A Literally Radical Act

Peter Jones writes:

Julie Burchill is rightly pleased with her amusing paradox: “If the past was so great, how come it’s history?” It is a good question, for if anything is “history”, surely Latin and Greek are?

In fact, the Greeks and Romans powerfully rebut the thesis.

Ask which of the following – one way or another owed to the ancients – is “history”: democracy, republicanism, tyranny, the concept of world citizenship, atomism, geometry, biology, botany, comedy, philosophy, the rules of logic, law, the architectural orders, the alphabet, grammar, tragedy, satire, lyric poetry, concrete…

Even history is not “history”, the subject having been invented by Herodotus in the 5th century BC and still going remarkably strong.

As for language… ! English is especially fertile in this respect, being a dialect of Germanic (through our great Anglo-Saxon ancestors) whose vocabulary and therefore expressiveness has been richly enhanced by Latin and Greek.

Wall, street, mile, pound, martyr, demon, paradise, choir are all classical and go back 1,400 years.

After 1066, French (a dialect of Latin) added some 10,000 words to English – statute, inquest, gout, metal, pain, gender.

Ancient Greek chipped in especially during the intellectual revolution of the 16th century: catastrophe, chaos, climax, drama and crisis are all direct transliterations of ancient Greek.

It’s with all this in mind that the charity Classics for All aims to open up the classical “past” for everybody. Private schools have long known that Latin and Greek give their pupils an intellectual edge.

Now state schools are getting the message: more of them teach Latin than private schools.

At Classics For All we want to encourage further expansion of teaching of the classics in state schools, and next week at City Hall in London, Boris Johnson will host an event to support the charity’s work.

None of this is about displacing central subjects like maths and science from the curriculum. How could it be? It is about offering all children the widest possible range of human experience.

We are all concerned about the degradation of our physical environment.

But there is an intellectual and cultural environment too, the best that men and women have said, thought and done, and to ignore that is no less degrading to our humanity.

In that sense, the study of the ancient world is a literally radical act: Latin radix, “root”.

No school subject is universally popular, Latin (by reputation) least of all.

Yet in 2011 a nationwide YouGov survey of those who had studied a classical subject to age 16 or beyond – a remarkable 81 per cent of the 2,700 surveyed responded – revealed that four out of five who had studied Latin to the age of 16 (and no further) rated it beneficial or very beneficial, though many commented they had thought it completely useless at the time.

Looking back, however, they realised the extent to which the subject had not only expanded their cultural horizons but had also given them a secure grip on English, not to mention other languages.

Billions, of course, have achieved that happy end without studying Latin. But they cannot read Catullus, Tacitus or Virgil.

It is surely striking that such a subject studied to 16 and never again can combine so much usefulness with so much pleasure (Horace).

Classics for All, a young charity, has already granted launch aid to more than 100 previously non-classical schools, and has many more applying to it.

We are confident of the value of classics and are determined to offer all state schools who so wish the zero-risk, minimum-cost option of expanding the curriculum and their pupils’ minds with the study of these restlessly searching and inquisitive peoples, whose great past, pace the witty Miss Burchill, remains so compellingly present.