Mary Beard: talking classics

 Recently, I finished Mary Beard's latest book, Talking Classics - the shock of the old.

I was disappointed.

Rather than a spirited anecdote laced defence of  'the classics' - the study of Greek and Roman culture - I found it read more as a defence of teaching classics.

Now the classics have a difficult history.

During the nineteenth century the study of the classics was the mark of an educated gentleman, and looking at Charles Dodgson's (aka Lewis Carroll) school timetable, one can see why. Apart from a bit of religion and a smattering of mathematics, they studied little but Latin and Greek, several hours a day, every day except Sunday.

And it was just Latin and Greek. No Roman history or archaeolgy, nothing quite so vulgar as a discussion of politics, corruption or what happens when some individuals become wealthy enough to buy control of the state, the res publica, the commonwealth, as one of Cromwell's men might have understood it.

And somehow a knowledge of Latin and Greek became required for getting into university, even to study sciences or medicine, and this of course meant that only those who had studied it at school could gain access to university, which of course produced a priviliged elite.

By the time I went to university in the seventies, the specious requirement for competence in Latin and Greek, had gone, even though its ghost still howled in the darkness.

So why should one study classics? Or Russian? or anything else difficult and complex?

Let's take Russian, which I did study. Studying Russian was not to correctly say 'я подчиняюсь' (I surrender) as the grim cold war joke went. Nor was it to read Dostoevesky or Tolstoy in the original - it was to try and gain some understanding of the opaque enigma of the Soviet Union and try and guess exactly what was happening, and this mean learning to assimilate a lot of complex and often obscure material and drawing sensible conclusions.

So with the classics, so with Egyptology, so with half a hundred other things.

The skills to learn, analyse and understand. If the history of the last fifty years teaches us anything it's that the future is unknowable,

And that's why the study of difficult things is important. To build understanding, not to be 'job ready'...