The Case for Parnassus.

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):

A student must know (1) the person, (2) tense, (3) voice, (4) number, (5) mood of the verb vellem; (6) that it comes from volo, meaning (7) "I wish"; and that 8) the subjunctive has here a particular shade of meaning. As to mortuos, he must know that it is (9) the accusative, (10) plural, (11) masculine, from (12) mortuus, meaning (13) "dead"; (14) the reason why the accusative is necessary. . . . A student who slips up on any one of these [steps] is bound to make a lovely mess when he comes to translate.

Simmons concludes the example with a truth well known to generations of schoolboys: "In Latin you must be absolutely right, or you are not right at all." And there are no shortcuts: The student must, if he wishes to comprehend the classics, abandon himself to a thought process that he quite naturally finds, at first and for some considerable time thereafter, alien and forbidding. Even someone who can casually read the relatively easy Latin found in Catholic theological textbooks will be brought up short by a passage of Horace or Virgil. "I know the meaning of each of these words," the reader will say in exasperation, "so why is it that I can't make head or tail of what the sentence means?" The answer is that the necessary intellectual habits are missing; they must be acquired, by dint of great effort.

And the work that is required if these habits are to be learned is analogous to the kind of intellectual rebirth W. H. Auden was talking about. It's an ordeal, but, as Simmons explains, its rewards are great. To be equipped, at an early age, with these habits of thought can only have a positive effect on the mind. The same rigorous subjection of the intellect to external reality that results in genuine knowledge of Latin and Greek gives the mind great incisiveness and elasticity in facing other challenges. This goes to the heart of what we mean by a liberal education, as opposed to vocational training: After a strict education in the classics, the mind itself has become a powerful instrument, undaunted by the strange, the complex, and the unexpected; it has been prepared not for a specific purpose, but for any and all purposes that may arise. Show me the man who can think his way through the Latin and Greek constructions, says Simmons, and I'll show you a man who should build bridges.

Simmons recognizes that few among us will aspire to these Parnassian heights -- though he makes a very strong case that more of us should. So we are left, again, with the argument from content and the need to preserve the cultural patrimony; and this, too, pace Auden, is not inconsiderable. The following story may be apocryphal, but it reminds us how fragile are the ties connecting us to the heights of civilizations past: A student at Oxford, when taking his oral Greek exams in school, was given a passage from the New Testament to construe and translate; it happened to be from the Gospel passage describing how Jesus was arrested and led away to Pilate. The student translated it very well, to the great admiration of his examiners, but when he got to the end of the passage he insisted on continuing the translation, because, he said, "I want to see how it turns out."

There are some things about the past that we simply need to know, in order to be cultured people. Simmons is passionate on the need to cultivate ourselves through a study of the classics, and he has made an engaging and comprehensive case in this fine book.