Laudator Temporis Acti

Dear Mike,

Boardman’s so far slightly doddery and occasionally Rhadamanthine autobiography (published in his crotchety 90s) arrived last week.

John Boardman, A Classical Archaeologist´s Life: The Story So Far (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2020) p. 32:

Cambridge Classics was but a mild extension of school, although I did come to see the value of working hard at translation into English, to improve my English rather than just render the Greek, and got no little pleasure from writing Greek and Latin verse. The Master, A.B. Ramsay ('the Ram'), made us have 'saying lessons' (as he would have done at Eton) each morning, and I got Demosthenes 'First Olynthiac Oration' off by heart, as well as long stretches of Virgil, Cicero and Sophocles. 'What do I want from my boys?' — 'Accuracy, eloquence and deportment, Master'. This did no harm and helped composition since they gave one inbuilt criterion for good prose. A fellow undergraduate at Magdalene was Maurice Pope, later Professor of Classics at Cape Town. He and I could still manage the first few sentences of the Demosthenes in 2004: Anti pollon an, o andres Athenaioi... — the whole took about 20 minutes. In Greece in 1949, in a taverna at Nauplion, I came across a Greek soldier who had also learned the Oration and we exchanged recitals over the dinner table with vastly different pronunciations.

Ramsay’s interrogation was evidently not confined to a single question, according to the reminiscence of a near contemporary, Braham Myer, Magdalene Memories, Issue 35:

Once a week during our first two terms every undergraduate reading Classics had to appear before him and recite a portion of the prescribed classical text — in our case a Demosthenes oration. Every week an extra section was added so that finally one recited the complete work. Strange though this was, the formal preliminaries were even odder — taking the form of an inquisition. To the first question ‘What do I expect of my boys in their saying lessons?’, the required answer was ‘accuracy, eloquence and deportment, Master’ and to the next question ‘And what do I expect of my boys in their work?’, the answer had to be ‘diligence and obedience, Master’. In 1939 we did not protest.

Best wishes,
Eric [Thomson]