We ALL Hated Caesar

Alston Hurd Chase, Time Remembered (2.1):

“In my first year at Andover I gained the reputation of being a very easy teacher who passed nearly everyone. Accordingly, everyone who had failed Latin tried to get into my classes the following year. However, I had learned a hard lesson for in the College Entrance Examinations, which all Andover students were obliged to take in those days, most of my students failed miserably and I returned in the fall a changed man. I still recall with shudders my Latin II class that second year. It met at 4 in the afternoon in an overheated room crowded with last year’s failures, many of them athletes fresh from their sports but, alas, not always fresh from showers. My memory is vivid of the smell of sweaty bodies, hot steam pipes and monumental wrestlings with Caesar. We spent two or three weeks on Chapter 40 of the first book of the Gallic Wars, a solid block of Caesar’s most involved indirect discourse, which I was resolved that they should master. They hated Caesar, they hated me, and I hated Caesar, but, fortunately, not them.”