PROBLEMS OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE 391 



The historian of classical literature has to do, to begin with, with 

 individual authors, with the literary creations of men who were once 

 alive and who spoke each to a particular audience. These men 

 or their work he makes real to himself, and as writer or teacher real 

 also to the world in which he himself lives. He is thus, in the first 

 instance, one who understands and appreciates his author, and, in 

 the second place, an interpreter. 



As one who seeks to understand his author, he must first be able 

 to place himself at the point of view of the reader to whom the book 

 was originally addressed. The writings of the ancients, in spite of 

 their universal appeal, were not written for us; they were written 

 each for a particular audience, and it was that audience that most 

 fully understood them. Hence it is only as we can put ourselves in 

 the place of members of this audience that we can apprehend the 

 meaning of the message they received. This means, in brief, that for 

 the time being we must ourselves be the ancients, must know their 

 language as they knew it, in its power, delicacy, and subtlety of 

 expression, must be familiar with all the circumstances and 

 elements social, religious, political, ethical that conditioned 

 the production and determined the character of the literary works 

 in question; we must respond to every emotion that anciently 

 stirred: we must surround ourselves with the atmosphere spiritual 

 and intellectual that surrounded the original audience. How much 

 this means! It means, for us who live in a different age, a power of 

 keen and discriminating appreciation and an almost limitless learning, 

 vital and vivifying, in many fields, not in language alone, but also 

 in history, in antiquities, in philosophy, in art. 



The student must also be able, in a way, to put himself at the 

 author's point of view; to realize vividly that the author was once 

 a living personality and individuality. This implies the amplest and 

 most sympathetic knowledge possible of the author himself, and of 

 all that will make him intelligible: the world of ideas in which he 

 lives, his characteristic habits of expression whether in his language 

 in its vocabulary, grammar, and idiom, in its rhythmical flow, 

 or in choice and arrangement of his material; recognizing above all 

 that every author is his own best interpreter, to be known only by 

 him who reads and reads and re-reads him time and again. Further- 

 more, enabled in the ways indicated to see and hear and understand 

 his author as he was to the men of his own day, the scholar must be 

 competent to place himself, for the most fruitful contemplation of his 

 author, at what we may call the universal point of view, the point of 

 view at once of common humanity stripped of its accidents, focused 

 on realities, and of the enlightened scholar and wise man who, 

 knowing in an organic way, like a master, the best and most signifi- 

 cant things that men of all times have achieved in letters, with these 



