ly sophistry," or, in other words rationalise, about the
gods.[93] Every one also has rather marvelled at the somewhat lame and
impotent conclusion of the play when Athene--herself in reality one of
the most infamous of the Olympian deities--is brought on the stage to
save the prestige of the oracle at Delphi and to explain away the
altogether disreputable behaviour of the no less infamous Apollo. But no
one before Verrall had thought of coupling together the free-thinking
and the episode in the play. This is what Verrall did. Ion sees that the
oracle can lie, and, therefore, "Delphi is plainly discredited as a
fountain of truth." The explanation is, of course, somewhat conjectural.
Homer, who was certainly not a free-thinker, made his deities
sufficiently ridiculous, and, at times, altogether odious. Mr. Lang says
with truth: "When Homer touches on the less lovable humours of women--on
the nagging shrew, the light o' love, the rather bitter virgin--he
selects his examples from the divine society of the gods."[94] But
whether the very plausible conjectures made by Verrall as to the real
purpose of Euripides in his treatment of the oracle in _Ion_, or, to
quote another instance, his explanation of the phantom in _Helen_, be
right or wrong, no one can deny that what he wrote is alive with
interest. On this point, the testimony of his pupils, albeit in some
respects contradictory, is conclusive. One of them (Mr. Marsh) says: "I
was usually convinced by everything," whilst another (Mr. J.R.M. Butler)
says: "I don't think we believed very much what he said; he always said
he was as likely to be wrong as right. But he made all classics so
gloriously new and living. He made us criticise by standards of common
sense, and presume that the tragedians were not fools and that they did
mean something. They were not to be taken as antiques privileged to use
conventions that would be nonsense in any one else."

Classical learning will not be kept alive for long by forcing young men
with perhaps a taste for science or the integral calculus to apply
themselves to the study of Aristotle or Sophocles. The real hope for the
humanities in the future lies in the teaching of such men as Butcher,
Verrall, Gilbert Murray, Dill, Bevan, Livingstone, Zimmern, and, it may
fortunately be said, many others, who can make the literature of the
ancient world and the personalities of its inhabitants live in the eyes
of the present generation.

[Footnote