UNDERGRADUATE ARTICLE
A Classical Education
By PETER BISHOP (Pembroke College, Oxford) pEOPLE have usually left their education some way behind before their writing is fit to be seen in public; and so, but for the suffering beneficence of the Spectator, essays rarely appear which have been written while the agony is still in progress, before time has numbed the issues and healed the wounds. And although the square, wooden peg of my mind is firmly wedged into the round hole of classical scholarship, I hope my vested interest will not spoil the argument.
Why have a classical education? The stock answer is that it provides the finest training for the mind. Distinguished men and women are pointed out whose exceptional ability is said to be the triumphant hall-mark of their classical education. But either they are brilliant anyway and would probably have been just as distinguished whatever kind of education they received, or else the success they later acquired is due largely to the snob-value of having read Greats at Oxford; which derives from the equally dangerous assumption that a classical educa- tion is the hall-mark of exceptional ability. For if that were the case, what brilliant careers are thrown away by so many schoolmasters I And what talent criminally wasted ! At Pembroke last year, for instance, everybody (with a single exception) who was reading Greats is now a schoolmaster. Or does the super-mind so wonderfully moulded by the Classics only find its real outlet in teaching schoolboys grammar ? The fact that the people who receive a classical education are simply those who, at the age of ten, are selected to learn Greek because they show a certain precocity in manipulating the various possibilities of the Latin for love, a precocity very often (at my prep school at least) fostered and stimulated by the possession of a crib. And as a result the wretched boy staggers through the happiest years of his life burdened with the dead albatross of a Liddell and Scott. It would make a good theme for a. Cautionary Tale. But apart from the sadly problematical advantages of the mental training, do the Classics afford any pleasures in after- life superior to those enjoyed by the student of history, say, or English or modern languages 7 Do the Classics afford any pleasures at all ? Beyond dons and schoolmasters I have never met anyone who could read Latin or Greek as literature in the original. A translation is always a necessary adjunct; and once you have sunk to a translation (I know from experi- ence), why waste time on the original ? I admit, especially with the poets, you Want to be able to refer to the original when a passage particularly interests you, but the linguistic. knowledge necessary on those occasions is such as you would have acquired by the age of fifteen, before there was ' any question of " specialising " in the Classics. - Nor socially is a classical education such a blessing as it appears to (at any raie undergraduate) outsiders. It is ..... impossible to quote in the original nowadays without being ostentatious; and ostentation at once takes the gilt off the culture-symbol. Knowledge of a more general variety (the myths and legends, etymology, etc.) is a useful addition to the all too few subjects of conversation, but this can be easily assimilated by anybody from Smith's Classical Dictionary. As for ancient history, I know less now about Greece and Rome than I did about England when I left my prep school; partly because of the actual lack of information and partly because there is simply no more room on the curriculum. Also, in the case of Rome, her civilisation lasted for so long and is so entwined with that of other races that yolii cannot properly get to grips with it and really feel its essential spirit; which, I imagine, is the point of history. Even visits to Italy, in this respect, are unrewarding, since the vigour of later bloomings has dispersed every breath of the ancient atmosphere.
In Greece, on the other hand, the civilisation was short and isolated, and it is a very different story. I don't want to become sentimental about Greece. Those who have visited the country talk at length about the intense, almost pathological nostalgia which hits you on damp November evenings in England. And I too have been bitten by the Byron bug. But it is not con- nected with a classical education. It is merely, the longing for the smell of thyme and the sharp outline of distant mountains and the phosphorescent Aegean in the moonlight; and possibly also (which is never mentioned) the general associations of holiday time. . But the key to the great secret of Greece is her poverty. The filthy, stinking slums cling to the northern slope of the Acropolis as they have always done, and the dusty roads wind desolate round the barren mountains. Time and progress have built no barrier : the rough stone surface of the Acropolis, the whisper echoing round the theatre at Epidaurus, the chill dampness of the beehive tombs at Mycene: the nerves of the old civilisation still tingle in the stone, unnumbed by any encroachment of the past twenty-four hundred years.
But it is on the Acropolis that you finally get rid of the cloy- ing sense of history. You want, on, this occasion, to turn your back on the Parthenon and Erechtheum, and simply look out on the purple slopes of Mount Hymettus. " City of the viqlet crown " someone had called Athens, and Aristophanes ridiculed the phrase. And you will wonder perhaps, as I did, why. The ridicule at once becomes personal, part of your experience, just as the buildings and sculpture of Greece have become part of it, and the exhilaration of the bright atmosphere. and the foul taste of the native wine, and the whorled bowl of mountains at Delphi so clearly sacred. And all the time in the background that gay, garrulous curiosity which the Greeks have always possessed; even from the days when they worshipped Homer as divinely inspired, and would listen to his story about the ghost of Achilles in the Underworld, while the other souls gibbered like bats in the distance, telling Odysseus he would rather be the meanest slave on earth than a king among the dead. Then, as you walk on the rough stone, over the gutters hewn out when Marathon was still an obscure village across the plain, the accumulation of these experiences will take hold on you; a sensation like the telepathic waves of vitality one receives from a person who possesses it abundantly. I cannot describe it in more detail than that. And if it could be described, it would surely have been done already a thousand times.
But those few hours on the Acropolis make sense of a classical education. And that is how I would justify its superior value; not that my mind has been magically moulded to exhibit a totally alien brilliance, but that it has been rendered a degree less brutish by that faint, momentary contact with the civilisation of Greece; that it has been freed from the gloomy cave of scholarship, seeing only the shadows that flit upon the wall, and led up into the sunlight of the Aegean.
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