Just last week the University of St Andrews hosted the annual conference of the Classical Association. The Class. Ass. is a defining part of the classical scene in the UK. It runs scholarly journals, supports a variety of good classical causes both at school and university level, offer grants and hosts podcasts. Its conference is an up-to-the-minute gathering of all those interested in Classics (you don’t have to be a university lecturer or post-graduate student to attend), with the usual mixture of celebrity lectures, specialist seminars and late-night socializing. (In case you haven’t been to an academic conference recently, it now comes – perhaps necessarily, but still sadly – complete with a three-page code of conduct for participants.)
It is hard to imagine now the intense campaigning that brought about the foundation of the Class. Ass. over 120 years ago, in 1903. Its aim was to save Classics in England and Wales from imminent extinction (the fact that the subject is still going strong is the only proof you need of its success). The Association’s launch came with a fanfare of lamentation about Classics being in its death throes, and a good deal of hand-wringing.
In an article entitled “Are the Classics to go?”, one of the ringleaders, J. P. Postgate, wrote: “On many sides we hear confident assertions, met for the most part by half-hearted and apologetic denials, that the work of Greek and Latin is done – that their day is past … If these studies fall, they fall like Lucifer. We can assuredly hope for no second Renaissance”. And there was much more along those lines to be heard at the inaugural meeting, inveighing against those who wanted to make education more “useful” and more “modern”. And there was some ridicule (obviously hilarious at the time) directed at reading Greek and Latin in translation: “[Translation] had its own utility”, observed Postgate again, “but as literature what was it? Pickled salmon, tinned salmon!”.
It is hard to take this completely seriously now. After all, 1903 seems to us close to the pinnacle of the glory days of Classics in the UK (or the acme of its self-satisfied, blinkered dominance over the curriculum, depending on your point of view). At that time, after all, it was still necessary to have qualifications in both Greek and Latin to take any degree whatsoever at Oxford or Cambridge. Maybe they realized that the writing was already on the wall for this. But could they really have imagined that the whole subject was going down the tubes?
I suspect that this breast-beating tells us about one important way that Classics has always defined itself. For as long as it has been a “discipline” in the western educational curriculum (after it had ceased, that is, to be part of the elite cultural hinterland, or after the Latin language had ceased to be the lingua franca of western intellectuals), it has been on the defensive. Many classicists have tended to think that the barbarians were at the gates, and that the death knell of their subject was already tolling. They have opted to stand somewhere on the spectrum between nostalgia for past glories and outright paranoia.
So, what does that say about Classics now? Will some of our own laments about the state of Classics one day look as over the top as those of 1903? Maybe they will. But the old quip is relevant here: “just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean that there isn’t someone out to get you”. I don’t think we should be complacent.
(If you want more on the whole history of the Class. Ass., try C. Stray (ed.), The Classical Association: the first century 1903-2003, published by the Class. Ass. itself.)
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