Dialogues with the Dead I
CW: Racist language
Why should we continue to study Classical languages?
Shiyoun Kim (Liz)
“I’d give ten years of my life to know Greek.”
So says enchanted Mrs. Dalloway, as she listens to the Odes to Man chorus from Antigone by Sophocles in Virginia Woolf’s debut 1915 novel The Voyage Out. Now it seems the modern reader no longer empathises with Mrs. Dalloway. Surely, one would ask, is there not a worthier matter to spend ten years of your life on, rather than learning an impractical, dead language?
This sentiment is reflected in the current state of the education of classical languages in the U.K. In 2019, the total number of A Level entries made in the Classical Studies, consisting of Latin, Classical Greek, biblical Hebrew, Ancient History and Classical Civilisation all together, was only 5,148. In comparison with the number of A Level entries for more popular subjects, such as that of Mathematics - 91,895, or of Business Studies - 33,925, we can see the extent of the decline in the study of not only classical languages, but of classics in the wider sense. Hence it is not surprising that over the last decades, countless books, reviews, articles have poured out with titles like “Classics is Dead!”, “Classics in Crisis”, and “Who Killed Homer?”, moaning ‘the loss of civilisation’, demanding ‘the right to Rome’, and suggesting some emergency procedures to save the study of classics from its critical state.
On the other hand, there are people celebrating the approaching end of a subject that is still considered as the mark of distinction for the privileged. There is an uncomfortable aspect of the study of classical languages when we consider how it has been used as an instrument of social exclusion and of enforcing a rigid echelon. Classical scholars themselves point out that most of the students who took Greek and Latin in A-level have been consistently from independent schools. It is easy to infer a connection between a financially privileged background and access to privately funded education. Some argue that classics has been a handy tool for its numerous white European male supporters, such as Goebbels, who had Greek tragedy as his bedside reading, and Senator John C. Calhoun, an American pro-slavery thinker, who declared that ”if he could find a Negro who knew the Greek syntax, he would then believe that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man.”¹
Moreover, despite the common claims that knowledge of Latin is an enormous aid in learning modern languages such as French, Italian, or Spanish, many point out the reason for the decline of classics is the pointlessness of learning dead languages. In this globalised world, especially in the post-Brexit period, it seems foolish to waste time on learning dead languages, while the ability to fluently speak Mandarin or German secures tangible opportunities.
Then why, after all these cries to let this problematic and unpractical subject perish, people still argue against and lament on its falling? What drives all those energies, anxieties and concerns featured in publications and debates on the current state of classics? Why does anyone even care about it? And there lies, I assert, the essence of classics.
When we examine the value of classics, we must first define what it is. The Cambridge English Dictionary characterises classics as “the study of Ancient Greek and Roman culture, especially their languages and literature” - which, to paraphrase as clearly as I can, is the study of the world that had gone before us. It is the search for the answer of the most fundamental question: where are we from?
As the scholars of the second century AD had called it, the study of classics is a series of ‘dialogues with the dead’. It is a communication with the people who have existed before us, not only with those who had lived two millenniums ago, but also with the great minds who had communicated with the ancients previously. There would be no Dante without Vergil, no John Stuart Mill without Plato. It would be impossible to comprehend the works of Sigmund Freud without Sophocles, nor Donna Tartt without Euripides. Just as the study of history is dedicated to learning the people, the nations, the events, the ideologies that have come before us, forming one lens through which we understand our present and ourselves, so is the study of classics another such lens. Through the lens of Ancient Greek and Roman civilisations we can see how our literature, our politics, our psychology and philosophy have come to be what they are now in a critically different and profound light.
In conclusion, to truly know ourselves, we need to understand those that had come before us, those that once were us. And to understand them, we need to speak their language. Dead languages are thus still relevant today, as without knowing the language, we cannot reflect on the cumulative history and the culture of a community and its people – hence their identity - and we can never fully comprehend the era in which the language had been spoken; our past. We understand more of ourselves and our lives today through speaking with the dead. And I believe that Mrs. Dalloway, who longed to pay ten years of her life for Ancient Greek, an indisputably impractical language in our modern world, knew this.
¹Crummell, Alexander. (1898) The Attitude of the American Mind Toward the Negro Intellect.