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  WHAT IS A CLASSIC?: A Lecture In October of 1944, as Allied forces were battling on the Euro- pean mainland and German rockets were falling on London, Thomas Stearns Eliot, aged fifty-six, gave his presidential address to the Virgil Society in London. In his lecture Eliot does not men- tion wartime circumstances, save for a single reference—oblique, understated, in his best British manner—to "accidents of the pres- ent time" that had made it difficult to get access to the books he needed to prepare the lecture. It is a way of reminding his auditors that there is a perspective in which the war is only a hiccup, how- ever massive, in the life of Europe. The title of the lecture was "What Is a Classic?" and its aim was to consolidate and reargue a case Eliot had long been advancing: that the civilization of Western Europe is a single civilization, that its descent is from Rome via the Church of Rome and the Holy Roman Empire, and that its orig