This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
Late one night in 1925, a classics professor named Carol Wight came across “one of the most interesting men” he’d ever met. In an Atlantic essay, Wight recalled finding a mechanic reading Thucydides on the grimy floor of his shop, a bare bulb illuminating his page. The worker said that he read the ancient historian “because he makes me think.” As though testing him, Wight asked the question every student of the classics hears at one time or another: “What good will that do you?”
I was a classics major in college, which means I got this question a lot, sometimes from concerned adults, often from teasing friends. Unlike Wight’s mechanic, I don’t have a trade, and it didn’t help that my second degree was in philosophy. If college is an investment, then what I did—spending four years reading ancient Greek—seems like burying gold in the backyard.
By the time I graduated last year, though, something strange had happened. AI’s speedrun was rendering once-marketable skills obsolete. Graduates in “practical” fields such as economics and computer science heard warnings of a job apocalypse. Suddenly, everyone was asking what their education was for. The doubt sounded familiar—at least to those of us who had always been told that we were studying something “useless.”
In 1955, the acclaimed scholar Gilbert Murray wrote a defense of classical education in The Atlantic. Many critics found it absurd, he wrote, to dedicate so much time to learning ancient Greek and Latin—“two languages which you never mean to speak, and would nowhere be understood if you did.” What good will that do you? Students were urged instead to study “practical technology,” as Murray put it: “Learn nuclear fission, learn medicine and surgery, learn modern languages, learn at least something new, and you will have some chance of meeting the most urgent needs of your generation.”
It wasn’t always this way. When The Atlantic was founded, in 1857, the classical languages dominated education. You could hardly get into college without knowing them, and once there, you’d likely study little else. In 1866, an unnamed writer complained in the magazine that “almost everything else has been subordinated in our college course” to those languages—including history, chemistry, and English.
But things were changing fast. In the late 19th century, American higher education was becoming more liberal and more accessible, and advancements in scientific research meant there were more subjects than ever to study. In 1883, Albert S. Bolles wrote that any professor still clinging to the primacy of the classics was “dreaming in the moonlight of the Middle Ages.” Students could still choose to study classics, but, as Bolles put it, “the complete curriculum of knowledge” had been “rearranged so as to serve a more useful purpose.”
And as considerations of “usefulness” came to dominate conversations about higher learning, the study of classics fell further and further from grace. Charles W. Eliot, a pioneer of the modern university, argued in these pages in 1917 that Latin should no longer be a college-admissions requirement, because knowledge of classical languages was of “little use” to modern people. It wasn’t enough that new fields be added to university curriculums—they should also replace the old.
These charges have haunted classicists ever since. In response, “the advocates of the classics have often tried to defend them on the ground of practical utility,” A. Lawrence Lowell wrote in 1941. But this is like “comparing the practical utility of a poem and a postage stamp,” he explained. Arguing that learning Plato and Sophocles is as tangibly beneficial to the world as medical research will always be a losing strategy.
Which brings us back to the AI age. Today, arguments about the usefulness of various human skills focus on whether AI can do them as well as we can. To hear the true AI evangelists tell it, human knowledge itself may soon be like Latin and ancient Greek: an important part of our history and a quaint intellectual exercise, but otherwise thoroughly unnecessary.
I’m sure that a large language model could be trained to parse aorist-passive verbs and third-declension nouns in ancient Greek better than I can. But the point of a classical education isn’t to develop a rarefied skill. As the literary critic Irving Babbitt wrote in 1897, “In the classics more than in other subjects, the fact should never be forgotten that the aim proposed is the assimilation, and not the accumulation, of knowledge.”
I remember a particularly late night in the spring of my freshman year. I was cursing myself for taking ancient Greek, because my friends were at a bar and I was in a library struggling to memorize some irregular verbs. It felt like a futile exercise: There were already countless translations of these ancient texts, and there were adaptations and summaries of those translations. So what was I doing?
Restless, I took an ancient-Greek copy of The Odyssey off the shelf and began stumbling through its opening lines. I knew them by heart in English, but seeing the true, original words was something different. I thought about the generations of people—schoolchildren and great thinkers alike—who had read these words before me. It sounds strange to say, but in that moment, I felt more human than I ever had before. I wasn’t learning anything new, I realized; I was learning something very old indeed.
Aristotle wrote that every line of inquiry aims at some good. But usefulness is only one type of good. There is a kind of learning that helps you do something, but there is also a kind of learning that helps you become someone. Perhaps this is what the mechanic had in mind when he answered Wight’s question:
“What good will that do you?”
He had risen to his feet by now, and said, tapping his lathe: “I can shape steel with this; and with this,” holding out the small chunky volume, “I can shape men.”
The post What Ancient Greek Is Good For appeared first on The Atlantic.
