The young Housman wrote home that he had absented himself from Jowett's lectures in disgust at the Professor's gross ignorance of Greeek. Here we must make allowance for a juvenile excess of rigour; but any page of the original edition of Jowett's famous translation of Plato will supply some evidence in favour of Housman's stern judgment. Even if one could forgive Jowett's deficiencies as a scholar and his reluctance to take action to amend them, what can we say of his openly expressed aversion to research, of his opposition to every scheme calculated to advance sound learning in the University, of his not only failing to perform what are usually held to be the duties of a Professor, but actually coming forward as the main adversary of the interests he might have been expected to protect? Yet it is impossible to ignore the distinctive contribution to the traditions of the Chair made by this remarkable man. The Plato and the Thucydides are defective in point of scholarship; but as literature they have great merits, and they reached, and still reach, a wide public.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "The young Housman wrote home that he had absented himself from Jowett's lectures in disgust at the Professor's gross ignorance of Greeek. Here we must make allowance for a juvenile excess of rigour; but any page of the original edition of Jowett's famous translation of Plato will supply some evidence in favour of Housman's stern judgment. Even if one could forgive Jowett's deficiencies as a scholar and his reluctance to take action to amend them, what can we say of his openly expressed aversion to research, of his opposition to every scheme calculated to advance sound learning in the University, of his not only failing to perform what are usually held to be the duties of a Professor, but actually coming forward as the main adversary of the interests he might have been expected to protect? Yet it is impossible to ignore the distinctive contribution to the traditions of the Chair made by this remarkable man. The Plato and the Thucydides are defective in point of scholarship; but as literature they have great merits, and they reached, and still reach, a wide public." in the context of "Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Blood For the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1982), p. 16" to mean that wisdom is timeless.