Books: Greek Meets Greek Scholar

GREAT DIALOGUES OF PLATO (525 pp.) —Translated by W.H.D. Rouse—New American Library (50¢).

William Henry Denham Rouse was a Calcutta-born Englishman who became the most learned teacher of Greek and Latin in his time. For a quarter of a century he headed the Perse School in Cambridge, where he made certain that each boy left with a conversational competence in the languages of Homer and Cicero. When he died in 1950 at 86, he left behind him first-rate, down-to-earth translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad that virtually returned Homer's classics to the common man. Total sales in the U.S. alone: 1,000,000...