Canton Youth – Homeric Greek Scholar

 Conor Shea of Canton, a senior at Boston College High School, gave a stellar performance in successfully translating and answering questions about Homer’s Odyssey in Bulger Auditorium on the Dorchester campus on April 9. Along with thirteen other senior classmates, Shea is a member of BC High’s prestigious Homeric Academy, a College Level course offered to students who have successfully completed two years of Classical Greek.

These fourteen students, under the guidance of Ms. Maureen Toner , devoted themselves to an intensive reading of the 1,000 lines of the Odyssey and prepared all year for the public oral examination, an academic exercise that BC High has been offering for 49 years.

At the defense, which is regarded as a final examination, Dr. Leonard Muellner PhD of the Brandeis Classics Department and Dr. Robin McGill PhD of Wheaton College's Classics Department were the examiners. They asked the students to translate and interpret passages from various parts of the Odyssey, to comment on the literary and historical significance of the passage, to read in Greek, to discuss scholars’ analyses of the poem, and to offer their own opinions, based on their year-long studies.

The examiners and the audience, who also questioned the panelists, were several hundred students and a large number of faculty members, parents and alumni all of whom were most impressed with the team’s performance. Shea received College level credit for this rigorous course.

Boston College High School is a Jesuit, Catholic, college-preparatory school for young men founded in 1863.  The school enrolls approximately 1600 students from more than 100 communities in eastern Massachusetts. For more http://www.bchigh.edu