Umanities

pologia transfugae

Ugh Trevor-Roper

e print below the text of Hugh TrevorPer's Presidential Address, delivered as sident of the Joint Association of Classical chers at the annual meeting of the assotion at Leicester on May 19. The address reported, illustrated by a cartoon, in the rnes Educational Supplement of May 25. th the report and the cartoon suggested Qt the address was a wholesale attach on Classics and that it was incomprehensible the association had ever elected the ker as president. This view has since en challenged by members of the associar1 in letters. We are therefore glad to print e address, very slightly abbreviated.

it

4 r some 400 years ' humanism ' — that is, e study of the Greek and Latin classics — S been central to education in England and rope. In our lifetime things have changed: e study of the classics has lost its primacy. ? has moved out from the centre to the perierY, where it has become one of several 'equal disciplines, like the study of oriental Modern languages. The central position been left vacant, and is still vacant, or at St contested. Even the word ' humanism ' been deprived of its old, clear meaning — a deed, has lost all meaning and serves only, n less re-defined before use, to confuse Ought. Let me therefore begin by re-defing it. Naturally I shall use it only in its corer and original sense: the study of Literae Noniores, human as distinct from divine )cts, Homer and Virgil, not Scripture and the thers. The trouble is, of course, that this TPle distinction, which served to describe knowledge in the sixteenth century, is W less comprehensive. In the 400 years durg; Which humanism has struggled first to ac're, then to retain its primacy, other branes of science have shot out and flowered. i fe tree of learning is no longer, as in its rrcY, an elementary dicotyledon.

0M our present position there is unques

;1;:lnably something very arrogant in the old einis of classical humanism to be the necesrY centre of our studies. The supposition St the seeds at least of all knowledge, all clom, all philosophy, are contained in the 'Icef experience of a chosen people is no more 'ensible in secular studies than in theology.

Should two ancient cities, minuscule by 1e Standards of our provincial towns, be the ett repositories of truth, the sources of civi,ttion, any more than a fanatical semitic hill 'oe in Palestine? Such a concept, however it tlY be sophisticated, is repugnant to those 0 believe in progress; and it had to be deetecl before the idea of progress could be nizened in European thought. 4nd yet, even after it had been defeated, V tenaciously the old humanism clung to hcentre of our educational system! The old :43sophy was formally dethroned, I supin the the great battle of the Ancients and 4 Moderns. It died, we may say, with Queen 2e. But while the death of Queen Anne 7, notoriously final, humanism survived the of its justifying doctrine and being set , from that inhibiting philosophy, flouinted as never before. The men of the "teen th century did not accept the pure ;tunlanist doctrine. They no longer believed, the men of the Renaissance, that the re:eetation of the Roman Empire in Europe was essary to civilisation. They no longer bewith their predecessors in the baroque 4,that all political wisdom was to be found lacitus. They no longer believed, with the

neoplatonist scientists of the Renaissance — with Copernicus and Agrippa, with Bruno and Dee, even with Boyle and Newton — that the function of the scientist, as of the theolo gian, was to recover the arcane wisdom of the remote past. They no longer used the Latin language as the necessary vehicle of thought.

Many of them, like Voltaire, Hume and Gibbon, were decidedly condescending towards Antiquity, tepid admirers of classical civilisa tion. And yet did any of them, for that reason, seek to exclude classical literature from the central place which, since Erasmus, it had claimed in education? Not at all. Humanism merely changed its credentials. Like a king who surrenders his divine right and is then elected president of his country, humanism retained its place in a more competitive sys tem by its supposed merits — and perhaps by the habit of deference, by that residual aura of majesty which still lingers over the head even of a deconsecrated king. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, it was stronger than ever. Never, perhaps, were the. Greek and Roman classics so widely read as in that century of bounding materialism and revolutionary science. Never, I think, did so many Englishmen know Greek. Even the most radical, most ' progressive,' most utilitarian of reformers insensibly drew their evidence, and their examples, from the classical learning which, theoretically, they rejected. James Mill, the prophet of Benthamite radicalism, was certainly not a traditionalist by birth or outlook. He was a man of the people, and the practical Scotch people too, the son of a shoemaker, destined originally for the kirk. He had no use for traditional learning and looked forward to a purely utilitarian society; and it was to be a continuator of his own utilitarian ideas that he bred up his son John Stuart Mill. But we all know, from John Stuart Mill's autobiography, what kind of education that entailed. The utilitarian father saw to it that the utilitarian son began to learn Greek at the age of three and, at the age of eight, should be competent to teach Latin to his younger sister. Even Milton had not gone as far as that ... He made his daughters read Latin and Greek without knowing them. One tongue, he observed sourly, is enough for a woman.

And then there is Mill's younger rival, Macaulay. Was any man more ruthless in his modernity, more outspoken in his materialism, more contemptuous of mere romantic -nostalgia, than Macaulay? The world to which Macaulay looked forwarci was, materially, a world of ribbon-development, locomotives, factories, washing machines. He wished for secular education, rationality, 'utility.' In London University, whose foundation he supported, he did not wish the classics to be taught. Traditions were to him for external decoration only: they were not, as for Burke, an inseparable, essential part of the life of society. And yet was any man more completely steeped in classical literature — indeed, more imprisoned by it, than Macaulay? When he sought historical parallels or literary standards, it was thither that he turned, there that he found them. His correspondence is full of classical allusions. In the heat of India, in the intervals of reforming the law and education of India, he read almost the whole of classical literature. Who can read without a shudder of mingled astonishment and almost disgust the list of his casual reading in those crowded busy years?

... During the last thirteen months I. have read

Aeschylus twice; Sophocles twice; Euripides once; Pindar twice; Callimachus; Apollonius Rhodius; Quintus Calaber; Theocritus twice; Herodotus; Thycydides; almost all Xenophon's works; almost all Plato; Aristotle's Politics, and a good deal of his Organon, besides dipping elsewhere in him; the whole of Plutarch's Lives; about half of Lucian; two or three books of Athenaeus; Plautus twice; Terence twice; Lucretius twice; Catullus; Tibullus; Propertius; Lucan; Statius; Silius ltalicus; Livy; Velleius Paterculus; Sallust, Caesar; and, lastly, Cicero. I have, indeed, still a little of Cicero left; but I shall finish him in a few days. I am now deep in Aristopha nes and Lucian ...

The domination of the classics over British education in the nineteenth century is, in retrospect, an extraordinary phenomenon. For surely it must strike any historian as odd that an industrial revolution, having triumphed at home, was carried over the whole world by the glite of a society bred up on the literature of a city state and an empire whose slaveowning ruling class regarded industry and commerce as essentially vulgar. What views could be more fundamentally opposed than the philosophy which Macaulay stated in India, that it is cheaper, and therefore better. to trade with civilised men than to govern savages, and the expressed philosophy of the greatest of Roman poets:

Tu regere imperio 'populos Romane memento . . .?

And yet it was the latter view in which the statesmen of England continued to be educated: which, indeed, in the days of imperialism, positively gained at the expense of the former and, indirectly, proved Macaulay right.

At the time this seemed entirely natural. Everything, at the time, seems natural. But in retrospect it is surely a paradox. Modern writers, observing the recent history of China, discover in Confucianism a convenient explanation of the retardation of Chinese society in the nineteenth century. The ceremonious conservatism implicit in Confucianism, they say, was incompatible with modern progress, and was bound to retard it: only when that inhibiting culture had been broken — and it took a revolution to break it — could the great leap forward into modernity be made. The argument sounds very plausible — until we look into our own history and discover that our great leap forward, in Victorian times, took place under a mandarinate which was wedded no less firmly to a culture no less inhibiting: a culture which was accepted not only by the mandarins themselves, but by their critics too.

Nor was it only in Britain that the study of the classics, in the nineteenth century, posi tively increased its hold over education in a modern ' progressive' industrial society. The other European country which, in that century, made the most striking material ad vance was Germany: indeed, Lord Salisbury, at the end of the century, saw Britain and Germany as the living nations, while the Latin countries (he thought) were 'dying.' But in Germany — the Germany of.Bismarck and the Zollverein, of Krupp, Blohm und Voss, and I. G. Farben — the claims of classical scholarship were higher still: higher and more pretentious. They were also even more paradoxical. In Britain, the classics could at least be recommended as the literature of liberty, of equality among free citizens. In the first half of the nineteenth century this was no doubt possible in Germany too. That had been the Bliitezeit of German culture and scholarship. But after 1850, humanist teaching in Germany had to be adapted to a society which was not only vastly different from that of Greece and Rome, not only highly industrialised, but also opposed to the essential doctrines of the Hellenism which it openly ex pressed. There is something artificial, even bizarre, in the formal, elaborate homage which the elite of Bismarck's military and militarist Reich paid to the literature of an ancient free city. It is characterised, for me, in the alleged remark of Wilamowitz when asked, with some surprise, if he had really never been to Paris. "I got within five miles," was the proud reply. To the greatest humanist scholar of Germany it was more gratifying to have served as a grenadier in the conquering Prussian army of 1870 than to have looked upon the capital of modern culture or visited the Louvre.

And yet, in Germany as in Britain, the absurd claim was somehow maintained. Like the British proconsuls who fondly believed that they were modelling themselves on the senators of ancient Rome, Prussian Junkers piqued themselves on theirclassicaltastes and spoke in classical allusions, and German historians saw nineteenth century Germany as the new Greece, the Bismarckian empire as the new Rome. They also — when Britain and Germany drifted apart at the close of the cen tury — saw London as the new Carthage.

Even Mommsen, in describing the first Punic War, could not avoid this parallel which im plied that Germany was the true heir to classical Rome and therefore, of necessity, to all those virtues which centuries of classical teaching had made synonymous with it.

Mommsen's Wilamowitz, saw Hohenzollern Berlin as the image of Periclean Athens and Pindar as an East Prussian aristocrat like himself.*

Such bizarre contradictions could hardly be maintained for ever. Against their own un reality they must some time crack. They were, I believe, not only an absurdity in themselwas but also a distortion of Antiquity. The figment that modern society, in Britain or Germany, represented classical values could only be sustained if modern society was hopelessly hypocritical or if classical values were hopelessly misrepresented. Alternatively, the difference could be tacitly acknow ledged by narrowing the area of classical studies: by reducing them to a mere study of language or literature, divorced from the society which generated them and which they reflected, but which bore little relation to the modern society which prided itself upon that spurious inheritance.

The Victorians, of course, were expert in the necessary hypocrisy. Just as they could scientifically destroy the intellectual basis of Christianity and yet ceremoniously assert, and evidently believe, the truth of the same Christianity, so they were perfectly capable of looking at the literature of Antiquity and not seeing what was plainly there. In this, of course, the gifts of the famous Dr. Bowdler were a great help. Aristophanes could be cen sored for use in schools. But it required more than external censorship — it took a positive genius for self-deception — to persuade

whole generations that the Ancients were animae naturali ter christianae, that the sexual morals of Greece and Rome were,

ideally at least, the same as those of Victorian England, that Lucretius was opposed only to superstition, not to religion, that Sappho kept a high-class finishing school for the daughters of the gentry of Lesbos, and that liberty meant the same in industrial England as in Periclean Athens. Such self-deception might be possible in amateur England: in pro fessional Germany the exercise was more dif ficult. There it was easier for scholars to take refuge in mere technical expertise: to reduce the study of the classics to philological re finements: to edit and annotate texts with ever greater precision, to emend their cor ruptions With 4riteigreater ingenuity, and to claim, for this narrow field of erudition, a moral and intellectual superiority almost directly proportionate to its narrowness.

Faced with this hypocrisy, this irrelevance, this narrowness, this arrogance of classical

studies in the last stage of their rule over education, we can sympathise with that cri de coeur of some Frenchman whose identity I have forgotten: ' Qui nous delivrera des Grecs et des Romanis?

Mommsen, History of Rome (Everyman) 11-19; A. Momigliano, Premese per una discussione su Wilemowitz,' Rivata Storica Bala:Ina 1972 pp753-4.

1 stand before you, somewhat inappropriately I feel, as one who has delivered himself from that delicious bondage. I delivered myself in 1934 when I decided to change the course of my own studies and switch from humanism to the study of history, in which I have since persevered. For several years after that decision, I never read a word of Greek. Then, one day in 1939, I realised that I was losing my command of the language. A fortunate illness gave me the opportunity to recover it by re-reading not quite so much as Macaulay but a good section of Greek literature. I am always grateful to that illness, which has saved for me one of the great intellectual pleasures of life.

Why did I make that sudden change? I am often asked that question, and therefore I am forced to pose it to myself. Sometimes I imagine that I have the answer, but the rational answers which 1 think up seldom convince me for long: no doubt they are a subtle form of self-flattery rather than the true explanation which lies hidden at a less rational level. Certainly it was not because of any technical dissatisfaction. Certainly it was not because the subject had been badly taught. I was lucky enough, both at school and at the university to have exceptionally good teachers: Frank Fletcher and A. L. Irvine at Charterhouse, J. G. Barrington Ward, Denys Page and J. D. Denniston at Oxford. To all these I owe distinct and memorable debts for lasting pleasure: Aeschylus to Fletcher, the Greek lyric poets to Page, while Denniston could miraculously re-animate even the smallest of Greek particles. I enjoyed every work that I studied under their guidance, and I was led, in my reserves of time, which at that time seemed unlimited, to explore every corner of ancient literature, finding pleasure (of a kind) even in the most remote and untempting corners of it: I can even remember reading the unreadable Alexandra of Lycophron, rightly surnamed 'the obscure,' and the equally unreadable Christian dramas of the German nun Hrodswitha. I doubt if I shall ever read them again. And of course, these studies, benefiting as they did from the gross over-endowment of the nineteenth century, were not unprofitable. The profits kept me in claret all through my undergraduate days, and enabled me to keep a hunter at livery in a Buckinghamshire village. Why then, I ask myself, did I repudiate that golden inheritance which now, in retrospect, seems to me to have been so misapplied? When I pose that question to myself. I seem to be gazing into a grey semiFreudian fog. And then, as I gaze, apparent dime facies . .

out of the haze there emerge two grim, frowning faces: first, the remote, patrician visage of the Teutonic Knight, Ulrich v Wilamowitz-Moellendorff; then, behind him, longo intervallo, the sour, crabbed figure of the spent English poet, A. E. Housman.

Still in our ashes live our wonted fires ... I confess that, to me, those two names, in the context of classical studies, still repel me. No doubt I am wrong. No doubt the faces which I see are not the real faces of those great scholars, whose talismanic names were so often uttered, in devout, liturgical tones, in my youthful ears. But to me the image is more vivid than the reality, Indeed I have never found it possible to invest those names with much reality. To me, they have always been ideal stereotypes, the representatives of the last and least attractive form of classical learning: the form against which I once rebelled.

I suppose I really ought to modify my irrational antipathy to Wilamowitz. He did, after all, affect my life. It was because of him that I learned German. Brought up, as I was, in the extraordinary and indeed, it now seems to me the ludicrous belief that one could not be a good classical scholar unless one read the works of this Prussian high-priest of the subject, I obediently set myself, as a first year undergraduate, to master his rebarbative Ian

guage. After spending the best part of t vacations in Germany learning it, I return to Oxford somewhat disillusioned. With dergraduate confidence, I decided that WI mowitz, whose works I had now read (or p haps only tasted) was a fraud and that N Germany was not only very disagreeable itself but also a menace to the world. I the fore used up the linguistic expertise which had so mistakenly acquired to read Hide' Mein Kampf, which was not then available translation. 1 found it very rewarding, in certain sense, and the experience has h some influence on my later career. Since war I have occasionally dipped into Me Kampf again. I have not found any occas to re-read Wilamowitz. My view of him, ho ever erroneous, was fixed in 1934, and I him now only as a salutary warning. He sy bolised to me the barrenness of a purely terary and philological approach to the cla ics, and indeed to literature in general, a the absurd pretentiousness of assuming th so narrow an approach can have any wid meaning. He warned me to turn away from line of study which, within those limits, I nowhere.

The same warning was uttered, in eV more minatory tones, by his English rival, E. Housman. In my undergraduate days t name of Housman was uttered by class' scholars, in the same deferential tones as th of Wilamowitz. We heard tell of the I significant °biter dicta of these great maste the reverential hush in which they lectu the crowds which sought to touch the hem their garments as they moved forward, in I passive arrogance, to deliver their oracul utterances on the text of Theognis or prosody of Manilius; that arrogance whi seems to have descended intact from the manists of the Renaissance of whom Bod wrote that they measured the fate of empl by " the balance of syllables." I shall not en ily forget my surprise on reading Housman. extraordinary preface to Manilius, with I outdated incivilities, reminiscent of the 0 scene pedants of the seventeenth centu , and his no less extraordinary article in He mes consisting of a series of texts on sexy perversions which he evidently saw so reason to list but none to explain. Was this asked myself, the poet — the real poet — of Shropshire Lad and Last Poems? If so, 000 turn mutatus! Looking at that dread( deformation, I felt no temptation to submitt the same desiccating process, For whatever my motives in turning aWa, from classical studies, they were not a repu6 ation of classical literature. Indeed, in sense, I believe that it was love of that liter ture which persuaded me to escape from course which, at that time, seemed likely destroy the passion which had been kindl at school. How vividly I remember each lie discovery in that progress! Above all, I member my delight when the vocabulary Homer, as it were, broke in my hands: whe' that novel epic dialect, which at first II seemed so strange and difficult, suddenly vealed itself as easy and I found that I coo enjoy the poetry. Once that had happened, would sit up half the night, and had soon re4 the whole of Homer — indeed, I even won. Homeric crossword puzzle at school, of whl. I still treasure the prize, and can say WIt Gibbon that Homer became the most intimin of my friends. And then there was Theocrit. whom I remember reading, for the first tinl, among the sounds and smells of a particular' lush, green English summer, amid the noise grasshoppers and the smell of mown grass: t den panta thereus mala pi onos, &len 0 ras and Pindar, whose majestic myths and MO' niloquent poetry transported me into a Wo so remote and elevated that one descend afterwards. with difficulty into the !To governed by the laws of gravity. But greatest discovery, I th in k,was Aeschylus: Aeschylus of The Suppliant Women, T, Seven against Thebes, and, above all. CII Oresteia, with his vivid, highly charged, complicated metaphors, swollen to bursting by the pressure of tormenting thought.

For a period of three years or so, I seem (when I now look back on it) to have lived on a constant diet of Greek and Roman literature: or rather, of Greek literature; for the Roman poets, apart from Catullus and Lucretius, did not then appeal to me: Virgil and Horace, who now seem to me the most perfect poets of all, are perhaps too calm, too mature, as well as too exquisite, for a juvenile taste. But then as the next stage of my life Opened before me, I began to ask questions. Where, I asked myself, do we go from here? What is the future of a classical scholar once the delight of discovering new worlds of literature, and the immediate freshness of that literature, has worn off? To comment, to an notate, to emend ...? I looked forward into the haze and saw only shades of the prisonhouse: the prison-house of which Wilamowitz and Housman held out, for veneration, the well-oiled, delicately-filed, jealously guarded keys.

There were of course other possibilities before me. Classical studies are not (as I had then been conditioned to believe) purely li terary. There were the delights of ancient history, ancient philosophy; and both these subjects were offered by the next phase in the classical curriculum at Oxford, the school of Greats.' But against these I had already, in some way, been inoculated. The study of li teratUre, if too intently and too successfully Pursued, can (I believe) have a blocking effect on the mind; instead of leading forward to the substance of that life which it once reflected and to which it opens the' way, it can shut the door upon it, leaving its too eager devotee enclosed like a miser in his treasure-house, counting, in the end, not the masterpieces of the goldsmiths and jewellers but the titles and the petty cash. All occupations have their diseases, and this I believe, is the occupational disease of the student of literature: it makes a man frightened of thought. I think

that some such fear deterred me from Greats.' Besides, when I discussed the subject with my friends then reading ' Greats,' I

learned that history, as studied in that School, lacked the scope and sweep which had already drawn me naturally to the sub ject. I had read the ancient historical classics, I had read Gibbon. I had read, while learning German, the whole of Gregorovius's great

History of Rome in the Middle Ages. But the

history — at least the Greek history — studied by my friends in the ' Greats ' school seemed to be a form of scholasticism rather than of history as I wished to study it: a series of textual cruces and speculative answers laboriously squeezed from the silence of partial sources or the gaps in Athenian tributelists. No doubt these exercises are very necessary, but I did not, at that time, appreciate their necessity.

So I took the great plunge which, I must ' admit, I have never regretted. I transferred My intellectual curiosity, such as it was, from

the ancient to the modern world. If I was going to read history, I would read modern history. Here too I was very lucky in my tutors, Sir Keith Feiling and Sir John MasterMan. They did not allow history to become too minute and scholastical, or to be separated from literature and life.

Soon after I had taken this grave step, experience seemed to confirm me in the opinion, or prejudice, by which it had been justified, In 1934(1 think) there arrived in Oxford, and in my own hospitable college, a fa mous German scholar who, being Jewish, had Wisely decided to leave Nazi Germany. He Was Dr Eduard Fraenkel, and his arrival generated in our learned society a gentle but

Prolonged purr of erudite complacency hard.13' less rich and comforting than that which had been evoked by the recent arrival, under the same pressure, and in the same college, of Albert Einstein. For Dr Fraenkel, we were

told, had been the pupil — perhaps even the favourite pupil — of Wilamowitz. He had been admitted into that temple, had touched that consecrated robe, had absorbed something of the mom of the high priest, was the living interpreter of his oracles, the true heir to his magical authority. Naturally, with such an inheritance, Dr Fraenkel expected due deference. And, from the Elect, he received it. When it was rumoured that Oxford University was likely to elect him as its professor of Latin, A. E. Housman (I was told) wrote a magisterial letter of protest from Cambridge: Fraenkel, he said, should not be elected at Oxford since he was the only scholar fit to succeed himself at Cambridge.

Though my own status at the time was very humble, I well remember the arrival of Fraenkel at Oxford. He lived then in my college, in a fine set of rooms normally assigned to a bachelor tutor, on the ground floor, overlooking a garden. But when Dr Fraenkel examined these rooms, he forgot that he was an unexpected guest hospitably received and subsidised: he remembered only that he was an eminent classical scholar, accustomed, and entitled, to obsequious deference; and he arrived at the Steward's Office, on his first morning, with a long list of complaints. It was the arrogance, I believed, not of the German scholar, for even a German professor of (say) physics would hardly have behaved thus — Einstein charmed all by his modesty and courtesy — but of the classical scholar who had risen to eminence in the elitist temple of a pre-war German university.

Out of interest, I attended for a time Dr Fraenkel's famous seminars. To the irreverent young, the experience was enjoyable. The heir of Wilamowitz, who had held a chair in Germany, did not seem to understand a system in which distinguished scholars could hold only tutorial positions in colleges, and he treated these mere Privatdozenten in somewhat summary fashion. "Construe, Mr Bowra," he would command; and when Dr Bowra, his veins somewhat swollen with suppressed resentment, had rendered three lines of Virgil into English, he would be told, in Teutonic syntax, that he seemed to understand the Latin but that his English left much to be desired. I must admit that I derived much innocent pleasure from these sessions. They also confirmed me in my prejudices. In Dr Fraenkel I saw my unseen bugbears, Wilamowitz and Housman, made flesh.

Do I dramatise those experiences? No doubt I do. We all dramatise our own past. No doubt my own juvenile judgement was very faulty. No doubt I read the wrong works of Wilamowitz. Everyone agrees that Dr Fraenkel mellowed greatly in later years. But still, believe, behind these romanticised impressions there lurks a truth. I believe that the study of literature, by itself, in itself, in that purity of concentration which the great German scholars had erected into a virtue, can be dangerously inhibiting. It can lead too easily to conservatism of the spirit, to pedantry — or, alternatively, to that opposite refuge from pedantry which is triviality. I be lieve that this is true of the study of modern literature no less than of ancient; but perhaps the greater investment of resources, and the stricter discipline, which are required by humanist studies, as they may bring a greater reward, may also impose a heavier weight on the mind. The mastery of the language becomes an end in itself.

However, having said this, let me immediately utter my corrective palinode. For hav ing changed course, I soon discovered that the formula could be reversed. As a historian, I learned that, without a study of literature, neither history nor any other humane subject is worth pursuit; and so, having once fled from the study of classical literature lest I be corrupted by that sweet and subtle poison, I now find myself preaching to historians the Opposite doctrine.

To me, the fault of the humanists has been that they have taken classical literature out of its own context — the context of an autonomous, living culture — and have tried to convert it, retrospectively and artificially, into the central tradition of a modern culture which was always very different and is now completely different from it. Literature, to me, is the voice of a society. It may, of course, transcend that society. Great literature always transcends the limits of the society which engenders it: that is what makes it great. But even the greatest literature is conditioned by that society, fully intelligible only by a true understanding of it. Therefore, full appreciation even of ancient literature requires that that literature be seen in its own true context, not artificially involved in our own.

But if this is so, does it not follow that the converse also is true? The study of history is the study not merely of politics but of civilisation; and since literature and society are so closely and indeed essentially interwoven, a study of history which ignores literature must be completely inadequate. How can anyone understand a society who does not read its literature? The professional historian goes back to the original documents: the documents of state, But what documents are more original than the art and literature of any people, the still living documents of society? Historical writing which is not nourished from such sources is dry and dead — as most academic theses, and most textbooks, too dismally testify. To study Elizabethan England without reading Shakespeare, or Puritan England without reading Milton, or Restoration England without reading Dryden — the idea is, to me, grotesque. All great historians have been students of literature too; for, as a great living French historian writes, art and literature are the true witnesses of all history that it is worth our time to studY-t To take literature out of the exclusive hands of the philologists and the literary critics, to take history out of the exclusive hands of the historians, to see both together as functions of autonomous societies — this, it seems to me, is the proper function of the teachers both of history and of literature. And it entails, for classical literature, a further consequence: an end to those high, distorting claims that humanism is somehow central to our own civilisation, Certainly we owe much to Greece and Rome. Since the Renaissance, we have chosen to see ourselves as their heirs. But if we would understand and appreciate them, we must recognise the artificiality of that inheritance, admit the autonomy of the ancient world, see it in its own terms, claim for it no extravagant authority, for ourselves no special relationship with it.

I think that this is now generally recognised: it is one of the great changes in classical education which have occurred in our time, and which are reviving the subject in spite of the technical loss entailed by a reduced interest and competence in the ancient languages. But how long it has taken for this change to be made! The point can be simply illustrated. One of the most remarkable facts about classical studies is their failure to lead towards the new science of anthropology. For two centuries after the Renaissance, the lit terature of Greece and Rome was intensively studied in Europe. The political constitutions of Greece and Rome were the topic of lively debate in the sixteenth century. But nobody, it seems, thought of comparing the society, the social habits, the systems of belief, with those of their own time. When the science of anthropology was born, in the eighteenth century, it was born from the discovery of other modern cultures — the ' primitive ' cultures of America, Africa and Asia. Only later were the new anthropological methods applied to the ancient world which had already been so intensively explored, The reason for this failure is obvious. The ancient world, all

(les grands teinoins de toute histoire valable). Fernand Braudel, La Maditerranee et le Monde Mediterraneen d repoque de Philippe 11 (Paris 1949, xii)

this time, was not regarded as a distinct society. It was a model, an idealisation, which could not be viewed objectively, and was hardly seen as a society at all. The scholars who studied it did not look upon it as a selfcontained totality. They looked upon it as the theologians looked upon the Hebrew world;. and, like the theologians, they devoted their greatest efforts, not to the understanding of society but to the elucidation of the sacred texts.

Above all, they loved to emend those texts. How those famous scholars vied with one another in that esoteric parlour-game! How they conjured with syllables, transposed lines, inverted letters, in the hope of finding themselves immortalised, in the apparatus criticus of their successors, with that noblest of epitaphs ' emendatio palmaris 1. When 1 first read the Greek tragedians, I was adjured to marvel at those brilliant tours de force which had made the names of Bentley and Porson and were still regularly continued, as a ritual exercise, in the pages of the Classical journals. Now (I am afraid) I view these ingenious reconstructions with considerable scepticism. My scepticism began when I had my own writings copied by a typist. The most regular error of any typist, 1 then discovered, was to jump from one word to the same word repeated a line or so later, omitting the intermediate text and thus making nonsense of the whole passage. Clearly, in such circumstances, no amount of textual tinkering can restore the original text. Assuming, as I do, that a certain common humanity links a modern typist with a monastic copyist of the Dark or Middle Ages, I now assume that such omissions are the cause of many corruptions in ancient manuscripts, and ingenious conjecture is effort wasted.

It is refreshing to turn from this textual pedantry to the comparative method which classical scholarship, of itself, never generated but which has recently been imported into it and has revived it. I suppose that Rohde's Psyche was the beginning. In England there is E. R. Dodds's The Greeks and the Irrational; but Dodds was not at first welcomed among the established classical scholars. More recently there is Moses Finley's book The World of Odysseus. But I note that the author of that exciting work was not trained as a classical scholar: he came into classical studies from outside. Your true classical scholar of the old, historic school would not admit such frivolities. When Eduard Fraenkel heard the word Geistesgeschichte, he declared summarily that Geistesgeschichte was merely a more polysyllabical word for Quatsch.

So I must come, at the end, to summarise my own philosophy on this old question. I stand before you as a lover of ancient literature, a believer in the teaching of the classics. But I cannot accept the old claims that have been made for that teaching, or the old methods of study of that literature. I do not believe that classical studies should be exalted above all others, or that the function of scholarship is to produce brilliant, but necessarily speculative, emendations, or to bury ancient texts beneath commentaries of monstrous erudition. Essentially, my attitude to the classical past is historical. In that past I see a society which is totally different from our society and which cannot be, and never has been, a true model for it; and I see a literature which, however it may rise above its local conditions (as all great literature does), remains essentially the expression — the still living expression — of that vanished society. But this relativism does not mean that I regard all societies, or all literatures, as equal. Classical studies may have been damaged — as all studies must be — by excessive veneration, by internal specialisation, by monopoly, and by the arrogance that is always bred by monopoly. They are now suffering, perhaps, the nemesis of that hybris. But ultimately they can justify themselves on another, if per

haps a more modest base. First, on a purely technical level, there is the rigour of the discipline. This is not an unmixed good, for a rigorous discipline can inhibit as well as strengthen the mind; but in an age of instant omniscience and journalistic slipslop any hard discipline, which imposes the necessity of understanding through a difficult medium, must be valuable, Secondly, and far more important, there is the content, and the reward, of such study. To study a civilisation that is different from ours, and to recognise its differences, is a valuable lesson in objectivity, a warning against self-centred parochialism. This is true whatever civilisation is studied, but it is clearly more instructive to study a civilisation which deserves study in its own right, because it has something elevating to teach us; and what civilisation has been more closely interwoven with our own literature and thought than that of Greece and Rome? Admittedly, we are now free from their tutelage, but what of that? To ignore the great civilisations of the past simply because we can dispense with their rudimentary technology or inappropriate political systems, is an unbearable vulgarity. Finally, we should not overlook the educational advantage which Dr Johnson discovered in a literary over a scientific education — remembering that, in his time, a literary education had not been driven, by internal specialisation, into its opposite corruptions of pedantry or triviality. Therefore let me end by quoting that robust moralist whom it is always such a pleasure to read and with whom I so seldom disagree.

The passage occurs in Johnson's Life of Milton. He is there describing the avant-garde boarding school which that great poet set up in Aldersgate about 1640. Milton proposed to teach his pupils 'modern subjects' — the physical and mathematical sciences." But the truth is," says Johnson, "that the knowledge of ,external nature, and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or the frequent business of the human mind ... Prudence and justice are virtues and excellences of all times and all places; we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary and at leisure ...Those authors, therefore, are to be read at schools that supply most axioms of prudence, most principles of moral truth, and most materials for conversation; and these purposes are best served by poets, orators and historians." Then, to forestall the possible counter-attack Johnson resorted to authority: "Let me not be censured for this digression as pedantick or paradoxical; for if I have Milton against me, I have Socrates on my side. It was his labour to turn philosophy from the study of nature to speculations upon life; but the innovators whom I oppose are turning off attention from life to Nature. They seem to think that we are placed here to watch the growth of plants or the motion of the stars. Socrates was rather of the opinion that what we had to learn was how to do good and avoid evil."

This, of course, is the old claim for a humane, if not necessarily for a humanist, education: a claim which has been argued often enough, for and against. I shall not involve myself in it now. I shall only say that although it has been challenged, it has never been disproved; and perhaps these claims can be advanced more plausibly now that our technological expertise, which humanist education was said to obstruct, is visibly passing out of control. All I shall say is that if the study of the classical languages serves to widen the base, deepen the foundations, and multiply the rewards, of such an education, that alone would seem to me sufficient justification for it, it' not as the end, at least as a beginning of wisdom. And without a beginning, how shall we ever arrive at an end?