Not dead – yet | The Spectator

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. In French GCSE, we learnt how to describe our summer vacances; in Greek, we read Plato and Euripides. I may only have had a vague idea of what those authors meant –– but that gave me something to aim for. What fule would have preferred French?

Unfortunately, classical languages are not what they used to be. For one thing, the syllabi for the Latin and Greek GCSEs and A-levels seem to be subject to continual erosion by the exam boards. In one paper in the current Latin GCSE, for example, students are no longer required to read the writings of Roman authors in their original form. Instead, they read extracts which are ‘adapted’ –– in other words, tinkered with to expunge words and syntax considered too difficult.