WISDOM AND CLASSICS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3822, 16 October 1936, Page 3

WISDOM AND CLASSICS

“Latin prose provides the finest ‘mental gymnastics’ that has yet been discovered. A classical education develops powers of judgment, the critical faculty and accuracy. In addition to those ‘purely educational reasons,’ classical studies are valuable because they introduce all who take, them up to wfhat is still the greatest human literature in the world.

“A knowledge of the Iliad, of the works of Sophocles and Aeschylus, of Plato and Thucdides, is abundantly worth while in forging one’s outlook on life. They bring to the disturbed world of to-day a knowledge of certain fundamentals discovered by those great Greeks who were the inspirers of all that is finest in civilisation.

“Their thoughts, sentiments, imagery and experience, enshrined by artist writers, are a great heritage. If the study of Geek literature, even more than Latin, goes out of the life and experience of our country, the country will be the porer for it. “The tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus teach a great lesson —if men revolt against the fundamental laws of human behaviour, inevitably retribution follows. That is as true of all life to-day, in pulbic life and in politics, as it was when written four or five hundred years before Christ.” —Mr Ormsby Gore, in a speech at Shrewsbury College.