390 CLASSICAL LITERATURE 



The first /xe'pos dvayvwo-TiKoV emphasizes the great truth that 

 ancient literature is almost without exception the spoken word 

 written, and that unless the word once spoken is heard again the 

 voice of literature loses many of its most significant notes. Not 

 only must there be correct pronunciation of single sounds, but the 

 unique cadences of ancient speech, so different from ours, must be 

 caught and reproduced. The book, the written page, the printed 

 word, must be made, as it were, to disappear; must not stand between 

 author and reader; the voice of the poet, the orator, the philosopher 

 in his conversation on high themes, must speak directly to the ear 

 and mind of the student. The second part TO e^yvptKoV - 

 reminds us that it is the duty of the teaching scholar to remove all 

 the difficulties that lie in the way of complete and intelligent appre- 

 hension and appreciation, manifold as these difficulties are. The 

 third element of the scholar's function TO SiopflumKoV means 

 that the scholar must purify his texts, correcting them so as to bring 

 them as nearly as may be to the words originally spoken. The fourth 

 TO KpiriKov that he must judge the works he studies in their 

 larger relations, especially in the light of the standards, sesthetic 

 and ethical, that either have been set up by the achievements of other 

 masters, whether in classical literature or in other literatures, or 

 may be inferred by the philosopher from the constitution and normal 

 life of the human soul. 



The problems that confront the student of classical literature 

 at the present time may be present problems either because they 

 are perpetual problems hence ever at hand or because they are 

 peculiar to our present age, either newly arisen, or re-arisen, their 

 immediate demand upon us to-day being caused by conditions and 

 emergencies peculiar to these our own times. 



In speaking of some of these "present problems," I have not kept 

 nor shall I hereafter keep distinct these two classes; nor will it be 

 possible to do more than hint at a few of the problems, whether old 

 or new, that call for a solution, or a better solution. These will be 

 taken, in what remains to be said, from the field of the history of 

 classical literature, and will have to do mainly with the demands 

 that may reasonably be made on the historian of classical literature. 

 And by historian of classical literature and the demands to be made 

 on him. I mean not only the writer of formal works on this subject, 

 but the classical scholar, investigator, and teacher who deals with 

 themes from or phases of the subject of the history of classical litera- 

 ture, and the ideals he should set before himself. In touching upon 

 deficiencies in present or past performance, and in sketching the 

 limitations as well as in extending the boundaries of our field, of 

 course many problems will be suggested by implication, though the 

 allusion to them will be brief and the treatment of them sketchy. 



