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The ideal classicist is surely one who understands "the linguistic minutiae of the text" (É«ºÐÖ±²¥S, September 29), but who can also employ modern literary critical and anthropological theory in his or her analysis of a text. The literary critic with inferior linguistic skill produces bad scholarship. The philologist who closes his or her mind to literary criticism produces dull scholarship.

What is needed, I suggest, is a synthesis of the "traditionalist" and "modernist" viewpoints.

Helen Cullyer PhD student, department of classics Yale University