'Words Massive With the Increment of Years'

“It teaches us to believe that there is something really great and excellent in the world, surviving all the shocks of accident and fluctuations of opinion, and raises us above that low and servile fear, which bows only to present power and upstart authority.” The first classical writer I can remember reading was, unsurprisingly, Homer, in a children’s edition. The Odyssey was treated as an adventure story – which it is -- not unlike Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe – though watered down, cleaned up, made palatable to a twentieth-century neophyte reader raised on cartoons. A few years later I would read Lattimore’s and Fitzgerald’s translations. William Hazlitt’s passage quoted above, from “On Classical Education” (1815), likely sounds grandiose to contemporary readers. I was a lazy student of Latin and never studied Greek. My understanding of Homer and other Greek and Roman writers has been filtered through centuries of subsequent readers. In the case of Homer, I’m lining up…