The old American and British curriculum was based primarily on three subjects: classics, mathematics, and Scriptures, and this was true even at Oxford. Math of course part of the traditional classical curriculum. But insofar as humane learning is concerned, educated people were those who knew Latin, and preferably Greek, and had been trained in the classical tradition. What is this classical tradition?
Critics like Mathew Arnold and TS Eliot have tried to define such terms as classics and culture. For Arnold, culture was “the best that has been thought and said. Eliot, in his essay on “What is a Classic?” was more detailed as well as more traditional, but his emphasis was on literary quality and seriousness per se. Both these essays in definition were, although valuable and perceptive, somewhat misleading. From one perspective, it does not matter so much if Homer and Vergil are the best writers, so long as they are the writers who define our civilization. We love our parents, even if we come to believe that there are better men and women and even better parents. We love—or should love—our region and nation, even if we travel and discover that our places are more beautiful and have better museums.
The body of classical literature is not a set of museum exhibits, catalogued, arranged, and dead; it is a living tradition, something handed down from one generation of intelligent readers to the next. When I started studying Greek first with a great eccentric named Kiffin Rockwell and later with a rigid philologist named Walton Morris, both of my professors took pains to explain to me that they had studied under the students of Basil Gildersleeve, and that I had the good fortune to be trained in that tradition.
Origins in Greece.
Early Greek education—Paideia—was the study of the basic Greek scripture—the Homeric poems (the Iliad and Odyssey, of course, but also other epic poems (now lost) as well as Hymns) and Hesiod, to which were added lyric poets and classic writings in prose. Since the purpose was practical and civic, the emphasis was on learning the lessons of literature—how to speak and argue as well as how to understand questions of right and wrong. This approach was developed into a practical theory of education based on rhetoric. The civic goals of rhetoric were announced by Isocrates, who saw himself as a more practical teacher of wisdom than his rival Plato, and were elaborated into a full-blown theory by Aristotle in the Rhetoric.
Rhetoric
We think of rhetoric as flowery language designed to deceive. In fact, rhetoric is the art of using language correctly and effectively. Or, as another of my teachers, George Kennedy, defined it, it is “the Art of Persuasion.” The roots of this art lie in human nature and in the need for human beings to get things done without recourse to knives and pistols. Whether you are writing a letter to the editor, asking the boss for a raise, making a speech to the Rotary Club, or proposing to a girl you’ve fallen in love with (or gracefully turning down the proposal), you will need rhetoric.
On a low level, then, the rhetorical art means nothing more than getting people to do what you want them to do. But at a higher level, the rhetor or orator is the person whose mind and tongue are schooled to the point that they can be of service to society. Political and civic rhetoric is exemplified in the careers of the great tradition of European statesmen—Demosthenes, Cicero; Edmund Burke, Patrick Henry, and John C. Calhoun.
Most of us, however, are not born to sway the destinies of nations, and yet most educated people for more than two millennia were trained in the rhetorical tradition. What did it teach them? Most obviously, it taught them how to express themselves clearly, so that when they were in a position to be of use, they had the necessary literary skills to apply to their profession, whether they were preachers or politicians; teachers or soldiers. As one of my old Greek teachers used to say, “If you know it, you can say it, and if you can’t say it, you don’t know it.” This usually shut up the student who claimed to know the material but could not quite express himself.
What I want to talk about today, though, is not the art of rhetoric but the development of a classical canon and the teaching of literature. The ancient Greeks, from a very early period, had acknowledged certain literary works as central to their culture: the Homeric epics, the religious poetry of Hesiod, certain lyric poets of the 6th and 5th century. Boys were required to memorize vast stretches of Homer and had to learn the songs of Alcaeus and Simonides to sing them at banquets. They were the common core of the Greek experience and to be ignorant of these works meant that a man was a barbaros.
In early days boys schooled at home. Later on as the requirements of civic life became more demanding, became customary to send children to a schoolmaster to learn the arts of grammar, argumentation, and correct expression. But sound argument and correct expression need to be illustrated, and before long the literary classics were being used as models to teach the skills of effective writing. Here is the point: Literature was taught to Greeks and Romans for roughly two reasons: 1) certain books were the common core that formed the character of the people—Homer as bible; and 2) they were useful in developing a good style.
We are so used to the idea of reading fiction and poetry in school, that few of us stop to ask why we should spend on time on what could otherwise be regarded as entertainment. If you take the trouble to read literary theory, you will discover a great many mystical statements about literature that no one in his right mind has ever believed. To take only the most banal example, you will hear that students should read Hemingway and Fitzgerald to learn something important about life. Practical men—businessmen and engineers—with some justification make fun of the whole idea of studying literature in school. Reading stories is all very well for people who have the time, but they can do that at home instead of watching TV? What possible use could it be to write essays on imagery in the poetry of Dylan Thomas or character development in the novels of Thomas Hardy?
Ancient writers on rhetoric, however, would have no problem in answering the businessman’s objections. According to these rhetoricians, the object of education was to turn out a good man who could be useful to his neighbors and to his community; they also believed that there was a certain set of books that could be used effectively both to teach moral principles and the art of writing; that civilization itself depended on the process of inculcating these values and techniques, year after year, and generation after generation, into the young.
Rhetoric was at first a merely practical occupation but in the hands of the greatest of philosophers, Aristotle, rhetoric became more than a way of training an effective speaker or writer: became a form of intellectual discipline, and in succeeding centuries, the educated classes in Greek world all trained in this method. The Romans began studying Greek about the time of the Punic wars—though there was a good deal of nativist opposition— but it was not until the last days of the republic that the greatest rhetorical master was produced: Cicero.
If there were one prose writer in the history of the West who is indispensable, it is M. Tullius Cicero. A brilliant lawyer and politician, he also wrote magisterial works on rhetoric and philosophy. Cicero was no theoretician but a practical man who saw rhetoric and philosophy as yoked horses that brought the student both to wisdom and to competence as a speaker and writer. He created the language of Roman philosophy and introduced natural law, which was subsequently imported into Roman Law and became the language of European discourse.
At the height of empire, rhetorical schools flourished all over empire. A contemporary of Tacitus and Pliny—Quintillian—wrote the first comprehensive book on rhetoric as complete system of education. This work was lost (or mislaid and ignored) for centuries, and its rediscovery in Renaissance sparked an intellectual and educational revolution.
Most ancient prose writers, whether they were philosophers, historians, theologians, were trained in rhetoric. In the case of St. Augustine, he was actually a professional orator, and perhaps the last great master of Latin prose. Like his friend St. Jerome, Augustine was torn between his pagan education and his Christian vocation, and he dreamed of drawing up a strictly Christian curriculum (much as John Henry Newman tried to create a kind of semi-Catholic reading list in English). In the end, Augustine failed entirely. The Christian empire in which he lived, and whose civilization we have inherited, is not derived directly from the Jewish experience. It is a garment woven of Jewish and Christian scriptures, Roman law and political institutions, Greek literature and philosophy. The attempt to disentangle any one of these strands is disastrous to the web.
Middle Ages and Renaissance
The Medieval school curriculum was heavily theological and logical, but it was largely a Christian extension of, not a revolution against the classical tradition. The same can be said, for the most part, of Renaissance Humanism, whose primary objectives were the restoration of correct Latin, the recovery of Greek, and the rediscovery of lost works of ancient literature whose mss. lay buried in monastic libraries. Many protestant and Catholic reformers—Thomas More, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, and Beza were trained in the humanist techniques.
English literature and culture from Chaucer to Eliot is unthinkable outside the context of the classical tradition, and by the time the British colonies were being planted in North America, English literature was even more rigidly following classical models. This was the age of Dryden and Pope, of Palladian architecture, and—as the revolution was getting started—of Dr. Samuel Johnson, but even the Romantic revolution of the early 19th century was more of a revaluation of Greece over Rome.
III Classical Tradition in America
It was this tradition, at least its English version that was brought to the American colonies, incorporated in the curricula at Harvard, Yale, and William & Mary. The first American work of literature was Edwyn Sandys’ version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, composed at Jamestown 1621-26, while the poet was colony’s treasurer. There was no other form of education, as the entrance and graduation requirements of American colleges reveal. Students at the University of Georgia were expected to be able “to read, translate, and parse Cicero, Virgil, and the Greek New Testament, and to write true Latin prose” before they were admitted. There were similar requirements in other colleges.
At the University of Virginia graduates were expected “to be able to read the highest classics in the language with ease, thorough understanding, and just quantity”—a requirement dear to my heart as a metrist and to the heart of Thomas Jefferson, who drove John Adams to distraction with his lengthy disquisitions on Greek meter. This curriculum, common to North and South, gave a basis for understanding to Jefferson and Adams, Daniel Webster and Jefferson Davis. President Davis attended a County Academy of Wilkinson then to Transylvania University, where he completed his studies and Greek, Latin, mathematics, surveying, history, and science. He left at 15 to attend West Point. Gradually, the North was seduced by progressive fallacies. Not long after the Revolution, Benjamin Rush and Noah Webster argued that study of classics was inappropriate for a democratic people. By 1857, as the attack on classics in the North was well underway (though it would be stopped by the War between the States), UVA had 247 students enrolled in Latin, 248 in chemistry, 168 in Greek.
American defenders of the classical tradition were not lacking Marylander Samuel Knox “Liberal Education” 1799 said attacks on Greek and Latin were result of “vitiated taste” and the “negligence or indulgence of parents.” Knox insisted that experience was preferable to theory: “That which has been tried and approved by experience ought not to be rashly abandoned. It is surely entitled to a decided preference to mere speculative theory.”
Thomas Jefferson, who is frequently depicted as a progressive critic of the old curriculum, realized that it was becoming modish in Europe to denigrate classical studies. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, he wrote: “The learning Greek and Latin, I am told, is going into disuse in Europe. I know not what their manners and occupations may call for: but it would be very ill-judged in us to follow their example in this instance.”
Jefferson was perhaps the most classically trained of any American statesman. At the age of nine he attended a Latin school kept by the Reverend William Douglas—a teacher not highly regard by in later years by his famous pupil. At 14 Jefferson entered the school of the Rev. James Maury, who had been trained at William & Mary. After 2 years the young student was able to read Greek and Latin authors with comparative ease. The future President entered William & Mary in 1760, where, according to his family, he studied 15 hours a day.
Jefferson is often regarded as revolutionary or progressive in his cultural views, and in his earlier days he did complain against the sterility of much classics teaching, but in later years he came to prefer the classical perfection of ancient literature. In a 1786 essay on English prosody, he observes along the way that “When young any composition pleases which unites a little sense, some imagination, and some rhythm in doses however small. But as we advance in life, these things fall off one by one, and I suspect we are left at last with only Homer and Vergil, perhaps with Homer alone.”
As his wisdom matured, Jefferson saw the central importance of the classical tradition, and he insisted on high entrance and graduation requirements for the University of Virginia, which he was instrumental in founding. The Commissioners Report for UVA (1818), for which he is largely responsible, recommended that at district schools and preparatory colleges in the state: “Boys should be rendered able to read the easier authors, Latin and Greek,” while in the university their “classical learning might be critically completed, by a study of the authors of highest degree; and it is at this stage only that they should be received at the University.”
In 1785 Jefferson drew up a reading list for his nephew, Peter Carr. As one would expect, the list is heavy on the ancient classics, especially the historians and poets. He saw the classics as propaedeutic, that is, as an essential basis for all further humane studies, but he also read the ancients for the intrinsic merits of their works and for the pleasure he received from them. In a letter to the radical scientist Joseph Priestly (27 Jan 1800) he declared, “I think the Greeks and Romans have left us the present models which exist of fine composition,” adding, “To read the Latin and Greek authors in their original is a sublime luxury.” Jefferson would not have admired Dr. Johnson’s political and religious views, but he would have heartily endorsed his statement that Greek is like lace (in an age when men wore a great deal of lace): “No man can get enough of it.”
Jefferson’s letters are peppered with classical allusions, some of them quite technical (cf. his 1813 letter to John Waldo on etymology), and his treatment of questions of Greek prosody is highly detailed. In a letter of 1819, he writes to Judge Spencer Roane: “It may be truly said that the classical languages are a solid basis for most, and an ornament to all the sciences.”
I have spoken at some length on Jefferson, because in many respects he represents the model of a classically educated American gentleman. He derived both his republican ideals and his literary taste from reading the classics, and so long as the tradition was alive, Britain and American produced public-spirited statesmen who knew what freedom was and poets who hoped to emulate the brilliance of Homer and Pindar, Horace and Vergil. Even as late as the generation of Frost, Pound, and Eliot, American poetry rests on the secure foundations of ancient Greece and Rome. By the 1950’s American schools had, for the most part, jettisoned the classics, and the results are frightening to contemplate: ignorant and cynical politicians who invoke the language of liberty without even knowing what the words mean and writers who cannot hope to write a correct English sentence, much less an effective paragraph. Those who do not see the connection by now will never see it, because only the classically trained mind can appreciate how much we have lost.
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