In high school I had two impactful but contradictory encounters with Classics, the study of Greco-Roman art, literature, language and culture. The first was in the context of a European history class, when the textbook recounted that classicism was in vogue in the late-Renaissance French royal court.
Reading this unsettled me, as I contrasted the vibrancy and vitality of Renaissance art that filled the pages of the school book with the bleached sterility of “classical art,” which was no more to my sophomoric sensibilities than the marble ostentation of a floundering monarchy.
The second encounter came at the apogee of my youthful aestheticism during an obsession with the infamous anti-Victorian Oscar Wilde. The Irish writer studied Classics prodigiously at Trinity College, Dublin.
Wilde was not unusual in pursuing this curriculum; Classics was the course of study for any aspiring man-of-letters.
But Wilde was a man of resoundingly nontraditional letters, and his classical education poised him to stand astride old and new intellectual worlds.
He used inherited knowledge not as a concrete to preserve and stabilize but as an oil to lubricate his life as a counter-cultural poeta ex machina.
He was, at least in my high school understanding, a perfect inversion of the 17th-century French classicist, standing not as a stone effigy amid a burgeoning polychromic modernity, but as the only coloration in a desert of black and white.
Now, nearly five years later, as an undergraduate classicist bound for graduate study, I see that much has changed without changing at all. The alternatives of classicist-as-conservative and, for lack of a better contemporary indicator, the #classicist, still persist. We are reminded daily that the languages we study and the authors who used them are very, very dead, and that our monetary prospects are, if not equally expired, certainly lying etherized upon a table.
This general rejection is bewildering and unfounded, since so many of my best-and-brightest peers are students of the Classics. They proffer lucid insights into the workings of our world, whether they concern the language we speak, the politics we practice, or the social codes we negotiate and enforce.
In this spirit of Oscar Wilde, I commence this weekly column, in which I will discuss issues relevant to contemporary readers of The Daily Gamecock from the perspective of a classicist.
I do so because I want to show that knowledge of antiquity can be a progressive and liberating force. I do so because I am convicted that we all share, or ought to share, in the relief that Vergil’s Aeneas felt when he entered Carthage on his odyssey after the Trojan War and found a monument built in commemoration of the efforts of his people:
Even here, merit will have its true reward.
even here, the world is a world of tears
and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.
dismiss your fears. Trust me, this reputation of ours
will offer us haven.