Classics

Why It Matters

Neville Morley

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509517961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

For generations, the study of Greek and Latin was used to train the elites of the western world. Knowledge of classical culture, it was believed, produced more cultivated, creative individuals; Greece and Rome were seen as pinnacles of civilization, and the origins of western superiority over the rest of the world. Few today are willing to defend this elitist, sometimes racist, vision of the importance of classics, and it is no longer considered essential education for politicians and professionals. Shouldn't classics then be obsolete? Far from it. As Neville Morley shows, the ancients are as influential today as they ever have been, and we ignore them at our peril. Not only do they have much to teach us about the past, but they can offer important lessons for the complex cultural, social and political worlds of the present. Introducing Polity's Why It Matters series: In these short and lively books, world-leading thinkers make the case for the importance of their subjects and aim to inspire a new generation of students.

1
What’s Wrong with Classics

The Foundations of Knowledge

Why does classics – the study of the societies and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world, and their literary and artistic products – matter? Five hundred years or so ago, such a question would have seemed entirely absurd: knowledge of the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans was knowledge as commonly understood by the educated elites of Europe, the foundation of all understanding of the natural world, human society and politics, and art. (Its relation to the spiritual world and to the truth revealed by Holy Scripture was a rather more contentious issue.) Latin was already the trans-European language of learning and law, thanks to the Church, and it remained the basis of all education, even when humanist scholars in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries started to develop alternative schemes of education in place of the curricula offered by Church institutions. Latin thus became the indispensable medium for all scientific and intellectual communication, the language in which figures such as Newton, Leibniz and Descartes published their most important works, so that their ideas could reach an audience across the continent. Since Latin was taught at higher levels through the medium of classical Roman texts, even the least historically minded pupil imbibed a substantial dose of Roman literature and culture in the process, whether or not they remembered any of the language, and classical names and references were as familiar in the conversations and letters of the educated classes as anything from the literature and history of their own countries.

More importantly, learning classical languages was the best means to access the store of classical knowledge and wisdom. The period of dramatic intellectual and cultural activity we know as the Renaissance, beginning in fourteenth-century Italy and spreading across the rest of western Europe over the next two hundred years, was conceived as the re-birth of classical learning, recovering it from obscurity and religious suppression so that it could be put into practice once more in the hope of matching the cultural achievements of the Greeks and Romans. Initially through Latin authors alone, and then gradually also through their classical Greek predecessors – above all after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the subsequent westwards migration of Greek speakers and their texts – the full breadth of ancient learning was put at the disposal of the new Europe. Scholars laboured to improve the quality of the texts, recognizing that the process of copying and re-copying them over the centuries had introduced errors and variations. Some endeavoured to recover forgotten (or deliberately suppressed) works from obscure libraries or by reading between the lines (literally) of manuscripts known as palimpsests, where pages of writers like Tacitus or Ovid had been reused for a later Christian work but the original could still be deciphered. Others worked to make this knowledge more widely available, translating Greek texts into Latin and Latin ones into vernacular languages, such as Thomas North’s English translation of the Parallel Lives of Plutarch, which provided Shakespeare with several plots and a great many references, or Thomas Hobbes’ version of Thucydides, which influences political theory to this day.

Classical wisdom was regarded as the fount of all knowledge. Science began with Aristotle, followed by figures like Theophrastus and Ptolemy, with Galen for medicine; philosophy began with Plato and Aristotle, and was continued by Cicero and Seneca; historiography had been invented by Herodotus and Thucydides, while Livy, Sallust and Tacitus offered further guidance on how one should write the history of a nation or a ruler, as well as providing ideas for political theorists like Machiavelli and Hobbes and rhetorical models for aspiring young politicians; the campaigns of Alexander and Caesar, and ancient handbooks of strategy and tactics, informed the latest military science; Plutarch, both because of his Lives of exemplary Greeks and Romans and because of his vast output of improving maxims, was virtually a complete education in how one ought to comport oneself in the world. Artists, meanwhile, looked to the achievements of the ancients in poetry, drama, sculpture and architecture, and to the ideas developed by figures like Aristotle on tragedy, Quintilian on rhetoric, Ovid on poetry and Vitruvius on architecture about how these works achieved their effects and what rules practitioners ought to follow. Not even the sphere of ‘everyday life’ was spared: agricultural handbooks, such as the one written by Varro, were adopted as sources of important advice for any estate owner, despite the fact that, to our eyes, they were manifestly dealing with an entirely different world.

The importance of the works of the Greeks and Romans, as a source of knowledge, understanding, and practical and theoretical wisdom, was undisputed – though the scope for debate about which classical authority one should follow, when inevitably one came across a difference of opinion or of practice, was enormous. There were questions to be asked about the relation of such learning to the biblical and scriptural tradition, which continued well into the nineteenth century: did one seek to reconcile the different perspectives that classical and scriptural sources offered on certain topics, such as the nature of the universe or the role of divinity (singular or plural) or apparently divergent historical narratives, or decide the conflict in favour of one or the other, or simply evade the issue? A still more pressing problem, at least for artists and scientists, was how far it might be possible for people of the post-classical age to match or even surpass their ancient predecessors in different fields. The greatness of the classical achievement was not in any question, but was it complete and perfect, so that the moderns could only imitate, choose between classical authorities or provide at best minor footnotes on already-established knowledge?

Ancients and Moderns

Even in the mid-seventeenth century, it was clear to many that the ‘ancient’ position, requiring total submission to classical authority, was untenable. In the fields of science, mathematics and technology, modern research and investigative techniques not only went far beyond the achievements of the ancients but in important respects (the structure of the solar system, for example) contradicted their claims, as well as those of biblical authority. Even if one adopted the view put forward by William Temple in his 1690 attack on the progressivists of the Royal Society, ‘On Ancient and Modern Learning’, that the moderns could see further because they were standing on the shoulders of giants, this was a clear admission that ancient authority was not in itself sufficient or complete. Increasingly, therefore, classical learning became less central as modern knowledge and understanding accumulated. The usefulness of Latin in this context was that it allowed communication with fellow scientists across linguistic boundaries, rather than because it gave access to the treasury of ancient thought – and so it was seen as a basic skill associated with one’s schooldays, rather than necessarily a matter of lifelong interest. Belief in the eternal validity of ancient aesthetic principles persisted rather longer – and indeed there were periodic reassertions of the centrality of the classical as a model for artists, for example in the late eighteenth century as the result of J. J. Winckelmann’s magisterial studies of classical sculpture, presenting works like the ‘Apollo Belvedere’ (Figure 1) as the epitome of ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’. However, adherence to classical norms was increasingly an artistic choice, one aesthetic possibility among many, rather than the sole acceptable form. One might, as the seventeenth-century French playwright Jean Racine did, choose not only to write tragedies based on classical plots, but also to adhere firmly to the principles of the Aristotelian theory of tragedy, even though many classical tragedies departed from that norm – but plenty of his contemporaries explored different approaches to the theatre. John Milton’s Paradise Lost is manifestly an attempt to rival ancient epic, and to explore what it means to write an epic in a Christian context, as much as it is influenced by or imitating ancient models.

Figure 1: The ‘Apollo Belvedere’: Roman copy (second century CE) of lost Greek bronze (fourth century BCE). Classical perfection? (Getty Images)

Moreover, there was a growing awareness of the differences between the present and the classical past in material and social terms, which raised questions about the validity and usefulness of classical knowledge. Quite simply, the world was changing, to the point where this became impossible to ignore: in the development of the European economy and the adoption of new productive technology, for example, leading to an increase in material prosperity and power over nature that went far beyond anything the ancients could manage. The consequences of these changes could still be interpreted in classical terms – some denounced them as ‘luxury’, and prophesied social and moral disaster as a result, just as Sallust had shown Rome becoming corrupted by its increasing wealth – but it was difficult to argue persuasively that the ancient world had actually experienced such an economic and technological revolution. New forms of knowledge – political economy and other embryonic social sciences – offered alternative explanations of modern developments. These promised the moderns not only that they could understand their own world, but also that they could turn these intellectual tools back towards the past, and understand the world of the Greeks and Romans better than they did themselves. From this perspective, classical antiquity comes to appear underdeveloped, even primitive; far from being the pinnacle of all civilization which we moderns can only try to imitate, it is seen instead as a point of origin, which modern Europe has now surpassed and from which it will continue to diverge.

This historical development was not always seen positively: for every celebration of the new power and dynamism of modernity, science and reason, we can find a lament for the loss of wholeness, authenticity, spirit and beauty as a result of our distance from antiquity....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• 1 What’s Wrong with Classics
• 2 Charting the Past
• 3 Understanding the Present
• 4 Anticipating the Future?
• Afterword
• Further Reading
• Index
• End User License Agreement