Series 03: John Brady Nash letters, January 1914-December 1915 - Page 530
Primary tabs
Transcription
[Page 530]
Further converse with you until tomorrow. I just feel fit to write away for a couple of hours, but were I to do so I should be falling asleep tomorrow morning while sitting doing ordinary work. Is there of us any who, twelve months ago, had thought that the Dardanelles Strait and the peninsula of Galipoli would, ere the annual rotation of the bodies of the firmament had taken place, be so closely linked with the history of our Australia. There may be those who would dare to remark – "I told you so – , but they would be playing with the truth and be romancers after the event when any may flatter himself that he was, in his own mind, a prophet.
Just think of it? The lands so close to the spots where of Homer and Virgil wrote two thousand more years ago being so closely knit with the history of that part of the earth which but for one hundred and thirty years has been peopled by those of the Caucasion race? No I do not believe that one mind in the world had built up any connection between the so young and so old.
Both the Greek and the Roman sang of times and events long anterior to the date when each filled a place in the atmosphere of the world. Though more familiar with the latin author Virgil, than with the Greek Homer, I could narrate to you anecdotes from each, which have been impressed upon the remembering tablets of my mind since childhoods days. Let one suffice. Virgil links up the destruction of Troy, just South of the place where the Australians have been fighting the Turks for five months, with the foundation of Rome. The date of the former has been lost in antiquity, while the latter is writ out to be 750 years before Christ. Aneas of Troy after the taking of his native city set out with various members of his family and his household gods to trust himself and them to the mercy of the seas. His wanderings were the subject of the Iliad. Finally he arrived on the coast of Italy. There his descendants Romulus and Remus, in the course of time laid the foundations of the imperial city. The story was so well told that it has lasted two thousand years as the standard from which must be taken the knowledge of the latin language which was spoken at the time. Not withstanding the hate of school boys and the anathemas piled by them upon the head of the author, his story is immortal, & it is as fresh to day as when it was first read.
But I really must stop. Were my business solely writing I shoud go on because my thoughts are running freely, the condition of my brain being such that memory is fresh and the material stored there is chasin one sentence upon the other to get plac[e]d or record as the out put of that unit in the cosmos of today, named by his parents John Brady Nash, and arranged by God to be father to four charming girls who