Expert() credite . . .
From Harty, Mount Sir: I am very much looking forward to sitting last year's Oxford Classics exams which the Dean of Wadham, James Morwood, has kindly promised to send me (The pluperfect is doing nicely', 17 April). The problem is, I'll be rubbish — real gamma material. I've forgotten most of what I learnt in a decade of optatives, locatives and gerunds. So will most in my small group doing Classics at Oxford. And the ones who are brainy enough to remember the various meanings of epi are not teaching British schoolchildren; they're earning megadollars at Harvard.
So although the Dean might be right to say that more children are learning about the Parthenon, the ability to read classical literature in the original is dying. It'll soon be dead. An Oxford Classics don, presumably a contemporary of the Dean's, was recently heard to say that it is 'impossible to actually read Latin; I mean, the way you read English. It isn't that sort of language.' This is simply not true. There are people who can read Latin just as they read English — the man who writes the Pope's letters not only reads Latin as fast as he reads anything, but he also speaks it all day long with his assistants.
It may be a good thing or a bad thing that some Oxford Classics dons can't read Latin, but it is a true thing. Of course, it's good that people learn about the Parthenon — but call them art historians, not classicists.
Hany Mount The Daily Telegraph, London El4
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