Greek to Us
MCDONOUGH, CHRISTOPHER M.
Greek to Us Why we need the classics, now more than ever. BY CHRISTOPHER M. MCDONOUGH My fellow classicists will know what I mean when I say that I hate the question "What do you teach?" because...
...But the deeper roots of the problem can be traced to various transformations in American and European culture over the last century or so...
...We will not be able to protect the genuine reproductive freedom of women—their right to have and love their own babies—unless there is a pro-life consensus embodied in our law...
...The long chapter entitled "Prospect from the Castalian Spring" sketches with journalistic esprit the ways in which the study of Latin and Greek from Auso-nius to Mr...
...This is, of course, exactly the problem...
...and which has since become "code for the painfully glorious exertions of Greek and Latin...
...But the deeper roots of the problem can be traced to various transformations in American and European culture over the last century or so...
...Or, as Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath asked in the title of their treatise on the topic a few years back, Who Killed Homer...
...At one time, classics was considered the queen of the humanities, the loftiest of the liberal arts, which conferred civilization itself upon its adherents...
...Yet, in his final chapter, he cites approvingly a little-known essay of C.S...
...But the real coercion has not yet begun...
...This is, of course, exactly the problem...
...Simmons waxes eloquent upon this high-minded concept: "Liberal education ought to aim not just at furnishing the mind with serviceable knowledge and information, nor even at habituating the mind to rational methods, but at leading it to wisdom, to a quality of knowledge tempered by experience and imbued with understanding...
...because I never know quite how to respond...
...and which has since become "code for the painfully glorious exertions of Greek and Latin...
...In the end, Climbing Parnassus is not really a clarion call for the study either of the classical languages or of classical literature per se, though Simmons has much good to say about both...
...His title refers to the ascent up the mountain where Apollo and the Muses were thought to reside, Christopher M. McDonough is an assistant professor of classics at the University of the South (Sewanee...
...Sure, it's handy for killing chitchat on airplanes, but it sometimes unnerves me to think just how dead is our Greco-Roman heritage...
...His title refers to the ascent up the mountain where Apollo and the Muses were thought to reside, Christopher M. McDonough is an assistant professor of classics at the University of the South (Sewanee...
...Those who believe the effective regulation of biotechnological development can be morally neutral about abortion are simply wrong...
...Under this new laissez-faire arrangement, classics wilted, while disciplines deemed more suitable for the dawning new century throve...
...The impression of elitism is one of the things that drove people away from classics: the fact that you cannot do anything with it gives the discipline a suspicious air of fecklessness such as only those with money can afford...
...As we set rockily forth in a new century, very few undergraduates have the courage to major in Greek and Latin when the cost of a college education is so very high and when much of what our culture prizes is so very stupid anyway...
...The one begins with hard, dry things like grammar, and dates, and prosody...
...Auden wrote in "Spain 1937," "but to-day the struggle...
...For help with not just your SAT scores but also your immortal soul, it is advisable to lift up your eyes to this mountain...
...Unless we become clear as a nation that abortion is wrong, women will—I predict—eventually find themselves compelled to submit to therapeutic abortions of genetically defective babies and then to do whatever is required to enhance their children genetically...
...Among the most notable beneficiaries of this tradition were the Founding Fathers...
...The subtitle of Simmons's book—A New Apologia for Greek and Latin— is really something of a misnomer, since the author's position is in no way dogmatic (a matter noted with relief by William F. Buckley on the first page of his foreword...
...Indeed, to the generation that came of age in the great war's wake, classical education itself symbolized the old, rotten ancien regime...
...But though classics was once the purview of the wealthy, Simmons remarks, "we should not confuse contingency with necessity...
...Chips has inspired its followers to precise expression and the disinterested pursuit of truth...
...because I never know quite how to respond...
...It should, in a word, humanize...
...and it has at least the chance of ending in a real appreciation which is equally hard and firm though not equally dry...
...Auden wrote in "Spain 1937," "but to-day the struggle...
...Indeed, to the generation that came of age in the great war's wake, classical education itself symbolized the old, rotten ancien regime...
...He discusses at some length the history of humanism, which he contrasts with humanitarian-ism—the latter concerned to perfect all mankind, the former more sincerely interested in cultivating as much as possible the individual soul...
...In the past when I've answered, "classics," I've been told how much my interlocutor loves Mark Twain or Dickens, or been asked (this from a medical doctor), "Oh, which instrument...
...Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek," W.H...
...Nowadays I mostly reply, "Latin and Greek," which isn't entirely true and which almost always results in a nervous silence...
...Under this new laissez-faire arrangement, classics wilted, while disciplines deemed more suitable for the dawning new century throve...
...So how did the queen of the humanities come to be pushed off her throne...
...In the 1880s, for instance, after Harvard did away with its strictly prescribed curriculum by introducing the "free-elective" system, which allowed students to choose their own course of study, schools all over the country eagerly followed suit...
...In the writings of the ancient authors, Simmons argues, we find all the wisdom which any age might ever hope to attain...
...It may be that Lewis has set up a false dichotomy here, since there are many who will never be led to the Optative unless they are first taught that there is such a thing as the Parthenon...
...I'm reminded here of an anecdote about the student who was asked in a job interview what the point of his classics major had been...
...and he answers, "Not all knowledge worth having need be worn with scholastic exactitude...
...It trains you to be a Roman emperor...
...In the past when I've answered, "classics," I've been told how much my interlocutor loves Mark Twain or Dickens, or been asked (this from a medical doctor), "Oh, which instrument...
...It trains you to be a Roman emperor...
...Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek," W.H...
...Simmons waxes eloquent upon this high-minded concept: "Liberal education ought to aim not just at furnishing the mind with serviceable knowledge and information, nor even at habituating the mind to rational methods, but at leading it to wisdom, to a quality of knowledge tempered by experience and imbued with understanding...
...Simmons does not address exactly this issue, though Hanson and Heath pointed the finger at academic hipsters and trend-followers, whose solipsistic, jargon-laden prose has no doubt contributed to putting the ancients that much further out of the general public's reach...
...The G.I...
...The impression of elitism is one of the things that drove people away from classics: the fact that you cannot do anything with it gives the discipline a suspicious air of fecklessness such as only those with money can afford...
...Tracy Lee Simmons's book is a timely reminder of how much the West has derived from its classical roots...
...He discusses at some length the history of humanism, which he contrasts with humanitarian-ism—the latter concerned to perfect all mankind, the former more sincerely interested in cultivating as much as possible the individual soul...
...The culture of the Old World, meanwhile, suffered irrevocable damage in the First World War: If the widescale appreciation of Greek and Latin has any grave, it is surely to be found among those in the poppies of Flanders fields...
...For help with not just your SAT scores but also your immortal soul, it is advisable to lift up your eyes to this mountain...
...So how did the queen of the humanities come to be pushed off her throne...
...Some of this, of course, is already happening informally through pressure imposed by physicians and HMOs...
...I'm reminded here of an anecdote about the student who was asked in a job interview what the point of his classics major had been...
...At one time, classics was considered the queen of the humanities, the loftiest of the liberal arts, which conferred civilization itself upon its adherents...
...But surely nobody will disagree that, in important matters, even the most tedious details need mastering...
...Nowadays I mostly reply, "Latin and Greek," which isn't entirely true and which almost always results in a nervous silence...
...In the 1880s, for instance, after Harvard did away with its strictly prescribed curriculum by introducing the "free-elective" system, which allowed students to choose their own course of study, schools all over the country eagerly followed suit...
...The "Optative" is one of the moods of the Greek verb] . . . Ever since then I have tended to use the Parthenon and the Optative as the symbols of two types of education...
...Lewis entitled "The Parthenon and the Optative," in which a trifling awareness of Greek art is contrasted with the rigors of Greek philology: "The trouble with these boys," said a grim old classical scholar looking up from some milk-and-watery entrance papers which he had been marking: "the trouble with these boys is that the masters have been talking to them about the Parthenon when they should have been talking to them about the Optative...
...In his new book, Climbing Parnassus, Tracy Lee Simmons (a journalism professor at Hillsdale College) ponders similar issues, offering in readable prose a spirited defense of classical education while surveying the history of the tradition...
...That which may cater to the privileged in one period might prime the aspirations of democracy in another...
...The climb up Parnassus is eminently worth making, and this volume worth reading...
...The book has no sustained engagement with any single classical author or work, and, tellingly, Simmons's discussion of Ciceronianism is longer than any of his remarks about Cicero himself...
...Auden may not have felt that way in the ensuing decades—Simmons quotes a later essay in which the poet castigates an inarticulate film review in the New Yorker as something only a writer without "a classical education could have perpetrated"—but, nonetheless, by mid-century there was no going back to amo, amas, amat...
...But though classics was once the purview of the wealthy, Simmons remarks, "we should not confuse contingency with necessity...
...The question is whether Greek and Latin are still among those important matters...
...The culture of the Old World, meanwhile, suffered irrevocable damage in the First World War: If the widescale appreciation of Greek and Latin has any grave, it is surely to be found among those in the poppies of Flanders fields...
...In his new book, Climbing Parnassus, Tracy Lee Simmons (a journalism professor at Hillsdale College) ponders similar issues, offering in readable prose a spirited defense of classical education while surveying the history of the tradition...
...The other begins in "Appreciation" and ends in gush...
...With a reluctant but firm tone, Simmons ends his introduction by asking, "Can someone be 'classically educated' without a reading knowledge of Greek and Latin...
...But that's because the book's true concern is less with the classics than with the Classical Tradition, the reception of antiquity in subsequent ages and the unbroken chain of edifying culture it represents...
...Bill of 1944 pushed American education still further away from the "impractical" classics, and the Second Vatican Council's sanctioning of the vernacular undercut the place of Latin in many of the nation's Catholic schools...
...That which may cater to the privileged in one period might prime the aspirations of democracy in another...
...Sure, it's handy for killing chitchat on airplanes, but it sometimes unnerves me to think just how dead is our Greco-Roman heritage...
...Auden may not have felt that way in there is an additional urgency to this argument now, as the threats of biotechnology begin to loom over us...
...by Christopher M. McDonough My fellow classicists will know what I mean when I say that I hate the question "What do you teach...
...It teaches a man to feel vaguely cultured while he remains in fact a dunce...
...In the writings of the ancient authors, Simmons argues, we find all the wisdom which any age might ever hope to attain...
...Simmons does not address exactly this issue, though Hanson and Heath pointed the finger at academic hipsters and trend-followers, whose solipsistic, jargon-laden prose has no doubt contributed to putting the ancients that much further out of the general public's reach...
...Or, as Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath asked in the title of their treatise on the topic a few years back, Who Killed Homer...
...It should, in a word, humanize...
Vol. 8 • November 2002 • No. 11
