WISDOM IN CLASSICS

Evening Star, Issue 22447, 18 September 1936, Page 6

WISDOM IN CLASSICS

“ Latin prose provides the finest! * mental gymnastics that has yet been discovered. A classical education develops powers of judgment, the_ critical faculty, and accuracy. In addition to those ‘ purely educational reasons,’* classical studies are valuable because they introduce all who take them up to what is still the greatest human literature of the world. “A knowledge of the Iliad, of the works of and Aeschylus, of Plato and Thucydides, is abundantly worth while in forging one’s outlook on life. They bring to the disturbed world of to-day a knowledge of certain fundamentals by those great Greeks who were the inapirers of all that is finest in civilisation. “ Their thoughts, sentiments, imagery, and experience, enshrined by artist writers, are a great heritage. If the study of Greek literature, even more than Latin, goes out of the life and experience of our country, tha country will be the poorer for it. “ The tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus teach a great lesson—if men revolt against the fundamental laws of human behaviour, inevitably retribution follows. That is as true of all life today, in public life and in politics, as it was when written four or five hundred years before Christ.”—Mr Ormsby Gore, in a speech at Shrewsbury College.