Classics in Paperbacks

...For remember that in that inner world to which great literature belongs, a man may go on all his life learning to see, but he can never see all that is there...

...So you might as well read the best...

...No tinsel optimist, he nevertheless finds hope for us in our ability to salvage the best of the past: " Try to read good things...

...one boy was bowled over by Norman Vincent Peale and another by Jean-Paul Sartre...

...If you have to make a living, you haven't got enough time to read everything...

...They're both terrific...

...And if there are famous books, generally praised by good judges, which you do not appreciate, give them a fair chance...

...Filled with the prejudice of men who were close enough to the events to be passionate about them, it reminds us—if we have forgotten—that history has as its subject men who were once as alive and vulnerable as you and I. The principal works of one of the major British historians, Samuel Dill, are being published by Meridian Books...

...1 think, feel that it has enriched his life...

...However one develops an interest in the classics, whether (as my student) through a sampling of the texts, or through the persuasive rhetoric of Gilbert Murray, or even through such a chatty popularization of the myths as W. H. D. Rouse's Gods, Heroes and Men of Ancient Greece (Signet, $.50), one soon feels the need for a good reference work...

...Though many readers will hesitate to accept his evaluation of Tennyson as "the modern Vergil" and though others will resent his analysis of the parallelism between details of Joyce's Ulysses and the Odyssey as "artistically pointless," everyone will, I think, be impressed by his enormous industry in demonstrating once and for all that without the classical tradition our literature would be a paltry thing, that all our major authors in one way or another both draw on and support it and that, indeed, without it our civilization itself would be a far different thing...

...three students had separately decided The Sun Also Rises was Hemingway's best book...

...His careful account of the decay of the old Roman religion (in the face of such popular cults as the worship of the Great Mother and the Religion of Mithra) is valuable not only for the specialist but for the reader interested in the development of religious thought at that crucial time...

...Murray is not only learned but witty as well...

...One girl was systematically reading everything Pearl Buck had written...

...Though Hadas in his interpolated comments points out their most obvious inaccuracies, veracity is sacrificed for immediacy...

...A History of Rome from Its Origins to 529 A. D. (Anchor, $.95) links translated passages from more than 50 ancient historians into a chronological history of Rome...

...The Classical Tradition in Poetry (Vintage, $.95...

...Though his book has been supplemented by more recent archeological discoveries, it remains vivid, useful and enormously readable...

...The first to appear, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aureli-us ($1.95), though suffering both from Dill's verbosity and from his disinclination to call a spade a spade, provides nevertheless an accurate and detailed study of the social and religious structure of Rome in the first and second centuries of the Christian era...

...Though some readers may skim over Murray's rather technical study of classical meter or be frightened awav from the book because its subject is poetry, everyone who reads it will...

...Try them from time to time, to see if you enjoy them or understand them better...

...Though originally published in 1864 and beautifully translated into English by Willard Small only a few years afterward, the book has lost none of its freshness...

...he can only hope to see deeper and deeper, more and more, and, as he sees, to understand and to love...

...The roots of the classical civilizations are the concern of Fustel de Coulanges's The Ancient City (Anchor, $.95...

...I read the Odyssey for a required course, and then I wanted to read the Iliad...

...At its best it has the impact of a morning newspaper...

...And his defense of the classics seemed to me very much worth making...

...Make them a part of you...

...And one valued the classics: "The Iliad was the most interesting book I read last year...

...and do not imagine you are wasting time, because you are not...

...It is a remarkable accomplishment...

...This wonderful book is simply too good to miss...

...more significantly, however, he is a thoughtful, wise man...

...Classics in Paperbacks By John Unterecker Instructor of English, CCNY When the fall semester was first getting under way, I asked each of my students at City College what book or author he had found most interesting in his summer reading...

...nd if that seems loo sweeping a statement, all I can do is urge each reader to test it...

...One of the best standard authorities, Oskar Seyffert's Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (Meridian Library, 11.95), has now appeared in the paperbacks...

...I'm confident the book will bear me out...

...Precisely this sort of a defense is central to Gilbert Murray's brilliant set of essays...

...Fus-tel's remarkable insights into the nature of the primitive religions which dominated all aspects of the social organization of ancient Greece and Rome still give us one of the clearest pictures of the evolution of the classical world...

...I expected—and got—all sorts of answers...

...An entirely different sort of history is that assembled by Moses Hadas from the principal Roman historians themselves...

...This is the history of Rome as the Romans knew it...

...Read them over and over...

...Its comprehensive treatment of mythology, literature, religion and art makes it one of the most useful additions to any serious reader's library...

...If Gilbert Murray persuades us of the importance of classical values and if Fustel, Hadas and Dill reconstruct for us the evolution of that classical world, Gilbert Highet in his breathtakingly ambitious survey The Classical Tradition (Galaxy, $2.95) sets as his project the presentation of the major Greek and Roman influences on the whole enormous stretch of Western literature from the fall of Rome to modern times...

...Read the books that you like best...

...My student's choice of Homer struck me, I suppose, because I had been reading a group of books for this review all of which centered on the nature of Greece and Rome and the value of the literatures they created...