The Iliad and The Odyssey are glorious, but the texts themselves are designed to be easy to recite, because the bards themselves could not read. Think on that if you found Boris Johnson's Ancient Greek recitation at all impressive.
By all accounts he has misremembered half of it and his pronunciation is awful. But even that is beside the point. He will have learned to recite The Iliad at school. His Classics degree ought to have taught him to analyse it. Ask him for some analysis, and then we might see how clever he really was.
Think that Rebeca Long-Bailey, Jeremy Corbyn, or any of Labour’s comprehensive educated front bench to recite the Iliad (or any other classic literature)? HAHA! To ask is to know the answer.
ReplyDeleteThe leftists who destroyed great education for the poor by destroying grammar schools have ensured only Eton boys have this ability now.
There is no higher skill in reciting something that you were taught by rote in school, and in any case by all accounts he cannot even do that. This recitation is impressing only people who have little or no Classics, while trained Classicists are laughing it out.
DeleteBut I say again that mere recitation would not be a higher skill even if he could do it, which it seems to be perfectly clear that he cannot. The mark of his intelligence would be his analysis, of which he has none.
I've seen the clip and I don't think he knows what the words mean. It must have been very easy to get a 2:1 in Classics from Oxford in 1987, although he claims that he was mostly an ancient historian and philosopher, which might account for it up to a point. Remember that incident with The Road to Mandaly? He didn't even know what those words meant, and they were in English. He is that public school type, taught to recite the pub quiz answers and the party pieces but with no capacity for original thought. Truly, a stupid person's idea of a clever person.
ReplyDeleteThat does seem to be the consensus, yes. And then there is his claim to turn to that, the opening passage of The Iliad, for consolation in times of trouble. Consolation of what kind, exactly? Not only does he not know what the words mean, as is common consent among those who do, but unlike the rest of us he has never even read the passage in translation. He has no idea what it is about.
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