Why Re-re-read the Classics?

Many (but not too many, on our timeline) years ago, Italo Calvino released a book entitled ‘Perche Leggere I Classici?’ (‘Why Read the Classics?’). Soon after this event, the University of Sydney Fisher Library graciously purchased the product and stowed it on a level eight shelf. Movingly balanced between the exile of the inner aisle and the visibility of the arterial walkway, it has sat in the same or similar position for a long time, gathering dust, thumbprints, marks and references. Books too are hard-pressed to escape the ironies of fate, and this one was no less (tightly) bound: a book which, in its mission to direct renewed attention to other, older books, had forgotten to encourage readers to take notice of itself. During my honours year, I would make sure to walk the level eight thoroughfare at a measured pace, in case some visual bud should shoot through the arid, desiccated air conditions and hit my eye. Repeated experience surrendered, as always, to routine, and I would become used to the spines that would jump out for their conspicuous designs: Aisle One, that thing in German on the second shelf from top, Aisle Twenty-three, an obsolete ‘Spain’ Lonely Planet. One day I felt primed for an ocular revolution. I scanned a shelf never-before-scanned and backpedalled at the text ‘Italo Calvino’; for the walking continued while the mind worked. I had read ‘Mr. Palomar’ long ago, so the recognition was there at least. The title spoke to me more loudly than the author, however. Even in the muted tones of a foreign language with which I could only claim rudimentary familiarity (my mum’s Italian), the project sounded promising. Not least because the title was head-on, almost puerile in its simplicity. ‘Why?’, that most irritating of interrogatives, had been boldly brought back, a word I struggled to keep sheathed in the fun memories of pissing off the parents: ‘But why?’ ‘Because…because!’. ‘Why?’ is a blow-fly of a question, inherently difficult to squash. It is an aggressive confrontationalist. So, ‘Why Read the Classics?’…Why?

Italo, as it turned out, never gave me an acceptable answer. It was all in Italian, which would be my most cogent answer to the question ‘Why did it not give you an acceptable answer?’. What was clear was that Calvino’s range of ‘The Classics’ went beyond my narrow little classical Latin and Greek writings: this was ‘Classici’ in the sense of distinguished members in a literary canon spanning from ancient times to the present day. Homer and Ovid still down the front, but wiped to proportionate importance by twenty other essays on Montale, Robert Louis Stevenson, Hemingway and others I fail to remember. But the question didn’t lose its urgency because of a difference in definition. The book’s bravery in asking set an example I had to follow. So out of storage came that question I had suppressed for a long time. ‘Why Read the Classics?’ is the most intimidating of questions in my case, because it is the individuation of the universal ‘Why do what I’m doing?’. There are a host of prefabricated responses available to the asker of that latter question – Money, Power, Intercourse with Hot Ladies, Serving the Greater Good – but none of them nicely fit the particular in this situation. One of the terrifying things about choosing an oddball day-job is that the vindication process is not available from articles in MyCareer: the feel-better-about-yourself is, unfortunately, all do-it-yourself.

As a classicist, one’s armour is always up for the informal, social phrasing of the question ‘Why?’. The gentle soul at the party will smile enthusiastically when they hear you say ‘I study Latin’, perhaps thrust a ‘Good on You!’ back with the implication that doing something out of the ordinary is risky and therefore commendable in itself. Or sometimes the implication is more of a verbal head-pat and hair-rustling: ‘Aww, aren’t you cute with your little Classics thing!’ But the more challenging/interested interlocutor will ask the doosy ‘Why?’, reasonably expecting a fully-fledged adult doing something to know why they are doing it. And in that moment my heart melts of fraudulence. My inner monologue fires the usual reproach: ‘I told you, you should know this by now!’ I scratch around for something real or novel, swearing at the same time that I will never suffer this mortifying ceremony again. But I can’t extemporise a justification on the existential level. I draw from the bank of tired explanations. I study classical languages because they give me a better understanding of the English language. I study classical thought because it forms the foundation of Western culture. I study classical literature to understand allusions in James Joyce and feel slightly superior.

The reasons sound mechanical, but are sold as a package (apart from the last one perhaps) for educational institutions as well as parties. During my recent experience teaching at a secondary school, I made one of my many blunders not preparing a response for the inevitable question ‘Why Study Latin?’ In the golden days of the cane, a light weapon-brandishing would have put that one to bed. But festering mutinies are not so easily neutralised in this current age; nor should they be. Constant re-examination is good for every discipline, even the oldest. Keep it Relevant, Speak to the Kids and all that. These are the children of the cost-benefit generation. No one wants to put their time into something that won’t yield a profit. So, Sir, what will we get out of it? ‘You’ll tap into the roots of your own language and culture. Now let’s start conjugating.’

Classics, until relatively recently, never had to do this. It enjoyed the backing of curricula worldwide; compulsory inclusion enshrined its value. But when governments abandoned this hitherto protected species, it suddenly became terminally endangered. It is doubtful that any other area of study has ever experienced as drastic and sudden a decline. From universality to near-zero in a few years; public incisors tore through Latin and Greek, taking ravenous vengeance for all those years of mind-numbing boredom as John Citizen was forced to sit through a crusty balding Master’s recitation of the paradigm ‘amo, amas, amat.’ Few people of the older generations with whom I have talked recall the learning of Latin in a positive light. Nevertheless, this Fall rivals original sin. Perceived as a fundamental component of Western education for hundreds of years, the 20th century removed Classics from the centrality of core syllabi to the margins of the ‘electives’, and to the non-essential end of even this remote spectrum. Such a damning, Siberian fate makes justification all the more difficult.

It is a truth (universally acknowledged) then that you don’t ‘need’ to learn classical languages to live, or function as even the most ideal product of State education. And even if my plangent cries for the prelapsarian lost world are mildly over-rosy (we lost Latin and Greek, but we won a democratised education system - I would ungrudgingly call that a good trade), it is clear that somewhere along the line, Classics became no longer integral. Latin ceased to be a Lingua Franca for European intellectuals as they found confidence and verbal wealth in their own native tongues. So the stranglehold that required intimate familiarity with the Latin language, at least, was finally broken. The Church’s power waned in the glare of the enlightenment, and its official language followed closely behind. There are many reasons (all of them reasonable) why Classics began to compel less and less interest, yet Latin and Greek were still must-haves on the curriculum for at least another few centuries. The horse, already dead to some, died for more still by excessive flogging. From an academic standpoint, the question ‘Why learn classical languages?’ would have once been answered with another, scoffier question ‘How can one not?’ Times change, as do the targets of scoffs. It is much easier and more natural nowadays to identify reasons not to learn Latin and Greek (they are hard, they are boring, their literature is available in translation, they are the languages of legitimate paedophilia – the list goes on) than it is to find ones in the other direction. The defence is becoming more polemic. The question is getting harder.

So, again…why? With the automatic validation of institutionalised education gone, Classics left in the lurch, what props can a handful of lingering students and teachers offer in support? What can I, as a small unit of that handful, fling in the face of ‘Why?’? Firstly, I can separate two strands which are, for me, at different stages of settlement. We began with ‘Why Read the Classics?’ I have moved imperceptibly to ‘Why Learn Classical Languages?’ They are not the same thing. To the second question I can confidently answer ‘In order to read the classics.’, assuming cyclically that they are worth reading. To the first I could give the same response. But that would be about as fun for all involved as a child interminably parroting ‘Why?’ back to their increasingly frustrated parent. ‘Why Read the Classics?’ ‘In order to read the Classics.’ – a smarmy little response that begs for corporal punishment.

‘Why Read the Classics?’ is also a step down from ‘Why Study the Classics?’ The first question implies a casual readership, the second a league of permanent full-timers. ‘Study’ is just close reading: the ‘re-re-read’ of the title. This stuttered repetition is perhaps a good way to capture the process of attempting to read texts in their original (classical) languages now. The eye becomes more fluent as grammar retires to second-nature and knowledge of vocabulary expands, but attaining that remote, ever-recessive goal of ‘understanding’ is a far slower operation than most day-to-day encounters with language. The act of reading a classical text is, like a child with learning problems, desultory and disruptive. A row of two lines ticked as ‘understood’ without any recourse to an external reference, dictionary or commentary, I would treasure as a rare creature. One’s eye jumps back and forth in the text, re-re-reading long periods to recall the crucial information in the first part which governs meaning in the second, then jumps out of the text altogether, to the sanctuary of handy co-texts which must be kept unfolded on the desk in circumscription of the central text at all times. The process is painstaking, word by word. But for all that work there is a grand sense of reward. Small intellectual victories are frequent: you remember that word from a parallel usage in Horace, that syntax looks similar to something in Homer. After a slog of effort, the dawn of understanding feels that much brighter, almost as visceral a contentment as stepping back to admire a hole you’ve dug into intractable clay. Then you look up, leaning on your spade with pleasant fatigue, and survey the earth still to be dug-up. It spans to the horizon. And so the head goes down again. The battle struggles on, uphill, reaching lows of hard self-reproach and highs of exhilaration. It is difficult, but this is precisely a reason why I like it. The process feels manual, earthy, like you are really getting down there and fondling the guts of the text.

The study of the classics is far from elitist, even if not quite akin to the picture of toiling the soil above. Its temporal qualifications make it still one of the biggest clubs you can join. The vast tradition of scholarship batters you into humility straightaway; any contribution you might one day make is automatically condemned to relative insignificance. Strangely, I find this comforting – almost liberating. The weight of the past presses, but at the same time exonerates you from having to add any more to it. Few people will notice if you fall off the Giants’ shoulders. Probably even fewer will register it if you make it to the top of their crowns. The odds are against you in doing more; and yet, clearly, there is still more to do. Classics has probably been one of the flagship beneficiaries of the recent interdisciplinary thawing all across the Humanities. The once barbarian-wary gates have been thrown open to new friends: literary theory, linguistics, philosophy, gender studies, anthropology have stimulated a miniature renaissance. The dialogue is, at least in theory, beginning to go both ways (as good dialogues should). Stephen Hinds, one of the most important living Latinists, began his invigorating series ‘Roman Literature and Its Contexts’ in the early 90’s with the following informal programme: ‘We Romanists regularly explore critical and theoretical work produced by Renaissance and modern specialists. Now, we'd like to encourage them to read some of our stuff.’ The newfound open-mindedness is exciting. The ‘ivory tower’ preconception of Classics as a discipline is fast dissolving into a substance much less hardy, and an edifice much less imposing. The mutually beneficial process of learning and teaching alongside other disciplines is a bracing (if not entirely new) idea for Classics; but it also serves to show that we’re not dealing with a closed universe, a form that seems wrongly entangled with the very identity of the classics. The very name suggests closure, solidity, canon. But Classics knows, at least as much as other disciplines, and certainly as much as the most dynamic businesses, that it is a case of move or die. Survival is contingent upon constant reinvention. Even if it is just now becoming critically aware of it, the history of classical study is a wonderful show of the flexibility of reception, of how texts are redeemed to the different purposes of their redeemers. The repossession goes on indefinitely. It is still going on.

So healthy expansion and new direction is a good reason for re-re-reading the classics. The value of the process for the self has been addressed. But can the benefits proffer their tentacles further? How does one cross the mist-laden bridge from studying Classics to philanthropy? These are natural, albeit terrifying, questions for the more socially conscious classicists who worry about the high self-indulgence factor of a pursuit which cannot be directly linked to improving the immediate welfare of humanity. Classics is not social work, aid work, development work. It resembles volunteering only in so far as you are doing voluntarily and for free (as a student) what the majority of people find unpleasant. ‘Why?’ often conceals a ‘What practical/monetary benefit does this occupation have for you or anyone else?’ Why, none whatsoever. But the sustenance of financially unproductive roles is at the essence of civilisation. Artists are paid not in accordance with how much food they produce, but with how much they contribute to culture, that aspect of humanity which intercedes between us and a collective of languid hippopotami. Classicists are not artists; and they are as far from cancer-curers as possible. But they do help keep alive something that is invaluable to the human psyche. Like a gallery, museum, library or university, you may go through life without ever really using it or making contact with it: but it is a wonderful consolation to know it is there. Life would be infinitely poorer without Classics.

Towards the end of Homer’s Iliad, Priam, frail, geriatric King of Troy, makes bold to recover the body of his son Hector from an inflamed Achilles. Priam breaches the Greek camp in the night, finds his way to Achilles’ tent and approaches him. In one of the most remarkable moments in literature, a grieving father bows down as a suppliant before the killer of his son. Achilles spares Priam and accepts the ransom. At the end of Virgil’s Aeneid, the hero Aeneas is faced with a similarly prostrate suppliant, his mortal enemy Turnus. He is on the point of sparing him in the vein of Achilles; but at the last moment he decides to kill him. Virgil draws attention to the fact that he could have imitated Homer and ended his epic with a spared life. But he, like Aeneas, chooses to go in the other direction. There was no more powerful way of saying ‘I depend on you, but now I also own you.’ Homer, a long-dead, dubious figure of a shady poet, signed his soul over to Virgil from the underworld: ‘Now I depend on you too.’ These texts always belong to the present, and hence to everyone. As you read them slowly, sometimes abortively, sometimes successfully, little thoughts of novelty swirl around, carving more conspicuously against the backdrop of thousands of people reading the same thing over thousands of years. Why? After all this – most emphatically – the texts belong to you.