Americans as well as cultivated Englishman into the first half of the twentieth century:

It is true that a moral system which so exalts the life of the intellect is in many ways alien to modern thought and practice; but in so far as Aristotle’s End can be...taken to include complete self-development and self-expression, the full realization in healthy activity of all the potentialities of human  nature, his  teaching has not lost its appeal.  His review of the  virtues and   graces of character that the Greeks admired stands  in  such striking contrast with Christian Ethics that this section of  the work  is a document of primary importance for the student of  the Pagan world.  But it has more than a historic value.  Both in its likeness and in its difference it is a touchstone for that modern idea of a gentleman, which supplies or used to supply an important part of the English race with its working religion.

Until World War I the Classics provided the core of secondary-school and higher-education curricula in this country, and prestigious American institutions of  higher  learning followed the Ivy League schools in setting at least two years of Latin as an entrance requirement.  Although social and civic goals in  the teaching  of the Classics had by then been abandoned,  Latin teachers continued  to  instill in their students Classical  respect  for precision in language.  (The eloquence of Churchill, Roosevelt and de Gaulle reflected their Classical educations.) The anti-intellectualism of the McCarthy era and of the youth rebellion of the sixties accelerated the decline of Classical studies in the United States. Subsequently, in the seventies and eighties, the Christian Right proclaimed that the Judaeo-Christian tradition was the sole valid stream of the American heritage and denounced humanism

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