What I am doing is nothing new; on the contrary, the whole idea of starting a podcast about the Classics in a modern context is as old as the Classics itself. From the Romans envisioning themselves in Greek statuary to the Renaissance painters inserting themselves into the School of Athens, humanity has been obsessed with looking back, and particularly to looking back to this pair of cities situated on a pair of craggy promontories on the coast of the Mediterranean.

 

As a child Classically educated at home, I was fascinated by how the voices of these men, though reduced to faint letters on a faded parchment, and passed through a myriad of generations to meet my ears, shook the foundations of philosophy, and shaped the world that I now live in. 

 

At the same time, as an adult studying the history of these civilizations a little more critically, I was sorely disappointed with the results of these lofty philosophical teachings. Demagogues, tyrants, and bloodthirsty warlords, run as rampant in this ancient world, as in our modern one.  

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The ancient authors were well aware of the problem of evil, and humanity's desire to escape it. They often struggled to reconcile themselves with it; they made their gods as cruel and fickle as the reckless kings who ruled them. Even their afterlife was a grim mockery of their present meaningless life: shades flickering in a thankless void. 

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I was shocked, appalled, confused. I wanted the world's questions to be easy. 

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But the philosophers that I read chased down the difficult questions. Though mankind was, for the most part, incapable of living entirely in the True, the Good, or the Beautiful, they could at least pursue it.

 

Throughout the ancient world, there are stories of real courage and real human kindness that exist alongside the brutality. 

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Every generation has its philosophers, its poets, its artists, and artisans who each offer their basin of water in an attempt to wash away the dust and dirt of the rougher roads we are forced to walk. 

 

They want our souls to be freer. They want us to see better. Our job is to listen and discern: what is this author saying, and is it True? Is it Good? Is it Beautiful?

 

Though this journey does not necessarily begin with the Greeks- if we are to believe them, it begins at the start of humanity- it is in these ancient texts that we begin to wrestle with these questions of purpose and existence.

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Now you might ask, WHY LATIN, WHY NOT GREEK?

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In the last few paragraphs, I have mainly been talking about Ancient Greece and its culture, but since I am a Latin tutor, you might- reasonably- be a bit confused. Let me explain.

 

"Classics" is a discipline that spans about fifteen to seventeen-hundred years (depending on how you count), covering the history, languages, and literature of two civilizations: the ancient Greeks, and the ancient Romans. 

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How did these two very different nations come together into one subject? Well, that's a long story, filled with many misadventures along the way.

 

It's called the Aeneid.

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(Well, that's not the whole story: if anything, it's the creation of Latin literature more generally that leads to this wider discipline of Classics. But that is a topic for a blog post, not an introduction to Classics). 

 

After the fall of Athens, the stories and texts and philosophies of Greece found their way across the sea to another city and to another people more ambitious than their Athenian fore-fathers. Though the Romans adopted many aspects of Greek culture. they put their own 'spin' on it: i.e. more palatable to the aristocratic, reasonably pious, somewhat stodgy, and collectively traumatized Roman male elite (though there are several notable exceptions, and Classics, as a discipline is peering between the lines to find these lost or obscured voices of the ancient world).

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It is through Rome that the 'West' as we know it from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance begins to take shape. 

 

Eventually, when the Roman Empire began to splinter in the West, the Church took up this same mantle of imperial identity and literary power, which it bore with mixed success until the Reformation, where it splintered again into a myriad of textual avenues that continue to diverge and reconnect in a dynamic tapestry of influences.

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I won't deny that this discipline- Classic- comes with its own set of problems: imperialism, genocide, xenophobia, slavery, and economic oppression. Some would say its inherent to the very term, and have rejected it completely. 

 

But, once again, these are no reason to shy away from a subject. If anything, the understanding of these ancient issues is essential for understanding the roots of our modern problems (many of which, I would argue, stem from these same issues that we have yet to solve). 

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With a thousand years worth of history to cover, with a wide range of disciplines from art history to culinary anthropology Classics has a huge range of topics. Even though the study of Classics is as old as universities themselves, there is still so much yet to be discovered about the ancient world. 

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