Taking the Long View

By Dr Peter Jones, Adviser to Classics for All In Evelyn Waughs Scott-Kings Modern Europe (1947), the classics teacher Scott-King just manages to escape from a chaotic post-war conference in Neutralia (Waugh meant the Balkans). The book ends at the start of the new term, when the head master summons Scott-King for a chat. He points out that parents want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world and asks Scott -King if he would also teach history, preferably economic history? Scott-King refuses. Its a short-sighted view, Scott-King. There, head master, with all respect, I differ from you profoundly. I think it is the most long sighted view it is possible to take. Hopeless idealism? Certainly. But there is nothing wrong with a little idealism, and we know that those who have studied the ancient languages are never, in fact, short of job-offers. A top asset-manager recently told me that his firm always employed classicists: they sold more. If Richard Dawkins is right, that is because what Classics has always done is just teach people how to think. Proposition: You learn Latin because the language and those who spoke it have not merely stood the test of time: they have become the test of time. The same can be said (some would argue even more so) for ancient Greek.
Socrates: the long view When the Roman historian Tacitus says of Roman empire-building solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant they make a desert and call it peace - here is a man deconstructing, in four words, his own countrys achievement - and the Wests? This is a literate, sophisticated, critical civilisation.

So too the Greeks. Athenians invented democracy in 509 BC, perhaps the one sacrosanct, unquestioned good of the Western world. In that context, one of them argued Questions of justice arise only where there is equal power to compel. In practical terms, the dominant exact what they can and the weak concede what they must. Discuss. But Latin is not only the medium of a superb literature, spanning some2,000 years. If you wanted to invent a language that would show you with crystal clarity how language basically worked, you would invent Latin. That is why those lucky enough to study it just to age 16 have valued it so highly. With Greek, it spins off into a rich study of the roots of the higher registers of our language, an ease with romance languages and complex modes of persuasive speech and argument.

That is what is available through the study of the ancient world the languages, literature, culture and history of the Western worlds first literate civilisations, where, uninfluenced by Christianity or globalism or mass communication systems, men grappled with exactly the same issues that we do: life, death, gods, sex, love, family, children, education, the nature of the world, our origins and development, the past, money, health, status, other cultures, friendship, power, patriotism, politics, law, crime, justice, empire, war. One purpose of education is to open pupils eyes to the riches of the world around them, past and present. The purpose of Classics for All is quite simple: to raise funds to give schools the risk-free, minimal cost opportunity to engage with those riches. Isaiah Berlin said To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed -in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity. To study the ancient world in all its restless curiosity, questioning, variety and inquisitiveness is perhaps the finest antidote to todays uniformed tendency.