CONGRATULATIONS to all 2012 classics award winners! This year Wilton High School students in grades 9-12 earned a total of 113 medals, ribbons, and certificates on the National Latin Exam, State Latin Exam, National Greek Exam, Medusa Mythology Exam and COLT Poetry Recitation Contest. See results posted below.
Slide Show: Classical Art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
2012 COLT POETRY RECITATION CONTEST AWARD:
LATIN I
A'ine Duffy: Second Place Award for her recitation of a poem by the lyric poet Catullus.
2012 NATIONAL GREEK EXAMINATION. This year, students earned a total of eight ribbons. Congratulations to all award winners and especially to Kathleen Smith, who earned a Blue Ribbon (Highest Honors) on this challenging exam.
ATTIC TRAGEDY (ADVANCED GREEK)
Green Ribbons (Merit Award): Kenny Schefers, Allie Schaefer
HOMERIC (INTERMEDIATE GREEK)
Green Ribbon (Merit Award): Paige Wallace
BEGINNING ATTIC GREEK
Blue Ribbon (Highest Honors): Kathleen Smith
Red Ribbons (High Honors): Alex Bendix, Evaline Xie
Green Ribbons (Merit Award): Aulden Foltz, Price Figurelli-Reid
2012 NATIONAL LATIN EXAMINATION. On this year's exam, students earned a total of 38 awards, including 21 medals: nine gold (summa cum laude) and twelve silver (maxima cum laude).
LATIN IV (Poetry)
Cum Laude: Grace Williams
LATIN III
Gold Medalists: Paige Wallace, Peter Jensen
Silver Medalists: Allie Schaefer, Josh Olin
Magna Cum Laude: Sarah Hynes, Maddie Kamp, Katie Ward
Cum Laude: Katie Kinley, Selena Cardona
LATIN II
Gold Medalists: Molly Hoch, Alex Bendix, Nicky Schefers, Liam Cunningham
Silver Medalists: Keiley Gaston, Harrison Vail, Luke Goodwin, Nicholas Murphy, Tristan Haas, Roger Hueglin, Matt Webb
Magna Cum Laude: McKenna Howard, Ryan Cross
Cum Laude: Price Figuerelli-Reid, Shefali Nagpal
LATIN I
Gold Medalists: Aaron Friedman, Mairead Deacy, Nathan Briglin
Silver Medalists: Kullan Warner, Mark Donohue, David Craven
Magna Cum Laude: David Wilson, Logan Forsyth
Cum Laude: Ryan Burke, Alex Babkowski, Patrick Ryan, Stephen Holmquist
2012 CONNECTICUT STATE LATIN CONTEST. On this year's exam, students earned a total of 29 awards, including thirteen medals:
LATIN III / IV
Summa Cum Laude: Paige Wallace
Cum Laude: Allison Schaefer
Cum Dignitate: Sarah Hynes, Megan Roughan, Matt Caswell
LATIN II
Summa Cum Laude: Molly Hoch, Alex Bendix, Nicholas Murphy
Cum Laude: Keiley Gaston, Ryan Cross, Tristan Haas
Cum Dignitate: Nicky Schefers, Matt Webb, Ryan Murphy, Luke Goodwin
LATIN I
Magna Cum Laude: Aaron Friedman, Nathan Briglin
Cum Laude: David Craven, Kendall Keough, Mairead Deacy
Cum Dignitate: Mark Donahue, David Wilson, Kullan Warner, Stephen Holmquist, Peter Mellin, Alexandra Babkowski, Alex Araujo
2012 MEDUSA MYTHOLOGY EXAMINATION. On this year's exam, students earned a total of 37 awards, including six bronze medals:
BRONZE MEDALS
David Craven, Aaron Friedman, Ben Steiz, Ryan Murphy, Peter Jensen, Selena Cardona
LAUREL CROWN
Peter Mellin, Nathan Briglin, Jake Kinley, Mary Beth Greer, Liam Cunningham, Nick Murphy, Cole Smith, David Wilson, Tristan Haas, Matt Caswell
OLIVE CROWN
Alex Araujo, Cole Ford, Kieran Kehoe, Avery Langhoff, Barry Hunter, Logan Forsyth, Matt Webb, Ryan Cross, Molly Hoch, Paige Wallace, Jack Winslow, Tyler Philbrick, Maddy Kamp, Caroline Arnold, Alex Ward, Emily Wingertzahn, Jack Zimmerman, Jennifer Xie, Katie Kinley, Wesley Shipp, Stephen Beck
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, a number of upper level Latin students successfully completed Latin AP examinations in each year from 2006 to 2010.
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 2011-12 school year) from 3:00 to 3:40 on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday.
Greek I students in 2011 will start their study of Greek with A Reading Course in Homeric Greek. Intermediate Greek students continue with the same textbook and will read original Greek in January; by year's end Greek II students will have read approximately 500 lines from Book 9 of the Odyssey.
Greek III students will read The Homeric Hymn to Demeter and Oedipus Tyrannos of Sophocles.
Excerpts from various writers on various subjects ...
from Plato's Laws (643 f.):
We must not be indefinite about the meaning of education. At present, when we are criticizing or praising a man's upbringing, we call one person educated and another uneducated, although the latter may be sometimes very well educated for the calling of a retail trader, or of a captain of a ship. and the like. But we are not speaking of education in this narrower sense, but of that other education in virtue from youth upwards, which makes a man passionately desire to be the perfect citizen, and teaches him rightly how to rule and how to obey. This is the only education which, upon our view, deserves the name; that other sort of training, which aims at the acquisition of wealth or bodily strength, or mere cleverness apart from intelligence and justice, is mean and illiberal, and is not worthy to be called education at all.
from Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, by George Will (1991):
"Proof of the genius of ancient Greece is that it understood baseball's future importance. Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic -- in a word, moral -- undertaking. Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind's noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage. By witnessing physical grace, the soul comes to understand and love beauty. Seeing people compete courageously and fairly helps emancipate the individual by educating his passions."
from The Immoralist, by Andre Gide (1902):
...Do you know the reason why poetry and philosophy are nothing but dead letter nowadays? It is because they have severed themselves from life. In Greece, ideas went hand in hand with life; so that the artist's life itself was already a poetic realization, the philosopher's life a putting into action of his philosophy; in this way, as both philosophy and poetry took part in life, instead of remaining unacquainted with each other, philosophy provided food for poetry, and poetry gave expression to philosophy-- and the result was admirably persuasive. Nowadays beauty no longer acts; action no longer desires to be beautiful; and wisdom works in a sphere apart."
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.
D. H. Lawrence, "Studies in Classic American Literature:"
Let us look at the American artist first. How did he ever get to America, to start with? Why isn't he a European still, like his father before him?
Now listen to me, don't listen to him. He'll tell you the lie you expect. Which is partly your fault for expecting it.
He didn't come in search of freedom of worship. England had more freedom of worship in the year 1700 than America had. Won by Englishmen who wanted freedom, and so stopped at home and fought for it. And got it. Freedom of worship? Read the history of New England during the first century of its existence.
Freedom anyhow? The land of the free! This the land of the free! Why if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will lynch me, and that's my freedom. Free? Why, I have never been in any country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen. Because, as I say, they are free to lynch the moment he shows he is not one of them."
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 way in 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
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