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And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,

From thence to honour thee, I would not seek

For names : but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus,

Euripides, and Sophocles to us,

Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,

To life again, to hear thy buskin tread

And shake a stage: or when thy socks were on,

Leave thee alone for the comparison

Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome

Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.

Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show

To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe.

He was not of an age, but for all time!

Ben Jonson, To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare and What He Hath Left Us

Once upon a time, a classical education was the sine qua non of intelligent and civilised society. The philosopher John Locke noted that Latin was “absolutely necessary to a Gentleman”; Thomas Jefferson was a “zealous advocate” for classical learning; and indeed the title of this blog is derived from Ben Jonson’s teasing reference to Shakespeare’s alleged linguistic deficiency.

In more recent years Latin and Greek have been elbowed out of school curricula, particularly in the state sector, where their apparently esoteric and elitist associations have made them easy targets for the empire-builders (I do not say Visigoths) of emerging subjects.

profanum vulgus rejected

It has to be said that classicists sometimes don’t help their case by retreating into isolationism and exceptionalism: Horace’s Bullingdonian odi profanum vulgus et arceo ( trans. “piss off, peasants”) can sometimes amount to a mission statement.  Thus , on occasion, we adopt an air of effortless superiority: witness Boris Johnson’s sneering response when it was put to him in a TV interview that David Cameron was his intellectual superior, having gained a first in PPE as compared to BoJo’s 2:1 in Greats. In the education world, the classicists’ subject snobbery is matched only by that of the physicists, who have the advantage of also being qualified to wire a plug. The few remaining classicists see themselves as living Sibylline Books, becoming all the more valuable as their colleagues are cremated; but will the powers-that-be will recognise their value and rescue them from the flames before it’s too  late? Well, no. The bonfire of Latinity in state schools is nearly at an end, not through any change of heart, but because there’s almost nothing left to burn. Small Latin and less Greek, indeed.

The consequences of this policy are however seen beyond the smoking groves of classical Academe. Anyone who has lengthy experience of teaching modern languages (including English) will recognise the narrowing of vocabulary and decline in understanding of grammatical concepts which has accompanied the demise of Latin. Younger teachers are unlikely ever to have been diverted by the stories of Caecilius from the transformational (in both senses) Cambridge Latin Course. 

Miniature?!

But it’s in the study of Eng Lit that the lack of classical education is most obvious: as plain as a pilum. Very recently I was looking at a text with a senior class when we came upon the word labyrinth. None of them knew what it meant. I straightened my Socratic robe and asked, well now, has anyone heard of the Minotaur? Blank faces. Then one scholar came to life, and offered does it mean small? Small? I replied. What do you mean small?  Miniature, he replied. 

Hey, Socrates, pass the hemlock, please… 

It wasn’t a joke or a wind up. Teachers of English Literature have to explain ab origine just about any classical or biblical allusion that appears in just about any text, from Shakespeare to Simon Armitage. Such repeated interruptions tend to kill the text stone dead for teacher and pupil resulting too often in the demoralised dominie switching to texts which are less demanding in pursuit of the assumed virtue of greater relevance. 

Which brings me to the purpose (and the name) of our blog. Observant readers will have noticed that I have confessed to having a toe in the waters of both Classics and Eng Lit: in fact, I am deficient in both, my formal qualifications being in Latin and English language (ie Anglo-Saxon, Middle English and Old Norse); I am largely self-taught in Greek and modern literature (ie everything after Chaucer).

My hope, however, is that these occasional rambles into classical culture and English literature will be a small contribution towards helping senior students or undergraduates better understand the allusions and references they might bump into in the course of their studies: perhaps they may prove diverting to the general reader too.