There Was a Roman in Your Garden, Penguin (£8.99); Seven Wonders of the Ancient World coming soon to 5.
I was lucky to have been taught classics at secondary school. It wasn’t a cool subject and was being phased out, with the closure of many ancient history and classics departments at universities across the country. There was a sense that “we’re heading towards the year 2000, why dwell on the past?”. I was swimming against the tide.
Today, pupils at most state schools don’t have access to the classics. Their counterparts at some private schools do, and so this mind-expanding subject is perceived as elite. That’s wrong, as is the fact that many state school children miss out.
Why? Because history reminds us to think more deeply and classics (which isn’t just ancient Greece, Egypt and Rome but the live hotspots of human history, such as Syria, Russia, the Caucasus, Sudan, the Arabian peninsula) encompasses a wealth of human expression that underpins so much of the world we live in.
As we witness a rise in populist leaders, how helpful would it be to know of the charismatic rulers who riddled the ancient world with abominable statements like, “all foreigners spread disease” and don’t deserve rights; and enslaved people aren’t really humans but “man-footed things”. One ancient historian said it was always easier to persuade a mob of 10,000 people to do something than a single, thoughtful individual.
And in what is a fragile time for democracy, we could take heed of the words of the philosopher Socrates, who warned 2,500 years ago that there’s no point having democracy unless we’re all educated enough to be responsible democrats. The ancient Greeks invented democracy and knew how precious and demanding it was.
In the fourth century AD, Quintus of Smyrna wrote an amazing feminist passage: “One common light we see, one air we breathe”. If everyone before us had access to that text, would it have sped up the process of trying to achieve equality between the sexes?
In my book, There Was a Roman in Your Garden, I explore the often overlooked lives of children in Roman times. The ancient world was largely created by the teenage brain – it was a passionate, juvenile society as so many people died young. There’s a sense that people were particularly aware that they had a very defined time on Earth and so really went for it!
They really thought about what mattered and, for example, how to write beautiful poetry. The female poet, Sappho, was the first person to describe love as bittersweet, although she does it better – she says it’s sweet and then bitter. Her description of first love – feeling hot-and-cold fire creeping under your skin – is incredible. She should be on the school curriculum.
There are lessons to be had in our social media age too. Socrates warned of the dangers of hastily written text, “written words are orphans as once out in the world they do not have their father [ie the author] to protect them!”
We’re pushing against an open door, because the kids want to learn classics; they’re inhabited by cool characters – gladiators, superheroes, there’s even semi-Latin incantations in Harry Potter’s spells.
One counter argument is that if you can’t afford an extra maths teacher, why would you hire someone to teach ancient Greek myths? But the teaching can be incorporated into different disciplines. So many scientific classifications are still in Latin. Hex is six in Ancient Greek, therefore the hexagon is a six-sided object. And then, so much literature is based on the classical canon.
At a dig in Pompeii, I watched archaeologists discover a 2,000-year-old nit comb. They look the same as the combs used by families today. As a kid, you can hold something like that in your hand and time collapses. When you study the very distant past, you learn how to spend time in other people’s shoes and so you become much more open-minded. It forces you to engage with the “other”. We could all do with more of that.
Hence then, the article about classics for all was published today ( ) and is available on Radio Times ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
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