led by Professor Gildersleeve into the closest communion with the great
minds of the ancient world and gained that intimate knowledge of their
written word which was the basis of his mental equipment. "Professor
Gildersleeve, splendid scholar that he is!" he wrote to a friend in
North Carolina. "He makes me grow wonderfully. When I have a chance to
enjoy Æschylus as I have now, I go to work on those immortal pieces with
a pleasure that swallows up everything." To the extent that Gildersleeve
opened up the literary treasures of the past--and no man had a greater
appreciation of his favourite authors than this fine humanist--Page's
life was one of unalloyed delight. But there was another side to the
picture. This little company of scholars was composed of men who aspired
to no ordinary knowledge of Greek; they expected to devote their entire
lives to the subject, to edit Greek texts, and to hold Greek chairs at
the leading American universities. Such, indeed, has been the career of
nearly all members of the group. The Greek tragedies were therefore read
for other things than their stylistic and dramatic values. The sons of
Germania then exercised a profound influence on American education;
Professor Gildersleeve himself was a graduate of Göttingen, and the
necessity of "settling hoti's business" was strong in his seminar.
Gildersleeve was a writer of English who developed real style; as a
Greek scholar, his fame rests chiefly upon his work in the field of
historical syntax. He assumed that his students could read Greek as
easily as they could read French, and the really important tasks he set
them had to do with the most abstruse fields of philology. For work of
this kind Page had little interest and less inclination. When Professor
Gildersleeve would assign him the adverb [Greek: prin], and direct him
to study the peculiarities of its use from Homer down to the Byzantine
writers, he really found himself in pretty deep waters. Was it
conceivable that a man could spend a lifetime in an occupation of this
kind? By pursuing such studies Gildersleeve and his most advanced pupils