“Alone once I set out drugs of forgetfulness,
Voiceless, yet speaking—when I made the syllabus
I discovered as letters for men to see
So one who was not present over the wide sea
Knows well everything happening in his home,
And as someone dies he speaks for those writing the measure of his wealth
For his children and for the one who accepts it to know.
And the evils that cause people to fall into strife,
A record dissolves–it does not permit the speaking of lies.”
“Agamemnon, human beings have every kind
Of luck—but it comes together in this one thing.
Everyone—both those who love art and those
Who live without it toil over money
And whoever has the most is the wisest.”
“Lesbia talks a lot of shit about me when her husband is around
This brings the greatest pleasure to that fool.
Ass, do you know nothing? She would be sound
If she forgot us in silence—but she rants and she squawks.
She not only remembers me but—a thing sharper to touch,
She’s enraged: it’s like this, she’s burning and talks.”
Lesbia mi praesente viro mala plurima dicit:
haec illi fatuo maxima laetitia est.
mule, nihil sentis? si nostri oblita taceret,
sana esset: nunc quod gannit et obloquitur,
non solum meminit, sed, quae multo acrior est res,
irata est. hoc est, uritur et loquitur.
As I have mentioned before, Catullus is the author who first drew me into classics when I was in high school. I loved the variety in his poems, the vitality, and the inappropriateness of some of his ‘subjects’. I can only imagine what would have happened had I been born but a bit later into a world in which the Latin AP was only Caesar and Vergil…
This poem has stuck with me for years as the most drastic version of the gap between passion (negative or positive) and indifference.
A.E. Housman, Manilii Astronomica, Vol. V (Introduction)
“The first virtue of an emendation is to be true , but the best emendations of all are those which are both true and difficult, emendations which no fool could find. It is humiliating to reflect how many of the type commonly called brilliant,- neat and pretty changes of a letter or two -, have been lighted upon, almost fortuitously, by scholars whose intellectual powers were beneath the ordinary. Textual criticism would indeed be a paradise if scribes had confined themselves to making mistakes which Isaac Voss and Robinson Ellis could correct. But we know by comparing one MS with another that they also made mistakes of a different character: and it is these that put a good emendator on his mettle. First he must recognize them, then he must deal with them suitably. Anxious adherence to the ductus litterarum is the fruitful parent of false conjectures. It seduced even such men as Scaliger and Porson: it led Scaliger to write ultimus ex solido tetrans in IV 757; it made Porson spoil his famous correction of Eur. Ion 1115 by omitting a necessary particle. The merits essential to a correction are those without which it cannot be true, and closeness to the MSS is not one of them; the indispensable things are fitness to the context and propriety to the genius of the author. The question whether the error presupposed was great or small is indeed a question to be asked, but it is the last question. With vulgar judges it is the first, though usually the last as well. This detail is their favorite criterion, because it can be discerned, or they think it can, by a bodily sense, without disturbing the slumbers of the intellect.
It surprises me that so many people should feel themselves qualified to weigh conjectures in their balance and to pronounce them good or bad, probable or improbable. Judging an emendation requires in some measure the same qualities as emendation itself, and the requirement is formidable. To read attentively, think correctly, omit no relevant consideration, and repress self-will, are not ordinary accomplishments; yet an emendator needs much besides: just literary perception, congenial intimacy with the author, experience which must have been won by study, and mother wit which he must have brought from his mother’s womb.
It may be asked whether I think that I myself possess this outfit, or even most of it; and if I answer yes, that will be a new example of my notorious arrogance. I had rather be arrogant than impudent. I should not have undertaken to edit Manilius unless I had believed that I was fit for the task; and in particular I think myself a better judge of emendation, both when to emend and how to emend, than most others.”
The pictures were sent by my mother-in-law who is visiting Morocco. They made me long for a Greek compound for “tree-goats”. There is not one. But here are some goatwords.
αἴξ, αἴγος: goat, usually female
αἰγοκέφαλος: “goat-headed”, for a type of owl
αἰγόλεθρος: “goat’s bane”
αἰγομελής: “goat-limbed”
αἰγονόμιον: “herd of goats”
αἰγοπίθηκος: “goat ape”
αἰγόπλαστος: “goat-shaped”
αἰγοπόδης: “goat-footed”
αἰγοτριχέω: “to have goat hair”
αἰγοφάγος: “goat-eater”
The Root aiks is unclear, but might have to do with jumping
τράγος, ὁ: “he-goat”
τραγίζειν: “to be a he-goat”
τραγέλαφος: “goat-stag”
τραγοβάμων: “goat-walking”
τραγόκτονος: “goat slaughter”
τραγομάσχαλος: “smelling like goat in the armpits”
τραγοπρόσωπος: “goat-faced”
τραγοπτισάνη: “a goat gruel
τραγοπώγων: “goat-bearded”
Trag- is probably derived from what goats are known to do: they eat everything
“After a while, Diomedes good-at-the warcry, addressed them:
“I will fight with you first because you are being foolish, son of Atreus,
Which is right, Lord, in the assembly. So don’t get angry at all.”
[“I will fight with you first”] “It is clear that he is also criticizing the rest of the Greeks because they are consenting to the retreat through their silence. For he says the fight in opposition to the speech.”
[“which is right in the assembly, lord”] This is the custom, in a democracy. It is established in the agora because it is the custom to speak with freedom of speech [parrêsia] in the assembly.
[“don’t get angry at all”] this is an anticipatory warning, since he is about to criticize him more severely than he has been reproached at anytime, [alleging that it is right] to speak against kings during assemblies. He asks him to set anger aside because he believes it is right to accept advantageous truth and he his clarifying the purpose of what is said—that it is not to insult.
“Diphilos in his Theseus says that once three girls from Samos were riddling while drinking at the Adonian festival. Then one of them posed a riddle to the others and asked “What is the strongest thing of all?”
One of them said, “iron” and then as proof of her argument suggested that they can dig or cut everything and use it for most things. Although she was thought well of for this answer, the second girl was saying that a blacksmith is much stronger than this since as he works he also bends even strong iron for whatever he wants to make.
And the third girl answered that a penis is the strongest of all and she explained that when someone buggers the blacksmith with it, he groans.”
I used to tell you that Cestius, because he was Greek, suffered because of a lack of Latin words though he had an abundance of ideas. Thus, whenever he dared to describe something more broadly, he often stalled especially when he attempted to imitate some great genius.
This is the issue in this controversy. For, in his story, when he was telling about how his brother was given to him, he was pleased by this lonely and sad description: “night was laid out, and everything, judges, was singing under silent stars.” Julius Montanus, who was a companion of Tiberius and an exceptional poet, was claiming that he wanted to imitate Vergil’s line: “it was night and all the tired animals over the earth, the races of birds and beasts, were held by a deep sleep.”
Soleo dicere vobis Cestium Latinorum verborum inopia hominem Graecum laborasse, sensibus abundasse; itaque, quotiens latius aliquid describere ausus est, totiens substitit, utique cum se ad imitationem magni alicuius ingeni derexerat, sicut in hac controversia fecit. Nam in narratione, cum fratrem traditum sibi describeret, placuit sibi in hac explicatione una et infelici: nox erat concubia, et omnia, iudices, canentia sideribus muta erant. Montanus Iulius, qui comes fuit , egregius poeta, aiebat illum imitari voluisse Vergili descriptionem:
nox erat et terras animalia fessa per omnis,alituum pecudumque genus, sopor altus habebat
If you studied Classics in college, you probably heard some sales pitch like this:
Classics is an eminently practical discipline, and you should study it because it offers you the critical thinking toolkit necessary to be a productive citizen in the 21st century. Students of Classics often secure successful employment in such diverse fields as computer science, law, media, and medicine.
If you are studying Latin in high school, you probably heard some sales pitch like this:
Latin is the most practical language to take: it improves your English vocabulary, helps you earn a better SAT score, and distinguishes you on college applications. Plus, if you are planning on going into medicine or law…
These sales pitches do what sales pitches always do: dupe the mark who believes them. But more importantly, these sales pitches commodify the study of Classics, and package it as something which has practical instrumental value. Yet, in truth, Classics is lumbering and unwieldy as an instrument, and can be compared to riding a horse to work: great if you’re into that sort of thing, but certainly not the fastest way to achieve some particular practical end. Classics has always been at least a little recondite, and certainly never practical, but these sales pitches tend to turn the field into an empty shell which can be filled with your personal hopes and used to convey you to the next step of the professional ladder. Indeed, I think that the attempt to sell Classical study as an instrument for the achievement of some end other than the understanding of and delight in the ancient world is not only morally dubious in an age of skyrocketing tuition, but also likely contributes to the steady decay which set in long ago.
We are already rapidly hurtling toward an age of wholesale and universal instrumentality, in which all of our ideas, feelings, and actions are directed toward the goal of making us better instruments for the achievement of no particular end other than the maintenance of an increasingly efficient system of production and consumption. We now strive for instrumentalized efficiency in everything we do. How many of our actions are not directed toward filling some quota on a health app, garnering further Twitter followers, or seeking some other form of existential validation in the countless metrics which can now be readily applied to every facet of our lives? The ‘high-score’ was noble teleology in the video arcade, but now even our leisure is a thinly-veiled form of work. This ‘leisure’ is hardly the otium cum dignitate of the Roman elite, who disdainfully eschewed labor to pursue literary, historical, or philosophical studies. We have bought into the notion of commodification so thoroughly that our lives are now nothing more than readily packaged and processed collections of data points ready to be sold and harnessed for the sole purpose of selling us and harnessing us further. In a world filtered by Instagram and Twitter, it is hard to believe in authenticity, and one begins to feel that experience unmediated by and undirected toward further commodification is no longer possible.
Ardent enthusiasts for the development of artificial intelligence range from those who think that it will simply spare us from tedious labour, to those who seem to hope that it renders us, as thinking beings, entirely obsolete. Whatever your stance on it, the rapid development of AI has ushered in a new crisis of nihilism. If we will never be as smart or as untiring as a computer in a world which only values practical utility, why not just invest in some sturdy rope now? A student once asked me what it was like to have devoted my life to Classics, something which is generally regarded as wholly useless. I responded that, if tech culture and AI continue to develop as planned (hoped?), then everyone else will have devoted their lives to pursuits which, in their own way, were also wholly useless.
A plague upon ‘usefulness’ and ‘practicality’! One can readily imagine a computer performing countless tasks better than humans, but could it ever care? I am writing this only because I feel some concern for the world which I inhabit, and similarly I studied Classics because I cared about it. Certainly, I felt some of the allurements of ‘academic rigor’ and ‘distinguishing oneself from the vulgar mob’ and ‘broadly applicable skills’ and whatever other codswallop was offered up at the time, but this mode of enticement only really appeals to those who are sold on the project anyway.
Classics cannot be important because it ‘teaches critical thinking’ – many other subjects do, and computers already excel at analysis.
Classics cannot be important because it will be ‘valued by employers’ – employers only value that which tends to increase the bottom line. Within a few decades, the term ‘employer’ itself will be outmoded, as companies will no longer be on the lookout for anything with a beating heart.
Classics cannot be important because it ‘exercises a humanizing influence’ or some similar claptrap; I know some Classicists who are roundly horrible people.
Classics is important only because people are capable of caring, in the broadest sense, about the world. Efforts to popularize parts of antiquity, especially in the form of podcasts as well as fresh and exciting new translations of ancient texts, have a broad appeal which is hardly reflected in institutional enrollment in Classics programs. Indeed, I have more students in my high school Latin class (100 out of a total student population of 2,700) than there were Classics majors in my entire university (67 out of a total student population of 25,000). People care about, are interested in, and feel excited by the study of antiquity in ways which cannot and will never be reflected in institutionalized study. Some of my students hate studying Latin, but they will read through massive volumes of Roman history with rapt attention, or discuss the Odyssey in translation with the same enthusiasm that they feel for Star Wars.
As a discipline, we ceded the field when we granted concessions to the language of ‘practicality’ and ‘job readiness’ in the first place. Indeed, I suspect that we have all been duped by a system which wants ‘job-ready’ graduates now only to fill a brief gap between the present moment and a future in which employers may fall back on the more appealing expedient of an entirely non-human labor force. People like Classics because it is interesting. I would ask, rhetorically, whether we feel similarly compelled to justify, in practical terms, our aesthetic and even spiritual pleasure in, say, a mountain vista, but I also know that in America a view is only beautiful if there is no material profit to be had from its destruction.
The large gap between the number of people interested in antiquity and those who study it professionally helps to point the way forward. The future of Classics will depend much less on conferences and far more on podcasts and popular books. Depending on your position in the field, such a suggestion may sound either novel and appalling or hopelessly worn and passé, but it applies more broadly to all of the humanities. Professionalized art, literature, and music have always been hard, but I doubt that becoming more obscure and recondite would help matters.
This is not an anomalous position for the field, either. Classical study was for some time a pursuit for passionate “amateurs”, and between Petrarch and Gibbon one could easily name a host of figures who made meaningful monuments to Classical learning which are far better remembered than any academic monograph. Undoubtedly, the privilege of Classical study in securing a position in the British Civil Service in the 19th century and the explosion of academic institutions in America along with its concomitant development into the rigidly professionalized system of today contributed substantially to the number of people who were employed in some professional capacity as a result of Classical study, but this connection between antiquity and employment has always been the most tenuous of threads.
What space, then, does Classics occupy in our intellectual and cultural sphere? Well, it’s there if you care. Never will more than a tiny fraction of the population want to study Greek and Latin, and we should stop telling potential students that ancient languages are useful for building vocabulary or demonstrating a unique commitment to diverse study or – the worst justification of them all – that the ‘rigor’ of Classical languages is a uniquely challenging type of mental gymnastics which will make you better prepared for other mental activity. The study of ancient languages is only useful in making you better at ancient languages.
The institutional study of Physics has always seemed to me the most closely parallel case to that of Classics. Our educated public loves the study of Physics; most of your friends probably enjoy watching shows with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and likely mourned the death of Stephen Hawking. Yet, for all of this popular enthusiasm, very few people actually get Physics degrees, and despite our very vocal support for ‘STEM’ in this country, some Physics departments face the threat of total closure just as Classics departments do. Why? All of that talent pool for Physics is attracted to the more instrumentalized and readily-monetized department of Engineering. Just as in Classics, only a few who make it to the end of a PhD program end up being able to secure the dream of an academic position in Physics. Generally, our society is not structured to reward study for its own sake.
In conclusion, the future of professionalized Classics looks bleak, but in truth, everything looks bleak on the blighted horizon of our techno-capitalist utopia. I regularly encourage my graduating students to study what means most to them – what they care about – because soon the notion of the ‘unemployable degree’ will be wholly outmoded when all degrees are unemployable. When robots and supercomputers are doing all of our accounting, medicine, and engineering in addition to physical and service labor, our pursuit of the inherently interesting and our experience of meaning for its own sake will likely be all that is left to us.
Selling the study of Classics on the basis of anything other than its inherent ability to fascinate the human mind is a losing strategy. The battlefield of practicality and employment was lost long ago when the first microprocessor was developed. I have no doubt that the instrumentalization and commodification of every aspect of our private and public lives will continue apace, but I hope that from the dystopian wreckage we can at least salvage one salutary relic of an earlier time: maybe we can return to thinking about antiquity not as a mine from which to extract conference papers and monographs, but as a vista which we climb to see for its own sake.
