Education: Homogeneous Homer

To compile his Concordance to Euripides, Classicist James T. Allen spent 43 years arranging 250,000 index cards in a nightmare game of "philological solitaire." Had he used a computer, Allen could have done the job in twelve hours. So says Classicist James T. McDonough Jr., 27, of Philadelphia's St. Joseph's College, who uses modern electronics to analyze Greek metrics. McDonough has done as much for Homer, and as a consequence of this odd work he can almost definitely answer an old scholarly question: Did one man or many men write the Iliad?

A Boston-born product of Boston College High School, where Jesuits...