When in Rome: in defence of classics

The study of ancient languages and history used to dominate our education but is rare now; but there are lots of reasons to learn Latin and Greek and ancient history

As seems more frequent than it ought to be, I will start with a disclaimer: I am, if you like, a failed classicist. Or perhaps a classicist in recovery. I learned Latin from the age of nine and Greek from 12, took A-levels in both and spent a year at Oxford reading literae humaniores—yes, they still call the classics degree that at our oldest university—and I was taking the full-fat version: Latin, Greek, ancient history and philosophy, with the assumption that you had a good knowledge (i.e. to A-level) of both languages. My Greek had always been a bit wobbly, as I’d learned it alone with a tutor who came once a week, and I’d only scraped a D in my Greek A-level (though some of that was down to massive laziness). Essentially, my grasp of the language wasn’t up to it, and after a year at Christ Church, the college authorities and I agreed that I would go away, not come back and we would never speak of this again. Officially I withdrew from the course.

Oxford and Cambridge classics degrees used to dominate the educational establishment in this country, and therefore graduates in the discipline tended to dominate public life. (Though even in the heyday of Benjamin Jowett no-one at Oxford would have said, as they do now, that “there is something for everyone in a Classics degree”.) And the grip of ancient languages was released with exquisite slowness: when my parents applied to university in the 1960s (Ma went to Edinburgh, Dad went to Glasgow), you had to have a pass in O-level Latin just to matriculate at Scottish universities (as well as Oxbridge). For any course. So brilliant mathematicians were sweating their way through O-level resits just to get that ticket to ride.

This entrenchment ran deep. When Sir Stafford Northcote, former legal secretary to the Board of Trade, and Sir Charles Trevelyan, assistant secretary to the Treasury, were commissioned to review the civil service in 1853, one of the issues they examined closely was recruitment and how candidates should be selected. Report on the Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service, published in February 1854, was in many ways a radical document, and it remains one of the most significant milestones in the development of our modern bureaucracy. However, it reasserted some truths which today we find very peculiar.

Regarding the qualifications to be required in candidates for examination, it spoke of “proficiency in history, jurisprudence, political economy, modern languages, political and physical geography, and other matters, besides the staple of classics and mathematics”. The hierarchy is important. Northcote and Trevelyan were both describing and endorsing an educational establishment in which classics was absolutely a core discipline, essential for those who would operate the machinery of government. But there was an element of bias too: facility in Latin and Greek, and a knowledge of ancient history and literature, would effectively play to the strengths of university graduates, especially those of Oxford and Cambridge. It was, in short, a kind of shibboleth for identifying “good chaps”.

It is important to remember how small the university sector was in the mid-nineteenth century. England boasted only the two ancient collegiate foundations of Oxford and Cambridge until 1826, when the University of London (now University College London) was founded; King’s College London was established by royal charter in 1829 and Durham University was recognised in 1832. There would be no more establishments in England until 1880. Scotland had taken a lead centuries before: St Andrews, the first university, was founded in 1413, and by the time of Northcote-Trevelyan it had been joined by four more institutions: Glasgow (1451), Aberdeen (King’s College) (1495), Edinburgh (1583) and Marischal College in Aberdeen (1593), which was folded into the University of Aberdeen in 1860. Trinity College Dublin, the great academic monument to the Protestant Ascendancy, had been founded in 1592, and in 1845 three “Queen’s Colleges” were created in Belfast, Cork and Galway, brought together federally as The Queen’s University of Ireland in 1850. Wales had no universities. So Northcote and Trevelyan were describing a United Kingdom (then including all of Ireland) with 12 institutions of higher education, serving a population of just over 27 million.

It was natural, therefore, that the leading figures of public life were schooled in the ancient languages and history. William Gladstone had a first in classics and mathematics from Christ Church; H.H. Asquith was a Balliol classicist, as was the great imperial proconsul Lord Curzon; F.E. Smith, perhaps the greatest political lawyer of the 20th century, matriculated in classics at Wadham College, Oxford, but then switched to jurisprudence; Sir John Simon, one of the last great Liberals to hold senior office and an undergraduate contemporary of Smith, had won a first in classics at Wadham; Sir Norman Brook, cabinet secretary from 1947 to 1962, was yet another Wadham classics graduate; Denis Healey, the Labour Party’s great lost leader, read classics at Balliol; Lord Butler of Brockwell, now the oldest surviving cabinet secretary, holding the post from 1988 to 1998, had a first in classics from University College, Oxford. In 1930, one in three entrants to the civil service was a classicist.

Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis, as all the bright boys say. (The phrase actually dates from 16th-century Germany but is cribbed from similar phrases in Ovid: times change, and we change in them.) Although Boris Johnson studied classics (he achieved an upper-second, to his extreme and continuing disappointment, from Balliol in 1987), he has been—in this sense as in so many others—an oddity, a self-conscious throwback to an England of Bertie Wooster, “Kipper” Herring and the Drones Club. He has been equally lauded and ridiculed for his ability to quote Greek poetry; he also has a fondness for Kipling but has had to be chided for recitation.

(A word on the quotation from the Iliad, not because it’s especially relevant but because it bothers me: his pronunciation may not be perfect, and he may skip some lines, but he’s not an academic classicist and not many public figures nowadays can or will quote extensively from verse in public. Look, it was a bit, a performance. And it was funny.)

Johnson was the first prime minister to have studied classics since Harold Macmillan, who resigned in 1963. (As a side note, Macmillan never graduated; he obtained a first in his honour moderations, the first university-wide examination in the lit. hum. course, at Balliol, but joined the Army as an undergraduate in 1914, and never returned to complete his degree. He liked to tell people he had been “sent down by the Kaiser.) It is unlikely that we will see another prime minister schooled in Latin and Greek any time soon, perhaps ever. Although 85 per cent of the current House of Commons attended university, 19 per cent going to Oxbridge, there are vanishingly few classics graduates: in the previous parliament, only eight out of 650 had studied the subject at degree level (though of those, interestingly, six voted to leave the European Union in 2016). Politics is now the most common degree subject, though the Oxford PPE degree retains a reputational stranglehold, which I examined last year.

Those few MPs with degrees in classics are not likely (barring an event of which ‘seismic’ would be an inadequate description) to seize the top job. Johnson, Geoffrey Cox (Cambridge) and Kwasi Kwarteng (Cambridge) have had their time in the ministerial limelight, though it is not impossible that Kwarteng will return to the front bench at some point in the future, as he is only 47; Nigel Mills (Newcastle) has served on countless select committees but has never been favoured with promotion to the government; Michael Tomlinson (King’s College London) is solicitor general, but the only law officer to become prime minister was the ill-fated Spencer Perceval, also the only premier to be assassinated (in 1812); while Jesse Norman (Oxford), minister for decarbonisation and technology at the Department for Transport, is a formidable thinker and intellectual, and a genuinely nice man, but not cut out for the highest office.

The paucity of classicists is, of course, a product of a trend which starts further upstream, in schools. MPs should have an advantage, as a disproportionately high number of Members, 29 per cent, attended fee-paying schools, which are more likely to teach Latin and Greek; in the population at large, only 6.4 per cent of pupils are at fee-paying schools. The predominance is not evenly distributed: 44 per cent of Conservative MPs attended independent schools, as did 38 per cent of Liberal Democrats, but only 19 per cent of Labour Members had that experience, and a nearly-representative eight per cent of the SNP.

(If people are interested in trends over time, at the 1979 general election, the first of my lifetime, the figures were 73 per cent of Conservatives and 55 per cent of Liberals, but 18 per cent of Labour MPs, almost the same as now. The SNP had only two Members, Gordon Wilson (Dundee East) and Donald Stewart (Western Isles), and both had attended state schools.)

What are the statistics in schools? Although studying a foreign language is required from the age of seven, this obligation can only include Latin and Ancient Greek at Key Stage 2, while at Key Stage 3 it must be a modern foreign language. Additionally, according to the British Council, Latin is only offered in three per cent of state schools. At Key Stage 3, the figure is 2.7 per cent for state schools but 49 per cent for independent schools.

Overall, entrants for examination are few and far between. Around 10,000 pupils across the state and independent sectors in England and Wales take GCSE Latin, with about 1,200 taking Greek. At A-level, the numbers are roughly 1,100 for Latin and 200 for Greek. The number of pupils who emerge from school at 18 proficient in both languages is, therefore, extremely small, around 200 in England and Wales. This is a small cohort from which universities can select candidates for classics degrees. And, to put this into some kind of perspective, in 2022 there were 622,000 entrants for GCSE examinations, while 788,000 were entered for A-levels. We are dealing with tiny fractions.

In July 2021, the education secretary, Gavin Williamson (remember him?), announced a £4 million programme to boost the teaching of Latin in state schools. The Latin Excellent Programme is designed to work with schools providing the best Latin teaching in the country to create high-quality resources with a low availability or take-up of the language. It has created a centre for excellence (one might wonder whatever happened to centres of excellence) and is run by Future Academies, a trust which operates 10 academies. This is, whether one supports the classics or not, a modest amount of money in a department which spends £57.3 billion on schools in England.

And where can these qualified and curious aspirant classicists go for further study? There are 27 universities in the UK which offer “classical subjects”, from the sun-dappled quads of Oxford and Cambridge through the ethereal existence of the Open University to the post-1992 University of Lincoln. But there are 170 higher education providers in the UK, so, once again, we are dealing with small fractions.

There are some suggestions that classics is undergoing a revival, of which perhaps the Latin Excellence Programme is merely a sign. Certainly, as a viewing and reading public, we seem to have rediscovered an appetite for learning about the ancient world. Professor Mary Beard is now the unmistakeable face of Roman history, with a strong academic career mostly at Cambridge (where she was both an undergraduate and a doctoral student) and an impressive list of publications to her name. Moreover, she has achieved “crossover” success, now a celebrity in her own right, whether it is presenting the BBC’s Front Row Late or appearing on Question Time. Bettany Hughes has produced a substantial number of popular television programmes about several aspects of the ancient world, while Charlotte Higgins (like Boris Johnson, a Balliol classicist), has taken time from her day job as culture writer for The Guardian to write several books on ancient history.

Nor has the new wave of celebrities ignored the literature and mythology of the ancient Mediterranean. National treasure and polymath Stephen Fry (my tribute is here) has written three reinterpretations of mythology and semi-history, Mythos, Heroes and Troy, and has spoken widely and eloquently on his love of classics (this conversation with Professor Michael Scott is wonderful). A hat is also doffed to Natalie Haynes, who has written two non-fiction books on the ancient world and four novels all of which draw their inspiration from ancient Greece and Rome, The Amber Fury, The Children of Jocasta, A Thousand Ships and Stone Blind. Madeline Miller, an American writer who studied classics at Brown, has also produced successful novels which reinterpret stories of the ancient world.

One final thing before I set out the key arguments, a matter of definition. What do we mean when we say a degree in “classics”? This is a cake that can be cut in a number of ways. Each institution will have its own finely nuanced definition, and there is probably an exciting academic project to be done in reducing all of these to an all-encompassing definition. For the moment, however, let us content ourselves with the guidance of The Complete University Guide, which provides—as you may have guessed—a fairly comprehensive analysis of British universities and degrees.

The guide explains that there are three main types of undergraduate degree which fall under this definition: classical archaeology and ancient history; classical studies and comparative literature; and, simply, classics. Here I have a dilemma. There is, as the gnarled and bitter traditionalist some of you know me to be, a huge temptation to be strict and rigorous and old-fashioned, and maintain that the only “classics” degree worth its name is the sort of degree I began (and failed to complete), the “full English” literae humaniores, the Oxford way: five terms (it takes four years to read Greats at Oxford) of Latin and ancient Greek literature, the study of both languages, ancient or modern philosophy (I chose Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, in translation), and a special subject in ancient history, archaeology or philology; then a further seven terms of more literature, ancient history, archaeology, philology and linguistics, in eight special subjects.

I’ll level with you. Reading classics at Oxford is hard. The terms are short (eight-and-a-bit weeks each), there are a couple of tutorials each week, the amount of reading in ancient Greek and Latin is substantial and you are expected to undertake a lot of independent study just to keep pace with the other students, never mind trying to excel. True, you could be accepted for the course with A-level knowledge of only one of Latin or ancient Greek, and there would be de novo language classes, but you were expected to catch up, the assumption being that you should not really be awarded a degree in classics if you were not proficient in the two most common languages of the ancient Mediterranean. It was possible to take that route: one of my contemporaries arrived with no Greek and she is now a judge (yes, that makes me feel very old).

I think it would be unfair to say that a degree doesn’t deserve to be called “classics” if it doesn’t have the full spread of the Oxford syllabus. It is a good thing that provision is made for undergraduates who have not had the opportunity to study one of Latin or ancient Greek but are keen to take it up. However, I do think that classics ought to be a fairly inclusive study of the ancient Greek and Roman world, and that understanding requires the study of literature in the original language, philosophy, history and archaeology. There are classical studies courses and classical literature courses which don’t have the language requirement, but I’m afraid these just don’t cut it. Someone who’d only read Molière, Maupassant, Voltaire, Rousseau, Dumas and Stendhal in English translation would raise eyebrows if they claimed to be an authority on French literature, and I think, mutatis mutandis (see? Latin is fun), the same must apply to Greek and Roman literature. You can’t get to the core of Cicero’s orations without understanding the actual words he was using, and a lot of Aristophanes’s comedy will pass you by if you don’t see his jokes without the filter of translation.

So, now we come to the big question: why should students in the 2020s study a subject built around two languages which have not been in common currency for at least centuries, and the zenith of which is millennia past? (Don’t get me started on ecclesiastical Latin.) Let me admit, right at the beginning, that some really bad arguments are sometimes put forward. One is that classics teaches students about linguistics and vocabulary and communication abilities. Well, that can be said of many subjects. Those who declare with inexplicable pride that they learned their grammar and syntax from Latin rather than English are simply admitting that they were not taught English adequately. Why on earth would our educational system make a conscious decision to teach the structure of the English language by a reading-across from the study of another language? At best it is clumsy, like trying to type wearing boxing gloves, and worst it will implant all sorts of odd habits which don’t make the transition from one language to the other.

There is also a rather miserable little argument that Latin and ancient Greek will “teach you where words come from”. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. If you want to study the etymology of our native language, you will need more than Latin and Greek: you will need French, German, Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Brittonic, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkic and even Welsh. (Yes, Welsh. “Bard”, “coracle” and “flannel” all have Welsh derivations, as probably does “penguin”, from pen gwyn or “white head”.) Again, it would be a very roundabout way of accomplishing the task which is touted. If you want to specialise in etymology, that’s perfectly possible: it’s a respectable academic discipline. Nor is it as abstruse as once it was, as the accessible and popular (but often rigorous) work of people like Susie Dent, Gyles Brandreth, Tom Read Wilson and Helen Zaltzman demonstrates. This subject sells.

Why should you study classics, then? Let me set out some of the secondary reasons first, because they needn’t detain us long. Like many humanities subjects, classics will teach you analytical and critical thought. It will teach you how to look at a text and interrogate it, considering its context, its purpose, its origin, its form, its transmission its legacy. It will teach you how to write essays, a skill one can sadly no longer take for granted. Friends who have managerial responsibility tell me that they are dealing with bright young people in their early 20s, well-qualified and able, who simply cannot produce continuous prose, never mind do say well enough to have a distinctive style. Classics, while it is not alone in this, will train you in this because you will have to, and the study of literature may inform the way you construct arguments, order paragraphs and produce long-form prose.

But let’s get serious. The overwhelming reason for studying classics, apart from an inherent love of the subject, is that this stuff is really important. It is our origin story, the source of so much of our culture, history, geography and Weltanschauung. To take etymology, for example, discussed above, 80 per cent of English words have their roots in Latin or Greek (or Latin and Greek: when the television was named in 1900 (it migrated to English in 1907), it was formed as a compound of the ancientt Greek τῆλε (tele) or “far”, and the Latin visio or “sight”; C.P. Snow, the owner of The Manchester Guardian and a Corpus Christi, Oxford, classicist, remarked caustically, “Not a nice word. Greek and Latin mixed. Clumsy.”)

If our words owe their existence to Greece and Rome, so too does what we do with them. Ancient literature has been vastly influential on fiction, poetry and theatre to the present day. So much is derived from the Iliad and the Odyssey that as early as the 14th century Dante Alighieri had Vergil describe Homer as the “poet sovereign”. (Was “Homer” one person or the personification of an ancient corpus of epic poetry? I’m unsure, though persuadable that two different authors created the Iliad and the Odyssey, so different are they in tone. See, for example, the splendid Daisy Dunn in this piece for the British Museum.)

Whatever the truth of their authorship, the two epic poems ascribed to Homer encapsulate and articulate with sublime perception and humanity some of the most basic experiences of existence: anger and jealousy (the reason Achilles withdraws from the fighting around Troy), destiny (Hector’s explanation to Andromache that he knows he will die in the fighting but must return nonetheless), grief and loss (the death of Patroclus at the hands of Hector when he goes into battle wearing Achilles’s armour), revenge (Achilles’s slaying of Hector and the dragging of his body round the city walls), pity and compassion (Achilles returning Hector’s mutilated body to King Priam), loyalty (Penelope’s resistance to the suitors in Ithaca) and cunning (Odysseus’s many ruses to escape the perils of his journey home). The Trojan War was supposed to have taken place in the 13th or 12th centuries BC, so these were events in the distant past even to the ancient Greeks, let alone for us, and yet we can identify so easily and powerfully with the experiences of the characters Homer draws.

If I launched into a recitation of the influence of all the major works of the ancient world, we would be here forever, and others have done it better. But think of the debt every historian owes to Thucydides and to Tacitus, every public speaker to Demosthenes and Cicero, every poet to Ovid and Hesiod. The tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides have taught modern dramatists almost everything they have needed to know, as well as being filtered through Shakespeare and Marlowe and Jonson and Webster. Philosophy would barely exist as a discipline without the foundations of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Zeno, Lucretius, Seneca and Boëthius (to snatch just a few names).

The ancient world informs the way we live too. It is very easy to criticise the Athenian model of democracy: yes, only male adult citizens could vote, and were only around 30 per cent of the population, excluding women, slaves and metics, and the system was prone to domination by oligarchs and dictators. However, representative democracy is now the default setting, or at least the ideal, around the world, promoted as the fairest and most just form of governing a society. And this idea starts in Athens through the reforms of Kleisthenes in the very late 6th century BC. This is the ground zero, the starting point, the cradle of the essential idea that people should be governed by those who have some elective legitimacy. It is as fundamental as that.

Rome picked up the baton of democracy and ran with it but stumbled often. Nevertheless, it has bequeathed to us many important political notions. The republic and then the empire explored models of leadership right across the spectrum and developed the first sophisticated bureaucracy Europe had seen (of course China had a highly evolved administration which would come to influence our friends Northcote and Trevelyan). The Senate of Rome demonstrated the important role that an organ of collective decision-making could play. And after the conversion of Constantine the Great in AD 312, Europe began to evolve notions of a divide between the spiritual and the temporal, albeit slowly and with friction, trying to find a practical expression of Jesus’s injunction to “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”.

Of course Greece and Rome were not the alpha and omega of the ancient Mediterranean world. We know about the Persian Empire, Ptolemaic Egypt, Phoenicia, its former colony Carthage (delenda est Carthago! as Lord Shaftesbury revived Cato the Elder’s famous injunction), and we can read of less well-known polities like the Odrysian Kingdom in Thrace and the pre-Roman Etruscan League. But it was those two civilisations which came to dominate, though they evolved within themselves, and it is from them that most of western Europe took its first steps. No doubt some people will find this a very narrow and Eurocentric perception of the world, but for Europeans this is our beginning, and it has been Europeans more than any other group who have spread their influence and society around the world. So I make no apology for taking this view.

There are so many aspects of our culture and lives which can be traced back to the ancient world. The Greeks, as early as the world depicted in the Odyssey, worried about excessive drinking; not, as we do, because of the injury to their health, but because of the loss of control and the potential societal shame which might be suffered, and they regarded it as a sign of dangerous, almost barbarian, indulgence to drink wine unmixed, that is, without watering it down substantially. They also seem to have passed the communal wine cup, the kylix, to the left, as we still do with port (we still do that, right?).

We also find the first clear example of political leaders being laughed at. Aristophanes is the best known writer of Old Comedy to have survived in any amount, with 11 of his 40 plays surviving more or less complete. You might not believe me, but there is a remarkable thing about Aristophanes: his plays are still funny. The surviving works span the period between 425 BC (Acharnians) and 388 BC (Wealth), so they are two and a half millennia old, but they are still viciously sharp and often obscene. Few were spared mockery in his plays: women were a reliable target, inconstant and sex-obsessed (Lysistrata is NOT a feminist play); foreigners, by which I mean non-Athenians, are lampooned for their strange accents and manners; and the great men of Athens were directly in Aristophanes’s sights. His most reliable target is the general and demagogue Kleon, an aristocratic Athenian who managed to become the spokesman of the powerful commercial class. Nothing is below the belt. The playwright drew him as a figure who was untrustworthy, populist, a manipulator of the people, venal, corrupt and—why not?—an effeminate, passive homosexual. (The Greeks had very complicated attitudes towards same-sex attraction: don’t believe the caricature that it was a Wildean paradise of equality and acceptance.)

Greece and Rome are in everything we do and feel and say. They have birthed the words we speak, shaped the literature we read and write and the drama we watch, they entrenched the tiny monotheistic cult which dominated Europe for 2,000 years (and maybe still dominates? The influence of religion is for another day) and they created our notion of empire and imperial power, which the most influential European countries came to regard not only as their destiny but their right, almost their obligation.

The Americans play baseball in stadiums, a construction the Romans would recognise. Ancient Greeks would understand the rudiments of a modern theatre, though they might struggle rather more (where’s the Pankration?) with what we now call the Olympic Games, a festival they inaugurated in 776 BC in honour of Zeus at Olympia in the Peloponnese. Either civilisation would grasp the rudiments of oppositional oratory in our legal system, though the jury would baffle them and they might wonder why the more lowly witnesses were being allowed to give evidence without having it extracted under torture—the Athenian legal system not only allowed but required slaves to give evidence while being tortured, a procedure known as βάσανος (basanos).

Each would of course comprehend the bibles found in hotel rooms, though the Greeks might wonder where the original New Testament (written in Greek) was, and the Romans where a translation into Latin might be. They would understand the cult of celebrity, the worship of idols, the danger of loose talk and demagoguery. They would see the lineaments of their own societies in ours.

That, surely, is a good enough defence of classics. Study the discipline because it unlocks the world around you. It does not make polymaths, not as a matter of course, and any halfway-intelligent person will know that life is spent learning and it is a task which will never be finished. But classics will help you understand where you, we came from, why we are as we are. It is an exercise of self-knowledge: scito te ipsum, as Peter Abelard put it, or, in the language of the Delphic Maxims, Γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnothe seauton). Know yourself.