Laudator Temporis Acti

Adam Sisman, An Honourable Englishman: The Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper (New York: Random House, ©2010), p. 24, with note on p. 582:

From the time he entered the Sixth form [at Charterhouse], Hugh was taught classics by A.L. Irvine, known as "Uncle," who made the boys learn by heart passages of Greek and Latin literature which he had selected and published for the purpose. Though rather mechanical, this method left pupils enriched. Even into old age Hugh could quote long passages that he had learned in this way. He was taught too by [Frank] Fletcher himself, who introduced the boys to Tacitus, the man Hugh considered the greatest of all Roman historians, whose work was to influence the book many rate as Hugh's masterpiece, The Last Days of Hitler. Fletcher also led the boys through his own favorite Greek tragedy, the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. But it was his introduction to Homer that ignited Hugh's passion for classics. At first he struggled with Homer's archaic vocabulary and the unfamiliar form, but once he had broken the code (as he later put it), he found he could read Homer's verse easily. Looking back a dozen years later, Hugh would count this as one of the most memorable moments of his life. "On I read, far past the appointed terminus, till late at night, fascinated; and all my leisure hours for long afterwards were spent in reading Homer, till I knew all the Iliad and Odyssey!"⁴

4 "Moments," wartime notebooks, I, pp. 19-21; DP 13/29.

DP = Dacre Papers, Christ Church, Oxford. Irvine's anthology was KTHMA EΣ AEI (Godalming: A.C. Curtis, Ltd., 1922).

Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Wartime Journals, ed. Richard Davenport-Hines (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), pp. 40-41:

There have been memorable moments in my life, — moments when I have deliberately turned my back for ever on an old world, or suddenly, through a narrow aperture, glimpsed a new, and gone out in search of it. The first was when, at the age of fifteen, in my study at Charterhouse, I discovered Milton's Nativity Ode, and realised the existence of poetry. Another was in the same room, when I was construing Homer. Hitherto my progress had been slow; the forms were unfamiliar, the vocabulary new. Then quite suddenly, — it was in the 7th Odyssey, the passage describing the Gardens of Alcinous — I found that, at last, I could read it freely and easily and enjoy it. On I read, far past the appointed terminus, till late at night, fascinated; and all my leisure hours for long afterwards were spent in reading Homer, till I knew all the Iliad and Odyssey. In all the variations of my tastes and standards (and very few have lasted intact from my school days) I have never wavered in my passion for Homer and Milton.

And then there was that moment in the summer of 1936, when, walking round the Ch[rist] Ch[urch] Meadow, and pondering on the complicated subtleties of St Augustine's theological system, which I had long tried to take seriously, I suddenly realised the undoubted truth that metaphysics are metaphysical, and having no premises to connect them to this world, need not detain us while we are denizens of it. And at once, like a balloon that has no moorings, I saw the whole metaphysical world rise and vanish out of sight in the upper air, where it rightly belongs; and I have neither seen it, nor felt its absence, since.

When I read Sisman, I said to myself, "Unfamiliar forms, not unfamiliar form." The actual passage from Trevor-Roper's journals confirmed my guess.