Classics

I was startled to read in the latest issue of the English journal Prospect that in a poll of their readers asked to rank the fifty most significant intellectuals of the year 2014 Mary Beard a professor of classics at Cambridge and a frequent contributor to The New York Review, the TLS, and so on was ranked number 7!  To say I was startled is understatement until I reflected that the readership of Prospect is a pretty exalted bunch.  Beard recently came out with a collection of her reviews, lectures and essays entitled Confronting the Classics which, indeed, I have not done in a long time, being almost twenty years retired, so I got the book and dipped in.  The first piece Do Classics Have A Future? was intriguing if for no other reason that "classics" is a singular noun in American English because it means the whole business of Greek and Roman antiquity seen through their artifacts from literature to artistic representation whereas I guess for Professor Beard it means the very items themselves rather than the study of them.  I will always remember the high toned secretary at Harvard answering her phone with "The Department of the Classics."  For a little guy from Iowa that was about as good as it gets at Harvard hearing that!  the Classics, and don't you forget it.  Do Classics Have a Future is intriguing for a thousand and one reasons, not the least being that Beard has been spending too much time with the intellectual elite so that she actually believes there is a large audience out there who cares about the future of the knowledge of Latin and Greek and their contexts, a large group who desperately care that the allusions to antiquity to be found throughout art and literature since the Renaissance are there for all to catch and understand whereas the truth of the matter is that most people, certainly in the United States,  cannot even identify the number, names, or location of most of the fifty states, have absolutely minimal understanding of the Constitution and the intellectual habits and beliefs of the Founding Fathers (otherwise why would so many people go on and on about how those gentlemen wanted this to be a Christian nation? Ridiculous!).  Beard talks at some length about the nineteenth century preoccupation with classical studies at school and university as a source for the definition of a gentleman, and talks as though that had somehow changed.  Yes, indeed it has, in that now not even so-called gentlemen are encouraged to study the Latin and Greek languages and their literatures.  When I taught at Yale in the late fifties they were still pedaling the notion that a classics major would get you a job in the state department, but there were certainly very few takers for that proposition.  Can you imagine G.W. Bush dipping into Latin and Greek?  A deep knowledge of classical antiquity was once upon a time a very healthy antidote to the pervasive Christian view of things with which the western world is so dramatically tinged; it gave a framework for life, and explanation of its meaning, a solid foundation in tragic uncertainty in place of a simplistic reflex surrender to happy thoughts and amelioration through good works and prayer.  But very few persons have a considered view of the Christian truth of things anymore, so the pagan alternative does not have the same resonance.  As a male student of Latin and Greek literature in my late teens and early twenties I was never bothered all that much by the extraordinary subordination of the female in those cultures, by the constant emphasis upon the existential problems of the powerful oppressor class, by the natural resort to violence and the suppression of the underclass.  It all seemed so natural.  I will always treasure the ancient view of things; a tragic sense of life seems absolutely right to me.  But I do know that not enough of the comic sense of life survives from antiquity, like making babies, raising children, eating feasts, fondling breasts, fingering erections, laughing, lying on blankets eating grapes, and all the rest.