13 July 1835, Monday
Cambridge, Massachusetts; Harvard University
Greek Dialogue on "Decius and Cato" with Manlius S. Clarke

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Walter Harding reports that Thoreau, at the end of his sophomore year at Harvard College, was awarded twenty-five dollars "exhibition money" for high grades and participated in a class honors exhibition on 13 July 1835 (Days, p. 36). The programme for that exhibition ("Order of Performances for Exhibition, Monday, July 13, 1835" [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard College, 1835]) lists eleven presentations involving a total of sixteen students. The third event is described as follows:

A Greek Dialogue. "Decius and Cato."
       MANLIUS STIMSON CLARKE, Norton
       DAVID HENRY THOREAU, Concord

We assume, based on the order of their names in the programme, that Clarke recited the part of Decius and Thoreau the part of Cato. The manuscript Clarke and Thoreau read from is at MH-UA (6834.37), and the authoritative text appears in Transl, pp. 145-47. Ethel Seybold has published on the sources of this dialogue ("The Sources of Thoreau’s ‘Cato-Decius Dialogue,’" Studies in the American Renaissance 1994, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), pp. 245-50).