A Torch in the Labyrinth

We invent the past, from what is at hand, and have invented Greece after Greece. Each time it grows strange, as did Swinburne’s within living memory, we restructure it. The Greece currently in favor is by Heisenberg out of Camus: vide infra.

We have been less prodigal with Romes, because for many centuries no one in Europe felt remote enough from a Roman world to see it as strange. The language, paid out like a spaceman’s umbilical cord, kept connections intact as late as Dr. Johnson’s time. Latin was food for schoolboys; it transmitted, it was the past on which their minds fed. The great benefit of rendering the acquisition of Latin unspeakably arduous was that the grown boy could be trusted to read it no more as soon as he had gotten clear of the schoolmaster. Thus his notion of what Latin literature contained was bounded by the curriculum excerpts—Caesar, Cicero, Horace, Vergil—and for centuries a synthetic but very stable Rome served as model for ideals of duty, public service, civic responsibility.

HK

About the Author

Hugh Kenner

Featured Tags

We invent the past, from what is at hand, and have invented Greece after Greece. Each time it grows strange, as did Swinburne’s within living memory, we restructure it. The Greece currently in favor is by Heisenberg out of Camus: vide infra.

We have been less prodigal with Romes, because for many centuries no one in Europe felt remote enough from a Roman world to see it as strange. The language, paid out like a spaceman’s umbilical cord, kept connections intact as late as Dr. Johnson’s time. Latin was food for schoolboys; it transmitted, it was the past on which their minds fed. The great benefit of rendering the acquisition of Latin unspeakably arduous was that the grown boy could be trusted to read it no more as soon as he had gotten clear of the schoolmaster. Thus his notion of what Latin literature contained was bounded by the curriculum excerpts—Caesar, Cicero, Horace, Vergil—and for centuries a synthetic but very stable Rome served as model for ideals of duty, public service, civic responsibility.