The Magic of Classics

Classics

The Magic of Classics

classicus: first-class, belonging to the highest class of citizens; classical.

Classics—the study of Latin and ancient Greek and the history, literature and culture of ancient Rome and of Athens (especially in the 5th Century B.C.)—is enjoying something of a renaissance today. The languages themselves, quite apart from their intrinsic beauty, are a tremendous mental discipline and will help the student to understand the structure and grammar of modern European languages, as well as greatly enriching his vocabulary and syntactical understanding of English. They will also teach him to think more clearly.

Not only do we have much to learn from the history of these great civilisations which largely form the basis of our own, but their literatures contain some of the finest, most perceptive and most moving works in the history of letters. As for Greek philosophy, it furnished the world with 800 years of thought, unrivalled in its fearless and witty exploration of man and his relationship to the cosmos.

Greaco-Roman mythology provides us with memorable and powerful stories that reveal the dynamics of the human imagination and describe the fascinating process of psychological development that human beings are forever undergoing. The greatest classics of Greek mythology are Homer’s two epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey. The first stars Achilles, the Greek warrior, who in seeking glory in the world, succumbs to the rage of ambition and wounded pride. The second has at its centre a very different kind of hero, Odysseus, who is identified by the epithet πολυτροπος, meaning both ‘much-travelled’ and ‘turning many ways’. His story is that of the return journey or second half of life, when the quest is an interior one and the principal enemy one’s own demons.

Greek drama, which in its tragic form was inspired by episodes from mythology, is still—with the exception of Shakespeare—unsurpassed for its psychological penetration and ability to dramatize mankind’s deepest moral dilemmas. And how strikingly modern it can seem! The hero’s alienation in Sophocles, whether it be that of Ajax, Oedipus or Philoctetes, leads us to question our own relationship as individuals with society and the unseen cosmic powers. Ajax’s cry of ἡμεῖς δὲ πῶς οὐ γνωσόμεσθα σωφρονεῖν; (‘And we—must we not learn discretion?’), which is the turning point of the play that bears his name and ironically marks his inner resolve to commit suicide, surely reverberates in the soul of Western man today. The study of Latin and Greek is an unwilting aid to the development of discretion.

Latin literature is no less challenging, though its foremost strengths are in poetry, history and philosophy. Lucretius, Catullus, Cicero, Caesar, Sallust, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Livy, Seneca the Younger—it is an impressive list. The Romans themselves recognized Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid as their greatest literary treasure and a profound mirror of the national soul. (As the story of a nation’s origins it is unsurpassed.) T.S. Eliot described it as ‘the classic of all Europe.’

As for the lexical influence of the Classical languages on our own, we cannot speak a sentence without being reminded of it.  Of the significant nouns used in this piece, ‘politics’, ‘philosophy’, ‘psychology’, ‘mythology’, ‘drama’, ‘grammar’, ‘epic’, ‘demon’ and ‘Europe’ are all Greek, while ‘literature’, ‘culture’, ‘civilisation’, ‘renaissance’, ‘quest’ and ‘imagination’ are Latin.

The spread of Latin through the reach of the Roman Empire made it the language of South and Western Europe as well as of the Christian Church. And for well over a thousand years after the fall of Rome in 476 AD, Latin was not only the lingua franca of educated Europe, but the language in which scientific and philosophical works were most often written. Even today, whether it is English, law, medicine, science, history, philosophy or the Romance languages that are being studied, a knowledge of Latin (and Greek) is of inestimable worth in connecting the European student to his cultural roots and sharpening his clarity of thought and expression. The latter virtue is particularly important in the digital age, when language is becoming increasingly fragmented and in many cases reduced to a semi-literate shorthand.