Classics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

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Greece gave western culture common roots that all educated people at least could share.

Every summer thousands of people do, in fact, visit Bassae (in Modern Greek, , Vasses, or Vassai),

There can be no explanation for anything in the classical world, from mining to philosophy, from building to poetry, that does not take account of the presence of slaves.

If Classics exists, as we have said, in the ‘gap’ between our world and the ancient world, then Classics is defined by our experience, interests, and debates as well as by theirs.

The rediscovery of Greece was, in a way, the rediscovery of the origins of western culture as a whole. It offered a way of seeing the origin of all European civilization, that transcended local, nationalist squabbles.

Roman culture, in other words, may be dependent on Greece; but at the same time much of our experience of Greece is mediated through Rome and Roman representations of Greek culture. Greece often comes to us through Roman eyes.

And some of the most powerful representations of classical Greece, those which have formed the ways we still see and understand the classical past, were the creations of men who had never visited Greece itself, whose Greece was, quite plainly, ‘imaginary’.

Thus Robert Graves’s novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God, re-create the lost autobiography of the Roman emperor Claudius. And in The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco imagines a still more sinister version, where a monk’s arson destroys his monastery library along with the only copy of the treatise by Aristotle On Comedy.

The poetry of Catullus, for example, including his famous series of love poems addressed to a woman he calls ‘Lesbia’, owes its survival to just one medieval manuscript copy. Likewise, Lucretius’ poem On the Nature of Things, which tells in Latin verse of the theories of the Greek philosopher Epicurus (including an early version of an atomic theory of matter), is preserved through a single copy.

In 1786 the classicizing writer and polymath Goethe (J. Wolfgang von Goethe, then aged 37) left his position in the government of Weimar for a two-year Grand Tour to Italy, where he went through an intense experience of awakening, accompanied by a feverish burst of writing. This experience and the surge in his life that followed his stay in Italy he recounted in his Italian Travels, entitling one poignant chapter Auch ich in Arkadien (a German rendering of the famous phrase).

Shakespeare too, to take another famous example, was near enough Greekless (‘little Latine, and lesse Greek’). Not that he neglected classical writers. He was well-versed in the works of the Greek biographer Plutarch, who in the second century CE wrote a series of Lives of famous Greeks and Romans. In fact, Plutarch’s Life of Julius Caesar was an important source for Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the play in which the memorable phrase ‘it was [all] Greek to me’ was coined. But he read his Plutarch entirely in the English of North’s translation.

All manner of eccentricities, from universal suffrage and democracy, to vegetarianism, pantheism, free love, eugenics, and genocide, found themselves precedents and authorities in Classics. It is a striking paradox that a late nineteenth-century guru and classicist such as Friedrich Nietzsche could rhapsodize weirdly about the cosmos being held in tension between ‘Apollonian’ control and ‘Dionysiac’ release, on the basis of the very same texts that students of Classics studied for the clarity of their syntax and their supposedly elevating moral earnestness.

then the ‘crime’ of the Amazons is much more than just the crime of departing from the proper behaviour expected of Greek women. In taking on the male role of fighter, the Amazons are to be seen as just as ‘unnatural’, just as monstrous a perversion of nature, as the monstrous Centaurs – whose behaviour strikes at the most basic rules of human society, the rules of marriage. The defeat of the Centaurs and Amazons amounts to the restoration of the ‘natural’ ordering of Greek society. The frieze proposes, in a sense, that the Amazons are the wrong which the Centaurs do.

The answer, as our visit to Bassae has already suggested, is that Classics is always the same and always different. When we sit down to read the epic poetry of Homer or Virgil, the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, or Cicero, the plays of Sophocles, Aristophanes, or Plautus, we are sharing that activity with all those who have read those works before. It gives us something in common with the medieval monks who devotedly copied out (and so preserved for us) hundreds of classical texts, with nineteenth-century schoolboys whose days were filled with studying ‘the Classics’, as well as with centuries of architects and builders throughout Europe who (like Cockerell) read their Vitruvius in order to learn how to build. More than that, our experience of Classics is inevitably influenced by theirs. It is not just that the choices of those medieval monks about what they should copy have effectively determined what classical texts are still available for us to read; for almost all the literature that survives from the ancient world owes its preservation to their energies in copying and recopying. It is also that we experience Classics in the light of what previous generations have said, thought, and written about the ancient world. No other subject gives quite such rich and varied company.