Laudator Temporis Acti

Anthony Kenny, A Path from Rome (1985; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 39-41 (on Upholland College, aka St. Joseph's College, a junior seminary in the diocese of Liverpool, where the top three classes were called Syntax, Poetry, and Rhetoric):

Equally important, from Syntax onwards I began to enjoy literature, and especially classical literature. I had now acquired enough Latin and Greek to be able to read the works of classical authors as books, without losing track of the story in the constant reference to Smith's dictionary or Liddell and Scott. The first classics I enjoyed were the third book of Xenophon's Hellenica and the fifth book of the Aeneid. I followed the Greek campaigns with fascination, marking the positions of armies and navies with flags as I had earlier marked the position of Russian and German armies in the Second World War; I placed bets on the candidates in the games described by Vergil. The long evening periods in the study hall under the new blue neon lights became something to look forward to rather than to dread. My Syntax diary is full of reviews of the classical works we were reading, as well as of the English books I chose myself: I was bored by the end of Aeschylus' Persae, and found I needed to use the crib ('cog' was our word) too much; but I preferred it to Euripides' Hecuba. More interesting than either was Plato's Apology, or the Latin book we were reading concurrently, the first book of Horace's Odes.

There were eleven of us remaining in Syntax at the end of the year. The academically more gifted were put into Group I and prepared to take the Latin and Greek and Ancient History options; they were no longer taught in classes (except for subsidiary subjects) but were left almost entirely to work alone, apart from weekly composition tutorials in Greek and Latin prose. Each student was encouraged to draw up his own reading list in Greek and Latin literature. and once it had been approved by the tutor, he was on his honour not to make undue use of the crib. All he had to do was to make notes on his reading and in due course discuss it in a tutorial. During most of the day. the Group I students had the vast study hall to themselves, reading unsupervised. It was a most enlightened and humane method of instruction.

[....]

The writing of Greek prose had always been a drudgery for me, and in Latin prose too I never achieved elegance. But the liberty to range over the whole of classical literature which Group I conferred was an unmixed delight. During the years of Poetry and Rhetoric I read in Greek all of Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and in Latin all of Vergil, Horace, Tacitus, and a fair amount of Cicero and Livy. I did not realize at the time that the Upholland system enabled one to get through almost as much reading as a university course; and I have never since been as well-read, in the sense of retaining so much literature in my head at the same time.

Homer (the Odyssey, not the Iliad) was my favourite Greek reading; of the prose writers I liked Plato best, and was particularly fascinated by the Phaedo. Thucydides I found hard going, and Pindar impossibly difficult: Sophocles was my favourite tragedian, and I was glad that the Oedipus Rex was one of our set books. Among the Latins I enjoyed the patriotic parts of Vergil and Horace. Livy was slow to plough through, the narrative always interrupted with tedious speeches; Cicero was a pompous windbag, except when writing letters, and my favourite prose author was Tacitus. I would memorize and recite some of his setpieces, especially the exordium to the Histories which concludes that the moral of history is that the gods care nothing for our peace but only for our punishment . . . non esse curae deis securitatern nostram, esse ultionem.