Atdtda29: Eridanus, actually, 823-825

[Paul Nightingale]

[825.14-21] Meanwhile, out on deck, Lady Quethlock was engaged in
conversation with two other spies pretending to be idiots.

"No, no," she was saying, "not gold, not gems, not oil or ancient artifacts,
but the source of the world's most enigmatic river."

"What, the Nile? But--"

"Eridanus, actually."

"But that's the old Po, isn't it?"

"If you believe Virgil, who's fairly late in the game ..."


Disinterested knowledge, then--and most certainly never oil.


Cf. the earlier explosion of popular culture ...


[823.26-29] The little orchestra struck up the lively two-step currently
sweeping civilized Europe, and Bevis, seizing Jacintha, began to stagger
quite uncoordinatedly about the pocket-sized saloon, while the game lass did
her best to follow his lead ...


Music as sex? Perhaps.


On the importance of a classical education--the following is from an article
in The Times, May 1916, co-authored by Viscount Bryce:


It is our conviction that the nation requires scientific method and a belief
in knowledge, even more than physical science, and that the former is by no
means identical with the latter. We might enthrone physical science in all
our schools without acquiring as a nation what we most need, the persuasion
that knowledge is essential to success and that this knowledge means facts
laboriously gathered, wisely selected and carefully tested. This scientific
method is not the peculiar property of physical science; all good work in
all studies is based upon it, it is indispensable to law, history, classics,
politics and all branches of knowledge rightly understood. 

What we want is scientific method in all the branches of an education which
will develop human faculty to the highest possible degree. 

In this education we believe that the study of Greece and Rome must always
have a large part, because our whole civilization is rooted in the history
of these peoples, and without knowledge of them cannot be properly
understood. The small city communities of Greece created the intellectual
life of Europe. In their literature we find models of thought and expression
and meet the subtle and powerful personalities who originated for Europe all
forms of poetry, history and philosophy, and even physical science itself,
no less than the ideal of freedom and the conception of a self-governing
democracy; while the student is introduced to the great problems of thought
and life at their springs before he follows them through the wider but more
confused currents of the modern world. Nor can it be right that the educated
citizens of a great empire should remain ignorant of the first state that
met the problem of uniting in a contented and prosperous commonwealth
nations differing in race, temper and culture, and which has left so deep a
mark on the language, law and political conceptions of Europe. Some
knowledge of Latin is indispensable for the intelligent study of any one of
these things, and even for the intelligent use of our own language. Greece
and Rome afford us unique instances, the one of creative and critical
intelligence, the other of constructive statesmanship. Nor can we afford to
neglect the noble precepts and shining examples of patriotism with which
their history abounds. 


In: Andrew F. West, Value of the Classics, Princeton University Press, 1917,
346-347.