Tuesday, April 17, 2018
Dislike of the Classics
Michael Meyer (1921-2000), Not Prince Hamlet: Literary and Theatrical Memoirs (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1989) p. 21:
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So I continued with Greek and Latin, becoming progressively disillusioned, and it was not until my final term, when I had twice failed scholarships at Oxford, that I moved to the history side. By that time my dislike of the classics had become so strong that I have never opened a Greek or Latin book since, and I, who once read these languages almost as easily as I did English, now have difficulty in understanding any but the simplest words and phrases. Sometimes, now that I am old, it occurs to me that it might be an amusing exercise to revive my knowledge of, at any rate, Greek by going through Homer or Sophocles with a dictionary or a crib, but I do not suppose that I ever will.Hat tip: Eric Thomson.
