The Future of Classical Education

THE FUTURE OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION 1 by J. ~l. CAMERON ~lany would find this a gloomy subject to talk about, for I suppose that in the English-speaking COWltries it is believed that the study of the history and literature of the ancient and Romans I.ill dl"indle still further and possibly die out al together. For all kinds of reasons I think this would be disastrous, and I think we have therefore to see to it that classical studies do have a future. I think that if we inquire about the future of classical education in the spirit of one who asks when the great San Francisco earthquake or the next eruption of Vesuvius will take place our cause is lost, for we should then think our questions about the future were questions about something already determined; this induces fatalism in the questioner, whereas if classical education is to have a future this can only be guaranteed if we think of the future as open and what we do now as bringing about what without our actions wouldn't happen. I am going too fast. What should we lose if classical studies and die? Pirst, what is at stake is not our knowledge, simply, of the ancient world and its cuI ture; it is our of our entire past . Simply because ancient history and literature have been so many generations the imaginative background of all those - the directing and exemplary elites -- who have been educated, it isn't possible to lUlderstand either the politics or the literature of the without some sense of the force of the ancient world as it moved men's minds and shaped their pictures of and responses to the world. Let me take some examples. I take it to be not worth disputing that Shakespeare and Mil ton are among the principal ornaments of our culture and not to be familiar wi th their work is to be cut off from more than just work, since their work enters into, as nourishment and challenge, all subsequent English writing. I take two examples from Milton. The fallen angels enter the have resolved to hold thei r constructed in hell after they TIle hasty multitude Admiring enter'd, and the work some praise And some the Architect: his hand was known In Heav'n by many a Towred structure high, Where Scepter'd Angels held their residence, And sat as Princes, whom the supreme King Exalted to such power, and gave to rule, Each in his Hierarchie, the Orders bright. Nor was his name unheard or In ancient Greece, and in lThis paper was read to the Toronto Classics Club on February 8th, 1980. 82 J. 1>1. CA,.n::RO~ "~n called him MuZciber; and how he fell From Heav'n, they fabl'd, thrown by angry Jove Sheer o're the Chrystal Battlements: from I>brn To Noon he fell. from Noon to dewy Eve, A Summers day; and with the setting Sun Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star, On Lemnos th 1 Aegaean. lIe . .. (Pcnudise Lost I. 730-746) Now, 1'm not especially concerned that the modern reader (no doubt like the seventeenth-century reader) might well have to look up "Ausonian" and "Mulciher"; but so long as he knows he has to look them up in a classiaaZ dictionary he has, so to speak, identified the context, and is open to the extraordinary charm, as of a glimpse of a bright landscape through a narrow window, of the account of the fall of the divine architect, the fall through a long summer day onto "Lemoos th' Aegaean lIe". Of course, it helps to know that the Greek god with whom the Roman poets identified their Vulcan- ~Iulciber was thrown, first from Olympus by his mother, later by Zeus, that he is variollsly thought to have been lame from birth or lame as a consequence of his fall onto Lemnos, and that he made a net in which he caught the goddess of love and the god of war in an embrace and exhibited them to the laughter of the illllOOrtals. But the setting of the passage is so...