Greek ruins

Mr. Simmons is the author of the forthcoming book Climbing Parnassus, a defense of classical education.

A speechwriter for Vice President George Bush once prepared a stump speech peppered with a bit of Thucydides, a Greek historian of the fifth century B.C. But after the Vice President tripped over the name one time too many, another staffer decided to avoid further embarrassment by drawing a line through the word and writing in "Plato." One dead Greek was as good as another, and who would know the difference?

Who indeed? Once a common possession of the well educated, classical knowledge now bobs like flotsam amid the wreckage wrought by a century of educational scuttling. In 1962, 700,000 American high-school students were taking Latin; by 1985, that number had dropped to 176,000. Consequently, classical studies in higher education have suffered. Out of more than a million BAs awarded in 1994, only six hundred went to classics majors. And these figures tell only a portion of the story. For with the passing of Greek and Latin we have lost part of the soul of our civilization.

Our Founding Fathers saw in education the key to national prosperity, both as an insurance policy against political tyranny and as an investment for worldly success -- although even then dissenters disputed the premium placed upon classics. Benjamin Rush, a physician and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, dallied in 1789 with the idea of a Federal University built on a new model. "While the business of education in Europe consists in lectures upon the ruins of Palmyra and the antiquities of Herculaneum," Rush wrote, "the youth of America will be employed in acquiring those branches of knowledge which increase the conveniences of life, lessen human misery, improve our country, promote population, exalt the human understanding, and establish domestic, social, and political happiness." Expelled from the new university, therefore, would be those "tyrants" of the old curriculum, Greek and Latin, along with their cornucopia of poetry, drama, history, and philosophy, which had nourished minds and spirits for centuries. Rush's proposal sounds a modern note, confirming a cherished view we hold of ourselves as makers of a novus ordo seclorum (a new order of the ages).

Yet most educated men of the colonial and Federal era were not beguiled by this rash form of cultural independence. Thomas Jefferson wrote to his grandson, just setting out for college, "Your Latin and Greek should be kept up assiduously." John Adams, keeping close tabs on the education of his sons, wrote to young John Quincy in 1780: "My wish at present is that your principal attention should be directed to the Latin and Greek tongues." "I hope soon to hear," he added, "that you are in Virgil and [Cicero's] orations, or Ovid, or Horace, or all of them." And Jefferson and Adams were not mere savants; they typified their class and generation. Greek and Latin furnished their minds, formed their taste, and perfected their style. Allusions to Greeks and Romans run as a constant motif in colonial correspondence and public documents.

Classical education continued to define the standard curriculum for the elite through most of the nineteenth century as well --although, in proper American fashion, plenty of others joined them in aspiring to pry open its vast treasure trove. James Garfield took his early education at a modest school in Ohio where he drank heady draughts of Homer, Herodotus, Livy, Tacitus, and Virgil; it was said that, years later, the ambidextrous Garfield, on hearing a sentence in English, could translate it onto paper, one hand into Greek, the other into Latin. Theodore Roosevelt, the quintessentially American man of action, is said to have maintained his Greek and Latin reading amid trust-busting and big-game hunting till the end of his life.

Why were generations of students made to suffer the inky travails of learning two difficult languages they would never speak? With concerns about education figuring prominently in the public mind today, we might well ask. After all, if another Constitutional Convention were convened next year, it's not at all clear that the current generation could bring to the chamber the same blend of practicality and learned wisdom -- or want of cliche and jargon --that armed the delegates at Philadelphia in 1787. Al Gore's inability to translate E Pluribus Unum might then be the least of our worries.

Classical education has always signified more than Greek and Latin. The two languages secured the basis for a humanistic training, being the necessary preconditions to access to Greek and Roman writings. But they were means, not ends; the text was the thing. Implicit in classics was the Virgilian dictum of Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas: Fortunate the man who can understand the causes of things. A classical education conferred full citizenship of the West, forcing its students to plumb the depths of their origins and tap into the vigor of their civilization, to understand it from within by the direct witness of men and women who had presided over its beginnings.