Austin Hall Library

Latin Helps

I just received the latest issue of The Classical Teacher from Memoria Press. It is a regular periodical devoted to "Materials, Methods, and Motivation for Classical Education" and it is available by free subscription on MP's website. If one is seeking materials for the study of Ecclesiastical Latin or study helps for the Classics in general it is hard to beat Memoria Press. I believe the website even has a discussion board for those interested in learning and/or teaching Latin. Add this fine resource to another one I previously mentioned here.

In this latest edition of The Classical Teacher, there is a short but excellent article by R.W. Livingstone titled "In Defense of Latin." The article is excerpted from Livingstone's A Defence of Classical Education, written in 1917, when "progressive education" had just begun to get a foothold that would eventually change the entire approach to education. Livingstone was President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in the early twentieth century.

A Latin Starter for Parents

By the way, if you have children, and are "Latin-challenged" like most modern parents, Andrew  Campbell's Latin-Centered Curriculum may be a wonderful resource. It is a short guide that explains classical education and even provides a great scope and sequence (K-12th grade) for Latin-centered classical education in homeschool or private school settings. One could even use this short book as a guide to help supplement a child's education in public schools. It would require some discipline on the part of parents, but it could be done.

If you get this book, read carefully the chapter "Multum non Multa" ("Not many things, but much"), which is often rendered "Less is more." If you are a driven homeschooling parent, it may be liberating. If you are a parent of a student in a traditional classroom, it may help you focus on the more important things.

Thucydides and the Loss of Meaning in Words

Jean Bethke Elshtain reminds us that Thucydides, in his great work The Peloponnesian War, "ties the loss of clear meanings of words to Athens's subsequent degradation and decline." His point was intended as an important civic lesson--beware of the result when words lose their meaning. Elshtain warns that "words and their meanings are connected to debates about truth," and "when words implode, so do worlds."

I can remember--barely (because I was raised in the South)--when being a "discriminating man" would have been a compliment. Today it will get you prosecuted.

The distortion and manipulation of historic language--especially under color of law--is characteristic of totalitarian regimes. Thucydides infers that when the polis (loosely, "government") begins to sanction the loss of clear meanings of words, it obliterates the shared understanding of what objectively makes a people who and what they are. And, their world eventually implodes because, while it can withstand outside pressures, it cannot withstand its own internal loss of identity and the possibility of truth.

A Good Life

In antiquity, a classical education was important for at least two reasons: first, it was the entrance into the culture and, second, it was the way in which the soul was formed. In short, it was the means to a good life.

For the Greeks, paideia (loosely, "education" in English) was the means of membership in the culture. Its purpose was to bring citizen boys into the life of the polis, the independent city-state, as virtuous and competent citizens. According to Tracy Simmons, "[p]aideia was about instilling core values, enunciating standards, and setting moral precepts." Of the Greeks and Romans, he said: "They filled their children's minds with 'useless' information, by rote, with one purpose among others: to make them members of a people, to make them one." And, particularly telling was Plato's definition of education as the process by which the student is "rightly trained in respect of pleasures and pains, so as to hate what ought to be hated, right from the beginning to the very end, and to love what ought to be loved."

In classical antiquity, the values and moral precepts eloquently expressed through the lives of gods and heroes, as well as the discipline instilled by rote memorization and recitation were calculated to train in the fundamental principles of virtue and a good life. Our own education might be well served by a return to classical thought on formation of a life and soul.

More Books for the Latin and Greek Challenged

There are other excellent English works available on Greek and Roman culture by writers quite capable of keeping one's attention. Read everything by Victor Davis Hanson. A former classics professor, Hanson is a military historian of the first order and an insightful social critic. Curiously (or, perhaps not), Hanson is also an able defender of agrarian philosophical principles. Many of the most provocative thinkers in the 20th century have been formally or informally related to the "Southern Agrarians"--some of whom traced their agrarian ideas back to Homer and Virgil.

Donald Kagan is a master historian and likely the premier authority on the Peloponnesian War. A great storyteller, his one-volume work The Peloponnesian War is a terrific read for any level reader. Kagan also wrote the four-volume definitive history on the same subject.

These two fine authors should provide the impetus to move on to original sources on classical antiquity. You might start with Herodotus' classic The Histories and follow with Thucydides' great work History of the Peloponnesian War. The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer should not be far behind, nor should Virgil's Aeneid be neglected. And, one final suggestion is important: Plato's The Last Days of Socrates--a great book to aid in one's understanding of Plato. Don't miss it.

Classical Antiquity Starters

It is difficult to know where to begin when starting a reading program in the Classics. There is simply so much out there. A good introductory author is Edith Hamilton. A few of her works are still in print after six decades. Her books The Roman Way and The Greek Way are mainstays in spite of the fact that readers sometimes find them a little dry or boring. Nonetheless, they are excellent introductions to classical culture, particularly through the literature of the period.

Hamilton writes in lofty and inspiring prose for audiences unfamiliar with the Greek and Roman cultures. I found The Greek Way mesmerizing when I read it years ago. I later stumbled upon her book Mythology in a used bookstore in Texas. Written in 1942, this book is now a classic in the modern sense. It is not a reference work, but for the beginner it is probably the best book in print on the subject of the "Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes."

Introduction to the Classics

A brief and provocative modern introduction to the study of classical antiquity--the classics--is Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin by Tracy Lee Simmons. This delightful and first rate defense of the classics will make you want to take a stab at studying Greek and Latin regardless of your age. For training in discipline and logical thinking there is nothing better than wrestling with the "dead" languages.

E. Christian Kopff's The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition is also a modern plea for the study of classical antiquity. Kopff is a classicist at the University of Colorado who believes that the elimination of Latin and Greek from the required university curriculum "has severed the Western culture from the literature, history, philosophy, and political traditions that should constitute its mental infrastructure" (Publisher's Weekly).

The powerful polemic Who Killed Homer: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek  Wisdom by Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath makes the case for Greek civilization. The dust jacket of this book notes that "the formal study of Western culture is disappearing from American life at precisely the time when it is most needed to explain, guide and warn the public about the wonders and dangers of their own culture."

These books are thought-provoking and at the top of the list of modern literary pleas for a return to the study of classical antiquity. For the modern person interested in intellectual formation, reading these books are the place to start--that is, if he/she is not already persuaded of the value of the classical tradition. They are encouraging and worthwhile, however, for anyone to read at any time.