Old Books in the New World

...It was a heady time for classics between 1860 and 1920...

...But the curious thing is this: People in rural California, given the chance, would have welcomed general knowledge about the classical foundations of their own American institutions, as well as information about the glory of Greece and grandeur of Rome...

...BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON I used to leave graduate classes in Latin and Greek composition at Stanford on Fridays to drive home to the San Joaquin Valley to help on our grape farm over the weekend...

...Meanwhile, Ph.D.s in counseling and sociology have been holding rallies to decry this apparently inexplicably barbarous lapse of education and maturity on the part of the United States in its decision to go to war...

...In the days since September 11, my own classics students have cited Plato's "Peace is only a parenthesis," and Heraclitus' "War is the father of all things...

...on the left, the winners were social scientists like John Dewey who felt that their new disciplines were more relevant to the reform of society at large...

...These pragmatists felt such esoteric studies had no relevance to the new emerging muscular classes in our factories and farms and on the frontier...

...We had left Europe to build something new—and better—in America, and our citizens needed vocational skills and rudimentary literacy, not declensions and conjugations...

...Rather, our puzzlement at someone who hates us so in 2002 arises from our knowing so little of the unchanging nature of man and politics...

...In the 1980s and 1990s, in a bizarre twist, some revisionist classicists schooled in the 1960s thought that they could retain the snobbery and specialization of the old purists and yet still enjoy the relevance of the modernists...

...In contrast, these distant grandees of the tiny field teach less than ever before and are unknown to the citizenry at large...

...In The Culture of Classicism Winterer correctly points out that many of the greatest achievements of American culture at large— neoclassical architecture, rich allusions and precision in the American literature of Pound, Eliot, and O'Neill, and the presence of Western civilization courses and general humanities classes in the college curriculum—were attributable to this unique generation of scholarly "popularizers," who battled the realists and vocationalists outside classics and the idle snobs and pedantic specialists inside...

...Classics seems to have the strange effect of making its twenty-year-old students wise beyond their years...

...Hand in glove throughout the twentieth century, popular culture and academic specialization killed off classics...

...Where, then, does classics stand today and does it matter any longer...

...So the old modernist versus traditionalist argument of the nineteenth century about the proper role of classics was long ago won by the realists...

...Classics, the formal study of the languages, literatures, and culture of ancient Greece and Rome, has always held an odd position in American life...

...Or so they thought...

...of articular infinitives in Greek—had much of a clue about how to teach anybody anything like that...

...Successors to the nineteenth century generalists could not— or would not—reconcile the basic inconsistencies of a field whose rigorous linguistic, historical, and literary prerequisites were at odds with the egalitarian spirit of twentieth century education for the masses...

...Immigrants especially would find Virgil or Livy a far better catalyst to success than a decade of bilingual education...

...Whether they be the old fogies (who, it must be admitted, really do know Greek) or the new politically engaged (who do not), few students take their classes, and no one else reads what they write...

...Neither of these antithetical worlds knew anything about the other...

...Later nineteenth century academics such as Stanford's David Starr Jordan joined with such figures as Andrew Carnegie and Charles Francis Adams to remind Americans that universities were not "cloisters," but "workshops" where "reality and practicality" ruled...

...Indeed, we didn't fail to foresee the attacks from the Middle East because too few Americans are acquainted with peace studies, multiculturalism, and various therapeutic theories that emanate daily from the university...

...Even newly created pillars of scientific classicism like the American Philological Society, the Archaeological Institute of America, and the American School of Classical Stud-ies—unlike their stuffy European counterparts—reflected larger efforts to teach the public and undergraduates alike about Greece and Rome...

...The new meritocratic guardians of language who emerged with Ph.D.s in the mid-nineteenth century could then certify and audit those with pretenses to knowledge about everything from Homer to gladiators...

...The doctors grew smug rather than worried that they had kept up philological standards as their culture yawned and passed them by...

...And nationwide fewer than six hundred out of one million bachelor's degrees are awarded in classics each year...

...But unlike the greatest generation of classicists who created the pillars of our field, our scholar-teachers are mostly ignored by specialists who run the major research institutions and graduate classics departments...

...Men like Charles Eliot Norton and Basil L. Gildersleeve—along with the antimodernist Paul Shorey—used their learning to argue for the dissemination of high classical culture to the masses, as if there were no inconsistency in establishing Germanic-based doctoral programs in classical languages to help the spread of Latin in the high schools...

...Students with a firm grasp of Homer, Plato, Thucydides, and Cicero, if only in translation, would have understood the beauty and contradictions of Western civilization—and have gained a sense of who they are and what their culture is about...

...For the last two decades or so, undergraduates got "the rhetoric of manhood" in Homer, rather than enjambed hexameters...

...Yet very few classics professors—who spent hours teaching us how to complete hexameters in Latin and create purpose clauses with the genitive case Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist at California State University in Fresno and the author most recently of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise ofWestern Power...

...Only a brutal regimen of philologically based doctoral study—open to those of all classes and backgrounds—could ensure legitimacy for classics...

...Meanwhile, within the discipline of classics itself, purists—under the influence of the great philologists, epigraphers, and historians of Germany and England—were also rejecting popular relevance...

...These new spe-cialists—with a new trendy message and the old tired values—failed as miserably as their stuffy mentors...

...Greek is nearly dead—taught, for example, only haphazardly each semester to fewer than a hundred undergraduates in the California State University system, the world's largest university, with over 250,000 students on twenty-two campuses...

...How, after all, can you argue for two years of Greek to a student facing thousands of dollars in loans, when he can better support his future family through a semester of accounting...

...Millions of working class Americans were to be as literate and knowledgeable of the basics of a humane and consensual society as had been privileged Roman aristocrats of old...

...Even a year of Latin for our nation's youth would do far more to inculcate grammar, style, and precision in written expression than all the current trendy variations of English composition classes...

...A few brilliant classicists withstood both these extremes—and for a brief period they succeeded in leaving the imprint of cultured classical erudition upon the general society...

...Mostly the teaching of Latin and Greek, and satellite classes in history, literature, and archaeology, are kept alive by a cadre of a few hundred devoted and mostly exhausted undergraduate teachers who follow the spirit of Norton and Gildersleeve at a wide range of colleges from St...

...There have been rallies in recent years, but mostly by those who lacked both the brilliance and public spiritedness of their nineteenth century predecessors...

...As late as 1915, only English, algebra, and history had larger enrollments than Latin in high schools...

...Bent on establishing classics as a truly scientific discipline akin to math or biology, they declared that only years of careful and narrow study of esoteric texts, Greek inscriptions, and archaeological finds—published in little-read journals and obscure doctoral dissertations— could ensure that classics was a legitimate field in a modern world...

...Already by the early 1920s social sciences—psychology, sociology, anthropology—had crowded out classics, aided by both vocationalism (nursing, teacher training, physical education) and the new academic professionalism of business, law, and medicine...

...Those Americans who graduated did so with a solid sense of language, literature, civics, and ethics...

...But as it turned out, students were to be taught a lot more about a lot less—and almost nothing about everything from literature to history to philosophy that had been the old stuff of classics...

...In despair, as enrollment plummeted and the nation's art, architecture, and literature were severed from their Greco-Roman roots, philologists fled modernism and retreated into further esoterica—more dissertations on the use of gar in Pindar's Odes or the 175th new and ingenious interpretation of how triremes were rowed...

...Caroline Winterer leaves unanswered the question of whether classics will ever again fulfill the vision of Norton and Gildersleeve...

...Such esoteric learning was more attuned, as Harvard president Charles Eliot warned, to the seventeenth than to the nineteenth century...

...John's, Santa Clara, and Amherst to Vermont, Iowa State, and San Diego State...

...Precious professors with long titles and reduced teaching loads would now "do theory" instead of Greek grammar, and thereby teach our new "diverse" student body the neglected "multicultural" world of the ancient Mediterranean and its vibrant population of "the Other...

...But both languages are time consuming, difficult, and bound up in class traditions...

...Like every besieged and shrinking sect, classicists found proof of true belief was found in greater specialization, as if mastery of every particle in Greek could prove one had not joined the infidels...

...As Caroline Winterer shows in her elegant book The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910, those professors who tried to teach the citizenry at large about how the Greeks and Romans created and struggled with democracy and republican government enjoyed little support—and often downright hostility—from both the public and universities...

...This is all a pity, really...

...Greek and Latin were better left to a few class-bound New England dandies or southern plantationists who aped, rather than properly rejected, Europe's leisured gentry...

...On the right, the winners were vocationalists who sought to use the university to train working class youth in marketable skills...

...An hour with Thucydides—whether reading of the great debate at Sparta, the stasis at Corcyra, the Melian Dialogue, or the argument over going to Syracuse— might have warned us that people attack others over their "fear, honor, and self-interest...

...To spread classical learning, tens of thousands had to learn Greek and Latin...

...But it is possible in these days that the beauty and the wisdom contained in Greek and Latin will again inspire a democratic public...

...It seemed hard to insist to an immigrant from Italy, Poland, or Mexico that spending two years learning Latin and Greek would make him a better citizen or wealthier—much less a gentleman or a national asset as a much-needed expert on the textual history of Petronius...

...And perhaps the seemingly irrelevant pieces of their esoteric publications might someday magically all fit together in one coherent mosaic of the ancient world—one that would justify their decades of painstaking and misunderstood research...

...But this renaissance of knowledge was short lived...

...At the very founding of our own nation, modernists in other disciplines—backed by the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Rush—claimed that knowledge of the classical languages was an empty aristocratic pursuit...

...But it all mattered little...

...Only a fraction of today's university population takes Greek and Latin, compared to the students a century ago—although the general student body is twenty times larger than in 1900...

...Probably not...

...Why take Latin for law school when psychology purportedly offers a better understanding of jury selection...