The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-04-03
INTEREST IN GREEK.

ward the abolition Of compulsory Greek, there is in the board schools, which are similar to the public schools In this country, an increasing demand for the chance to study Greek. He said that he had been asked by the secre- tary of the Workers Educational as- sooiation to point out in his lectures the need of having In each district school where the sons of working men could If they wished acquire a knowledge or Greek.
 part of the demand. Professor Mur- ray thinks is due to the socialist move- ment, which he describes as being "a sober, thoughtful and conservative" movement in Englanc Students of socialism want to be able to read Plato's Republic" at first hand and England, says Professor Murray. is now express ing what is called there "a secona renaissance of intellectual thought among the working class that if they did not obtain know1edg ge of the class ics "something precious was being with held from them."
 Professor Murray says that there are tooay "a greater number of people who can translate Greek at sight than there ever were" He finds two main reasons for keeping our knowledge of Creek thought and literature always alive" | One Is that "the roots of all that Is progressive in modern civilization lie ia ancient Greece; that our religion comes | from the Greek testament, and our ideas Of freedom and democracy, of the duty of the individual to the state, our cen tral ideas in art and almost the whole of our philosophy are based on some dozen great books written in Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christi" The other is that i've do not want the most beautiful things in the world to die, although if nobody knows Greek they will die, since 1t happens that a great deal of the most beautiful and noble poetry and philosophy and history ever written by men was writ ten by Greeks.
 Professor Murray said that it was at the suggestion of William Archer, and with the assistance of Mir Archer and Granville Barker that he produced his first popular" Greek play. Getting the play ready for stage production had
 
 many passages that had before seemed to have no adequate reason for being. To express the growins interest of the public in the Greek drama in English he mentioned the receiprs for a play that had a four days run. They were f4u, fs0. f160 and f3.0. He said that visiting the theatre on one of the last days he saw a long line of people waiting to buy tickets and thought at first that he had come to the wrong theatre. A large proportion of the au- dience, he said, was made up of peo- pie who knew no Greek, but who wish to learn.
 It is Professor Murray's belief that what is needed nowadays is greater differentiation in education-less effort to give everybody the same kind of training. He said that one of the worst things about the modern movement against the classics is that it tends to do away with what he considers the most valuable part-the pos,ry and philoso- phy of the Greeks, and to retain only the bare facts concerning the achieve ments of the ancients.
 Professor Murray's translations of Greek plays include "Hippolytus,r "Bacchae," "The Trojan women,y .Medea" and "Iphigenia in Tauris" of Euripides and Sophocles' "oedipus Rex"