Garry Wills, an Esquire contributing editor with a gift for wit and lucidity, occasionally writes an article that is absolutely unreadable to most people. There was, for instance, his piece in the American Journal of Philology, "The Sapphic 'Umwertung Alter Werte.' " It began: "The poem differs from other early (i.e., pre-Pindaric) Priameln in two respects. First: the catalogue, which seems to be completed in the first strophe with the climactic iyw 8é, is resumed after an interval of three strophes. Second: the relationship between the catalogued values and the climactic one...
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