Classic Ground

"Poets that lasting marble seek Must carve in Latin or in Greek", wrote the English poet, Edmund Waller, in 1645, and the languages and culture of the classical world have been long admired.

Lord Middlesex, in his Panegyric of his contemporary, the 17th-century traveller Thomas Coryate, saw familarity with classical languages as a mark of culture: "He Greek and Latin speaks with greater ease Than hogs eat acorns, and tame pigeons peas."

"I would have clever boys learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat" said Winston Churchill (although it must be acknowledged that he also commented, "Mr Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right").

The mother of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges evidently wished that her son had followed Churchill's advice: "I don't know why you waste your time with Anglo-Saxon, instead of studying something useful like Latin or Greek!"

In some spheres, admiration for the classical world has brought perceived problems. The 18th-century Swiss-born painter and art critic Henry Fuseli, on first seeing the Elgin marbles, might have exclaimed, "The Greeks were gods! The Greeks were gods!", but Augustus Pugin was unhappy about some of the results of such admiration: "Notwithstanding the palpable impracticability of adapting Greek temples to our climate, habits and religion, we see the attempt and failure continuously made and repeated; post office, theatre, church, bath, reading-room, hotel, methodist chapel and turnpike gate; all these present the eternal sameness of a Grecian temple outraged in all its proportions and character." (In a later day, the journalist C. P. Scott was concerned about a linguistic coinage which showed a similarly unhappy cultural blend: "Television? The word is half Greek, half Latin. No good can come of it.")

Pugin and Scott, in the end, were concerned about what they saw as clumsy borrowing from great originals. Their criticisms were not directed at the source itselfx: what Edgar Allan Poe characterized as "The glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome."

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