Grumpy Oldie Man

Homer is crucial – even if he’s responsible for Boris Johnson’s mind

The University of Oxford, the Daily Mail website relates, is contemplating a syllabus tweak that has ‘shocked classics students’.

Eager to tailor its classics degree for state-educated pupils less au fait with dead languages than their public-school brethren, it is proposing to make Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid, those epic cornerstones of the classical canon, optional rather than mandatory texts.

In strictest sooth, ‘shocked’ doesn’t begin to capture the reaction of this former classics student (though not, as will be explained, at Oxford).

If I had a tent, I’d already have retired within it to sulk in the style of Achilles ( Iliad, Book IX). In the absence of camping equipment, I write from the bed to which this outrage has sent me with a grievous fit of the ague.

Yet one should have been prepared. On these pages only last month, Oxford don John Davie eloquently regretted the decline of linguistic teaching of the classics.

It is perhaps inevitable that John and I would be of one mind here, both of us being Trinity men. Admittedly, his career at that Oxford college, where he has taught for a decade, is marginally the more impressive.

My tenure as a Trinity classicist endured for ten minutes. Under the sort of sustained and intense pressure more familiar at the time in a Lubyanka interrogation cell, I cracked and confessed to the following.

The source material drawn on for a 1,500-word entrance-exam essay about Euripides’s Alcestis had, in its entirety, been the ten-line blurb on the back of the Penguin translation.

That episode came in 1981, years before The Fast Show’s Mark Williams introduced the phrase ‘I’ll get me coat’ into common parlance. But the sentiment was identical, as was the deed.

Mumbling incomprehensibly, I collected the garment and bade that bemused trio of dons a jaunty good day.

For almost 40 years, the memory has had a berth on the endlessly rotating roster of self-inflicted gigahumiliations that wake me at 3.43am with a yelp of anguish.

And for what? Nowadays, the essayist who admitted to not having read a syllable of a text in the original tongue wouldn’t feel compelled to take the early bath. She or he would be awarded an exhibition on the spot.

The battle between elitism and inclusivity has raged in academia, as elsewhere in a country where social mobility has been in more precipitous decline than classics for so long.

There are potent arguments either side of the chasm between traditional standards and attempts to extend the Oxbridge talent pool.

As someone to whom ‘Oxford Mods’ means a Paul Weller tribute night in a Headington pub, I may not be best qualified to adjudicate between them.

This is not wholly to dismiss the lasting worth of a redbrick degree. I retain a recollection from reading the

Iliad (in the Loeb edition, with the translation on the facing page) about a cleaning product going berserk and slaughtering its flock of sheep.

I also recall – John will correct me if this stems from a misreading – the equally anachronistic segment of the

Aeneid, in which Virgil’s eponymous hero falls for a Carthaginian sex toy.

Yet when it comes to gauging the timeless value of traditional teaching, there are better exemplars than a half-witted idler.

Here, we look for guidance to more scholarly types who not only reached the scheduled end of an Oxford interview, but enjoyed a mastery of Greek and Roman literature that won them a place.

These are the living proofs of the faith that studying the classics in the formal manner imbues the student with such priceless qualities as unremitting respect for the truth; an innate sense of personal honour; the ability to speak English with crystal clarity; and corresponding disdain for incomprehensible waffling.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Prime Minister. Could there be a finer standard-bearer for the unflinchingly old-school classical education than Boris Johnson himself?

Johnson got into Oxford on the strength of the classical learning he wears – not so lightly – to this day.

Would he be capable of the spellbinding forensic tours de force at the despatch box had he not lavished his Etonian attentions on Cicero and Demosthenes?

Is it conceivable that his ungodly genius for long-term political strategising would have been born without his intensively studying the wily Odysseus in the original?

A danger of not reading the Iliad in Greek is that you risk missing the nuances. Even the better translations can misrepresent what the poet had in mind.

The right-hand side of the Loeb, for instance, describes the ungodly raw courage of Hector as he faced down the Achaean armies almost alone at the gates of ravaged Troy.

But, having consulted my trusty Liddell & Scott Greek-english dictionary, I find that the literal translation of the passage actually concerns the son of Priam taking fright when a Greek warrior asks him a harmless question, and hiding in a fridge.

‘My tenure as a Trinity classicist endured for ten minutes’