The Case for Parnassus.("Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin")

Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin, by Tracy Lee Simmons (ISI, 268 pp., $24.95)

Why the classics? This question has dominated the education debate for decades now. The late Mortimer Adler made an impressive case for the Greeks, and other greats, as a source of good answers to the problems of philosophy. But Adler received the following rejoinder from W. H. Auden, in a 1940 essay:

Most [adults] are reading only in order to escape from their own thoughts or to be socially respectable. If they are to improve, the first thing to say to them is not -- "You don't read enough," or "You read bad books," but -- "You read far too much. You haven't the slightest idea what kind of person you are or what you want to know, and it is no use your trying to read at all until you have, and are compelled to admit that the truth you discover is most disagreeable. To read the Iliad because Professor Adler tells you it is good is no better than reading the Saturday Evening Post because your neighbor reads it. No one can tell you how to become a civilized person. There is no ready made answer because to become civilized, you will have to be reborn."

Tracy Lee Simmons, formerly an associate editor of National Review and now director of the Dow journalism program at Hillsdale College, is less dismissive than Auden of the benefits of a casual acquaintance with the classics. But a bracing spirit very similar to Auden's is in evidence throughout Simmons's fascinating new book on the importance of classical studies. In recent years, there have been many conservative appeals for a return to the classics; but what makes Simmons's new apologia different from the run-of-the-mill conservative argumentation is his disdain for easy uplift -- and his insistence on the value of intellectual rigor.

There are two main reasons for studying the Greek and Roman classics. The first has to do with content: Knowledge of this material is a passport to the Western inheritance, and to be ignorant of it is to be disconnected from a key element of our identity. To be unfamiliar with the voyages of Ulysses and Aeneas, and of Homer's "rosy-fingered dawn," is to lose one's character as a Western man. The second has to do with the formation of the mind: The act of mastering the ancient languages trains the mind in abstract, detailed, and specific thought.

What makes Simmons's apologia distinctive is the seriousness with which he takes this argument from formation. He dismisses the stereotype of Professor Dryasdust, as well as that of Mr. Gradgrind and his soul- deadening exactions; he says that far from being a pointless exercise in the accumulation of outdated trivia, the detailed study of classical languages renders a very specific benefit to the mind that undertakes them. By concentrating the mind on specifics and the need for total accuracy, this course of study makes the student a focused and rigorous intellectual -- insistent on truth, and impatient with vague and gaseous generalities.

Simmons offers a memorable example, borrowed from classicists of an earlier generation, of the specific intellectual tasks demanded by the study of Greek and Latin. The Latin sentence Vellem mortuos ("I would that they were dead") contains just two words, but to understand it and translate it accurately requires no fewer than 14 discrete intellectual actions. Here they are (Simmons is quoting from classicist R. M. Wenley):