In Defence of Classics

I am a member of an oppressed minority. Unlike other groups which claim that label, however, I have no legal protections to defend me from bigotry. No-one touts their “allyship” with me. Nor are there well-funded campaigns telling people to be nice to me. I just have to suck up my status as a second-class citizen, content to be openly mocked in the public square.

I am a classicist.

One gets used to such things, of course. Trauma does that to you. It was, thus, no surprise to see a journalist take to X to mock my type. Learning that the Minister for Illegal Immigration was one of my tribe, she suggested that his education explained why illegal immigration is “screwed”, further opining that “we have too many people with classical/non practical degrees dealing with these issues” (I have not linked to the tweets – every sinner has a future, after all). The Minister can, of course, do nothing about his education now that he has had it. It has become an ineradicable characteristic. Is there any other minority whose competence we judge on such a basis? Is there any other group of whom we could say we have “too many” without immediately being accused and irredeemably convicted of hate speech?

There was, of course, no pile-on. No cancellation. Anti-classicism is the hate which still dares speak its name.

If, as we regularly tell ourselves, we are better than those who went before, it is because we have seen their prejudices for what they were. Prejudices. Not facts. Africans are not a different species of humanity nor are women less capable than men. Can I keep some small glimmer of hope that, like those who went before, the world will learn, the world will “be better”, and I, or those like me who come after, will finally be acknowledged as fully fledged members of society? A fat reparations cheque wouldn’t go down badly, either.

For classics do have their uses, both tangible and less so. Romance languages are merely peasant Latin, with simplified grammar and dodgy pronunciation (an observation guaranteed to gladden the heart of any Frenchman). Familiarity with the mother tongue makes acquiring her bastard children easier. A quick spin through the Battle of Salamis will immediately endear you to any Greek, the European people most proud of their culture. Any trip to an art gallery will be made more comprehensible by a familiarity with the Classical World’s myths and history, the depiction of which was long seen as the acme of painting. Part of the reason we still speak a language partly derived from the Romance family is that, during the war, a group of classicists decoded German (decidedly not a Romance language or culture) cyphers, their familiarity with Latin giving them the logical rigour required.

These are, however, obvious reasons for studying the classics. They are also utilitarian. Others, with a more poetic soul than mine, would tout the virtues of reading some of the world’s great literature in the languages it was designed to be read in. But, from the heights of my A-level Latin and degree in Classics (and my side-hustle in classics-splaining the modern world), there is another perhaps less obvious, but far more important benefit to studying the ancient world.

If we were to take a trip back to Rome or one of the cities in Greece, it would be a highly discombobulating experience. Not only would the buildings and the fashion look odd, we would be surrounded by languages we could not understand. We would see people doing odd things, sometimes things we might find distasteful and immoral (killing each other for sport, as an example). We know that Rome was noisy, the urban throng never quite ebbing. It would smell (all TV and movie portrayals of the past romanticise it because they cannot capture the olfactory impact of animals, sweaty bodies, less than perfect sanitation and open food stalls).

But once we acclimatised, we would be struck not by how different people were, but by how similar. The Iliad is the story of a workplace dispute, Agamemnon, like Sir Alex Ferguson, insisting that the manager receive higher pay than his star player, Achilles. Augustus’ daughter Julia led the sort of racy life that would have been familiar to any of the twenties’ Bright Young Things. The philosopher Epictetus talks of a young man, so in love with a woman that he wishes to visit her at all hours, even when his slave refuses to go out with him. I believe the young call this a “booty call”. Seneca may have been right that the millions you lend out at interest do not make you a good person, but that people did this shows a recognisably capitalist system. His currency speculations are reminiscent of George Soros (although the latter only broke the Bank of England, the former caused Boudicca’s Revolt). A century earlier, Crassus had become Rome’s richest man by engaging in what we would now term “distressed asset investing”.

Everywhere we looked, we would see people working, paying the bills, loving their spouses, children and dogs, looking for an opportunity to chill out, starting affairs, ending affairs, gossiping, jockeying for money, position and honour. In other words, we would see ourselves.

To some extent, we know this. The bits of psychology which work are the bits stolen from the ancients (the Stoics of Ancient Greece to be precise), the bits which do not are the ones we have invented ourselves. But it is a lesson we have only half learned. For we are too quick to conclude that, because we live different material lives to those in the past, we are different people who operate by different rules. Where we draw the line, I know not. The invention of the NHS (modern Britain’s foundation myth), the arrival of the Windrush (modern Britain’s year zero), the invention of the computer? No matter, we have decided that there is an uncrossable barrier between now and then which means the past is not just another country, it is an irrelevant country.

The lessons of history we have replaced with the lessons of social science, examples from the past supplanted by models in the present. It is not just that we no longer learn from it but that we no longer think it has anything to teach us, so different is the modern world which works on principles which we both can and do understand and whose outcomes we can predict to the nearest tenth of a percent.

But the greatest gift of classics is, I think, the perspective it casts on this narrative. For if we see people at such a remove acting in ways we recognise in the modern world, this should make us sceptical of any notion that there is a hard and fast line dividing us from them. And if we look at the long sweep of history and see people acting in the same way, should we assume our different, modern approach is now the norm? When, content in our liberal democratic assumptions, we see the leader of a failed coup and the primary opposition to an autocrat die, should we invent a new analytical category to explain the aberration or, reaching back to the reign of, say, Tiberius, should we see it as a modern example of the old practice of court politics? Which will help us understand it best?

Throughout history, states have attempted to conquer other states. The history of the world is, after all, the history of empires. But to the panjandrums of foreign policy, steeped in the nostra of International Relations, war in Europe was an impossibility. It was a leader who had spent his youth imbibing Ancient Rome who was most alive to the prospect that the self-described “Third Rome” might choose to emulate its predecessor. To devotees of Development Theory, all it would take to turn Jalalabad into Jacksonville was some money and women’s rights. To a student of the Roman Empire, it would take time and at least as much stick as carrot. Economists rejoiced when China joined the WTO, it is the work of the Greek historian Thucydides which is now used to explain the problems this has caused.

Nor is it just in the field of foreign policy where our complacent disregard for the lessons of the past causes problems. Every market bubble has been easy for economists and analysts to justify on the basis of theory. But the collapse of every market bubble has seen those who studied the models become lunch for those who studied the history.

For it is a useful rule of thumb that, whenever a model predicts an outcome which has never been seen before, it will be wrong and the history will be right. Social sciences may be good (I’m being generous here) but they are not that good – “All models are wrong. Some models are useful.” – and the key skill is identifying when the latter will become the former. At heart, we are still the same hairless monkeys we were back when crucifying slaves along the Via Appia was the done thing. We have the same drives and we behave in similar ways. When we turn our backs on the classics, therefore, we cut ourselves off from a valuable source of information about how we behave and lose a valuable reality check on the predictions of theory, often undergirded by goal-seeking assumptions.

Some, to their credit, recognise this. James Mattis, Marine General and avowed Marcus Aurelius fan, would give all his junior officers reading lists on the basis that it was better for them to read about experiments in military theory than conduct them with the lives of his soldiers. But he is an isolated case and so we suffer the failures of those all too ready to believe, “It’s different this time”.

To some this may be unconvincing, a last-ditch defence of a subject finally being put out of its (and many of its students’) misery. But ask yourself this: in the 19th century, the classically-educated spawned the Industrial Revolution, ended slavery and ruled the world. Today’s PPEists can’t even build a train line. Who would you rather was in charge?

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.

This piece first appeared in Country Squire Magazine, and is reproduced by kind permission.

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