Mary Beard offers a spirited defence of studying classics

Extolling the virtues of learning Greek and Latin, John Stuart Mill observed in 1867 that “The structure of every sentence is a lesson in logic…no modern European language is so valuable a discipline to the intellect.” Many such claims have been made over the decades about the merits of a classical education. Studying the languages, literature and history of ancient Greece and Rome is said to promote logical thinking, simplify the learning of other languages and reveal informative patterns in history, from spotting tyranny to understanding imperial decline.

Nonsense, say critics of classics. The entire subject is steeped in whiteness, privilege and colonialism, and was invented in the 18th century as a Eurocentric foundation myth. Putting Greece and Rome at the top of the global cultural pile, and declaring Europeans to be their heirs, “to have empire over the peoples of the world”, as Virgil wrote of the Romans, has since been used to justify all kinds of misdeeds, by everyone from Cecil Rhodes to Mussolini. The subject needs to be updated and reimagined—as “global ancient history” or “ancient Mediterranean studies”—or perhaps abandoned altogether.

What to make of such arguments? Battlefields abounded in the classical world, and now the discipline itself has become one. It is to be expected that Mary Beard, Britain’s best-known classicist and a professor at Cambridge until her retirement in 2022, considers her turf to be worth defending. But she surprisingly discards most of the familiar arguments in favour of classics on page two of her provocative new book, “Talking Classics”. Instead, like an archaeologist, she aims to excavate the discipline from the layers of discourse that surround it, and to make the case for it anew, without resort to shopworn traditional arguments.

Her starting-point is that if you want to understand the similarities and differences between the past and the present, the classical world provides an ideal arena (as it were) for such exploration. Unlike many other periods in history, it offers both great distance in time and a large amount of surviving evidence: “one of only a few past cultures that are simultaneously quite so far and quite so near”.

It is easy to be beguiled when reading graffiti in Pompeii or the letters of Cicero by how familiar the Romans can seem to be. But this is a trap, says Ms Beard; people in the past were also unthinkably, incomprehensibly alien. (“If it is a girl,” a Roman writes to his pregnant wife in the first century, “throw it away.”) Studying antiquity raises questions about the extent to which the past can ever be understood—and how people in the future will think about and judge the modern world.

This leads on to Ms Beard’s next argument, which is that classical literature is relevant because it poses questions that still matter today. That is not to say that the Greeks and Romans had it all figured out. It is another trap to look to classical texts for “ready-made answers to contemporary problems”, she warns. Tacitus may have anticipated Orwell by two millennia on the way in which language becomes subverted under autocracy, but he has no simple solution to offer. Indeed, the Greeks and Romans were just as liable to come up with wrong answers as anyone.

What matters is that they asked such good questions. Rather than being a trove of timeless wisdom to be consulted, classical literature encourages debate and disagreement. Classics thus provides a framework in which to discuss questions to which there are no simple, right answers. True, the same can be said of other subjects in the humanities. But by being helpfully distant from the modern world, classics can provide a laboratory in which to argue about contentious issues.

But is classics not irredeemably tainted by the many ways it has been misused? Those who have appropriated classical history and symbols, and harnessed them to justify their actions, include imperialists, fascists (the fasces, a bundle of wooden rods, were a Roman symbol of authority) and even January 6th protesters, who sported Greek helmets and slogans as they stormed the Capitol. But classics is not “a gateway drug that takes you down a slippery slope to white supremacy”, Ms Beard insists, and “does not automatically lead to membership of the alt-right”. Studying a distant culture is not the same as endorsing its unsavoury aspects.

Indeed, it can be a way to challenge them and subsequent versions of them. On this view, the misuse of classical history is an asset, not a liability, because it sheds light on themes such as tyranny, colonialism and imperialism. As Ms Beard notes, “The sharpest critiques of empire come from within imperial states themselves.” This was certainly true of Rome. But there has also been some fascinating recent scholarship about the role of classical history in Victorian arguments about the British empire. For some educated Indians in the 19th century, meanwhile, studying classics was a way to gain insight into the mindset of their colonial overlords.

Ms Beard admits there is a “serious case to answer” when it comes to the use of classical languages as “the policemen of privilege, class and social exclusion”. Until 1960 students applying to Oxford or Cambridge needed a secondary-school qualification in Latin, regardless of the subject they wished to study. (Greek was also required until 1920.) But just because classical languages were once a tool of social exclusion does not make them unworthy of study today.

What of the idea that classics ought to be reimagined and updated? Arguments about the boundaries of the field date back to the 19th century. Should it include archaeology? Or the study of Mesopotamian epics? Or Sanskrit? But expanding the field to broaden its appeal and its range—by including non-European cultures, for example—would be a mistake, Ms Beard says. Just because white men have long seen themselves reflected in the classical past does not mean others should be encouraged to make the same error.

Defenders of the special status of classics will say she has not been kind enough to the discipline. Those who decry it as a bastion of privilege will say she has been too gentle. Whether you agree with her or not, there is no doubting the vim of Ms Beard’s arguments, which are pithily presented, with flashes of salty humour. Rather than simple answers to complicated questions, she offers yet more complicated questions. This is, in fact, just what she says classics itself does. It is not a source of easy answers or unquestionable authority, nor is it to blame for the ways it has been misused. Her book’s argument epitomises the very kinds of thinking that the study of classics aims to encourage. ■