Why Latin and Greek?

Are they "necessary?"

“Learning Latin (once I was free of Caesar) fed my love for words upon words, words in continuation and modification, and the beautiful, sober, accretion of a sentence.” — Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings

Of course, as a classicist I love Latin and Greek. They are an indispensable part of my daily life. Do I think everyone needs to study them? Shockingly, perhaps, no.

To anticipate one objection: “But there are some subjects that have to be studied! How is Latin different? Shouldn’t we study Latin if we want to be classical?”

Yes, some school subjects are absolutely compulsory. We must learn to read and do basic math. As there is need in our society to read, people will learn to read. Grounding in some kind of history and science is necessary. But they do not guarantee any particular outcome for a student. You can lead a horse to water, as the saying goes, but you cannot make him drink. Education is much the same way.

The impulse of universal public education certainly isn’t a bad one, but its failure largely lies in its inability to admit the basic facts of human nature, and it has become nothing if not a colossal monument to the failed philosophy of utilitarianism.

And so concerned members of society created alternatives; there are many different types of alternative educational paths now including homeschooling, charter schools, various types of private schools, etc. The one educational philosophy I am particularly concerned with is the “Christian” “classical” sphere of education because it touches upon my particular profession, and is inadvertently still quite utilitarian by nature. I am a Latin teacher, so in theory I have every reason to push whatever appealing rationale exists to get more people taking Latin classes.

There has arisen a large movement to bring Latin into classical schools as almost a moral imperative, which of course sounds great on the surface to those of us who are already convinced of its importance.

However, it is not seen by general society as at all useful so many classical schools offer pragmatic reasons for its inclusion in the curriculum.

1. Latin is good training for the mind and teaches students to be more conversant with grammatical concepts and etymological roots. This is true, but a secondary, ancillary reason. I'd sooner not include Latin if it continues to promote ignorant and arrogant students who puff themselves up because they’ve had a smattering of Latin. More often than not, they never get out of the sheltered bay of Latin classes and into the open water of reading Latin texts.

2. Latin is part of our “western heritage” so we have to study it and appreciate it to preserve it. There is an increasingly noisy line of thinking which asserts that if we inject Latin (among other things) into our schools we will somehow “save” Western civilization (whatever that means) because we are creating “better” students.

3. Studying Latin teaches students about interacting with other cultures and societies. This might be true in a non-existent ideological vacuum, but I have observed that this tends to be done with all the sensitivity and precision of a sledgehammer in our present societal situation.

4. To have access into the original works written in Latin, such as the Aeneid. If you are Roman Catholic, you have more reason to interact with Latin because of your church traditions. Though there is a robust Protestant Latin tradition as well, and many yet-untranslated Latin works by Reformed scholars. Of all the reasons, this should be the least difficult to justify. We should still desire to read things in their original language because something is always lost in translation, no matter how good AI may become at translation. We at least need a handful of scholars who can read and interpret these texts in their orignal language.

These aren't all bad reasons of course, but the whole idea is still a hard sell for most people. It’s not as obviously useful as math or science. Can your child benefit from even cursory Latin in school? Absolutely. But we need to put it in its proper place, and understand that our relationship with it usually is not anything more than a cursory scraping of the surface most of the time. Giving students a cursory smattering of Latin might help them with English. But it will not save society, nor will it automatically ensure that student's success.

What seems to be going on in some segments of classical education rhetoric is that some people have identified the superficial traits of “traditionally educated” people that matter to our literary tradition and exalted those traits beyond their due. One of those superficial traits is “knowing Latin.” As if “knowing Latin” is some magic bullet for greatness.

A man like J.R.R. Tolkien knew Latin as a recipient of “traditional” education in 20th century England. But he was so much more than that, as we all know. An educated person is far more than merely what they know or what skills they have; it is how they use the skills they have cultivated. That’s not something that can be taught or controlled by teachers or a school administration. All I do as a teacher is teach Latin, but I have no control over what my students do with that knowledge.

I have no problem pushing back against the widespread push for Latin (or Greek) in schools. This is for one simple reason: our reasons for studying them in grade school are insufficient and utilitarian.

Classical education as a movement in the 21st century United States also depends on drawing in families that may not be wholly on board with the ideology because these schools need students to survive. But this means they will have to compromise to draw in new families on the hope that eventually they may be converted to these methods. More often than not, they just want a better alternative to public schools and aren't as committed to the lofty ideals.

Western Civilization (however we are defining that) doesn’t need any of us. Whatever we think it is, it’s stuck around this long and through far more turbulent times than we presently experience. We’re arrogant to think we can do anything to “save” it. (Yes, even in Post-Christendom). We will need a whole separate post discussing what “Western Civilization” even is, and I suspect that might be a surprise.

The people who have done the most good for “Western Civilization” aren’t the people who set out to save it. They were men like Petrarch or J.R.R. Tolkien who had a fascination and followed it out of love for their subject, not because they were trying to achieve some larger goal. They dedicated their lives to their love of literature, and their contribution to literature flowed from that.

In my years in mainstream academia, I have found that those who seek to use classics for some other end will find that she doesn’t yield her secrets so readily. She remains a barren waste rather than a fertile field, even though we all enjoy the fruits that come from it whether we recognize it or not.

Therefore, I have no interest in advancing arguments for the practical utility of Latin and Greek. If you need practical utility to sell a Latin program to the prospective parents of your classical school, you’ve already lost the battle to “save” Western Civilization because it is utilitarianism that is eating us alive, and we have bowed the knee to it for centuries.

If these languages “train the mind” that’s a happy byproduct but shouldn’t be proffered as THE reason to study them. Calculus and physics will also train your brain. I know many highly intelligent people who only know English (or only modern spoken languages) and have tremendous respect for their abilities.

If these ancient languages “produce greater ability to interact with other cultures,” so what? That’s really not a reason to study them in and of themselves. There are other more readily available cultures for us to observe and interact with more directly without having to spend years just pretending to learn their languages.

But related to that desire to interact with other cultures, you shouldn’t befriend people from other nations merely because you want to “interact better with other cultures.” You’re not treating them like people; you’re treating them like tools and that is a denial of their complexity, uniqueness, and personhood.

Nor is it advisable to study Latin and Greek because you want to make a name for yourself in classics, or to use the languages and their literatures to advance ideological platforms. She won’t share her riches with you if that’s your primary motivation.

Latin and Greek are beautiful languages and worth studying for their own sake if you have the desire and the time, and because we all live amongst the remnants of what the Greco-Roman literary world accomplished. I studied the languages as a teenager simply because I was interested in them, and that’s it. I had no pretensions of being important or impactful. Most likely I will be forgotten at death and that's just reality for most human beings.

I wanted to know more about the classical world, and I wanted to be able to learn as much as possible about it because I love it. What I soon discovered was simply that if I wanted to know this ancient world as well as possible, I had to learn the languages. I soon discovered that knowing Latin and Greek opened the door to being able to read literature that spans well over a thousand years because I am the type of person who is not content to read things in translation. Not everyone has to be that type of person.

As my career has developed, I have noticed that the vast majority of grade school students learning Latin are doing so for all kinds of pragmatic reasons pushed on them by their parents or teachers or by school administrations. If a student does end up falling in love with Latin and/or Greek, it’s most likely in spite of this pragmatic push rather than because of it.

Another aspect of the push for Latin in “classical education” that is simply misguided is this simple statistical reality: in any given field, sport, or hobby, only about 10% of the students are going to actually make it to the “end” of a given program. 90% will quit at some point along the way. This is true of music lessons, sports, and crafts.

If one goal of a classical program is to get students “reading Latin,” it is simply a statistical likelihood that maybe 10% of the students who have been required to take Latin are going to achieve that or keep working on their Latin after they have graduated from the program. Probably less if your program is not well-staffed by competent teachers.

Now that I’ve probably thoroughly offended you, I want to talk for a bit about Latin and Greek as a “symbiosis,” and why Latin and Greek together have survived as a cultural artefact for so long, and why it’s interesting to study and why it has persisted so long. There is something about the Latin-Greek “cultural symbiosis” that just will not let us go.

R.L. Palmer in his book The Greek Language asserts that, linguistically speaking, Latin and Greek are “worlds apart.” There’s no real reason for them to have formed what he calls a “cultural symbiosis” but this is what makes the classical world and its literature so unique. The two languages do not come from the same linguistic branch under the Proto Indo-European family tree, though they certainly share many superficial similarities such as inflection and a handful of loan words and syntactical features.

It is, therefore, very curious that these two languages should become so closely intertwined despite their fundamental differences, and the different characters of their respective people groups.

Denis Feeney in his book Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature argues for the historically unprecedented nature of the Greek and Latin literary world, largely because Latin literature began as a translation project of Greek literature, which is a unique feature and by all historical theories should not have happened.

For that reason alone it is fascinating. Why did this happen? Why did it create this shared culture?

The first Latin literature we know of is a translation of Homer’s Odyssey into Latin by Livius Andronicus, who also evidently translated Greek tragedies into a Roman context. This means far more than merely translating the words into their rough equivalents in another language. It means translating concepts and metaphors and images which will shape that language and all subsequent literature. Greek literature entered the Roman world at a crucial moment, which mean that the foundational metaphors and ideas and stories that the Romans used in literature were primarily from a Greek source. Even so, the things that are “distinctly Roman” are still easily perceptible. They were not mere copyists. They took that Greek fountainhead and made it their own.

I will be giving a talk that touches on this topic at the 2025 Literary Life Online Conference, and looking at some specific examples of what this looked like in Greek and Roman poetics, but one need look no further than Vergil’s Aeneid for the crowning achievement of Roman literature that is completely and utterly intertwined with Greek mythology and epic.

More broadly what this has done is it created what would eventually become what I’ll call a “super culture” that transcends cultural boundaries, and this “super culture” still exists today though perhaps it is diminished from past centuries.

Within classical antiquity, you can find authors like Lucian of Samosata who was a native Syriac speaker from Central Turkey, or Apuleius who was likely from the group that would eventually become the Berbers in North Africa. Lucian was educated in Greek, and thus was able to participate in intellectual life because he knew Greek. Apuleius, who likely spoke a native dialect of North Africa, was educated in Latin and was thus able to participate in literary life while also maintaining their unique background and bringing it into their literature. They did not erase their unique cultural identities, but were able to participate fully in an intellectual life because they became a part of the Greco-Roman literary life.

In the 1500s (for example), the existence of the Latin and Greek literary “super culture” meant that someone from backwater provincial France could have access to intellectual life if he knew at least Latin. And again, he did not have to erase his unique European identity in order to participate in this intellectual culture. This has proven true in more recent centuries of authors from French, German, Italian, English, Chinese, Japanese, and Nigerian extraction (though this is a non-exhaustive list). Great minds from all cultures can all participate in this literary tradition without losing their own distinctiveness, and that is a wonderful thing.

If you want a rather pathetic modern parallel to this concept of “super culture,” consider present-day internet youth culture. Despite the barriers of language and culture, Gen Z kids on the internet share a “super culture” that exists because of the internet and it somewhat transcends their cultural and language boundaries. Now unfortunately most of what goes on in that internet culture is shallow at best, but that is the closest parallel I can think of in contemporary society. I recently heard someone relate in a lecture about Gen Z culture that between high school students in Japan, Malaysia, and Europe, he noted that they all use the same English slang words because that just goes along with this internet “super culture” that they are all tapping into. They can all participate in popular culture but without erasing their native identity.

The real “point” of studying Latin and Greek for many years was simply to have access to this “universal culture” that intellectual history revolves around. Up till a certain point in recent history, it was merely impossible to exist in intellectual circles without a background in Latin and Greek literature, whether you cared about it or not. It just went without saying.

Nowadays, English language and literature is the “super culture.” I have met many people from Ghana and Malawi and Nigeria in the last few years and I always like to learn about their past, and one thing that has always surprised me is how many of them have studied Shakespeare in school. Many of their famous authors write in English and were educated in the Anglosphere, while also bringing their unique African identities to their literary work. It creates something truly new and unique that doesn’t do away with either the literary tradition or their own unique cultural influences.

If your primary focus is the English language “super culture” you are still able to be very well-educated and to find plenty of literature to delight in, and plenty of room to keep learning.

I just read a recent and fascinating book by Alexander Chula called Goodbye, Dr. Banda: Lessons for the West from a Small African Country. This book recounts Chula’s experience as a Latin and Greek teacher in Malawi, and he explores the complicated legacy of Dr. Hastings Banda, the president-turned-dictator of Malawi in the 20th century. Banda was unwavering in his conviction that his country needed Latin and Greek education if it was to succeed at all. In many ways, his experiment failed especially after his death and the subsequent collapse of his regime, but he was deeply committed to this ideal during his life. Alexander Chula spent some time teaching at the school founded by Banda before pursuing a career as a medical doctor.

If you take any time to study Western intellectual history especially (though there is an ever-expanding vista that encompasses far more than just “the West”), you will inevitably come to the conclusion that you cannot escape knowing about these languages, nor can you escape being aware of their profound direct (or indirect) influence on nearly every important intellectual for the last two millennia. They have exerted a permanent fascination over history, and that is no less true today than it was 500 or 1000 years ago.

But again, if we are studying Latin for any reason, we cannot allow ourselves to fall into the trap of thinking we are superior to others because we study Latin and the hoi polloi do not. I condemn that attitude completely, even if it is not intentional. We cannot allow arrogance to flourish or the movement will die.

It is a privilege to be able to study these languages and learn to love them, but it is not necessary for someone who seeks to live a faithful, upright Christian life. It certainly adds human interest, but Latin and Greek and their literary world does not inherently make anyone better or more virtuous than anyone else. We don’t live solely for this world anyway. I don’t know if there will be Latin and Greek in heaven. It’s a gift I enjoy in my earthly life, but it’s not the most important thing about my life.

If you want the best possible access into the intellectual culture of the Western sphere, then you may want to consider Latin and Greek if you have the time and the inclination, and a commitment to spending many years learning and to being slapped in the face by your own ignorance. You cannot just check a box when you get to the end of high school or college and say, “I’m classically educated.” That’s not how that works. It’s a lifetime of learning and a lifetime of realizing ignorance. I have a PhD in Classics, teach these languages for a living now, and read constantly, but I feel more ignorant than ever because the sheer mountain of knowledge that exists. It is a lifetime’s worth of learning and you will never find the end.

The segments of “classical education” movement that fixate on Latin and/or Greek for largely utilitarian reasons will fail on several counts:

1) the arrogance of supposing that it can “save” society in some way by producing “better” students. This ignores all the lessons about hubris we perhaps ought to have internalized from Greco-Roman literature. Or basic Biblical wisdom. “Pride ever goeth before a fall.”

2) It puts before students and families an impossible ideal which can only create bitterness and insecurity in those who do not achieve the nebulous goals, while it puffs up and inflates the egos of those who do seem to have reached the goal.

3) It puts an absurd amount of pressure on its students. Students are not mere clay that we have to mold into the shape we want, or empty vessels to be filled so that they might act in the way that we want them to. Instead, the desire should be to show students what kinds of things exist and let them discern on their own what their interests are, without the pressure to “save the world.”

So…why Latin and Greek? They are beautiful and worthwhile and have influenced much of our daily lives and language use. That’s it. Not everyone is called to study them. Not everyone has time or the inclination for it. That is fine.

Are you interested in Latin and Greek? Then study them. You will find that they are endlessly fascinating and often difficult, but worth it. And if it takes ten or twenty years, so be it. If you don’t read a page of Cicero until you’re 56 or 79, that's a page more of Cicero than most people will ever read and that is worthwhile.

Do it for love and for no other reason.

The real point of Christian education is to grow more like Christ, and we don't do that without God's help, nor is there only one path towards being like Christ and learning to love as He loves.

In any case, God doesn't need you to know Latin.

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Bibliography:

Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature. Denis Feeney. Harvard UP: 2016.

Goodbye Dr. Banda: Lessons for the West from a Small African Country. Alexander Chula. Polygon: 2023.

Roman Literary Culture: From Cicero to Apuleius. Elaine Fantham. Johns Hopkins UP: 1999.

The Greek Language: R.L. Palmer. Oxford UP: 1980.

Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature. L.D. Reynolds & N.G. Wilson. Oxford UP: 1968. 3rd edition: 1999.