J.E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship Vol. 1:

“Apart from Homer, the epic poets studied in the Athenian age included those of the ‘Epic Cycle’ (c. 776-566 B.C.) which (as we have already seen) supplied the tragic poets with many of their themes. The Theogony of Hesiod. {floruit c. 720 ? B.C.) was also studied as a text-book of mythology, and the questions which it raised may well have been embarrassing to instructors who had to deal with exceptionally precocious pupils. We are told that Epicurus, before the age of fourteen (c. 328 B.C.), asked certain schoolmasters and sophists some puzzling questions about Hesiod’s account of Chaos; and that, dissatisfied with their replies, he resolved on devoting himself to the study of philosophy’.”

J.E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship

“In connexion with the use of Homer as an educational text-book, we may recall two anecdotes of some little interest in Plutarch’s Life of Alcibiades. We are there told that when Alcibiades ‘was just emerging from boyhood, he went to a school-master and asked him for a book of Homer; and, on the master’s replying that he had nothing whatsoever of Homer’s, Alcibiades struck him with his fist, and went on his way’. Another school-master told him that he ‘had a copy of Homer, emended by himself. ‘What?’ said Alcibiades, ‘are you really content to teach reading and writing, when you are capable of emending Homer ? Why are you not instructing young men?’ The first of these anecdotes shows that a young Athenian held he had a right to expect even an elementary teacher to possess part at least of the poems of Homer; the second presents us with an early example of amateur textual criticism; and both imply that Homer was really better suited as a text-book for young men than for mere children.”

[For fuller treatment of the anecdote about Alcibiades punching his teacher, see this post. ]

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Bk.1 Chp. 4)

“Ever since his first ecstasy or vision of Christminster and its possibilities, Jude had meditated much and curiously on the probable sort of process that was involved in turning the expressions of one language into those of another. He concluded that a grammar of the required tongue would contain, primarily, a rule, prescription, or clue of the nature of a secret cipher, which, once known, would enable him, by merely applying it, to change at will all words of his own speech into those of the foreign one. His childish idea was, in fact, a pushing to the extremity of mathematical precision what is everywhere known as Grimm’s Law—an aggrandizement of rough rules to ideal completeness. Thus he assumed that the words of the required language were always to be found somewhere latent in the words of the given language by those who had the art to uncover them, such art being furnished by the books aforesaid.

When, therefore, having noted that the packet bore the postmark of Christminster, he cut the string, opened the volumes, and turned to the Latin grammar, which chanced to come uppermost, he could scarcely believe his eyes.

The book was an old one—thirty years old, soiled, scribbled wantonly over with a strange name in every variety of enmity to the letterpress, and marked at random with dates twenty years earlier than his own day. But this was not the cause of Jude’s amazement. He learnt for the first time that there was no law of transmutation, as in his innocence he had supposed (there was, in some degree, but the grammarian did not recognize it), but that every word in both Latin and Greek was to be individually committed to memory at the cost of years of plodding.

Jude flung down the books, lay backward along the broad trunk of the elm, and was an utterly miserable boy for the space of a quarter of an hour. As he had often done before, he pulled his hat over his face and watched the sun peering insidiously at him through the interstices of the straw. This was Latin and Greek, then, was it this grand delusion! The charm he had supposed in store for him was really a labour like that of Israel in Egypt.

What brains they must have in Christminster and the great schools, he presently thought, to learn words one by one up to tens of thousands! There were no brains in his head equal to this business; and as the little sun-rays continued to stream in through his hat at him, he wished he had never seen a book, that he might never see another, that he had never been born.

Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.”

Basil Gildersleeve, Hellas and Hesperia

“I am not going to plead for Greek, even if it were only for the Grecians in this audience; for if there is one thing that a classical scholar cares less to read than another, it is a plea for classical scholarship; if there is one thing that a Grecian would fain be excused from hearing, it is an impassioned oration in behalf of Greek studies. For every classical scholar has himself had to plead for classical scholarship, and every Hellenist has lifted up his voice in behalf of Hellenism. We are aweary of our own arguments, our own illustrations; and only a short time since, being called on for some confirmatory remarks on an orthodox exposition of the value of the Greek language and the Greek literature, I felt stirred to pro-test against the whole thing. If the study is doomed, I said, let it die. Living is the test of vitality, for that is the sum and substance of pragmatism, the latest phase of what I may venture to call truistic philosophy — truistic philosophy to match altruistic ethics, of which one hears so much, which one practices so little. If classical culture has outlived its usefulness; if its teachers are squeaking and gibbering ghosts and not real men, let in the light, turn on the current and have done with it. So I am not to make a speech pro domo, for my house, which is my castle, my fortress. Everybody knows every redoubt, every salient. The gabions are all counted, and the fascines all numbered, and the chevaux de frise all roughshod, and the fosse all flooded with ditchwater eloquence. This then is to be no vindication of Greek as a study. Call it an exemplification of Greek as a study and I will not protest so strenuously, Invidious as It may be to set one’s self up as an example of anything, especially when critics have proved triumphantly that I have not profited by my lifelong studies, and that the chaste reserve of my classic models has not properly regulated my style.”