Latin and Greek are an antidote to shallow woke ideology

The French minister for education, Jeanmichel Blanquer, has announced a European plan for the teaching of Greek and Latin. He sees this project as a response to the “abyssal absurdity of woke ideology”. While Canadian students burn the Odyssey because it allegedly promotes slavery, and universities “decolonise Classics”, this project aims to unite Europe around a shared cultural identity.

Yet the Classics are not about Europe. Neither are Greek and Latin limited to the transmission of a “white Western male ideology”. Classics are not a distant point in the past, but a world that we all still navigate.

Classics face discredit because people who know the value of Greek and Latin send the message that ancient languages are too hard for younger people – especially those from ethnic minorities. “Decolonising” is gatekeeping in disguise.

When education became free in France, if one wanted to become a lawyer, one studied Latin, and if one had a medical vocation, one studied Greek – not because it was a privilege but because it was necessary to understand the language of the profession. Classics are still a major factor in social mobility. They are often vilified as creating an elite. The blame should not be put on the subjects but on educators who deem pupils unworthy of Greek or Latin.

In any case, classical culture is far from being “oppressive” or “heteronormative”. Hermaphroditus is one of the most fascinating figures of Greek mythology. The Classics are not a world of pompous bearded men discussing abstractions. Of course, our laws would not be the same without Plato and Aristotle. Yet, look at any Classics bookshelf, and you will find tales of the creation of the world and of the women of a whole city going on a sex strike, of Sappho mourning her dead female pupil as Achilles mourns over Patroclus, and of Trimalchio using a silver vessel as a urinal. Not to mention passages in Ovid or Petronius that would make many a modern libertine look like a prude.

Classics are neither about Europe, nor about dead white men, nor even just about antiquity. Seneca was from Spain, which was harder to access from Rome than Tunisia. St Paul was Jewish and a Roman citizen. St Augustine was a 4thcentury North African who wrote in Latin and was notoriously bad at Greek. St John of Damascus was born in modern Syria and died in Jerusalem, and wrote a refutation of Islam in Greek in the 8th century. In the modern era, Benjamin Larnell, a Native American student in the American colonial era, wrote poetry in Latin. The Africanamerican poet Phillis Wheatley was taught Greek and Latin by the family who emancipated her.

Greek and Latin do emancipate us. Perhaps their strength is that they do not offer a pre-packaged set of “values” that might fall down in our collapsing ethical stock market. Classics help us take things with a wholesome distance, as all empires must fall, and find our way through a maze of sciences, languages, and cultures to reach a more enduring understanding of humanity.

Values change: those of Athens were not the same as those of Renaissance Europe. But our theatres, courts of justice, medicine and modern human rights, shaped by Greek and Latin, show what is universal about our needs. Even the half-latin, halfgreek phrase “dismantle the patriarchy” pays homage to our ancient roots.