Why I Study the Classics
The Rotunda (University of Virginia)
I don’t want to die.
For a while I envied vampires, but realized they can’t enjoy the flood of emotions and senses that make us human - just like the cursed pirates of the Caribbean. They both seem cooler than zombies, who, from what I can tell, have no thoughts whatsoever apart from their zest for brains, making them scary versions of the Wizard of Oz’s Scarecrow; I’ll pass. Ghosts and ghouls seem to have their wits, but they don’t have agency. Werewolves tend to get hunted by villagers. And I saw what happened to Dorian Gray. The religions of salvation certainly are a salve, but they have emphases on the other side of the curtain, so won’t suffice in this case. What immortal options remain on this side of life for me, and scores of thousands like me who simply want not to suffer the listlessness of an unflinching abyss? The answer is obvious.
Study the Classics.
The people of the ancient Mediterranean identified many essential truths. To me, the most elegant realizes memory as a solution to the human condition. To put it another way, regardless of the various advances of science and medicine, we can’t live forever. But we are able to enjoy infinite existence in this world through the thoughts and recollections of the people who remember us, so long as they remember us.
Many ancient societies around the world realized something similar. The endearing film Coco popularized similar beliefs about the memory of ancestors held by various people in Mexico and Mesoamerica, and the idea that loved ones can be recalled - if not resurrected for a brief moment in ritual - is common to tribes in the American plains, in Balkan folk song, and even in the science fiction of Phillip K Dick. Shang China communed with ancestors on a regular basis.
But it is Homer, the hostage and blind bard, who makes the Classics what they are and profoundly shapes our modern world. He was a master rhapsode so electrifying an entire corpus of performance art about the Bronze Age and the Fall of Troy has been attributed to him. In English alone there are seventy-five - 75! - translations of the Odyssey, as Wikipedia tells us, with such luminaries as Alexander Pope, William Cullen Bryant, William Morris, and Lawrence of Arabia joining a cast familiar to schoolchildren: Lattimore, Mandlebaum, Fitzgerald, Fagles, Butler, and Lombardo. I do wish that the most recent works of Peter Green and Emily Wilson weren’t published in back-to-back years in 2017 and 2018; both deserve their plaudits.
This recurring interest in Homer over thousands of years starting with the ancient Greeks themselves and running through the Romans into modernity echoes a much deeper need: the quest we all share for acceptance, involvement, and love requited.
Ancient authors, by their own volition, admit that they were fed on scraps from the table of Homer. When you study the Classics, your own legacy immediately inherits powers lamented by the nymphs and celebrated by the muses; you find yourself immersed in a world of wonder, myth, and discovery. You gain the confidence to realize you are important and stories about you are inevitable. In the film Gladiator, Maximus reminds his friends,’What we do in life echoes in eternity.’ As the protagonist in your own life you have a responsibility to be kind, courageous, and heroic in your own way. Ultimately you’ll appreciate the context of your story because it has been the scene behind everything and everyone from Sappho to Beyoncé and you, too, have the power to be awesome.
Many people assume I teach dead languages because they are seldom spoken. I guess some folks haven’t been listening. TS Eliot in ‘The Dry Salvages’ reminds us of a moment in and out of time where we are music, music heard so deeply it isn’t heard at all - we are the music while the music lasts.
Long before Jesus, Plato’s Socrates urged his followers to continue his dialogues, for when two of them gather together to continue in his quest for truth, so he would be with them. I listen to countless songs I don’t really like because they remind me of an old friend, or a specific time and place. The Classics have that same power, but on a much grander scale, with the amplitude to broadcast memories to the whole world through time and space.
By studying the Classics I’ve become a better person because I know that all my actions are informed and part of a vast continuum. I’ve also confirmed Faulkner’s mantra that the past is never dead. In fact, it’s not even past. Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas surely are immortals…and these heroes have their own heroic creators and contributors, just like me. If any of us take part in recalling their stories, we open our own account with the bank of cosmic memories. As we learn about others, we empathize with their experience and realize what we must do to be remembered ourselves. And go on living.