I recently read in The New Criterion  (November 2023) that students at Princeton can get a degree in classics without taking Greek and Latin. This startled me:  classics is by definition the study of ancient Greek and Latin literature. If Princeton whimsically lowers its standards, where does that leave the rest of us?  Does  Princeton intend to phase out classics?  There can be no other explanation.

In a  short story I wrote, a classics student at a small liberal arts college refuses to take required classes outside her major.  She takes pride in her resistance to science and gym. At the end of her sophomore year, she is summoned by the Dean. 

“There must be some misunderstanding. Did you know that you need these classes to graduate?”

She says that she has neither the time nor the energy to study subjects outside her major. “I’ve already done physics.  I’ve read Lucretius in Latin on physics and Epicurean philosophy. That should count for physics and philosophy.”

He compliments her on her versatility but reminds her that she needs the required classes anyway.  “And I’m sure you’ll enjoy the modern take on physics.”

The student quits and transfers to a state university where  she is also required to take core courses. She doesn’t mind: it was the principle of the thing at the posh college, where elite  students from the east coast had essentially taken college-level-courses at prep schools, which gave them an advantage over others, whether or not they had understood the subjects in their adolescence. On the other hand, the egalitarian state university gave bright, occasionally under-prepared students a chance to catch up and bloom.

I threw out this story because it was basically a treatise on education.  I, too, grumbled about core requirements. Fortunately, Drama in Western Culture proved to be my favorite class for two semesters, though I was bored by the Physics of Something or Other, and have blocked all memory of gym.

These days articles in newspapers and magazines frequently describe the confusion and anxiety in humanities departments. Enrollment is declining. They’re trying everything they can to survive.

But the description of the undergraduate classics program at Princeton is depressing.

In the photo at the Princeton classics website, there are no books in Greek or Latin, except the green Loebs, referred to by my professors as the Low-ebbs, because they have the English translation facing the Greek or Latin. Loebs are useful if you want to read an obscure author, because it is sometimes the only text in print.

Here’s the good news: state universities still have traditional classics programs. And I’m sure the faculty at Princeton would like to restore tradition.

I am saddened by the desperate changes in the humanities.

O brave new world!

O tempora! O mores!

The first problem is, we were poor.  The second is, we were  women. The third  is, we were not the canny students who read the classics bulletin board and scribbled down information about summer scholarships at The American Academy in Rome.

Showing up for class after working the night shift: “Filled out your application?”

Stage direction:  Burst into giggles.

There was nothing on that bulletin board for my friends and me.  We could not afford Rome, even if we had won a scholarship. The irony is that the secretary might have found us other grants, since she was the only one who understood the system.  But we stared blankly at the professor who told us to check out the bulletin board.  He was well-meaning but clueless. 

It was never going to happen.

Once a member of the middle class, I’d dropped a class or two in the struggle for independence.  For a year, a toxic relative paid my tuition, grudging to the point that he did not reveal until my senior year that there was a college savings account for me. (He had spent most of it.)   And so I  worked part-time, as did most of my friends, to pay rent (for a tiny room in a house with a communal kitchen), tuition (eventually covered by loans and grants),  food (a lot of Ramen noodles), and necessities (soap, shampoo, etc.).

I was too exhausted to think about Rome.  Bizarrely, like the travel writer in Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist, I had little desire to travel.  I had already attended dinner parties with Catullus in my head (“You will dine well if you bring your own”) and pondered the words of  Horace (Epistle 1.11):  “…They change their sky, not their spirit, who hurry across the sea.”

 And I certainly would not have gone to Rome without my boyfriend.  Was that being a woman? No, I was in love. 

As I have said, I was not a bulletin board person.  But a wonderful small thing happened there.  A friend’s brilliant, charming parent showed up in front of the bulletin board and congratulated me on winning the Latin Prize.

I was so touched.  In the end, it’s these little moments that make it possible to pursue our dreams. Professors are distant, friends care. I fondly remember the socialists, hippies, anarchists, poets, and others I met along the way.  Just a word from the past to the future, now from the future to the past. 

Although I am trying to be peaceful and positive— avoiding the crowd, steering clear of argument, making chitchat for the greater good, bicycling to save a devastated planet—I have decided to respond to an irresponsible, depressing article published at the Millennial blog, Book Riot,  “When You Hate the Classics, But You’re an English Teacher.” 

First, let me say I have known many splendid, well-read English teachers.  And yet I have been appalled by others who have not cracked a classic since college.

The writer Lily Dunn may well be of the latter persuasion.  She begins, “Hello, my name is Lily and I hate the Classics. Also, I am an English teacher.”

She writes,

I know what you’re thinking.…but wouldn’t it be more hypocritical if I made my students read books I pretended to love while secretly wishing I could bring the dead author back to life just to tell him (it’s usually a him) how overrated he is? 

Indeed, Dunn is an equal-opportunity enemy of the classics: she spares neither sex in her ravings.  She despises Hawthorne’s The  Scarlet Letter, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Melville’s Moby Dick,  Mark Twain (she finds the dialect too challenging), Joyce’s Ulysses, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.  

One does wonder if she has finished  any of these books.  She writes of her loathing of Thomas Hardy, “I can’t expect a 17th century author to be all woke.”  Can’t you imagine her professor writing gently in the margin, “Victorian”? 

I am sure Book Riot has some talented, bright contributors who could have written a thoughtful essay about the classics.

When you click on Dunn’s bio, you will discover that she is not a high school English literature teacher, as she implies, but a literacy teacher in Hong Kong.   

Whew!

Class is fluid when you are in classics. You can rise a class or two in the world.  Without classics, I might have puttered around for years as an office clerk or at a library circulation desk (and the latter would have been a long shot). But when you are young, have a degree in classics, and invest your life savings in preppy clothes, you can get any job. Yes, you’ll have to move to Maine or Texas, but at least you’ll work.

I fell out of the middle class for a time.  Can that really happen?  When my parents got divorced, my dad got custody, and then got bored and left me to live on my own. A lesbian teacher on the prowl picked me up (I was her second high school student) and installed me in her house for a year and a half. I wonder, what class was I then? Meretrix (a prostitute)? Serva (a slave)? Later, I knew another classics student who’d been prey to whoever came along, and had a reputation as a meretrix, poor girl. She’d had sex with the sex education teacher.

Classics brought us back into the middle class.  We both found good, if not lucrative, jobs.

Classics— derived from the Latin noun classis,  meaning “a  class or division of the people (according to property),” and classicus,  an adjective meaning “of or belonging to the highest class.”

Language enthusiasts love Greek and Latin. Some enjoy the puzzle of the grammar and syntax, others the elaborate figures of speech and meters, still others the history or the philosophy.

I was always a serious reader.  I’d devoured Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Trollope on my own. I was a Victorian, or might as well have been. But unlike John Stuart Mill, who started learning Greek when he was three,  I took it up in college.  It all started when I decided Homer was ridiculous in translation. Before I knew it I was studying Greek and Latin, and reading Homer and Virgil in the original. I was an epic freak!

It wasn’t just the literature I loved, it was the all-absorbing process of translation. It required so much equipment!  I hustled into the library and spread out my Greek and Latin books, dictionaries, grammars, commentaries, notebooks, and flashcards.

The Greeks and Romans are with me for better or worse, through sickness and health. In the hospital, I have recited lines of Latin poetry feverishly. Once a doctor decided I was well enough to go home when he discovered me reading Lucretius in my room.  Nowadays I snuggle up on the couch with classics and a dictionary.  I’ve read classics so long I no longer need an entire table!  There’s less “equipment.”

The ancient languages are no longer spoken; you study them to read the literature. And since you are reading poetry, plays, philosophy, oratory, history, and more, the vocabulary is different for each genre. Even if the words overlap, they mean something different. That’s why you need a dictionary.   For instance, the Latin word classis, which can mean “class,” also means “fleet (of ships).”You cannot read Virgil or Livy without encountering a  classis, a fleet of ships.

Excuse me while I go read Sappho and Catullus.  (Sappho influenced Catullus, and he translated one of her poems.”

Later!