Apologia transfugae

From the Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford.

Sir: Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper's presidential address to the Joint Asso,ciation of Classical Teachers, printed in, your issue of July 19, has struck some people, as you tell us, as being " a wholesale attack on the classics." I am by no means of this opinion; but I should like to comment on some of the remarks which it contains. Its author is not only a scholar whom I admire but a valued friend and colleague, so that I cannot be suspected of animus against him. But since he gave up classical studies in favour of historical studies in 1934, he will not be offended if a professional student of the subject suggests that he is in some details incorrect.

No classical scholar now claims for his discipline the, dominating place in education which it held till well into the nineteenth century. It acquired that position, as Professor Trevor Roper says, because people believed that the ancients furnished them with a pattern worthy of imitation. That belief depended on the assumption that their own historical position resembled, to a significant degree, the position of the ancients.

That belief survived, in certain of its forms, well into the nineteenth cen tury; but its historical base was des troyed by the historicism of that age. The great classical scholars of the time, who were with few exceptions Germans, held that the classical civilisation was only one of many civilisations worthy of study; they stu died it with particular intensity because of its special historical relation to modern Europe and because of the intrinsic interest of its history and the intrinsic value of its art and literature.

To them every detail of a past civilisa tion seemed worth studying, because every detail contributed to the un derstanding of the whole; to this end, many were prepared to devote their lives to dry and arduous tasks. An eminent representative of this kind of outlook was Wilamowitz, whom I do not recognise in Professor Trevor Roper's account of him. To him Wilamowitz "symbolises the barrenness of a purely literary and philologica,l, , approach to the classics." That is the exact opposite of the truth; nowadays Wilamowitz is sometimes criticised for having approached antiquity from a standpoint that was too exclusiveIy historical.

The historicist at4itl:i'de• was L of course, confined to the classiosz-lit-per

vaded the discipline of mediaeval and modern history also. The histOricists' indulgence in the accumulation of de tail was bound to arouse protest.

Nietzsche complained that instead of asking, as they did, "What can we do for scholarship?" people ought to ask, " What can scholarship do for us?" He did not share the belief of the earlier ' Classicists' that the ancients could supply us with an ideal pattern; but he sided with them against the historicists in his belief that we could learn mos't from antiquity by concentrating upon its greatest and most creative period and by looking not simply for its resemblances to our own civilisation as for the differences between them.

In that respect, Nietzsche started a revolution; since then the best classical scholars have been chiefly interested in those features of the ancient world which separate it from our own. It is just because the ancient world, though it was the ancestor of our own, was yet so different from it, that its study is so difficult and so rewarding. — Professor Trevor-Roper complains of the excessive interest and respect paid by scholars to the art of verbal emendation. Textural criticism seems to me more difficult and more rewarding than could be guessed from the account of it offered in a few lines of his article. Housman, it is true, chose to concentrate his great powers upon

textual study according to an

eighteenth-century tradition (a tradition which we may associate with Por son, but not with Bentley, a great text ual critic but also a great scholar in much wider fields, and as Houseman readily admitted a far More important figure in the history of scholarship than either Porson or himself). House man has still a few imitators; but his attitude is now very far from common, and no one need fear that if he reads classics at the university he risks being condemned to an excessive quantity of this kind of work.

Professor Trevor-Roper devotes about a column to tales of the tac tlessness of Eduard Fraenkel, the famous German scholar who held the chair of Latin at Oxford from 1935 to 1953, and taught there for many years after his retirement. Fraenkel arrived in England after a distressing experience of racial persecution. He found things strange at first, and he was far too honest to pretend to feel immediately at home. Certainly he was often rude and tactless at this time. But Fraenkel lived to become one of the most popular and successful Oxford teachers of his time. No trouble was too great for him to take on behalf of anyone who showed even the slightest interest in the classics, and even the unlikeliest people were often deeply impressed by his absolute devotion to the study of antiquity in all its branches, as it had been conceived by the great scholars of the nineteenth century, and in particular by Wilamowitz. Whatever Wilamowitz was, he was never dull or pedantic. Fraenkel's insistence on scrupulous care over details made him seem to , some pedantic; but he never forgot the , connection of classical studies with real life, and he communicated his attitude to his audiences.

The view of the place and prospects taken in the last section of Professor Trevor-Roper's address would be accepted by most classical scholars of the present day. It is not generally realised that, if we make exception for the towering genius of Bentley, English classical scholars have achieved more during the twentiethcentury than in any previous age. To name only a few, Sir John Beazley, the great authority on Greek vases, Sir Ronald Syme, the eminent historian of Rome, and Mr Edgar Lobel, who has published with unique skill many precious fragments of Greek literature recovered from the sands of Egypt, are surely among the most distinguished scholars of modern times. Able people who have studied at the university a course influenced by these men's work have not found the subject dull or trivial.

Why then, are classical studies so unpopular in modern England? Why are those who control the media of communication so hostile to our subject? Partly, I believe, because the twentieth century has concerned itself much with the irrational side of human nature and associated the classics with an excessive orderliness and logicality; it is significant that one of the most important books written by a living Classical scholar is E. R. Dodds' The Greeks and the Irrational, which is well calculated to dissolve , this prejudice.

There is also, I think, a social reason, and an even more superficial one; classical studies are associated„'' many minds with such unfashioflly! notions as 'the establishment,' t: public schools, the ruling class'

Close as it has been, the connection' classical studies with these entil0

hardly destroys the significance of ancient world and its influence ont;;; modern. Karl Marx was devoted ton'

classics, and was profoundly i.„r' fluenced by his study of them, nor 0: the origins of his philosophy be understood by those unwilling to 1,3' account of this. One could give Or' similar examples. A third main reason for the unPo,.P:. larity of classical studies is that 10, are difficult. So is any really reward'sr academic discipline. Those who ov for an easy subject, and one calc,J. lated, like the old type of divinity,' strengthen their prejudices rather IN' to subject them to critical scrutin had better turn to what nowade passes for sociology. Every generation asks differ questions about the past; and in own time some classical scholars Al: asking questions about classical ar' quity that anyone but an ignorant listine can see are relevant to our condition. The subject is difficult, ar" no one now claims that it should 110; the central place in humanistic edoc., tion that it once enjoyed. But for thc'., suited to it it offers, and will alo). offer, an education second to none . know that my friend Professor Trevo Roper will agree with me. Hugh Lloyd-Torl°

Christ Church, Oxford