Harry Mount’s diary: Class war with classicists and wisdom from Brian Sewell

I never knew classicists could be so scary! Last week I wrote a Telegraph article saying classics exams had been dumbed down. It followed the news that Camden School for Girls — the last comprehensive in the country to teach Greek A-level — is planning to drop the subject in September. Soon after, the classics trolls came a-calling, on Facebook’s Classics International forum. The insults were impressively high-minded. A classics student at King’s College London called me an ‘antediluvian ape’. A classics teacher at Durham Sixth Form Centre predicted my next book would be ‘bowel-achingly derivative’.

My kind former tutor, Professor Greg Woolf, disagreed with my argument but flatteringly suggested I should become president of the Classical Association. That incensed Richard Wallace, a former classics lecturer at Keele. He compared the idea to the time he stopped Enoch Powell becoming the association’s president. I’m not remotely as well-qualified for the job as Powell. After a double, starred first at Cambridge, he became Professor of Greek at Sydney University at 25. In 1938, aged only 26, he published an edition of Thucydides’s Historiae and the lexicon to Herodotus. But this row wasn’t about qualifications. The classics trolls instantly associate any dumbing down suggestions with far-right fogeyish snobbishness. One classics teacher said, ‘Before we all panic too much, this was in the aspirational Telegraph, a paper marketed to people who would like to be thought of as posh.’ Meanwhile, comprehensives are deprived of the wonders of Greek for ever. And posh apes with expensive educations — like me — go on benefiting from the dumbing down of non-selective, state education.