Word: iliad
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Philadelphia's St. Joseph's College, who uses modern electronics to analyze Greek metrics. McDonough has done as much for Homer, and as a consequence of this odd work he can almost definitely answer an old scholarly question: Did one man or many men write the Iliad...
Since a computer prefers to read numbers, McDonough designed an eight-digit code covering all possibilities in the Iliad's 250,000 syllables. The digits represent eight variables: syllables at the beginning, middle or end of words, and monosyllables, all four of which can be either long or short. To "translate" every line in the poem in these terms, McDonough used computers that he begged and borrowed time on, from Harvard to Columbia. Then, summing up all the metrical patterns, one machine, in a total of five hours, clacked out a detailed analysis of the Iliad's style...
...them kid you with their humanities courses; the real dope is out now. Erich Segal has written an expose of the Iliad which offers the inside story of how Paris made it with Helen (or vice versa). And a better musical hasn't sailed to these shores since Harvard's own classical era (when Greek was mandatory, and diplomas still...
...admission to the Freshman Class are examined in the grammar of the Latin and Greek languages, Virgil, Cicero's Select Orations, and Sallust or Caesar's Commentaries, Arnold's Latin Prose Composition, eight chapters; Xenophon's Anabasis and two books of Homer's Iliad; English Grammar, Arithmetic, Algebra to Quadratic Equations, and two books of Loomis' Geometry or of Playfair's Euclid...
...combat specialization, all St. Johnnies take the same nonelective diet. Instead of training for jobs, they mull the perennial principles in the "100 Great Books" (now actually 168). In four years, they span more than 2,000 years of "the substance of human experience," from Homer's Iliad to Einstein's Theory of Relativity...