Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted . . . [The Odyssey, Book I]
In the beginning, I resisted studying Greek. But studying Greek, as it turned out, wasn’t my choice. Not at McQuaid Jesuit High School in 1955. Anyway, I was just a naïve kid who liked running around on courts and playing fields; how was I to know this was going to be the best damn set of courses I would ever take at any school, anywhere.
I was having a good time playing three sports at McQ—lettering in basketball, football and baseball – and with the practices and the study workload there was time for little else. I had sort of had a girlfriend, but I saw her so infrequently I probably couldn’t have picked her out of a line-up of girls in Catholic girl school uniforms. But in the sophomore year, students were chosen for “honors” programs, one of which was “Greek Honors.” In place of one period of study hall each day (except on Friday, when that period was used for mass) those “honored” to study Greek would spend the period with Fr. White, our Odysseus.
Greek Honors was a double-whammy; not only would I lose the study period to get a jump on my homework, but between 20 and 30 lines of Homer’s Odyssey would need to be translated for the following day.
At first I went to see Fr. Kelly, the principal, to ask if I could be excused from the honor of classical Greek because I had after school practice for one sport or another every day and usually didn’t get started on my homework until at least 8 PM. Adding 20 or so lines of Homer to the 30 Latin lines or so of Caesar’s Gallic Wars was going to cause both my grades and athletic performance to suffer.
Fr. Kelly just smiled. It was a smile that would have been most suitable for a 16th-century inquisitor—only the mouth smiled, the eyes remained cold, inexpressive, and fixed on me, like a snake sizing up a mouse. He could, and usually did, speak while holding this “smile.”
“Well James,” he said softly, “McQuaid has brought the best Greek teacher in the New York Province here so that you could benefit from the Greek Honors curriculum. Your first-year grades make you eligible for that honor. So, if you are concerned about your performance on the field and court more than this honor, you can take those skills to the Catholic boys school across town.”
Notice he said “boys school.” We were always referred to as “men” of McQuaid, never boys. He was putting down Aquinas Academy at the same time he was putting me in my place. That was it, no argument, no appeal or rejoinder, no requesting a letter from my parents; the Jesuits knew what was best for me, even if I couldn’t see it. “give us the boys and we’ll show you the man,” they like to say.
I could, and did, go on playing ball, but I had added a new team—the band of Ithacans roaming the Eastern Mediterranean with their royal captain, Odysseus, and I had better show up ready to play in that game with the Laestrigonians.
As things turned out it was, educationally, the best thing that ever happened to me. I didn’t like knuckling under to Fr. Kelly, but I ended up liking Homer a hell of a lot more than I thought I would. The Odyssey became, and remains all these years later, my all-time favorite book, in some measure because it is the only book I ever (participated in) translating from the original Greek. Fr. White was a gentle, patient teacher, and seemed to enjoy wandering from adventure to adventure in the eastern Mediterranean as much or more than his band of students. He was our Odysseus, or “eye” on the prow of our trireme, our captain, as he led us to the land of the Lotus Eaters, past Scylla and Charybdis, and into the cave of Polyphemos, the Cyclops–all the way back to our queen, Penelope.
I have forgotten much of the Greek, although its roots, its forms, are always sticking up through the soil of English. Ever since, they have been a indispensable aid to me, as The Odyssey has been a jewel mine of insight on various aspects of human behavior as sung by a blind poet some eight centuries before Christ.
Many years later, my study of Greek actually played a practical, and important, role in my life. We were in Athens, my family and I, in 1979, having driven in a VW all the way from Amsterdam, and youngest daughter Lisa was sick. She had been feverish and flu-ish since Rome and now was quite sick in our rather crummy, cheap hotel at the edge of the Plaka. I had managed to get a prescription from a local doctor for some anti-biotics, having been directed to his office rather late at night by American Express. I just had to get it filled.
I was told by the desk clerk that there was a pharmacy a couple of blocks away. I drove around in our little VW Rabbit, looking for some evidence of it at the late hour. But then there wasn’t going to be a place called “Pharmacy” in Athens, where the signs were almost all in Greek. I was beginning to panic when I spotted a place with a sign that read
“Oh, thank you Fr. White, even thank you Fr. Kelley,” I shouted. Right, apotheke, the root word for “apothecary,” the precursor of the pharmacy. “Gotta be the place.”
And it was. Prescription filled, I did feel a bit like Odysseus, the king of Ithaca who thought up the Trojan Horse idea, and led his men around the eastern Mediterranean on one adventure after another. He was called the “one who is never at a loss,” the man who lives by his wits and his resources and whose nickname, “polu mekon,” I adopted it as my own.* My “classical” Greek was almost useless in modern-day Greece; they speak a completely different form of the language, although many words are decipherable because the roots are still there, as is the Greek alphabet. But Odysseus taught me that it pays to know your ABCs, whatever they might look like.
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©2006, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 6.21.2006)
* I also adopted, from another Greek, Heraclitus, the words that I use as my daily existential reminder–panta rei kai ouden menai (all things change, nothing remains the same). Well, except father Kelly’s smile.