Laudator Temporis Acti

Hugh Trevor-Roper, "Apologia transfugae," The Spectator (July 14, 1973) 43-46 (at 43):

From our present position there is unquestiably something very arrogant in the old claims of classical humanism to be the necessary centre of our studies. The supposition that the seeds at least of all knowledge, all wisdom, all philosophy, are contained in the brief experience of a chosen people is no more defensible in secular studies than in theology. Why should two ancient cities, minuscule by the standards of our provincial towns, be the repositories of truth, the sources of civilization, any more than a fanatical semitic hill tribe in Palestine? Such a concept, however it may be sophisticated, is repugnant to those who believe in progress; and it had to be defeated before the idea of progress could be denizened in European thought.

Id. (at 44):

I suppose I really ought to modify my irrational antipathy to Wilamowitz. He did. after all, affect my life. It was because of him that I learned German. Brought up, as I was, in the extraordinary and indeed, it now seems to me the ludicrous belief that one could not be a good classical scholar unless one read the works of this Prussian high-priest of the subject, I obediently set myself, as a first year undergraduate, to master his rebarbative language. After spending the best part of vacations in Germany learning it, I returned to Oxford somewhat disillusioned. With undergraduate confidence, I decided that Wilamowitz, whose works I had now read (or perhaps only tasted) was a fraud and that Nazi Germany was not only very disagreeable itself but also a menace to the world. I therefore used up the linguistic expertise which I had so mistakenly acquired to read Hitler's Mein Kampf, which was not then available in translation. I found it very rewarding, in a certain sense, and the experience has had some influence on my later career. Since war I have occasionally dipped into Mein Kampf again. I have not found any occasion to reread Wilamowitz. My view of him, however erroneous, was fixed in 1934, and I saw him now only as a salutary warning. He symbolised to me the barrenness of a purely literary and philological approach to the classics, and indeed to literature in general, and the absurd pretentiousness of assuming that so narrow an approach can have any wider meaning. He warned me to turn away from line of study which, within those limits, led nowhere.

Id.:

For whatever my motives in turning away from classical studies, they were not a repudiation of classical literature. Indeed, in a sense, I believe that it was love of that literature which persuaded me to escape from the course which, at that time, seemed likely destroy the passion which had been kindled at school. How vividly I remember each new discovery in that progress! Above all, I member my delight when the vocabulary of Homer, as it were, broke in my hands: when that novel epic dialect, which at first had seemed so strange and difficult, suddenly revealed itself as easy and I found that I could enjoy the poetry. Once that had happened, I would sit up half the night, and had soon read the whole of Homer — indeed, I even won a Homeric crossword puzzle at school, of which I still treasure the prize, and can say with Gibbon that Homer became the most intimate of my friends.

Id. (at 46):

Above all, they loved to emend those texts. How those famous scholars vied with one another in that esoteric parlour-game! How they conjured with syllables, transposed lines, inverted letters, in the hope of finding themselves immortalised, in the apparatus criticus of their successors, with that noblest of epitaphs 'emendatio palmaris'! When I first read the Greek tragedians, I was adjured to marvel at those brilliant tours de force which had made the names of Bentley and Porson and were still regularly continued, as a ritual exercise, in the pages of the Classical journals. Now (I am afraid) I view these ingenious reconstructions with considerable scepticism. My scepticism began when I had my own writings copied by a typist. The most regular error of any typist, I then discovered, was to jump from one word to the same word repeated a line or so later, omitting the intermediate text and thus making nonsense of the whole passage. Clearly, in such circumstances, no amount of textual tinkering can restore the original text. Assuming, as I do, that a certain common humanity links a modern typist with a monastic copyist of the Dark or Middle Ages, I now assume that such omissions are the cause of many corruptions in ancient manuscripts, and ingenious conjecture is effort wasted.