I've only once attempted a conversation in Latin, writes Denis Tuohy.It was with a priest who worked in a south American slum where I was filming a television report.
As I couldn't follow his Spanish and he had no English, we tried our best in the nearest thing to a common language. His best was much better than mine, but I could understand what really mattered, the words for "starving", "protest", "police", "kill".
Long before that, on a summer morning in 1959, I had no thought of a broadcasting career when Alan Sinclair, professor of Greek at Queen's University, Belfast, told me how I'd done in my Classics finals. "It's a Third," he said, "but after spending so much of your time acting, debating and writing for university magazines, you've done well to get an honours at all." I was relieved but disappointed. He smiled.
"As time passes, the level of your degree won't matter. What will matter is what you keep from what you've learned."
It is precisely because of what I still keep that I regard the recently announced decision to scrap Classics at Queen's as betraying many fine teachers such as Sinclair, many students who are going to miss out, and the good name of the university itself.
Western civilisation
So what's the real stuff in studying Classics? Simply this. Making contact with core words in Western civilisation and with people who invented or significantly advanced their meaning. Philosophy, poetry, drama, science, architecture, politics, history, law, religion, ethics - you cannot follow a degree course in Greek and Latin without exploring every one of them to some extent and without being touched now and then by genius.
This is not about assigning places in an all-time culture chart: "Aeschylus pips Shakespeare as top playmaker. Dante closing in on Virgil. Aristotle and Aquinas neck and neck." The true glory that was Greece and grandeur that was Rome cannot be contained in a trophy cabinet. They are living spirits, creative spirits that have ranged far from their time and place of origin to animate the later literature of other European languages. Getting in touch with those spirits is the purpose of studying Classics. Honouring that purpose is the duty of any university that respects the word "academic" and the memory of Plato's garden of learning from which it derives.
But now we know that the decision-makers at Queen's don't see it that way, or if they do, don't care. "The teaching of classical languages," says the press release last June, "will cease due to very low demand."
"Single figures"
Very low demand. Hmm. When I phoned Queen's to ask what "very low" meant, the spokesman said "single figures" as if that were game, set and match. Sorry, spokesman, but even if student numbers are indeed that low (although critics of the decision argue strongly that they're higher), it's still not an argument that impresses me. As far back as 1959 the number who sat Classics finals was not just in single figures, but almost as low as single figures can get. There were precisely two of us: Terry Robinson, who is now a professor of Greek in Canada, and myself.
Yet no one threatened to close the department for failing to meet some production target that year, or indeed in the years before and after. During my time I can't recall that there were ever more than three graduating in Classics. There were, of course, others, then as now, who took some Latin or Greek on the way to a more general degree. Among them was a Greek Cypriot friend of mine whose arrival was regarded as a blessing from the gods. His name was Sophocleous.
In this hour of crisis, however, it's not the great playwright we need but the great questioner. Would that Socrates could be with us to take on the Queen's University power structure as he once challenged the intelligentsia of Athens. He might start, nuisance that he was, by asking Vice-Chancellor Sir George Bain if he believed in the importance of truth. The answer, presumably, would be yes.
The vice-chancellor would then be reminded of his public declaration that the new strategic plan, which includes the dropping of Classics, was not motivated by a need to cut costs or to make savings. But if that's true, Socrates might say, why did he tell the university senate that the strategy would be negated if Classics were saved, as nobody had said where the corresponding financial savings should be made? Does Sir George need to make savings (statement 2)? Or does he not (statement 1)? Things wouldn't get much better for the vice-chancellor and senate when the discussion moved on, as it surely would, to the purpose of education and the meaning of wisdom.
Drinking hemlock
We know, of course, how Athens dealt with the troublesome Socrates. He was put on trial for impiety and corrupting the young, convicted and condemned to death by drinking hemlock. But even if none of today's protesters can match his intellectual rigour, at least our numbers are growing, among both classicists and non-classicists, and we'll be making more and more noise.
Sir George Bain and his colleagues would do well to have second thoughts. The cost of buying enough hemlock to silence all of us could sabotage their whole strategy.