Homer, the divine poet
CONGRATULATIONS to Phoebe Gaston (WHS '09, Yale '13): 2009 National Latin Exam Scholarship Winner. This ultra-competitive $1,000 scholarship was awarded on June 27 by the American Classical League to 21 top Latin scholars in the USA. Application for this scholarship is open each year to high school seniors who earn a gold medal on an upper level National Latin Exam. Phoebe is the first WHS student to earn this high honor.
"Come forth ....
and marvel at the courage of this woman and her great power
and at what sort of fight she is waging with unflinching head,
a girl whose heart is superior to toil
and whose mind remains unshaken by storms of fear."
Pindar, Pythian 9 (transl. by Wm. H. Race)
Classical Antiquities from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Here are 2009 WHS student awards in the following classical examinations and contests:
CANE ESSAY WRITING CONTEST
COLT POETRY RECITATION CONTEST
NATIONAL GREEK EXAM
MEDUSA MYTHOLOGY EXAM
CONNECTICUT STATE LATIN CONTEST and
NATIONAL LATIN EXAM.
2009 CANE ESSAY WRITING CONTEST
Congratulations to Sarah Gustafson, a WHS junior who placed second in Connecticut in this essay contest sponsored by the Classical Association of New England. This contest on a classical subject is open to all students taking Latin, Greek, or Classics in New England middle and secondary schools. The theme of this year's contest was "Living Antiquity: Classics and Modern Life." The three top winners in each state receive certificates and prizes; the New England-wide winning essay is traditionally read at the Annual Meeting of CANE held each spring. Essays are judged on their content, originality, style, and clarity.
2009 COLT POETRY RECITATION CONTEST
Over 1,000 students participated in this statewide contest held on April 7, 2009 at Wilbur Cross High School. Students recited poems from memory in fourteen languages, including Classical Greek and Latin. Congratulations to the following award winners:
LATIN IV GOLD MEDALIST: Abigail Kempson
ANCIENT GREEK III Bronze Medalist: Michael Garland
ANCIENT GREEK I Bronze Medalist: Harrison Vail
2009 NATIONAL GREEK EXAMINATION
This year's results are the most extraordinary of any year in which Greek has been offered at WHS. Fifteen students took the examination; thirteen received awards across three levels of Greek. Congratulations to the following award winners:
ATTIC PROSE
Merit Certificate: Joanna Valk
HOMERIC GREEK
High Honors: Phoebe Gaston, Mike Tartell, Christine Roughan
Merit Certificates: Christy Kaelin, Paul Sackstein, Austin Schaefer
BEGINNING ATTIC GREEK
High Honors: Caitlin Cugno, Kenny Schefers
Merit Certificates: Brandon Ray, Haley Garbus, Christina Greeley, Harrison Vail
2009 MEDUSA MYTHOLOGY EXAMINATION
Congratulations to the following award winners:
BRONZE MEDALIST:
Bryan Caswell
Laurel Crown Certificates:
Abigail Kempson, Christine Roughan, Brandon Ray, Haley Garbus, Mark Meiselbach, Christie Greeley, Austin Schaefer
Olive Crown Certificates:
Sarah Gustafson, Jed Lai, Kaitlin Cugno, Peter Walker, Michelle Monk, Grace Williams, Kenny Schefers, Jack Zimmerman, Jessica Street
2009 CONNECTICUT LATIN CONTEST
Congratulations to the following award winners. Note that summa cum laude award winners are in the 99-100th percentile of exam takers; magna cum laude are in the 95-98th percentiles, cum laude in the 90-94th percentiles, and cum dignitate in the 75-89th percentile.
LATIN IV (Poetry)
Summa Cum Laude: Phoebe Gaston (two winners statewide in this category)
Cum Dignitate: Victoria O'Dea
LATIN III (Poetry)
Magna Cum Laude: Sarah Gustafson (three winners statewide in this category)
LATIN II
Summa Cum Laude: Bryan Caswell, Austin Schaefer (five winners statewide in this category)
Cum Laude: Jed Lai, Jack Pforzheimer
Cum Dignitate: Christie Greeley, Sam Somers, Haley Garbus, Jessica Morris, Margaret Lee, Brandon Ray
LATIN I
Magna Cum Laude: Patrick Connelly
Cum Laude: Tanner Pratt
Cum Dignitate: Eleanor Clifford, Mark Meiselbach, Stephen Beck, Will Lawther, Georgia Blatchford, Jack Zimmerman
2009 NATIONAL LATIN EXAMINATION
On this year's exam WHS students earned a total of ten gold medals. Congratulations to all award winners and especially to Phoebe Gaston (fourth straight gold medal) and Sarah Gustafson, Sophie Broach, and Christina Kaelin (third straight gold medal):
LATIN IV (Poetry)
Gold Medalists: Phoebe Gaston, Joanna Valk
Magna Cum Laude: Abigail Kempson, Rachel Rothenberg
LATIN III (Poetry)
Gold Medalists: Sarah Gustafson, Christine Roughan, Christina Kaelin, Sophie Broach
Siver Medalists: Anna McMorrow, Michael Tartell
Magna Cum Laude: Eric Roberts
Cum Laude: Ryan Taylor
LATIN II
Gold Medalists: Bryan Caswell, Austin Schaefer
Silver Medalists: Haley Garbus, Jed Lai, Brandon Ray, Sam Somers, Kaitlin Cugno
Cum Laude: Christie Greeley, Michael Squitieri, Peter Walker
LATIN I
Gold Medalists: Mark Meiselbach, Grace Williams
Silver Medalists: Pat Connelly, Mike Deming, Jack Zimmerman, Eleanor Clifford, Jennifer Xie
Magna Cum Laude: Tanner Pratt, Michelle Monk
Cum Laude: Elsa Dyk, Andrea Rothenberg, Kori Dean, Jessica Street, Stephen Beck, Tyler Southmayd
Slide show of the Nashville Parthenon
LATIN at WHS is a four year program which begins in year one with Units I and II of the Cambridge Latin Course, a popular textbook series. Students continue in second year Latin with Unit III of the series. In third and fourth year Latin, students read selections from either Ovid's Metamorphoses or the Aeneid of Vergil.
Although there is no formal AP Latin course at WHS, upper level Latin students have successfully completed Latin AP examinations in each year since spring 2006. Beginning in 2010, the College Board will discontinue all Latin literature offerings except the AP Vergil exam. In those alternate years in which we read Vergil's Aeneid in upper level (III, IV) Latin, the AP Exam is a manageable goal for serious students since our in-class readings from the Aeneid cover a major portion of the same passages that are included in the AP Vergil syllabus.
ANCIENT GREEK at WHS is an accelerated, 1.0 credit Honors Independent Study offered at three levels. Beginning Greek classes are held before the start of the school day every Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 7:45 a.m. to 8:10 a.m. Intermediate Greek classes are held at the same times on Tuesday and Thursday. Advanced Greek classes are held (in 2009-10 school year) from 3:00 to 3:40 on Monday, Tuesday and Friday.
Greek I students complete nearly the full text of Athenaze, an Attic Greek textbook that follows a reading approach to the language. In April or May, these students switch to a Homeric Greek textbook. Greek II students continue with the same textbook and begin reading Homer's original Greek in January; by year's end Greek II students will have read approximately 600 lines from Books 9 and 6 of the Odyssey. Greek III students will focus in 2009-10 on Greek tragedy, including major selections from Euripides' Medea and additional readings from Bacchae, Sophocles' Antigone and Philoctetes, and Aeschylus' Persians.
In the school year 2010-2011, advanced students will read Iliad Book 3 and major selections from the Histories of Herodotus. Since this is a college level course, application will be made for students to be eligible for 3 college credits under the University of Connecticut's Early College Experience program.
Excerpts from various writers on various subjects ...
from John Henry Newman, "Poetry With Reference to Aristotle's Poetics" (1829):
...while [poetry] recreates the imagination by the superhuman loveliness of its views, it provides a solace for the mind broken by the disappointments and sufferings of actual life; and becomes, moreover, the utterance of the inward emotions of a right moral feeling, seeking a purity and a truth which this world will not give. * * * From living thus in a world of its own, it speaks the language of dignity, emotion and refinement. Figure is its necessary medium of communication with man; for in the feebleness of ordinary words to express its ideas, and in the absence of terms of abstract perfection, the adoption of metaphorical language is the only poor means allowed it for imparting to others its intense feelings. * * * ... the style of Homer's poems is perfect in their particular department. It is free, manly, simple, perspicuous, energetic and varied. It is the style of one who has rhapsodized without deference to hearer or judge, in an age prior to the temptations which more or less prevailed over succeeding writers -- before the theater had degraded poetry into an exhibition, and criticism narrowed it into an art."
Pierre Bayard, "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read" (translated by Jeffrey Melhman) (2007):
In the intellectual circles where writing still counts, the books we have read form an integral part of our image, and we call that image into question when we venture to publicly announce our inner library's limits.
In this cultural context, books -- whether read or unread -- form a kind of second language to which we can turn to talk about ourselves, to communicate with others, and to defend ourselves in conflict. Like language, books serve to express us, but also to complete us, furnishing, through a variety of excerpted and reworked fragments, the missing elements of our personality.
Like words, books, in representing us, also deform what we are. We cannot coincide completely with the image the totality of our reading presents; whether the image makes us look better or worse than we should, behind it all our particularities vanish. And especially since books are often present within us only as little-known or forgotten fragments, we are often out of phase with the books that are our public face; they are as inadequate in the end as any other language.
In talking about books, we find ourselves exchanging not so much cultural objects as the very parts of ourselves we need [in order] to shore up our coherence during these threats to our narcissistic selves. Our feelings of shame arise because our very identity is imperiled by these exchanges, whence the imperative that the virtual space in which we stage them remain marked by ambiguity and play.
In this regard, this ambiguous social space is the opposite of school -- a realm of violence driven by the fantasy that there exists such a thing as a thorough reading, and a place where everything is calibrated to determine whether the students have truly read the books about which they speak and face interrogation. Such an aim is, in the end, illusory, for reading does not obey the hard logic of true and false, of waving off ambiguity and evaluating with certitude whether readers are telling the truth." (pp. 128-29)
from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (1932):
In the old school the grammatical study of Latin and Greek, together with the study of their respective literatures and political histories, was an educational principle -- for the humanistic ideal, symbolized by Athens and Rome, was diffused throughout society, and was an essential element of national life and culture. Even the mechanical character of the study of grammar was enlivened by this cultural perspective. Individual facts were not learned for an immediate practical or professional end. The end seemed disinterested, because the real interest was the interior development of personality, the formation of character by the absorption and assimilation of the whole cultural past of modern European civilization. [Pupils] learned [Greek and Latin] in order to know at first hand the civilization of Greece and Rome -- a civilization that was a necessary precondition to our modern civilization: in other words, they learnt them in order to be themselves and know themselves consciously.
from Henry David Thoreau's Journal (March 15, 1852):
I lean over a rail to hear what is in the air liquid with the bluebird's warble. My life partakes of infinity. The air is as deep as our nature. Is the drawing in of this vital air attended with no more glorious results than I witness? The air is as a velvet cushion against which I press my ear. I go forth to make new demands on life. I wish to begin this summer well, to do something in it worthy of it and of me, to transcend my daily routine and that of my townsmen, to have my immortality now, in the quality of my daily life, to pay the greatest price, the greatest tax, of any man in Concord, and enjoy the most!! I will give all I am for my nobility. I will pay all my days for my success. I pray that the life of this spring and summer may ever lie fair in my memory. May I dare as I have never done. May I persevere as I have never done. May I purify myself anew as with fire and water, soul and body. May my melody not be wanting to the season. May I gird myself to be a hunter of the beautiful, that naught escape me. May I attain to a youth never attained. I am eager to report the glory of the universe. ... It is reasonable that a man should be something worthier at the end of the year than he was at the beginning.
Plato; or, The Philosopher, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Among secular books, Plato only is entitled to Omar's fanatical compliment to the Koran, when he said, "Burn the libraries; for their value is in this book." These sentences contain the culture of nations; these are the corner-stone of schools; these are the fountain-head of literatures. A discipline it is in logic, arithmetic, taste, symmetry, poetry, language, rhetoric, ontology, morals or practical wisdom. There was never such range of speculation. Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought.
... Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato -- at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.
Andrew Lang on Vergil (in a letter to Lady Violet Lebas):
The sorrows of the poor, the luxury of the rich, the peril of the Empire, the shame and dread of each day's news, we too know them; like Vergil we too deplore them. We, in our reveries, long for some such careless paradise, but we place it not in Sparta but in the islands of the Southern Seas. It is in passages of this temper that Virgil wins us most, when he speaks for himself and for his age, so distant, and so weary, and so modern; when his own thought, unborrowed and unforced, is wedded to the music of his unsurpassable style.
William Hazlitt's "On Reading Old Books:"
I have more confidence in the dead than the living. ... If you want to know what any of the authors were who lived before our time, and are still objects of anxious enquiry, you have only to look into their works. But the dust and smoke and noise of modern literature have nothing in common with the pure, silent air of immortality.
Somerset Maugham's The Summing Up:
I have read many books on English prose, but have found it hard to profit by them; for the most part they are vague, unduly theoretical, and often scolding. But you cannot say this of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage. It is a valuable work. I do not think anyone writes so well that he cannot learn much from it. It is lively reading. Fowler liked simplicity, straightforwardness, and common sense. He had no patience with pretentiousness. He had a sound feeling that idiom was the backbone of a language and he was all for the racy phrase. He was no slavish admirer of logic and was willing enough to give usage right of way through the exact demesnes of grammar. English grammar is very difficult and few writers have avoided making mistakes in it. So heedful a writer as Henry James, for instance, on occasion wrote so ungrammatically that a schoolmaster, finding such errors in a schoolboy's essay, would be justly indignant. It is necessary to know grammar, and it is better to write grammatically than not, but it is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated. Usage is the only test. I would prefer a phrase that was easy and unaffected to a phrase that was grammatical.
"Reading, the Most Dangerous Game" by Harold Brodkey:
I can't imagine how a real text can be taught in a school. Even minor masterpieces, Huckleberry Finn or The Catcher in the Rye, are too much for the classroom, too real for the experience. No one likes a good book if they have actually read it. One is fanatically attached, restlessly attached, criminally attached, violently and criminally opposed, sickened, unable to bear it. In Europe, reading is known to be dangerous. Reading always leads to personal metamorphosis, sometimes irreversible, sometimes temporary, sometimes large-scale, sometimes less than that. A good book leads to alternatives in one's sensibility and often becomes a premise in one's beliefs. One associates truth with texts, with impressive texts anyway; and when trashy books vanish from sight, it is because they lie too much and too badly and are not worth one's intimacy with them.
Norman Mailer on Truman Capote ...
Truman Capote I do not know well, but I like him. He is tart as a grand aunt, but in his way is a [bold] little guy, and he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm. I would not have changed two words in Breakfast at Tiffany's which will become a small classic.
Kenneth Rexroth on De Bello Gallico...
Practically all teachers of Latin agree that it would be hard to find a less appropriate textbook for second-year students than Caesar's Gallic War. His prose is eminently simple and clear -- to those who read Latin fluently. Yet his use of the language is not just eccentric; it is entirely peculiar to him. Caesar was one of the most completely competent writers in all literature. It is impossible to doubt his meaning, if we have an ordinary grasp of the Latin language; but his style is nervous, full of surprises, and deliberately odd. His syntax on the page looks like speech; but like Ernest Hemingway's, it is not talk that can be uttered. It is as formal, with its own special formulas, as that of Racine or Pope, who are also supposed to have written simply. Reading Julius Caesar, if you read Latin and have never read him as a child (a most unlikely contingency), is like riding a high-spirited horse who for all his nerves is always completely under control. There is no prose just like his in any language, so it is hardly pablum for schoolchildren or a "Basic Latin" introduction to Roman literature.
Click the picture below to visit a gallery of famous monuments from Rome and Pompeii.
Actaeon: sculpture in Brookgreen Gardens, South Carolina
(Paul Mansh, 1924)
"Actaeon ego sum, dominum cognoscite vestrum!"
verba animo desunt: resonat latratibus aether.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3.230-31.
ROMAN and ETRUSCAN ART:
French neoclassical painting of a scene from Book I of the Iliad.
Can you identify the characters and dramatic situation?
Grrrrrr!
This controversial statue of George Washington was sculpted by the American artist Horatio Greenough. Washington is shown relinquishing his military command by holding forth his sword. The pose is based on Phidias' famous statue of Zeus at Olympia. The statue is a striking example of the degree to which 19th century neoclassical artists embraced Greek models to portray American political leaders. The statue is on display in the Smithsonian.
Digital reproduction of the original Parthenon
Parthenon and Erechtheum photos courtesy of Kayla Berman
The Battle of Teutoberg Forest, A.D. 9. The Romans lost this one -- badly.
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