Popularity Of Paperback Classics

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31115, 19 July 1966, Page 8

Popularity Of Paperback Classics

Supermarkets, motels, and “masses” of good paperbacks was one of the outstanding impressions gained by Sir Ronald Syme, Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University, when he last visited the United States in 1956. In Christchurch this week he said he found that New Zealand was following in the same footsteps.

Sir Ronald Syme said that during the last 15 years he had found many moire people in England and Europe reading the classics. Translations in paperback editions had done much to stimulate the interest of readers, but one of the difficulties in New Zealand was to get enough paperbacks. He is in New Zealand at the invitation of the University Grants Committee to give talks at universities and to classical groups. Sir Ronald Syme was born in Eltham in 1903 and educated at Stratford High School. He began reading for a B.A. and LLJB. degree on a junior university scholarship at Victoria University College, but soon gave up the study of law. Before he had completed his BA. he was appointed lecturer to the Auckland University College

classics department, and later acting-professor of classics while still an undergraduate. He was awarded a postgraduate scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford, in 1925, and four years later became a

Fellow of Trinity College. Apart from leave for diplomatic appointments in the Balkans and Turkey early in the Second World War he was at Trinity College until 1949, when he took up his present position at Oxford University. Sir Ronald Syme will give a public lecture in he University of Canterbury hail at 8.15 p.m. today on the ttae Eng-

lish historians. Gibbon, Macaulay and Toynbee. “The Augustan poets without Augustus” will be the title of his address to the Christchurch Classical Association on Thursday evening. Sir Ronald Syme said that the newly awakened interest in the classics was "a good thing” and a good display of books did much to stimulate it. “The reading public is much more intellectual today than it was in my early years. If you get an enlightened public, then you need experts to satisfy their need,” he said. He said that everywhere there was the danger of such

subjects as history and literature being squeezed out by science and technology, yet scientists were often the best friends of such studies. Sir Cyril Hinshelwood, a former president of the Royal Society, had Taler become president of the Classical Association. The need was being felt in many countries for classical studies. The move was away from old fashioned methods of teaching, old fashioned grammar and philology. Sir Ronald Syme said that In his public lecture he proposed to show how Gibbon, Macaulay and Toynbee became historians, and why they chose the subjects they did.