I finally screwed up my courage and spoke to the Regius professor of Greek. All year long I had gone to every lecture that E. R. Dodds gave at Oxford. He spoke of Classics in what was to me a fresh way, deeply grounded in the texts, of course, but passionate and full of delight. For an American student, just beginning the study of the Classics, and far behind his well-trained British contemporaries in preparation, it was amazing to witness Dodds’ mastery of the field, and his patent love of what he taught.
Finally, after one of his lectures, on the Agamemnon, maybe, I went up to him and stammered out just that. It would have been so easy for him to dismiss me with the scorn many Englishmen reserved for inept colonials. Instead Dodds smiled and ask me in his gentle Irish accent which college. I was at..
“ University College, sir.”
“Ahh, that’s my old college. Do you live in college?”
“Yes, sir, now I do.”
“Where are your rooms?”
“Past the Shelby Memorial. One flight up. Overlooking the High.”
“With a window seat that juts out over the High?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Those are my old rooms.”
This was too good to be true. I could think of nothing better and nothing at all to say. Dodds seemed not to mind the silence; had he retreated into a reverie?
“We used to heat pennies in the fireplace until they were red hot and then drop them onto the sidewalk on the High Street, We laughed when people bent to pick them up, then dropped them because they were still hot.”
That was it. We both laughed and went our separate ways.
It would be easy, I suppose, to make a metaphor out of those pennies, or an allegory even. Dodds; scholarship still has a bright glow to it. And the Classics? A little too hot to handle some of the time? I never tried to attach such meaning to our conversation. What stays with me is the shared laughter, fleeting, but never forgotten.
I
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