The classical tradition

Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 2004 11:54 PM John Gehl quotes from The Classical Tradition (1949) by Gilbert Highet, the Oxford classical scholar who moved to the US and taught at Columbia University: "While it is now academically fashionable in some quarters to downplay the importance of the Western tradition, there may be some value in recalling these words of the learned classicist Gilbert Highet about its origins: The Greeks and, learning from them, the Romans created a noble and complex civilization, which flourished for a thousand years and was overthrown only through a long series of invasions and civil wars, epidemics, economic disasters, and administrative, moral, and religious catastrophes. It did not entirely disappear. Nothing so great and so long established does. Something of it lived, transformed but undestroyed, throughout the agonizing centuries in which mankind slowly built up western civilization once more. But much of it was covered by wave after wave of barbarism; silted over; buried; and forgotten. Europe slipped backwards, Backwards, almost into savagery.

When the civilization of the west began to rise again and remake itself, it did so largely through rediscovering the buried culture of Greece and Rome. Great systems of thought, profound and skilful works of art, do not perish unless their material vehicle is utterly destroyed. They do not become fossils, because a fossil is lifeless and cannot reproduce itself. But they, whenever they find a mind to receive them, live again in it and make it live more fully." [See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195002067/qid=1089661185/newsscan com/ref=nosim for Gilbert Highet's The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature "

RH: This brings up my own ambivalent academic training. As a boy. I read Caesar, Virgil, and Cicero in Latin. (How different from today, when one can get a Stanford Ph-D- in Spanish without knowing any Latin!)- At the same time, in a play, it being a boys' school, I was assigned to play the part of Queen Boadicea, who in AD 60 led a rebellion against the Romans. The hall rang with my eloquent denunciations of Roman tyranny. "Give me liberty or give me death!" I got the latter, and then stood up to take the applause. I once more became a brain-washed devotee of classical Rome, its literature and its monuments.

Things have changed, Scholars are looking at the society which produced classical literature and monuments. Athens appears more as a slave-owning society in which there was a cultured oligarchy. Robert Graves, whom I knew, was a great classical scholar, even though he owed his popularity to works like I, Claudius (1934), which was made into a TV series. Today I saw an excellent documentary on the Roman emperors, and they were a demented lot as Graves depicted them. My recent tirade against Versailles and its imitations reflects a reaction against the fawning admiration for classical monuments instilled into me; the Roman emperors' mania for building palaces was an expression of inflated and sick egos. My admiration for monuments with a larger social basis, such as churches and civic centers, remains. Like all societies, Greece and Rome were mixed bags, albeit far superior to the invading barbarians who contributed the word vandals to our vocabulary. "Yo, ho, ho! Western civilization musy go!" was the cry of the barbarians on our campuses. Nevertheless, we must view western civilization as part, albeit central, of a larger world culture. This is the age of globalization, of which St. Paul was the herald.