There is a historical curve. In the 16th century, British people started to learn Greek. From those times until they stopped doing so, what we call civilisation prospered.
Elizabeth I read Greek easily. Made jokes in the language. From her days down to the 1970s, when educationalists began to bugger up the education of the poor, ‘the elite’ in Britain were, to put it in a nutshell, those who knew Greek.
This included thousands of grammar- school children from poor backgrounds. I was taught by such people.
Now ‘the elite’ are know-nothings, with degrees in PPE or business studies. The Great Tradition is over.
A few weeks before Christmas, a professor of social mobility at Exeter University, one Lee Elliot Major, asked for education to be aimed at working- class students.
Rather than being taken on trips to museums, today’s young should be ‘learning’ about the miners’ strike and the Jarrow March.
If they had been learning Greek literature and history, they would not be discussing house purchases (another of the professor’s worries); they would be asking the great questions – what we mean by good or evil; how we come to learn to live with inexorable fate; what is the nature of matter?
Last year, only 200 pupils took Greek A-level. Because of our skewed educational system, they will all be privately educated. Many of them, sadly, will be the children of pushy parents who have heard that it’s easy to get in to Oxford if you offer to read Honour Mods (ie Latin and Greek literature).
Now the classics departments of universities are so desperate, they are offering places to children with no Latin or Greek at all. To read Greek in translation – such as my daughter Emily Wilson’s Iliad and Odyssey – is a great thing to do, but it is hardly the same as tackling the language.
Louis MacNeice, the great Northern Irish poet, has a splendid passage in his 1938 Autumn Journal, in which he describes his day job, teaching the stuff. He was
‘Impresario of the Ancient Greeks
Who wore the chiton and lived on fish and olives
And talked philosophy or smut in cliques;
Who believed in youth and did not gloze the unpleasant
Consequences of age;
What is life, one said, or what is pleasant
Once you have turned the page Of love?’
Acknowledging our great difference from the Greeks was, for MacNeice, one of the reasons for our soaking ourselves in their philosophic dialogues, the unrivalled Homeric epics, and the tragedies of the great ones – Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.
Someone once said that all Western philosophy is just footnotes to Plato. All Western literature is just footnotes to those three and Homer. Those who read them truly are in a better position to be wise. That is why ‘the elite’ of the past were wiser than our present politicians.
In the past, most of those ordained in the Church of England had a rudimentary knowledge of New Testament Greek – Koine, as it is called, possibly the easiest language there is to learn, and a thousand times easier than Plato. (Or English.)
It meant that wherever you went in England, you were only a mile or so away from a parsonage where some clergyman knew the language in which Christianity was first formed; the language that, undoubtedly, Our Lord himself spoke. Greek was the lingua franca of the entire Mediterranean world. The Hellenistic city of Sepphoris was just on the doorstep of Nazareth. Compare the old C of E and today’s mess, and this is a vivid example of ‘the curve’ – the decline!
Virginia Woolf’s best essay is ‘On Not Knowing Greek’. It is in the literal sense pretentious, since she in fact knew Greek rather well. She was taught it by Clara Pater (sister of the famous aesthete Walter and one of the first Fellows of Somerville College, Oxford).
Poor Virginia! When she went mad, she would hear the birds twittering in Greek. When sane, she was reminded, as she read and re-read them, that learning the language of Sophocles or Plato is difficult.
But, more than this, getting your mind round the way these writers think and speak is difficult. In that exercise, she writes, we broaden ourselves and truly learn.
‘There is a sadness at the back of life which [the Greeks] do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its confusions, of our own age.’
She wrote when the ‘age’ had shreds of Christianity left. Now our confusions are those of the fake godless optimism with which we spoon-feed our young: the most insidious life view that it is possible to hold – the lie that everyone has a hope.
That professor who wanted to tell children the story of ‘working-class’ history wanted to make them feel good about themselves, as do all the other calls to retell history from the underdogs’ point of view.
The Greeks knew that, under the pitiless eyes of Fate, we are all underdogs. But also we are all capable of having the wit, knowledge and courage to feel bad about ourselves.
