"Let them learn Latin"

Have university “students” turned into “consumers”, more anxious to get value for money for their fees and loans, than to expand their minds? How have traditional subjects – like Classics – fared in this last round of expansion in higher education?

The answers aren’t quite as simple as you think (“yes” and “badly”). In fact, just before I left for the conference in Italy I did an interview for an “Analysis” programme on Radio 4, which is taking a careful look at the debates and discontents around the twenty-first century university. It is being broadcast tonight, repeated on Sunday.

I am usually a bit nervous about this kind of thing. Whatever you actually say, it’s all too easy if you’re in my position to get edited into something that sounds like a cross between an Oxbridge toff and Marie-Antoinette: “Let them learn Latin”.

But I tend do such interviews anyway, on the not wholly worthy grounds that I’d rather it was me having my say than someone else. And on this occasion the programme was being put together by Ruth Scurr (biographer of Robespierre and historian in Cambridge) who wasn’t likely to play fast and loose with my no doubt elitist stumblings.

One of the questions was along the lines of “Why should the state pay for university courses in Latin and Greek”.

This is quite a different question from the ones we classicists usually face -- “Why should I choose to take Latin at school?”, “Why is it interesting?” , “Where will it lead”? This blog has already discussed a number of these. And in fact Classicists in general, though they may disagree among themselves, are very good at giving convincing and enthusiastic answers.

Indeed our success on this score is evident by the fact that Harry Mount’s little Christmas guide to learning Latin is selling at the rate of 1000 copies a week. (Many of us are green with envy . . . if all it took was re-writing Kennedy’s Latin Primer interspersed with some blokeish humour, why didn’t we get there first?)

The “Analysis” question is not about what individual students choose (or not) to study.  It is about educational policy in a broader sense. Fun and stimulating it may be, but does the study of ancient languages and culture deserve government support?

Again, there are all kinds of possible answers – including, to put it in contemporary jargon, the strong track record of Classics in teaching “transferable skills”, and so fitting students for the different challenges of the workplace over their long and increasingly flexible careers (sorry – it’s horribly easy to slip into this kind of jargon).

But, reflecting in advance of the interview, I decided the bottom line was much more straightforward. Do we want this country to continue to have a direct access to the literature and cultural achievements of Greco-Roman antiquity? Or are we happy to rely on an array of Penguin Classics, translated sometime in the late twentieth century, for the rest of eternity?

If we want that direct access (and it is, of course, what underpins the success of translations of Greek tragedy in the West end, or even the movie Gladiator), then we have to support the study of Classics institutionally within the educational system. Not just at university, but at school too (direct access to a poet as difficult and influential as Pindar takes rather more than three years to acquire).

If we decide we don’t want it, then please let us know. I might still be able to retrain, thanks to those transferable skills.

Comments

[Mikaki]

@Mr Millner: I took a look at your site [http://latinum.mypodcast.com] and noticed a plethora of languages and I was quite impressed by the concept and thought it would be fun to listen to Latin. I found the pronunciation to be rather strange and am not quite sure whether it was electronic or something else. In any case it was a turn off for me and I became very disappointed. I then noticed that you had done a similar thing with the French language ("Fancy French") and started downloading the mp3s to listen to and found what appeared to be you reading the French. Not wanting to knock it, I think the whole enterprise would benefit from a native speaker doing the French bits - not such a difficult thing to do nowadays - I'm sure you could get someone to volunteer.

[Millner]

I've taken matters into my own hands (a safe thing to do?) and have been using podcast technology to improve my Latin.
http://latinum.mypodcast.com

This is a link to my website for learning Latin - I am using an excellent out of copyright text book, by Ahn and Seidenstucker (1855) for the basic stuff. I also have vocabularies on the site, and a variety of materials from a selection of other out of copyright textbooks - all the material on the site is read aloud.

This site will possibly be useful to those studying Latin at home, or someone who wants to learn Latin on the go, by downloading a list of definitions or a lesson onto their MP3 player.

The idea is to get Latin into my head by osmosis - simply by listening to lots of it. I don't claim to be a great reader of Latin - I'm using the site as I build it, to teach myself as I go along, as well.

[Zareen P. Bharucha]

Lastly, can I just say how much I agree with what David Kirwan said (30 Nov, 200; below). Especially the last two sentences. Bravo for a beautiful point, so wonderfully stated.

[Zareen P. Bharucha]

"It is only really amongst the Greeks where rationalism in its purest form finds a foothold and later fecundates Western thought. What distinguishes the West in the mind of Easterners today, at least thinking Easterners, is precisely that. It is highly unlikely that we would have developed the system of thought that we have, and which now dominates the world, without the Greeks"
_____________________

Oh dear.
I'm afraid I must step in there. This is a foolish decision because I know absolutely nothing whatsoever about it. But even if I did, I would probably resist the temptation to enter into the quagmire of (debateable) examples and (contestable) conjecture. The history of science is, I'm sure, full of all the usual biases and subjective pitfalls that the history of anything else under the sun is.

So. All I want to say here is:
Based on the little I know, I think more credit needs to be given to the alternative ontologies and epistomologies on which GREEK thought is based. The Western system represents one possible refinement of these, rather than The Is.

As for it dominating the world, well – no one can dispute that it does.
But look in the corners, in the cracks, look at all those societies that are not industrial, not market-driven, and still very much a part of this world, that have evolved ontologies which you would call fanciful, but the parallels they have with the most advanced rational thought are not to be brushed aside lightly. Also, you might consider that that most ‘basic’ of sciences, the Oracle of Delphi when it comes to ‘acceptability’, Physics, is more and more turning up fascinating parallels with ‘Eastern’ mystical thought. (Please don’t brush that off as New Age namby-pamby until you’ve looked at the more credible accounts.)

What I am trying to say is: there is no single point of origin for a certain body of knowledge and even less of a tangible origin for a whole body of thought.

Also, the spread of ‘rationalism’ has ensured that there is NOW no linear stream flowing from the West outwards, eagerly quenching the thirst of 'thinking Easterners'. (I STRONGLY object to that phrase. There are people who think - and do not think - everywhere.) Science, and the cultural and social impacts it has, now bubbles out of the ground everywhere - and contrary to what anyone may believe, not all of it is founded on a static system originated by the Greeks. Instead, epistomologies have evolved and are more context-specific than I think we give them credit for.

[Stephen Belfield]

In my experience the people who suggest that Classics is a "waste of time" are invariably those who are very evidently not clever enough to have studied it themselves. Odd that.

[Alex Drace-Francis]

Thank you for that enlightening post. I think Mary will now definitely have to call her faculty "Classics, Barbarian Studies and the Occluded Epistemology of Eight-Legged Love" - will look good engraved on a brass plaque by the main entrance. And keep up the posting as presumably she gets paid according to a blogometric scale...

[postblogger]

I like the idea of Classicists proselytising their subject as the best way of getting to grips with tentacle hentai; if it’d been sold to me that way I may well have succumbed to Seneca and not seaweed.

Which is another way of saying that everything I’m about to write should be taken with the pinch of salt you’d normally reserve for amateurs commenting on blogs outside their fields...

Alex raises two points, which I’ll try to paraphrase (but with apologies if I miss the point); first, was Aristotle really all that innovative a biologist? Second, are the Classics of any use to modern scientists?

Very, very broadly, my answers would be 1) Yes and 2) Not directly. In more detail...

A) In contrast to what Cuvier thought, Aristotle’s predecessors probably did have a pretty good idea about this stuff, but they didn’t leave written records to show that they looked at it in the same way that Aristotle did. I’ll try to explain the little that I know and apologies again for the background which which I’m sure most of you are already familiar...

Aristotle wrote a lot of biological books (Parts of Animals (PA), History of Animals (HA), Generation of Animals (GA) being the three ‘biggies’) and, to a modern biologist (i.e. me) they read rather like a draft of the sort of paper you’d find in ‘Cell’ (one of the most important pure biology journals – the two biggest science journals, ‘Nature’ and ‘Science’, don’t stick to the normal conventions of scientific paper layouts because they’re written for interdisciplinary audiences). The catch is that HA, GA and PA only read like that when the three books are viewed as a single work. If you simply pick up, say, HA and start reading, you’ll find a list of biological phenomena which is about as interesting as the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships – gripping if you’re into that sort of thing, but not the world’s most fluid read.

Now, there’s plenty of evidence that Aristotle didn’t gather all those data on his own – HA in particular is full of references to other authors (‘Ctesias says this about the sperm of the elephant’ &c.) and animal handlers (the bit about the hectocotylus came from fishermen, for example). Presumably this reliance on other sources reflects, at least in part, some sort of burgeoning (oral?) tradition of biological knowledge, possibly originating in Egypt or elsewhere, but I’m not sure what studies have been done on this. My own theory is that Aristotle’s impressive marine biology might reflect the obsessive categorization and qualification needed to sustain the classical Athenian seafood fetish, but that’s pure crank speculation and should be treated with even more contempt than the rest of this comment.

But (and it’s a big but), to read HA as ‘a strange and tiresome farrago of hearsay, imperfect observation, wishful thinking and downright gullibility.’ [1] is to miss the point. The real achievement of Aristotle’s biology lies not in the gathering (or even the accuracy) of its observations, which would have made him merely an earlier Pliny the Elder, but in the fact that Aristotle treats biological phenomena as part of the unified whole that is Nature and that, in consequence, the study of biology can shed its own light on the world around us. Not simply in a by analogy, ‘Consider the lilies’, sense [2], but in the sense that fundamental mechanisms about what we see can ONLY come from (messy, imperfect) animals and not from the (clean, perfect) mathematical focus of earlier workers (Francis mentions, germanely, Bablyonian astronomy/astrology – these deal with relatively ‘pure’ concepts and predictable celestial motions, not the uncertainty with which biology has traffic). This contribution to biology, and not the data collection, is what Allan Gotthelf points out in the article which Francis mentions and is also what a great biologist called D’Arcy W. Thompson was on about when he wrote ‘Could it ever be proved that he discovered many [facts], or could it even be shown that of his own hand he discovered nothing at all, it would affect but little our estimation of his greatness and our admiration of his learning.’ [3]

B) Despite all that hagiography, I don’t think that modern biologists need to read Aristotle, although I'd really like to be wrong about this. In fact, and rather sadly, most modern biologists haven’t even read Darwin and he’s both much more relevant and in English.

So, to summarize, I think that Aristotle’s great contribution was to see biology as a field worthy of study, I don’t think this has direct relevance for modern science, I wouldn’t advise any readers of this blog to place any great reliance on my opinion, and have we set a record for the number of comments on one of these posts yet?

[1] P.B. Medawar and J.S. Medawar, Aristotle to Zoos: a philosophical dictionary of biology, (London, 1984). Peter Medawar won the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, but is still wrong about Aristotle.
[2] Luke 12:27
[3] In an essay called ‘Aristotle the Naturalist’, in a book called ‘Science and the Classics’, (1940) OUP.

[Alex Drace-Francis]

Now that Early Bird has come in, I can hardly hope to get the worm; but I am still eager to grapple with various conundra on the theme of octopus sex & the value of ancient learning. mainly @ postblogger:
1) Can I question, openly & from ignorance, Cuvier's proposition that Aristotle's "predecessors never had any idea" about this stuff? Cu. was writing in the year after publication of Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero Worship & the Heroic in History & it is the tendency of the age to attribute all discovery to one man. Moreover, you hint that Cu. didn't himself have a firm grasp of the literature. By contrast, in recent years the debt of Greek knowledge to Egypt has been the object of much controversy. Was it just A. that got all this stuff together on his ownsome?
2) Your very interesting story doesnt' give any evidence that knowing Greek in the original is needed for avoiding embarrassing misattributions of body parts that get pulled off during sex as separate species. (You can imagine Mary putting this in the prospectus: 'Put an end to mistaken identifications of a tentacle tip as a parasitic worm! Learn Greek with us! Gain in confidence!, Win friends and influence people, &c.') The problem is not which language Cuvier could & would read in. The problem is the old one of filing - can I find that email address or octopus article reference when I atually need it?

[Early Bird]

I've just picked this up from the US. Not sure I follow all of it. But what an amazing discussion. Keep it up everyone.

[Francis Tuttle]

Just a brief addendum to postblogger's very enlightening comments. I agree that our rationalist system of thought has been amplified and mediated by centuries of thought by great scientists and researchers.

However, when one looks at the other ancient cultures, although they achieved a great deal from the Sumerians onwards, we do find a great deal of the rational conflated with the irrational. Hence, Babylonian astronomical studies led to astrology, not to astronomy except as a by-product. Chinese and Indian science, although extremely effective in the light of pragmatism, also includes a great deal of what we would call scientifically unjustifiable claims. It is only really amongst the Greeks where rationalism in its purest form finds a foothold and later fecundates Western thought. What distinguishes the West in the mind of Easterners today, at least thinking Easterners, is precisely that. It is highly unlikely that we would have developed the system of thought that we have, and which now dominates the world, without the Greeks. Perhaps that is why post-modernists are noted for scavenging on the margins of literature and in the annals of history, to promote their own anti-rationalist catalogue of great (anti-) thinkers;-)

That is not to say of course that the Greeks did not go in for a great deal of irrational activities as well. One only has to read the great study by Dodds "The Greeks and the Irrational" to see that. Nor do I wish to write off religion as irrational. There are plenty of rational philosophers who used their rationalism to defend their faith, and what's more, considered that faith should be exposed to a rational critique. I suppose the present Pope, who is a Professor emeritus of Philosphy and Theology, of our contemporaries, would be included amongst these as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury.

As for Darwin I really can't opine. It's a well known quote and I have based my view on a scholarly article, the abstract of which can be read here: http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=1551904

Titre du document / Document title
Darwin on Aristotle (Darwin contre Aristote)
Auteur(s) / Author(s)
GOTTHELF A. (1) ;
Affiliation(s) du ou des auteurs / Author(s) Affiliation(s)
(1) Philosophy Department, The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ 08628-0718, ETATS-UNIS

Résumé / Abstract
Charles Darwin's famous 1882 letter, in response to a gift by his friend, William Ogle of Ogle's recent translation of Aristotle's Parts of Animals, in which Darwin remarks that his two gods, Linnaeus and Cuvier were mere school-boys to old Aristotle, hasbeen thought to be only an extravagantly worded gesture of politeness. However, a close examination of this and other Darwin letters, and of references to Aristotle in Darwin's earlier work, shows that the famous letter was written several week after a first, polite letter of thanks, and was carefully formulated and literally meant. Indeed, it reflected an authentic, and substantial, increase in Darwin's already high respect for Aristotle, as a result of a careful reading both of Ogle's introduction and of more or less the protion of Ogle's translation which Darwin says he has read. Aristotle's promotion to the pantheon, as an examination of the basis for Darwin's admiration of Linnaeus and Cuvier suggests, was most likely the result specifically of Darwin's late discovery that the man he already knew as one of the greatest ... observers that ever lived (1879) was also the ancient equivalent both of the great modern systematist and of the great modern advocate of comparative functional explanation. It may also have reflected some real insight on Darwin's part into the teleological aspect of Aristotle's thought, indeed more insight than Ogle himself had achieved, as a portion of their correspondence reveals
Revue / Journal Title
Journal of the history of biology (J. hist. biol.) ISSN 0022-5010
Source / Source
1999, vol. 32, no1, pp. 3-30

But I am willing to listen to other opinions on that.

In any case, I'm glad to see that this article has stirred a lively debate. Well done, Mary!

[Fiona]

Latin GCSE was one of the most useful subjects I ever took - both for A-Level sciences and degrees in Linguistics.

[postblogger]

P.S. While writing this, Alex beat me to the punch and I completely agree with his far more clearly written post!

re: Monica

You (and Francis Tuttle's original post) are quite right - Aristotle was a major source of inspiration for the entire biological community in which Darwin operated and his work would certainly have been an indirect influence on Darwin.

My point, really, was twofold: first comes the pure pedantry bit, I think that that particular quotation of Darwin's is too often cited out of context and can give the impression that (to paraphrase Whitehead) Darwin was a footnote to Aristotle (*).

Second, while I agree that the Classics are probably unique in the range of 'transferable' critical thinking skills which they can impart at schools level (and Francis's post gave several excellent examples), Mary's original post was about higher education and I think that putting forward the relevance of the Classics to modern science is a weak tactic when arguing for the retention of Greek and Latin in Universities. Specifically, I believe that this sort of thing could all too easily turn into classical creationism. You may recall that creationists argue that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in order to teach students that there are a number of ways in which data can be interpreted. Well, yes, but some ways are right and some ways are wrong. Aristotle, for all his wealth of (extremely interesting) information, was wrong about many important points. Darwin wasn't.

So, when Francis writes that 'Our scientific categories, and in general our rationalist thoughtmode, ... comes directly from the Greeks.', I think he's wrong. They don't; they come indirectly from the Greeks and have been filtered by two millenia of other thinkers. If the government wants to produce a more scientifically literate population, they'll be better off dropping Classics and teaching more science.

From all of that, it might sound like I'm against the teaching of Latin and Greek; I'm not, I'm passionately for it, which is why I want to see as strong an argument as possible advanced for their retention and, while I think that Francis's arguments are excellent at schools level, I don't think they hold as much water in Higher Education.

But, again, this isn't a field in which I spend much time and I may well be wrong!

* Speaking of footnotes, if a quotation is wanted to show the 'direct' benefits of reading Aristotle, Cuvier himself (great 19th century anatomist and the first man to reconstruct a dinosaur from its skeleton) said of History of Animals "I cannot read this work without being ravished with astonishment. Indeed it is impossible to conceive how a single man was able to collect and compare the multitude of particular facts implied in the numerous general rules and aphorisms contained in this work and of which his predecessors never had any idea." Georges Cuvier, Histoire des Sciences Nat., 1841, I.46 (trans. G.H Lewis).

Not ravished enough, I should add. A famous example of Aristotle’s powers of observation involved describing how the male octopus transfers sperm to the female using an adapted tentacle. In the late 1820s, Cuvier found a small object wedged in the body of a female Argonaut. An inch or two long, it was covered in suckers and Cuvier soon claimed it to be a new species of parasitic worm, which he christened Hectocotylus (100 suckers). Cephalopod reproduction, however, can be an energetic process, and the adapted tentacle is often torn off, remaining in the female, which is actually what Cuvier had discovered. The adapted tentacle has kept the 'hectocotylus' tag, but this is one example when a direct reading of Aristotle really would have trumped what was then modern science...

[Eleanor]

Why is it up to the state to make this decision, if the student wants to study this subject and a reputable university is willing to offer it? If it makes sense to fund education at all, why should the state get to choose between advanced courses of acceptable academic quality, rather than the student?

There'd be a far better argument for declining to fund Theology than for declining to fund Classics.

[Alex Drace-Francis]

Let me play Postblogger's Advocate.
There is a tendency to trace 'influence' on the assumption that the earliest manifestation of an idea is the purest & truest, and that all else is a late echo or dilution thereof. I suppose this derives from some religious model of knowledge as having been 'revealed' at the 'beginning', whereas in my view knowledge is continually revised & sustained, possibly even improved, by ongoing debate.
So while Darwin was undoubtedly working in a framework to which Aristotle made significant & early contributions, that doesn't mean we have to talk about D. being 'influenced' by A. If someone has read A. & nothing else, they won't be in a better position to make much sense of modern theories of evolution.
So, more generally, to speak of Greek & Latin as 'the sources of our humanistic culture' is questionable - they are SOME sources & not necessarily the most important ones. The use made of them also changes & this needs to be understood in the context of each time & place. That's why I advocated study of other cultures besides Greek & Latin. Maybe Mary's faculty could change its name to 'Classical & Barbarian Studies' (including Tolkein-reception).

[Monica]

re: postblogger

But just to play Devil's Advocate here--does that necessarily mean he wasn't indirectly influenced by Aristotle? Others who influenced Darwin probably read their Aristotle.

I, for instance, am a bit ashamed to admit that I hadn't read Tolkien until a few years ago. But I look back at some of the science fiction stories I'd written years before that and find obvious Tolkien influences--why? Because the science fiction/fantasy authors I was reading and watching back then were fairly obviously influenced by Tolkien.

My personal favourite quotation on science and Classics, though, is Einstein's: "But I have never gone away from them. How can an educated person stay away from the Greeks? I have always been far more interested in them than in science."

[postblogger]

Am I allowed to post out of sheer pedantry as an addendum to Francis Tuttle's post? There's very little evidence that Darwin drew directly from Aristotle. His famous quotation - which used to preface A.L. Peck’s Generation of Animals translation ("Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere school-boys to old Aristotle.”) - wasn't written until a couple of months before his death in early 1882 and, in an earlier 1879 letter, he replied to a correspondent “I have forgotten the very little Greek which I once knew. Nor have I ever read, to my shame be it spoken, the works of Aristotle.” The 1882 quotation came after he HAD read his first solid block of Aristotle (Parts of Animals), but it was much too late in the day to influence any of his thinking on evolution.

[Ian Thorpe]

Well it is forty five years since I was being told that a knowledge of Latin was a sine qua non for any decent career expectations. My utter disinterest did not hold me back career wise at all but I have to say that due to the threat posed to our social systems and world peace by fundamentalist Christianity I think we need plenty of talented classics scholars to pull apart the ancient texts and tell the world what they really said: i.e. The Woman at the well was not a "loose woman" (transposed to harlot by the Bible's seventeenth century translators), but an "unattached woman" meaning she had neither husband, father nor bothers to look after her. There's a world of difference.

[Mary]

For Monica. I think you should be able to find something at the City Lit (though the beginners evening course started in the early autumn so you may have to wait until next September:

www.citylit.ac.uk/coursetype.php?section=Classical+languages

Also there are classes, I think, at UCL;

www.ucl.ac.uk/language-centre/evening-courses/index.shtml

Hope you find something to suit. You might also try looking at weekend courses (some details on both the JACT and the ARLT web sites).

[Francis Tuttle]

Why should we learn Greek and Latin?

1. Greek and Latin are the sources of our humanistic culture. The Renaissance came about directly through our rediscovery of the Greek and Latin Classics. Even the heyday of Arabic Muslim culture was inspired by the translations of scholarly Christian Arabs from Greek through Syriac (see Aristoteles bei den Syrern vom V. - VIII. Jahrhundert. Syrische Texte. 1. Band: Syrisch-arabische Biographien des Aristoteles / Leipzig 1900; Walzer Greek into Arabic; De Lacy O' Leary How Greek Science passed to the Arabs; and the articles of Dr F W Zimmermann).

2. Our scientific categories, and in general our rationalist thoughtmode, the way we divide up the mannifold, comes directly from the Greeks. Darwin said of Aristotle: "Linnaeus and Cuvier were mere school-boys to old Aristotle". Euclid's Elements were in use until the new geometries of the 19th century. It is otiose to mention Roman Law.
People who lose contact with their origins lose themselves--especially in this age of historical amnesia.

3. Whitehead (of Principia Mathematica fame): "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them". Also Leo Strauss: What is Liberal Education? http://www.ditext.com/strauss/liberal.html

4. Greek and Latin literature are the source of inspiration for a large part of our European literary heritage: from Dante through the Elizabethans, French Clasical theatre, up until the modern Age.

5. The learning of Greek and Latin is a very special sort of linguistic training which bears little resemblance to Modern Language learning. It encourages an attention to detail and demands clarity of thought. It also demands an ability to think cross-culturally, by recasting the thought of an earlier age, which in turn helps us to understand ourselves.

The study of classical languages also helps us in our use of English: J L Austin: "Words, rarely if ever, escape from their etymology"

6. Greek and Latin History are like a microcosm. There is a beginning a middle and an end. This allows us to study the development of societies and cultures from an historical viewpoint in their entirety.

Moreover, Classical history offers the great advantage of (usually) not stirring any prejudices. Any book written on contemporary nations will raise passions and even fury, since national interests are at stake: nobody is upset today by a biography of Caesar (which is not to say that classical historians do not have a view). Classical history allows a far more objective study of the material that many historians of the modern age must be envious of. E H Carr: "The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present."

I'm sure there are other, better reasons than these, but I can't think of them now.

Having said that, I don't believe that Classics should be a compulsory subject. Latin up to GCSE for most would be fine with an option to take Greek for a minority. In the bewildering range of options available today and with the natural science departments closing, and Chemistry and Physics struggling to fill their quota at university, Classics can hardly expect to regain the position it once had. But the value of a classical education should be more highly valued, for it is worth it.

[Jackie]

This is probably not the place to advertise Monica, but the Open University does two Latin courses, Beginners and Advanced!

[John Moore]

I wanted to pick up on something Oliver Nicholson wrote: "Composing Latin constantly forces the student to state his meaning in multiple ways till he finds the most effective." One of the problems with teaching Latin, it seems to me, is the diminished status of prose composition; with prose composition, though, one actually puts the language to use and performs activities that Bede, Duns Scotus, More, Buchanan, Milton, and Wren performed on a daily basis. If one is able to write some Latin, one has a better sense of how that language works and, by contrast, how one's mother tongue works. Also, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, school editions of Virgil were sometimes printed with a running footnote, in which the Latin text was placed in a natural (for native speakers of English) word order, with subjects preceding verbs, adjectives preceding nouns, and so on. No wonder cultivated Englishmen in the past could read Latin with such ease! That convention, which I think is worth reviving, is not cheating: it is not a translation, it makes the Latin text accessible and much easier to comprehend; the meaning thus mastered, one can then turn to the complex poetic expression above and begin to appreciate its interwoven structure and rhythms.

[monica fan]

The timing of this article is brilliant. I would like to learn Latin in the evenings as I work full time in the City. I cannot fine a Latin evening course. Does anybody have any suggestions? Separately, the capacity to learn a language is a good signal to employers that students are bright and in the century of knowledge workers being able to grasp new subjects quickly is just as important as how immediately relevant it is to a particular job.

[Jackie]

David - I haven't given up - just postponed temporarily! I do so agree with you about learning for the sheer love of it. The problem with this is that students at school are so geared to passing the 'right' exams for many it becomes a chore, and this takes the joy away. I do know, however, that many people do come back to it later in life. What we need is some sort of system that allows more 'mature' students back into higher education, in such a way that they are not stymied by the responsibilities already taken on. These students would be less likely to take on the 'airy-fairy' subjects mentioned by Winter! I don't mean just the Classical subjects either, as Mary said, we abandon things at our peril. Some things are too easily lost to 'fashion'

[Winter Hathaway]

I couldn't agree more with the pursuit of languages, both classical and modern- I'm a nineteen-year-old university student with a GCSE in Ancient Greek, A-level in Latin, studying Ancient History at the same time as a double-honours degree in French and Italian, and an evening course in Mandarin!

It is sad the way in which things are getting knocked off the curriculum- Ancient Greek is no longer available at my old school, and Latin can only be taken at A-level, rather than being compulsory from the second year. Ancient History also disappeared pretty rapidly. They were taken off the curriculum to be replaced with, uh, 'airy-fairy' subjects. Pretty poor work for a grammar school!

It's also sadly true that modern languages are on the way out too. French was compulsory for 5 years at my school, but at some schools languages barely feature. People are too dismissive of languages, thinking instead that 'everyone speaks English'. It's such a ridiculous opinion to hold. And by removing study of the Classics were are letting go of such a wealth of information about cultures, languages and systems often far superior to ours... it's a crying shame!

[David Kirwan]

I thought I'd said my piece and left the field, but I find I just want to say how much I agree with Simone. That was part of what lay behind my little rant. But I'm afraid that the idea of education as aimed at broadening horizons, or the sheer love of learning are deeply unfashionable points of view. It is obvious that Mary, who posted this blog, and everyone who has added their comment has the same enthusiasm for learning, and the same wish that their enthusiasm was more generally felt: not only for Classical studies and the languages that open the door to them but for all learning. But I fear that we are in a desperate minority. Well, let us hope not desperate, but pitifully small anyway. Perhaps we must be content to be like the people in Fahrenheit 451 each doing our bit to keep the thing alive until better times come.

As to the matter of 'relevance': the measure of relevance of any activity should be the degree to which it develops the whole person who undertakes it. But you will never convince the movers and shakers of the present age of that. Can no-one find a modern Carnegie to endow a Chair of Totally Irrelevant Studies?

(By the way: to encourage Jackie and Emma, I gave up Latin perforce - not by choice - after O-levels, read Physics, now work in computers, but have simply refused to give up struggling with the Latin authors and added the little Classical Greek I can manage all on my own. I shall never be proficient, but it's fun, and it beats talking cars and football at lunchtime. Never give up! Never get disheartened! Just plug away at your own pace.)

[Simone]

I fear that, more and more, there is a tendency, in both schools and universities, to ditch any subject that cannot immediately and obviously be proved "relevant" to modern day living. Whatever happened to the aim of simply broadening people's horizons? What about study for its own sake? What about the sheer love of learning?

[Mary]

Thanks Emma -- this blogging-lark turns out to be rather fun AND I think some really good points come up in our discussions.

Alex -- I think that the best Classics departments do try to do exactly what you say (thank heavens). On the point about whether knowledge of Latin and Greek COULD ever be lost. Well -- OK, we might still have the information about the grammatical structure etc; but the sills at reading developed over 2000 years in a pretty much (no entirely I grant) unbroken tradition could never be recaptured.

Max. Some people might think that dissembling was a useful transferable skill.

[alex drace-francis]

Modern languages have already disappeared left right and centre, without the batting of too many eyelids. London ditched Finnish, UEA axed an excellent Scandinavian department, Cambridge scrapped Czech, Hungarian and Romanian, Liverpool lost Russian and Dutch. Disastrous measures are now being taken to make languages optional at school.
It's not the knowledge or access per se that is lost (storage, reproduction & also general linguistic science has alterred so radically not just in the Dark Ages but in the last century that the possibility that knowledge of Latin & Greek may be completely erased is highly remote). With the modern languages, people can go to the respective countries. The sad consequences are for the possibility of doing comparative cultural research. To maintain this someone needs to make a case not just for one or another language but for a study of human diversity to complement & extend that offered in depts. of history, anthropology and linguistics (the latter two also under threat in places). Good classics dept.s could offer a version of that. If you can do it, good luck.

[Emma]

By the way, Mary - love the column. Deeply entertaining & witty!

[Emma]

Speaking as a 'comprehensively' educated (oxymoron anyone?) person I would have loved the opportunity to learn Latin. As a student of medieval history and, later, law I would have been one of the minority who would have found a practical use for it. Had I been able to read original sources there would have been more opportunities for me in my field of study. As it is, I don't need Latin in my everyday life, but still I'd like to have it at my disposal.

I simply never had the choice. It was French or Welsh (or French and Welsh) and even then the standard of teaching was poor. Some of us actually did care about the limited choices we were given but at age 11-18 what could we do about it?

Asking whether the state should pay for ancient languages at university, or whether school pupils should choose Latin (or Greek) is surely coming at the issue too late in the day...the real problem, it seems to me, is that far too many pupils are never given the choice in the first place. Schools and universities should be about learning but sadly, they seem to have strayed away from this central purpose.

[Mary]

Sorry. I didn't mean to sound as much of a classical ideologue as I obviously did. What I wanted to stress was that there was something big at stake here: namely if we let the study of Latin and Greek disappear, sooner or later (and I mean sooner) we will have lost our direct access to the cultures of Greece and Rome. The same would go for Hittite or Akkadian or Linear B...or whatever. We might then argue about which we wished to retain if some had to be lost (and I could put up a case for Latin and Greek, as others would for other subjects). But my main point is that when any of these specialisms go, we wont ever get them back. Do we want that?

[Jackie]

Carol, thank you for your comments. I haven't given up on Latin altogether, just postponed it. I have an MA dissertation to write in 2007 and it is not possible (for me anyway with my lack of talent for languages!) to learn enough to help with that. When that is finished it is my intention to dig out my Latin books and try again. Last time I tried (two years ago) I fell at the hurdle of 36 different ways to say much or many! Hopefully I will do better next time!

[alex drace-francis]

i agree with postblogger & was about to write on similar lines. studying cultures of all periods is great but why privilege Latin & Greek? Even Ovid says he learned Getic in exile (although, being embittered, he wasn't prepared to say it enlightened him). Let's have more Arabic, Hungarian & Japanese.

[postblogger]

You've thought more about this than I have, but I don't see anything in your argument (direct access to Greco-Roman antiquity) that doesn't also apply to a number of other humanities. What's so special about Greco-Roman literature and culture that can't be gained from studying, say, French literature and culture by learning French?

As a start to answering my own question, it seems to me that one thing which does lift Greco-Roman stuff above modern languages is its (I think) unique straddling of the known and unknown in terms of time and place. Scratch Moliere and you get the commedia dell'arte, scratch the commedia and you get mystery plays and so on and so on. But how did linear B granary accounts suddenly turn into the Iliad? I can't think of many subjects which do that and while a similar argument probably applies to something like ancient Chinese, if we come back to why the state should fund Greece and Rome over China, then it's because the infrastructure (Romance languages, museums, translations, western cultural references etc.) is already in place in the UK to study Greco-Roman things; it isn't for more far-flung cultures.

As I think I've mentioned before, I'm actually a biologist and we have something called the Cambrian Explosion, which was a point around 600 million years ago when complex life suddenly, well, exploded onto the scene. People debate how, or even whether, it happened, but they do so because it (probably) set the pattern for the subsequent development of life on Earth. As far as I can see, classics holds a similar position in western culture.

Again, this is way out of my field, so I may well be wrong...

[Independence Ogbodo]

How I wish that Latin is being studied in Nigerain universities especially, for those of us who never had the opportunity of attending a Catholic seminary school,where Latin is taught.Nevertheless,I really think that Latin and some other classic languages should be taught both in post-primary and university levels.This will make Latin pleasurable and easy to learn esp for us that wants to learn Latin by every necessary means possible.

[Oliver Nicholson]

The Romans knew the answer. Ancient education had at its centre the serious rigorous study of language (as serious and rigorous as the study of mathematics, especially calculus, seems to be in the schools of the American state where I live most of the year). Latin (in particular) is a language which can be anatomised and assimilated in such a way that the student acquires not merely the knowledge of an old language with an interesting literature but a sense of the way that language itself works. That was the point of all those proses (Caesar autem, Labieno in castris relicto...) and copies of verses (En procul hinc nostri.....) which one did at school. Composing Latin constantly forces the student to state his meaning in multiple ways till he finds the most effective. Such is the language that in doing this he will need to be quite clear about the grammatical and syntactical function of each word, and its appropriateness to his intended meaning. Latin is valuable, then, not simply as a teacher of 'transferable skills' which are good for business, it is meant to educate people to be articulate and to know how and why they are being articulate. The (successful and tough-minded) magazine editor who sometimes teaches the Business of Journalism course in our vast public university starts his course by saying that he has never taken a course in either business or journalism, but strongly recommends Latin, especially Horace. Closer to home, what do you think J.K Rowling owes to the Ovid she read at the University of Exeter ? To learn to use language is to educate the imagination. And imagination is not merely 'ornamental' (the word used by C. Clarke, M.A. Cantab. about mediaevalists), it is what one uses for having fresh ideas. No wonder politicians are suspicious of it.

[Carol A]

Jackie (posting Nov 30), please don't give up on Latin just yet. I must be about the same age as you and have now completed 3 years of Latin at university and 1st year of Classical Greek. I've loved every minute (well, perhaps not the exams) and have found so many new, interesting topics opening up - philosophy, history, linguistics.
Exercising our brains is surely just as important as physical exercise.

[Jackie]

Should the teaching of Latin be supported by taxpayers money? Yes, yes , yes! I didn't learn Latin at school because I went to a middle class boarding school for 'young ladies' in the 1950's and 60's. Latin was considered irrelevent as we were expected to marry and bring up children. I was happy at school, but my education was sadly lacking. Coming to the Classicslate in life I find it is too late on a practical level to learn Latin. The reason for learning is to read the sources in the original language, and that takes years. So I am limited in my choices for study by being reliant on translations, good though some of them are. Classicists, as has already been noted, learn skills that are useful in many other areas.The widened horizons available to those who read Latin, and Greek as well, can only be an asset. Latin should be available in schools, if not compulsory, and it should not be left to the Universities to plug the gap.

[Max]

"Learning Latin"or studying Classics? I know the former is still more or less a requirement for the latter, but to use it as shorthand for a Classics degree is hugely misrepresentative. It always seemed to me that the obvious difference between Classics and other old-school disciplines was that all the others *were* disciplines, while Classics let you flit between several (history, language, philosophy, art history, sociology, yadda yadda), as long as you applied to one contingent (but culturally privileged) place and time. Isn't that its attraction? (But then as someone who somehow got through their degree without ever reading the entirety of the Iliad, Odyssey or Aeneid, even in translation, maybe I'm not a good person to pontificate.)

[David Kirwan]

Two points - though looking again at what I have written I think the second point is just an amplification of the first:

Firstly: it used to be said - or I at least used to be told - that it doesn't matter what you study so long as you learn to think. That is true to a certain extent, but not entirely true.

If you try to study a subject that holds no interest for you the chances are that not only will you not learn much of the subject, but you will not learn independence of thought either. You will just switch off. And as many people evidently enjoy learning about the Romans and (perhaps to a lesser extent) the Ancient Greeks, then to provide them with these paths to learning and intellectual awakening is surely well worth while.

Secondly: a wise old man I used to know held that children should always be taught a foreign language, using materials drawn from the native literature, because it brought them into contact with an alien culture and opened their minds to other ways of regarding the world and how to live in it that their own homes could not provide. Now that globalization is increasingly obliterating cultural differences between contemporary societies, the classical cultures must be candidates to fill this role. Just similar enough to make imaginative and intellectual contact (because we came from there) but in many ways so different that we are brought up with a jolt, and, perhaps, made to think again about the modes of thought and behaviour that we take for granted.

Finally, the argument against supporting the Classics departments at our universities holds just as strongly for, let's say, the Mathematics departments. Why should tax-payers' money be spent on people who spend their time proving Fermat's last theorem, or similar economically unproductive activities? And what economic benefit derives from the Physics departments pursuing the structure of the proton? Surely (here I mount a hobby-horse - allow me to gallop on for a bit longer) part of the definition of a civilised society is that it is willing to spend time and money on the pursuit of truth, all truth, any truth, no matter what well it is found at the bottom of? Of course we live in an age of fashion and spin and truth is deeply unfashionable. So much the greater need for universities where people are free to seek it out and publish it for those who are willing to receive it.