For at least the past half century or so, classicists have been drawing up lists of reasons why one should study Latin and Greek. The most embarrassingly utilitarian argument has been that such studies improve one's SAT scores, while the best reason is to learn how to conquer the world and claim it was all self-defense. Some honest classicists have admitted that they simply enjoy learning dead languages, and left the matter as one of sentiment. But if Oxford University required its undergraduates to know Greek until 1920 and Latin until 1960, then surely our culture once believed that such study led to a more substantial benefit than a smattering of Ciceronian dicta and a few grubby points on a university entrance exam.
To begin with, there is a lot to be learned about writing from studying these highly grammatical languages. I have studied Spanish and French and am now at work learning Arabic and Italian on the sly, though I make no claim to proficiency in these languages. With the qualified exception of Arabic, none of these tongues requires as rigorous an understanding of grammar as Latin and Greek. Latin has six cases and tenses, and Greek verbs come with seven tenses, five moods and three voices. There are many more intricacies that I gloss over here.
Good writing is the application of grammar to thought. If one conceives of a piece of prose as a carefully ordered set of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, conjoined and cast into cases and tenses, the resultant writing will, in all probability, be of a much higher quality, and far clearer to read; thus, more enjoyable than otherwise. Learning the classical languages, however, will not make one a Wordsworth or a Milton: Poetry is a bird of a different feather.
Robert Frost famously said that poetry is what cannot be translated. One might want to learn Latin to hear Aeneas make the long descent into Hades, to feel as though the lights are dimming in the room and fog is rolling off the page. This is an argument to sentiment and an offer of beauty. As a classicist told Alexander Pope, who translated the Iliad and the Odyssey, 300 years ago: "You have written a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope. But you mustn't call it Homer." Robert Fagles can give us Homer's story but not in Homer's words. Homer's words are in Greek. Fagles was a poet of skill, but as he wrote in his preface to the Iliad, "No two performances of the same work ... will ever be the same."
Finally, it is impossible to learn a language without learning quite a lot about the culture that it serves. In the case of Latin and Greek, these are the cultures that produced our modern world yet are in many ways alien to it. I am not referring to the status of women or technology; but to a society that thought of morality as accessible by reason, conceived of friendship as equal or greater in value than romantic love, believed the purpose of the state was to make men moral and that civil government was analogous to the government of oneself. To know why the ancients thought as they did will not merely help us better understand our own roots, but also makes us ask if we have gone astray from or improved upon the cornerstone that was laid by Plato, Homer and Solon. Thucydides told us in "The Peloponnesian War" that history was to be "an everlasting possession, not an essay written for a prize."
Fagles' prize-winning translations may prove to be everlasting possessions themselves. We still read Pope's Iliad and Odyssey. There are obviously many other reasons for studying the Classics that cannot be addressed here. But let the last in my short list be this, from Horace: "I will not wholly die, and a great part of me will shun death ... for I have built a monument more lasting than bronze." In memoriam Roberti Fagles.
Brendan Carroll is a freshman from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at btcarrol@princeton.edu.
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