Word: iliad
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Columbia freshman had to know Greek grammar and composition; four books of the Anabasis; three of the Iliad; Latin grammar and composition; seven books of Caesar's Commentaries; six books of the Aeneid and six orations of Cicero. In history, English, geography and mathematics the tests were equally severe. "Acute paralysis" would afflict modern youths faced with such tests, in Dr. Butler's opinion. But the same condition would probably have afflicted the youth of 1879 if there had not been unbroken centuries of the so-called "humanities" drilled into their ancestors. It is another instance of adaptability...
...much a matter of politics that the real issues, violent and blood-spattered, are dimmed. George Creel* brings them to light through the colorful story of Sam Houston, dreamer, drunkard, man of action. A youth, in Tennessee, he showed dangerous scholastic tendencies, poring over Pope's Iliad, so his brothers set him clerking in the village store. Seeking refuge with the Cherokees, Sam announced in grandiloquent terms worthy of his master, Pope, that he preferred measuring deer tracks to tape; and later married a squaw as majestic as himself...
...words assembled like so many pearls; but not, on the whole, in a manner to sustain interest. Apparently the abridgment was intended to give the reader all the dynamiting and slaughter at the expense of paring down the Arabian milieu. This was a doubtful course?like abridging the Iliad into a penny dreadful about a wooden horse. Fortunately, Mr. Lawrence has done his own abridging and retained more than a modicum in the original nobler and broader strain. The book is simply what its author pleases the public shall read; and such is the nature of vox populi that hosannas...
Died. Walter Leaf, 75, chairman of the Westminster Bank (one of the "Big Five" banks); at Torquay, England. Onetime (1919-21) president of the Institute of Bankers, he was also a noted Greek scholar, having translated the Iliad* and other poems. Henry Bell, banker, wrote of him: For while we see Crowns drop from kingly heads, and canker Attack the hereditary tree, Yet there is left one Leaf to be At once a Poet and a Banker...
...ILIAD...