{"id":339,"date":"2013-02-25T11:10:39","date_gmt":"2013-02-25T11:10:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/?p=339"},"modified":"2013-04-11T17:56:07","modified_gmt":"2013-04-11T17:56:07","slug":"my-favorite-commentary-william-turpin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/2013\/02\/25\/my-favorite-commentary-william-turpin\/","title":{"rendered":"Favorite Commentaries: William Turpin"},"content":{"rendered":"

What is your favorite classical commentary? \u00a0What place did it have in your intellectual development? Recently I asked the members of the DCC editorial board to write for the blog about these questions. Here is the response of William Turpin, Professor of Classics at Swarthmore College, and author of the DCC edition of Ovid’s Amores<\/em>, Book 1<\/a>:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In practice the most important commentaries are simply those that help me with the language. Daniel\u00a0Garrison\u2019s editions of Catullus and Horace, for instance, explain the things that he believes students will\u00a0usually find mysterious, and that frees up my mind to concentrate on everything else. If I can\u2019t\u00a0understand a passage after checking the commentary, at least I know that it\u2019s my fault.<\/p>\n

The transformative commentaries in my own life have been those of T. E. Page, on Vergil. The small red\u00a0volumes of text and commentary published by Macmillan were as iconic for classicists of my generation\u00a0as OCTs and Loebs, and not just because they are so wonderfully portable. Their authors are deeply\u00a0learned, insightful, and stimulating, though even relatively modern editions were probably unrealistic in\u00a0what they expected of their readers; Kenneth Quinn, in 1970, could expect students of Catullus 51 to\u00a0profit from his quoting Sappho 31 in the original Greek, with no translation.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em>Thomas Ethelbert Page (1850-1936), spent 37 years as a master at Charterhouse, one of the great English\u00a0\u201cpublic schools\u201d (or we would say \u201cprivate boys\u2019 schools\u201d). He remained at Charterhouse despite offers\u00a0of headships of other public schools, and even the chair of Latin at Cambridge. He is also the subject of\u00a0a short biography by the distinguished Latinist Niall Rudd, (T. E. Page: Schoolmaster Extraordinary<\/a>,\u00a01981), which I have not seen, and there is apparently a portrait of him at St. Johns College, Cambridge.<\/p>\n

\"[t-e-page.jpg]\"<\/a>

T.E. Page<\/p><\/div>In his 1929 autobiography, Good-bye to All That<\/em> (which is mostly about his experiences as an infantry\u00a0officer in the First World War), the poet Robert Graves mentions the profound influence Page\u2019s teaching\u00a0had on him. English poetry, in those days, was rarely taught in schools, which concentrated on Latin and\u00a0Greek, but Page\u2019s love of poetry and poetic language had a profound effect on Graves, no doubt on\u00a0hundreds of other boys, and on readers of his commentaries.<\/p>\n

A good example of what I mean is offered by Page\u2019s comments on the first two lines of Eclogue I:<\/p>\n

Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi
\nsilvestrem tenui Musam meditaris avena
\nnos patriae fines et dulcia linquimus arva:
\nnos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra
\nformosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas.\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps I might have found these lines appealing without Page\u2019s help; they are, after all, some of the\u00a0most important lines in western literature. But Page can pull the language apart in a way that I have never\u00a0found easy: he comments on \u201cthe marked antithesis between tu<\/em> and nos<\/em> repeated in inverse order, and the\u00a0pathetic repetition of patriae<\/em> and patriam<\/em>.\u201d And Page enriches our connection with Musam meditaris<\/em> by\u00a0quoting Milton in Lycidas: \u201cand strictly meditate the thankless Muse.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of this is the standard stuff of commentaries, and Page is by no means a comprehensive guide to what\u00a0we would now call the \u201creception\u201d of Vergil. Moreover his taste in \u201cmodern\u201d poetry would now be\u00a0considered downright reactionary; I remember him as referring above all to Milton, to the Psalms, and I\u00a0think also Shelley. But he was the first classicist I encountered in print who gave me a sense of what\u00a0made Latin poetry, and English poetry, worth reading.<\/p>\n

William Turpin<\/p>\n

image source: Michael Gilleland<\/a> (no known copyright restrictions)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is your favorite classical commentary? \u00a0What place did it have in your intellectual development? Recently I asked the members of the DCC editorial board to write for the blog about these questions. Here is the response of William Turpin, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[61800,1],"tags":[61785,61784,61751],"class_list":["post-339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-favorite-commentaries-2","category-uncategorized","tag-favorite-commentaries","tag-t-e-page","tag-william-turpin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}