Learning Greek Research Articles

How the French Humanists of the Renaissance Learned Greek

The history of Hellenism in the French Renaissance includes not only the leading intellectual figures of France, but also the record of an heroic and idealistic enterprise, embarked upon with courage and enthusiasm, carried on with tenacity, and brought to a brilliant and successful conclusion in the numerous editions of the Greek classics which appeared from 1507 to the end of the century. Ample testimony is available concerning the modest beginnings from the time when Robert Gaguin and Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples acquired a smattering of Greek from Gregorio Tifernas during his short stay in France in 1456, to the period of official recognition of Greek studies by the founding of the College royal in 1530.

The Garland of Meleager

Perhaps it is a little late to deprecate the decline of ‘Verses’. Nevertheless such of us as put our trust in a classical renaissance after the war cannot but hope that that branch of scholarship in which Britain was and still is pre-eminent will survive and flourish again in happier times.In Lorna Doone John Ridd describes his second in his fight at Blundell's: ‘A rare ripe scholar he was, and now he hath routed up the Germans in the matter of criticism.’ It would be interesting to know who that contemporary of Bentley might have been, because we British do not appear to be cut out for ‘scholars’ in the formal sense. We have yet to produce a Madvig or a Cobet, and it is doubtful whether we ever shall. Constitutionally we are apt to be not so interested in externals as in internals; and once having learned Greek and Latin we wanted to write them and express great thoughts in them. So we invented ‘Verses’.Wilamowitz, it is recorded, once attempted to compose a Greek iambic in order to illustrate a point of metre. The result was ludicrous. It is extraordinary how so great a scholar could have been so poor at manipulating the language. It is doubtful whether the author of the Prolegomena Xenophontea could have composed a set of verses in any wise comparable to those produced by Thomas Saunders Evans as a boy at Shrewsbury, and although the latter never exhibited the extreme form of precociousness which enabled the Dutch scholar to acquire an international reputation in the early twenties, the praise he once earned from his headmaster when announcing the winning copy of hexameters could hardly have been higher: ‘Gentlemen, the copy of verses which has been awarded the prize this year is worthy of Vergil!’ No wonder another copy of verses written by a Shrewsbury boy at that time and secreted among some Oxford papers won a University prize!

Reflections on Fourth Dimension

For over two thousand years Euclid was the accepted authority for geometry. In fact, in England the terms “reading geometry” and “reading Euclid” were considered synonymous. The learned Greek mathematician founded his geometry upon a set of axioms whence he derived all his theorems. These axioms, or truths, he derived from his own experiences, being unable to prove any of them. There was one which subsequent mathematicians did not consider self-evident, and which they tried fruitlessly for centuries to prove. It is a long, involved declaration which is equivalent to the statement that “through a point outside a line, only one parallel can be drawn to the line,” and is universally known as the “eleventh axiom of parallels.”

WHAT THE ANCIENTS KNEW CONCERNING OBSTETRICS RICS AND GYNÆCOLOGY.

Presented to the Section on Obstetrics and Gynæcology of American Medical Association, June, 1883.] A short time since I was presented by my friend Dr. Dickinson with a Latin folio edition of all the extant works of the two most valuable Greek medical compilers, Oribasius and Ætius. The book itself is some 300 years old, and in a good state of preservation —never having been read, and though published only a little over 100 years after the invention of printing, could scarcely be excelled in mechanical execution at the present day. But any value that might be attached to this is utterly lost in the priceless value of its contents. Oribasius, a learned Greek physician of the fourth century, was court physician to the Emperor Julian, and wrote his great work, the Hebdomekontabiblos or Seventy Volumes—a compilation of all that was known of medicine, at the order of Julian, who

A Bio-Bibliographical Note on Coray

The publication of Coray's correspondence with Chardon de la Rochette (Lettres inédites de Coray, Paris, 1877) and of the little autobiography prefixed to the volume makes us pretty familiar with the circumstances of Coray's life from 1790 to 1796. But, as there are still some obscure points in his history during this period, the following notes may perhaps some day be of interest, whenever a complete biography of the illustrious Hellene comes to be written.(1) In 1800 Coray published an edition of Hippocrates περὶ ἀέρων, ὑδάτων, τόπων, his letters showing that he had been for years hard at work on this author. There are probably very few in this country who know that at the time of the Revolution Coray was in constant communication with two English scholars, Thomas Burgess, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, and Holmes, the editor of the Septuagint; and that he in 1792 contributed to an almost forgotten Oxford publication, the Musei Oxoniensis litterarii conspectus et specimina, edited by Burgess, a paper of Emendations on Hippocrates. The learned Greek is thus introduced by the editor to the English readers of the Museum:—‘Emendationes in Hippocratem nunc editas accepi cum duobus aliis fasciculis ab auctore eruditissimo sagacissimoque, hodie medico Parisiensi, V. Cl. Corayio, qui ad prelum Oxoniense parat Observationes in omnia Hippocratis opera.’

1. On the Pronunciation of Greek

On the revival of learning at the middle of the fifteenth century, the Hellenists of Europe took the pronunciation of Greek from their teachers, the learned Greek refugees who fled from Constantinople when that city was taken by the Turks in 1453, and who carried with them the Greek language, both as the living people who used it, and as the inheritors of the rich store of philological learning accumulated by an unbroken succession of Alexandrian, Roman, and Byzantine scholars.