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Decline and fall

Michael Wilson
/
Wikimedia

The history of the Roman Empire has all the drama, violence, and political duplicity that the heart could desire. It is fascinating to read about, but you wouldn’t want to live in it. From the safe distance of a couple of thousand years, we can admire the Romans for their limitless ambition, their discipline, their creativity, and above all, their ability to speak Latin, which I cannot.

The unfortunate person responsible for instructing us in Latin was Dr. Lewis, the classics teacher at school - a tall, vinegary, cultured man who certainly deserved a better fate. I hated the classics - the great works of Latin and Greek literature. I hated them particularly because Dr. Lewis held the unreasonable theory that, to read the classical texts, we first had to learn those languages. So, I abandoned Latin and ancient Greek and have regretted it ever since.

There has been a modest revival of Latin teaching recently, perhaps as people look for parallels to our time in the sad history of the Roman Empire. There are online classes, a Latin crossword in the London Times newspaper, and I have even heard a suggestion that Latin might be introduced into schools once more, although not many students have put their hands up and cried “Ave!” to that.

Dr. Lewis never explained that the real payoff for learning the classics would be self-esteem. There's nothing more humiliating than failing to recognize a classical reference or being perplexed by a Latin tag or a clever Greek phrase. But of course, there's more to the classics than just keeping your conversational end up, there’s that extraordinary history.

Hollywood has presented us with a grotesque version of ancient Rome, all heroes and gladiators, but we owe much more to those classical civilizations. The Greeks invented the alphabetical script, without which books and newspapers could not exist. They invented democracy (of a sort), they invented philosophy, which allows us to ask awkward questions about democracy, and they invented comical musical theatre, which is a pretty good metaphor for democracy.

Both these great civilizations created magnificent literature, which I can read only in the shadowy form of translation. Homer, writing perhaps three thousand years ago, created the first and best soap opera in his long-running series, The Iliad and the Odyssey. It has everything — sex, violence, jealousy, revenge, treachery, dysfunctional families — it would be a mega-hit on the small screen, except that all the characters speak in verse. Socrates was a genius as a teacher, although we've forgotten his lessons now. There were fine Roman poets like Virgil and Horace. Even Julius Caesar wrote a much-admired history of the Gallic Wars, although he had a full-time job in the Roman government at the time.

The Romans were less reflective and more practical than the Greeks. Rome gave us the inestimable gifts of state bureaucracy, the rule of law, military discipline, global imperialism, and the kind of in-your-face architecture that we see around the mall in Washington, D.C. today. They also showed us, by example, how easy it is to flip a republic into a tyranny while citizens are distracted by bread and circuses. But they forgot to tell us what to do about it in Latin or any other language.

David began as a print journalist in London and taught at a British university for almost 20 years. He joined WSHU as a weekly commentator in 1992, becoming host of Sunday Matinee in 1996.