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    A Student's Guide to Classics
    A Student's Guide to Classics
    A Student's Guide to Classics
    Ebook97 pages1 hour

    A Student's Guide to Classics

    By Bruce S. Thornton

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A concise introduction to the literature of Greece and Rome.

    Bruce Thornton’s crisp and informative Student’s Guide to Classics provides readers with an overview of each of the major poets, dramatists, philosophers, and historians of ancient Greece and Rome. Including short bios of major figures and a list of suggested readings, Thornton’s guide is unparalleled as a brief introduction to the literature of the classical world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJul 29, 2014
    ISBN9781497645196
    A Student's Guide to Classics

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    Reviews for A Student's Guide to Classics

    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      Gilgamesh NOT Greek or Roman - not missing from this book, just not relevant

      3 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Nice introduction to the subject, but missed one big classic. I didn't see the Epic of Gilgamesh, but it was good besides that.

    Book preview

    A Student's Guide to Classics - Bruce S. Thornton

    INTRODUCTION

    POLITICS, PHILOSOPHY, history, epic, poetry, comedy, tragedy, rhetoric, democracy, aesthetics, science, liberty, senate, republic, judiciary, president, legislature—the terms included in this brief but impressive list have two things in common: first, their referents constitute much of the political, intellectual, and cultural infrastructure of Western civilization; second, they all derive from ancient Greek and Latin.

    Classics is the discipline that studies the language, literature, history, and civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, two cultures that bequeathed to the West the greater part of its intellectual, political, and artistic heritage. For centuries Western education comprised the study of Greek and Latin and their surviving literary monuments. A familiarity with classics provided an understanding of the roots of Western culture, the key ideals, ideas, characters, stories, images, categories, and concepts that in turn made up a liberal education, or the training of the mind to exercise the independent, critical awareness necessary for a free citizen in a free republic.

    Times of course have changed, and the study of Greek and Latin no longer occupies the central place it once held in the curriculum. Classics today is a small, shrinking university discipline kept alive, where it can be afforded, more because of prestige and tradition than because of a recognition of its central role in liberal education and in teaching the foundations of Western civilization. Yet at a time when Western civilization and its values are under assault, the need for classics is as urgent today as it was in the past. And people are still interested in antiquity: translations of classical texts continue to sell well, and popular films, Gladiator for instance, testify to an enduring fascination with the ancient Greeks and Romans. I hope that this brief introduction to classics will encourage students to study in more depth what Thomas Jefferson called a sublime luxury, the ancient Greek and Latin languages and literatures.

    WHAT IS CLASSICS?

    THE DISCIPLINE of classics actually is made up of several different areas of study, all linked by a grounding in the Greek and Latin languages, the study of which is called philology. The first skill a classics student must learn is to read Greek and Latin, which means mastering their vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and morphology.¹ The study of these languages, moreover, usually proceeds through sentences adapted or taken whole from Greek and Roman authors.

    Right from the start, then, classics students are learning about the great writers and works of antiquity, rather than learning how to ask for directions to the train station or the museum. Thus, even the technical study of Greek and Latin vocabulary and grammar exposes the student to some of the greatest literature, writers, and ideas in history. Here is an important difference between classics and other disciplines in the humanities: to a much greater degree classics teaches languages in a way that also introduces students to the culture, history, philosophy, and literature of Greece and Rome. But the first step remains learning the languages themselves, so that students eventually can read Greek and Latin masterpieces in their original languages.

    After learning basic grammar, students begin to read ancient authors and decide in which specific area of classics they wish to concentrate. But no matter where students eventually focus, most will have first read a wide range of ancient texts in literature, history, and philosophy. This is another advantage of classics: since it is grounded in languages, students are compelled to become broadly educated in the whole culture of ancient Greece or Rome rather than just in some narrow subspecialty. Moreover, the habits of analysis and close reading required to understand the ancient languages often carry over into other areas, lessening (but not alas eliminating) the chance that students will be attracted to, or will themselves put forth, subjective or ideologically slanted interpretations. For in the end, no matter what ideological axe you want to grind, the Greek and Latin have to be accurately read and correctly translated, and this empirical, concrete procedure makes it difficult to get away with fuzzy or interested readings.

    The possible areas of concentration in classics include the whole gamut of the humanities and social sciences: history (including religious, social, and intellectual history), philosophy, art (including vases, mosaics, and sculpture), architecture, literary criticism (including metrics and poetics), grammar, rhetoric, archaeology, geography, political science, and the histories of science, medicine, engineering, war, mathematics, and geometry. Moreover, classics is a fundamental discipline for those interested in the history of Christianity, the formation and transmission of the text of the New Testament, and the early Christian theologians and their doctrines (patristics).

    In addition to these concentrations there are more technical foundational disciplines:

    Epigraphy. This is the study of inscriptions engraved on stone, pottery, and sometimes wood (coins are the concern of numismatics). Thousands of inscriptions from the ancient world have survived, some intact, others badly mutilated. Once an inscription is discovered, the epigraphist must clean and decipher it. This process can be very difficult, not just because of the often-deteriorated condition of the stone but also because usually words are not separated and there are no small letters. Also, over time the style of some letters changes or letters pick up decorative flourishes. Inscriptions are valuable for historians of all sorts, whether social, political, religious, legal, or literary, since inscriptions cover a wide range of subject matter, from political decrees to expressions of affection for a dead spouse or child.

    A fascinating example of epigraphical sleuthing involves the Colosseum in Rome. An inscription still visible today concerning repairs made in the fifth century A.D. is covered with holes in which were once anchored the metal letters of an earlier inscription. In 1995 Géza Alföldy of Heidelberg reconstructed the original inscription by analyzing the hole patterns. The reconstructed inscription dated to the time of the emperor Vespasian and specifically to the completion of a phase

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