Laudator Temporis Acti

Eduard Fraenkel was holding his (packed) weekly class on Greek lyric metres in early 1952, and was taking us through the first chorus of the Agamemnon. On a whim, he asked a student in the front row to read a few lines. All went well until αἴλινον αἴλινον εἰπέ, τὸ δ᾽ εὖ νικάτω, when the last word came out, decisively, as an anapaest. The class burst into a howl of derision.

[....]

The central importance of textual criticism was slow to wane: my 'Green-and-Yellow' edition of Philoctetes by T.B.L. Webster (1970) devotes 10 pages to the transmission of the text and the relevant MSS (by Pat Easterling); my much larger edition in the same series by S.L. Schein (2013) dismisses the subject in under a page.

[....]

I return to Fraenkel. In addition to his weekly lecture on Virgil, his Greek metre class, and a small class on Ernout's Recueil (of pre-classical Latin authors), there was also his justly famous weekly 2-hour seminar in Corpus, which others have described—most memorably in Stephanie West's description of those attending as 'rabbits caught in the eye of a stoat'. It was indeed fearsome, and dons were among those as scared as the graduates or undergraduates.

[....]

It must have been 30 years later in one of the years when I was myself examining for the Ireland and Craven Scholarships that I asked the candidates (only six out of the announced eight had turned up), after the Greek prose paper, 'What is the perfect tense of λαμβάνω?'. Not one of them knew it. Their intelligence was at worst no less than that of my pupils in the 1950s, but their knowledge of the nuts and bolts of the Greek language was incomparably poorer. My generation could have answered that question at the age of 13, at the latest.