East Pyne Hall where the classics department is located. Image courtesy of Flickr.com
In a statement on June 1, the Classics Department announced that students in the concentration are no longer required to take Greek or Latin. The Department also eliminated the “classics” track, which focused on the ancient languages.
When telling someone I plan to major in Classics, I’m commonly asked of what use it is, and how it can make me better suited for life after graduation.
To major in Classics is to engage with complex grammar and vocabulary, attain the requisite knowledge to study ancient works of the western canon in their original languages, and develop a relationship with the works that laid the foundations for the literary and philosophical structures that underlie western civilization. The study of Latin and Greek imparts critical thinking and analytic skills that extend beyond the realm of language into fields such as law, business and medicine.
I also don’t like math and wouldn’t know a byte if it bit me in culum.
But what, you might ask, is Classics? According to Wikipedia, “Classics or classical studies is the study of classical antiquity, and in the Western world traditionally refers to the study of Classical Greek and Roman literature in their original languages of Ancient Greek and Latin, respectively. It may also include Greco-Roman philosophy, history, and archaeology as secondary subjects.”
To have a degree in Classics from Princeton has had meaning, and historically has signified that you have struggled to overcome difficulties in understanding the ancient mind and its products. Of necessity, those struggles have included understanding the ways thoughts are formulated, and how they are expressed. Aristotle did not conceive or write the Nichomachean Ethics in English. He wrote it in an alien, dead language, a language he not only wrote and spoke, but also one in which he thought.
Ancient Greek was the lens through which he saw the big questions. How can we hope to truly understand Aristotle in English? His concept of the “good life” – eudaimonia – has a richness that is to be explained, not rendered in a single (English) word. And the beauty and power of poetry – of the love poetry of Ovid or Shakespeare, the passions and musings of Catullus and Rilke, the worlds above and below of Dante, the scandalous work of Petronius – how can these be grasped fully in translation? They can’t.
A few translations of the first lines of the Odyssey:
Marvelous renderings all, but without the metrical integrity that so enlivened Homer, and as reflective of the translator’s genius and world as of the poet’s.
Classical languages are foundational to Classics in the way calculus is foundational to mathematics. Most Princeton students have the opportunity to learn calculus in high school and to launch mathematical and other studies from that footing. Fewer learn Greek and Latin before college. I studied Latin but not calculus in high school; I was happy to study calculus at Princeton. Anyone can learn Latin or calculus in college, especially, we must assume, students at as serious and rigorous an institution as Princeton.
Professor Joshua Billings, Director of Undergraduate Studies, said that “having people who come in who might not have studied Classics in high school and might not have had a previous exposure to Greek and Latin, we think that having those students in the department will make it a more vibrant intellectual community.” I concur wholeheartedly. But “let them learn Latin” differs from the famous dictum attributed to Marie Antoinette: cake was not available, but Latin is, and anyone who wants it can have it – even starting from scratch in his or her first year.
By all means, the Classics Department should do its best to gain and cultivate students with no prior exposure to Greek or Latin. But is not requiring that they develop some skill in an ancient language really what’s best for the field of study? In my view, this decision has the potential to stunt generations of scholars, take away value from the degree, and not guarantee students the ability to enter the field of academics. Bringing in students who otherwise wouldn’t have studied Classics could indeed create a more vibrant intellectual community, but not if they remain foundationless, only studying works in translation.
No doubt, the Department’s decision to eliminate the ancient language requirement, and the language track, will be greeted with rancor and disdain by some, with approbation by others. My hope is that partisanship will abate, that the discussion will be carried on respectfully, and that the Department reverses what I view as a policy that will dilute what it means to have majored in Classics at Princeton.
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