THE GLORY THAT WAS GREECE

In the opinion of Dr. James H. Breasted, who has just returned from a four months stay in Egypt, that "the race that launched a thousand ships" belonged not to a poetic ideal but to a very real person, may lie the seeds of a possible renascence of interest in the study of Greek. Dr. Breasted believes from examinations which he has been conducting among the entombed records of Tut-ankh-amen that Helen of Troy actually lived, and that the much doubted Trojan war was considerably more than a mere fight of fancy on the part of Homer.

Prior to the extraordinary discoveries of Dr. Schliemann on the supposed site of the windy city some decades ago, the whole history of Troy and its attackers and defenders was popularly supposed to be nothing more than a pleasing poetical fabrication, designed primarily to amuse the yokels of Sparta and Macedonia, and--although unwittingly--to provide material for the exercise of ingenuity on the part of countless subsequent generations of Greek classes. The whole train--crafty Ulysses, noble Priam, brave Hector, fair-haired Menelaus, together with the attendant array of angry gods and jealous goddesses, and all the clangor of archaic war, the rumbling of chariots, the crash of spear on shield, and the dominating twang of Apollo's silver bow--was thought to be nothing more than the day dream of an idle afternoon, as the blind minstrel whiled away the sunny hours on some hillside overlooking the sea.

With the discoveries of these two savants, however, and the opinion of Mr. Masefield that the. Trojan War was fought principally for the strategic reason of obtaining possession of the Dardanelles, the study of at least one of the dead languages may take on a certain flavor of romance which almost always attaches itself to the historical past, but which sometimes refuses to grace what is pure fiction. The legend of Roland, for instance, dying in the Roncesvalles, is far more appealing to the imagination than any wholly man made fairy tale. If one can believe, no matter how faintly, in what one reads and hears, interest increases to a surprising extent. While it is of course impossible to expect a sudden passion for the study of Greek similar to that which seized Italy during the Renaissance, it is not unreasonable to predict that the perusal of the Iliad and the Odyssey may be taken up in future with a slightly greater degree of enthusiastic abandon than has prevailed heretofore.