No Latin less Greek
Benny Green
It has been most enjoyable watching Mr Frank Kermode giving us a show on the theme of what he considers good for those of us literate enough to enjoy Mr Kermode giving us a show. It seems he has been rummaging around recently in his grandmother's attic where, among the solar topees and the sepia-tinted postcards of Ellen Terry as Imogen, he came across the rickety Victorian rocking. horse of Classical Education. Dusting down the peeling paint of its dappled flanks, and concealing its moth-eaten tail with a gloss of pedagoguery, Mr Kermode took a little ride which he later reported as follows: "The serious student of modern literature, or art, or history, is certainly under a real handicap if he knows no Latin." There were several other jokes but none as broad as this one.
I know the standard arguments proving the indispensability of Latin and Greek to the student of English prose. but as I am myself one of those students with absolutely no Latin and even less Greek, I can do no more than pelt Mr Kermode with rotten fruit. The Romans had a nasty habit of until the end of each sentence the verb withholding. so that by the time it became clear what it was they were trying to say, the Goths and Visigoths were inside the walls and that was the end of the whole business. As for the Greeks, I have no objection either to Platonic flapdoodle about Life after Death, or to endless successions of virgins who persist in turning into elderberry bushes the moment any passing swan makes eyes at them, but it all has little to do with how a man might fill this column. If I may step down from Parnassus for a moment, perhaps may describe a slightly less rosytinted Aurora rising from the wine-dark sea than Mr Kermode had in mind.
I was taught Latin by a Miss K,
Spectator .April 21, 1973 ot whose academic sensibilities it might be most charitably said that she was the school's best wicketkeeper. Miss K dragged US through the mausoleum of the Aeneid and the Gallic Wars, trying to fob us off with a tissue of blackguardly lies the moment questions of sexual ethics or poll. tical expediency raised their heads, so that nothing we learned inside the building had the sligh' test relevance to anything hap' pening outside it. All this took place in one of those sad gramMac schools where a bad essay on fishing was magically rendered pro: found if you signed it ' Piscator.
Where did all this feeble pretentiousness arise. It is tilt', for most of the nineteenth centurY the British liked to regard then!' selves as latterday Romans. which is why so many academics of the period did what they could t° sweep Gibbon under the carpet. why they erected imbecilic statuary of commonplace Vict0' rian gentlemen wearing togas' why they persisted in carving their dates of birth as MDCCV, why Palmerston said Civis Ronla: nus Sum when what he reallY meant was "He who holds th,,e biggest stick clouts hardest." %O..; generals like Charles Napier vie"' considered intellectuals for wirin,g, Peccavi meaning" I have sinned,' when capturing the town of Slow (Actually he never sent the me5. sage, but no matter.) Whenever Miss K bore down us ready to feed usthis kind 0„1 garbage I would brace myself. table!" I would exclaim, and Pce. pare to drag myself through Ca e'
sar's campaign reports and say s
silent prayer for Lucan, who de: tested Caesar almost as much 8,1 Tolstoy detested Napoleon OA' wrote a libellous book call" Pharsalia to vent his spleen. I know I should make allogi,; ances for such as Miss K. After al" it couldn't have been many laugh5 dealing with a bunch wil° genuinely believed that Phil Helle' nes was the name of a chap. But still doesn't excuse the intellect dishonesty of the whole business' the persistence with which everY' one tried to conceal from us the, fact that Herodotus was really demented novelist, that ever' time Thucydides talked of Colo nies what he really meant W°.res outposts whose possession 0'; advantageous to his own that Pericles was caught with n' fingers in the till, that Ovid ,t)e.i lieved the kind of things t" would get you or I certified. fly( stead of this we got the kind ?' junk wickedly lampooned nil Houseman's Fragment of a Gree Tragedy: 0 suitably-attired-in-leather-boots , Head of a traveller, wherefore seek ing whom Whence by what way how purposed art thou come
To this well-nightingaled vicinitY?
As for the usefulness of Latin int the modern world, I have to ref)°,:d that once in the well-nightingal world of my childhood, when 013:1 father tried to solace a defeatel horseplayer with the old saW,,,141eld desperandum, the punter p..,er",,at up immediately and asked, " w "race is it running in?"
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