Greek Is Greater

Let me advise you to study Greek, Mr. Undershaft. Greek scholars are privileged men. Few of them know Greek; and none of them know anything else; but their position is unchallengeable. Other languages are the qualifications of waiters and commercial travellers: Greek is to a man of position what the hallmark is to silver.

Last week a bright-eyed old man sat on a worn leather bench in London's Athenaeum Club and echoed this admonition from Greek Scholar Adolphus Cusins in Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara.

"My belief in Greek is greater than ever," said 84-year-old Gilbert Murray, who 45 years ago served as model for Shaw's brash young classicist. Murray, an author and statesman and, until his resignation in 1936, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, is one of the few men left in a mechanistic age who still "know Greek" and believes in it as part of the education of the full man.

An Ideal Pattern. When Australian-born Gilbert Murray entered St. John's College, Oxford, in the 1880s, the great Greek Scholar Benjamin Jowett, translator of Plato and Master of Balliol College, was one of the most venerated and influential men in England; Gladstone and his Liberals seemed to be among the eternal forces in English politics, and the poetry of Tennyson and Swinburne was much admired. In years to follow, if fewer & fewer men bore the hallmark of the Greek scholar and the classicist, it was not Gilbert Murray's fault.

In 1908 he took over as Regius Professor at Oxford, became one of Britain's reigning Hellenists. He translated 18 tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides into flowing Swinburnian verse, saw successful stage productions of many of them. When enthusiastic playgoers shouted "Murray" and "Author" after one production of a Euripides tragedy translated by Murray, the scholar rose from his seat and said simply that the author had been dead for many years. Nonetheless, Murray's translations of Electro, and Hippolytus made Euripides (484?-4O7 B.C.) an international bestseller in English.

Murray had other interests besides ancient literature. In classical Greece he saw the ideal pattern for the skeptical humanism which guided his own active political life. In party politics Murray was a Liberal, stumped unsuccessfully for Parliament three times. He backed Lloyd George's social reforms, wrote a book commending the policies of Britain's World War I Foreign Secretary, Liberal Sir Edward Grey.

On a broader front, he was an ardent internationalist. After the first World War he was one of England's most active backers of the League of Nations, headed its International Committee of Intellectual Cooperation, helped scores of refugee scholars find jobs in Britain and the U.S. After the League failed, he began plugging for Anglo-American friendship and the United Nations.

A Brisk Walk. Today Octogenarian Murray is still a busy man. He is at work in his book-lined study every morning by 10, reading, writing, annotating. Like his old friend Bernard Shaw, he is a vegetarian and teetotaler, enjoys a brisk daily walk on the heath which borders his comfortable white house on Boar's Hill near Oxford, sometimes wanders down to the university to give a lecture or address the Oxford Liberal Club. He frequently takes the train to London to attend meetings, supervise a BBC production of one of his translations, or discuss the publication of a political article. This winter he and his wife Mary quietly celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary with their two surviving children of five: Stephen, a Laborite barrister, and Rosalind, whose marriage to Historian Arnold Toynbee was dissolved in 1946.

Last week, as proof that he was not resting on his oars, Gilbert Murray brought out his 23rd translation from Greek drama: Aristophanes' extravagant and rowdy comedy, The Birds.*He was thinking now about starting his autobiography. "The trouble is," said Murray, "I've had such a long life. It's going to be an awful lot of work."

*In translating Aristophanes, Murray was promoting no fellow Liberal. One of the most outspoken of Athens' aristocratic conservatives, Aristophanes continually needled the new Athenian democracy; his comedy, The Clouds, was a bitter and libelous attack on Socrates that helped lead to the great philosopher's arrest and execution.

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