A case for Classics

There is a photograph of me as an eight-year-old standing on top of the Pont du Gard, the Roman aqueduct not far from Nîmes. I remember feeling both petrified — there were no railings — and awe-struck. Visiting an aunt and uncle who were spending a year living in the south of France was allowing me to indulge my fascination for all things Roman, instilled by obsessive reading of the Asterix books. 

A few years later, there was a chance to learn more about the Romans at school. Classical Studies lessons with the elderly headmistress at my girls’ grammar school were a highlight of the week, but they stopped after a year, when our school merged with the local boys’ school and went comprehensive. Our parents having been assured that we would be seen through as a grammar-school cohort, we were allowed to study Latin for GCSE, but the school pulled the plug on it for younger year groups. It has now been a very long time since opportunities to learn about the classical world were routinely available to those of us not lucky enough to have attended a private school.

  Even in the 1980s and early 1990s, there was little space on the curriculum to learn about the foundational ways in which classical culture shaped the world. When we studied Troilus and Cressida at A-level, most of us lacked the background knowledge about the Trojan wars that our private school contemporaries would probably have taken for granted. I had picked up bits and pieces here and there about the Minotaur and Daedalus and Icarus, but overall my knowledge of Greek mythology felt patchy and at university I had no foundations to make sense of all those classically inspired operas by composers from Monteverdi to Strauss. As for any education that might have helped me to understand the classical architecture of ancient Greece or Rome, or how it had influenced the buildings we saw around us, forget it. You had to teach yourself that.

These days, of course, things are much worse. Latin, like History of Art, has become an endangered discipline, largely taught only in private schools, and therefore sniffed at as ‘elitist’. Further contraction of the discipline has been willed on by the current government, which announced in December 2024 that funding would be terminated for the Latin Excellence Programme, meaning some pupils would have to stop studying the subject midway through preparing for their GCSEs. 

This scheme, launched by the last government in 2021, was intended to boost the teaching of Latin and “include activities such as visits to Roman heritage sites to give pupils a deeper understanding of Classics, and life in the ancient world”. Professor Mary Beard welcomed it, stating that Latin “gives you direct access to some of the most inspirational literature in the western world” and that “Studying the ancient world helps us look at ourselves, and our own problems, afresh and with clearer eyes”. Bridget Phillipson, alas, thinks she knows better. The recent curriculum review she commissioned singles out Latin and Greek for mention only to remark that take-up of these subjects at GCSE is consistently low — no surprise when only 7 per cent of state schools offer the former and 1 per cent the latter.

Of course, it is still possible to study Classics at our top universities, and some are actively working to encourage schoolchildren to take an interest in their subject. Euge! How encouraging to see the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford offering free Latin tuition, from scratch through to GCSE, to local state-school pupils, for free on Saturday mornings, via its OxLAT scheme. Of course, there are geographical limitations to participation, but this sort of scheme is both generous and imaginative. 

Considerably less productive, it seems to me, was a recent initiative at King’s College London. The 2026 Rumble Fund Lecture, funded by an alumna of the College in order to stimulate student interest in the ancient world, was recently given by the artist Grayson Perry. Its title? “Why I hate Classical Civilization”. A KCL news report stated that Perry drew on “stories from his own life and career” in order to reflect on “his personal ambivalence towards classical aesthetics”. Peppering his talk with references to classical culture being “often used to bolster or lend credibility to a right wing, authoritarian, patriarchal, Eurocentric, white supremacist view of the world” — though then, with no apparent irony, declaring himself  to have a “deep allergy to clichés” — Perry concluded that his dislike of it was “more personal, more irrational, more enjoyable. I love a good grievance.”

If our classics departments are to survive, they need to foster enthusiasm for their discipline

So this is subjective, and consciously mischievous. But why should it interest anyone else? Of course the purpose of an education is not merely to create “enthusiasts” for the object of study — a degree is not the same as an “appreciation” course — but what is to be gained from hearing a non-expert express dismissive views on centuries of rich human achievement? The serious study of any topic at university should not be about emotional responses: neither the students’, nor the lecturer’s, and certainly not a celebrity’s. As for bemoaning the fact that the classics have reinforced “social hierarchies” and “cultural authority”, well that isn’t even an original thought. It seems really cool to go against the grain, until doing so becomes the completely bleeding predictable.

When today’s students know so little about classical civilisation, because of long-standing failings in the school system, the role of our leading universities is surely to help them to fill in the gaps. And if our classics departments are to survive, they need to foster enthusiasm for their discipline, rather than thinly disguised contempt. The Perry event seems symbolic of some of the most tedious aspects of contemporary academia: constant attempts to be “edgy” and “disruptive”, a navel-gazing focus on “lived experience”, mistaking subjective opinion for argument, and an unhealthy regard for celebrity. Eager young minds, hungry for knowledge and sincerely interested in learning about the past, deserve better.