The Spirit of Hellenism as a Guide to Life

Abstract

The date is 1880: the scene an undergraduate's rooms in Oxford. The undergraduate, Edward Pargiter, is preparing for his final exams. His performance, he hopes, will earn him a fellowship so that he will then be able to stay at Oxford devoting himself to Greek for the rest of his life. Over many months he has been training for the exam but now, with only a fortnight to go, he has been advised to relax; so he is merely skimming through a plain text of the Antigone, commentaries being unnecessary as he knows the play word by word with the parallel passages, grammatical and textual cruces, metrical analysis, and so on. As he reads he sips a glass of port. Together the port and the mental image of the two girls, Ismene and Antigone, arguing in front of the palace, stimulate erotic sensations which he wills himself to repress, and he does so by concentrating his mind on the first choral passage in which Theban elders sing of the attempt to storm Thebes in hypercharged language containing nothing in the least provocative of sexual images. Nevertheless, thoughts come to him unbidden of his cousin Kitty, with whom he has danced once or twice at college balls and with whom he has fallen in love, regarding her as embodying all that is beautiful, worshipful and desirable in life although he does not in any serious sense know her at all. He abandons the Antigone to write her a poem, but the poem is not a success. His mind, over the last few years, has been so filled with Greek that he can manage nothing better than a pastiche of Theocritus. At least he has been taught enough discrimination to recognise this, and so he tears it into small pieces to escape the prying eyes of his bedmaker.