Not dead – yet

It was a dark afternoon in November, and the wind was rattling the casements of the bare schoolroom. My small but enthusiastic class of Greek students nibbled chocolate biscuits and listened politely as I ploughed through yet another list of irregular verbs. Suddenly, standing by the electronic whiteboard, I had a sort of minor epiphany (Epiphany: from the Greek term for a god’s manifestation to undeserving mortals). Why, I asked myself, were these bright teenagers devoting so much time to studying a difficult language which they would never be able to use to communicate, whose native speakers died two millennia ago, and in which it would take years to reach fluency?

Twenty years ago, when I was learning Greek and Latin, this question would never have occurred to me. In my old-fashioned girls’ school, no one worried about anything so mundane as getting a job; I certainly didn’t. Rather, what drew me to classical languages was that they seemed logical, exotic and unconnected to everyday life.