Philology No More? Latin and Greek on the Sidelines

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Philology No More?Latin and Greek on the Sidelines
• Nigel Nicholson (bio)

No one would raise an eyebrow if an undergraduate philosophy major at an American university studied Hegel, Kant, or de Beauvoir without knowing German or French. Nor would anyone raise an eyebrow if an undergraduate history major studied the Russian Revolution without Russian, or New Spain without Spanish—let alone Nahuatl or indeed Latin—even if this work constituted a senior capstone project. This is not a question of resources; it is true at the wealthiest schools. The simple fact is that, at the undergraduate level, mastery of the relevant languages has long ceased to be considered integral to history or philosophy.

In coming years I suspect Classics will go the same way: the discipline will increasingly define studying its materials without command of Latin or Greek as the norm, and while some teaching of the languages will be provided by better-resourced institutions, language study will not just be peripheral in undergraduate education, but be accepted as peripheral, and its absence will not be understood as a failure or a loss.

Classics has long been centered around language. Until 2013 the North American professional association of classicists, which was founded in 1869, was known as the American Philological Association. Philology has a range of meanings, but all stress the study of words, whether texts or—especially in Britain—languages themselves. At Reed College, where I teach, until recently we required a year of advanced work in one language and a year of at least introductory work in the other. My undergraduate degree, at Oxford, was centered around large swaths of Greek and Latin, although it was impressed upon us that our reading lists had been considerably reduced from what confronted previous generations. In American universities Classics departments are usually grouped with modern language departments, and in many institutions, historians of ancient Greece and Rome find their home in these Classics departments, not in history departments, and often teach Latin or Greek language classes. I know nowhere where this is true for the modern languages. Historians of France and Spain hold appointments in history departments, and do not teach the languages. [End Page 51]

Control of language—language in general, rather than just Latin or Greek—has long been a central part of the mythology of Classics. Certainly, the study of Latin will teach you grammar and syntax, and enlarge your English vocabulary, but in my youth there was also a clear sense that such control was a key to power and influence. One of the most popular sitcoms in 1980s Britain, the BBC's Yes, Minister, revolved around the interactions of Jim Hacker, the Minister for Administrative Affairs, with his Permanent Secretary, the head of the relevant department of the Civil Service, Sir Humphrey Appleby. A regular gag was that Sir Humphrey, a man with a "first class" Classics degree from Oxford, was a master not just of process and precedent but of long, grammatically correct but opaque sentences that would confound the Minister, whose "third class" degree from the London School of Economics—presumably in a social science—left him ill-equipped to engage in this verbal combat. The Minister may have been more likable, but the Classicist owned language.

This anecdote makes the control of language sound like a cynical game, but there was a positive vision behind the comedy. Understanding how words work, what they can do, and what they should not do has always been crucial. Precision matters, how things are described matters, owning one's words matters, and tropes and figures matter. With its focus on the workings of language, combined with deep reading in ancient history, philosophy, and literature, Classics instilled a real understanding of language, and was for this reason a preeminent training in politics, law, business, and public life in general.

Evidence of this was all around me as I grew up. My Latin and Greek teachers were impressive people, and some of the most famous political logocrats had Classics backgrounds, for better or worse: Enoch Powell (Cambridge, first class), for example, or, my favorite, Denis Healey (Oxford, first), who, it was said, called his underlings on their incorrect...