Classicists being classicists

Classicists being classicists: or are we changing?

Note beforehand: this post should have been a short anecdote about my fondness for nitpicking, grammatical questions but it turned into a rant about new teaching methods. If you don't get the coherence, it's not your fault: I don't get it either.

To continue my blog, I want to share a short anecdote about one of the peculiarities of classicists I have noticed during my Latin literature course. We’re reading the Pro Caelio for this course, a rather short speech of Cicero (38 pages in the Oxford edition and 100 pages in the Loeb edition). The professors chose this speech for a compelling reason: due to its manageable size, reading the entire speech should be a piece of cake so we can examine specific passages carefully while being able to connect them to the rest of the speech.* For example, we examined the rhetorical figure ‘dilemma’ at one meeting, where we discussed an article by Craig: he analysed all the passages where Cicero used a dilemma (8 times in total).* During the discussion, we were hopping from each dilemma to the next similarly to Craig. Unlike Craig, however, we picked up other passages that did not contain dilemmas but were even more important to understand Cicero’s rhetorical effect.  These passages formed necessary build-ups towards the dilemma that Cicero would construct. By omitting them in his analysis, Craig failed to capture the whole rhetorical effect these dilemmas would achieve (although he was thorough in his analysis of the links between the dilemmas). In short, we could discuss Cicero's construction of dilemmas more profoundly than Craig (which some of us considered being a dilemma) since we discussed them in the context of the whole speech.

After this digression, I want to draw your attention to the realisation that occurred to me. For this week, we had a round-up meeting where we as students could ask anything about the text that we wanted (so you know that you’ve got it right for the exams). During these questionable meetings (I know, bad pun), we as students step back from the overview of the text and start to overanalyse each word’s tense, aspect, or meaning. Sitting there and trying to come up with answers, I could understand why people dislike Latin and/or Greek. When you are wondering why someone uses the word cum with a subjunctive instead of si and when you trying to define every “odd” subjunctive, you know that you are extremely nitpicking.*

My own notes around the text of the Pro Caelio

It is these types of questions that make me feel like a real philologist and classicist. For the first time, however, they also left me worrying for a moment: we could bother with these questions because of our short text. For a whole course, we need to read 38 pages (and 16 of another Latin text).  That amount is not even a short novel. An undergraduate who studies any modern language would be laughing at the mere thought of having to read 54 pages. These students read several book weekly.  For Greek and Latin, you are happy when you can read a book in several weeks (provided that the work is as large as a modern book and is extant in its entirety).

Furthermore, the slow reading pace is also causing secondary school teachers of Classics to change their teaching methods from reading and translating texts to listening and speaking activities in class. There are even teachers who have written whole Latin novels for pupils to read.  These teachers want to provide more comprehensible input for their pupils, so they are more inclined to engage with the languages (for most ancient Greek and Latin texts are not so easy to understand when you are not at an advanced level). All these new methods are addressing a part of my fear, i.e. that students and pupils are not addressing pressing issues of text when they are trying to analyse every grammatical issue.

If we were to transform our curriculum to this methodology, we would lose one of the most characteristic fundaments of Classics: an excellent grasp of grammar (and linguistics) that combines this knowledge with the overall interpretation of the work. In fact, knowing why cum should stand there instead of si makes you understand the point Cicero tries to make even better: the regularity with which boys become great men.

* Other reasons for this speech were, I quote, its prominence in secondary schools (where we would have to teach this text), the well-established scholarship on this speech, and the humour and fun it provides (and I add to this the rhetorical craftsmanship which you have to appreciate)  

* C.P. Craig, ‘Reason, Resonance, and Dilemma in Cicero’s Speech for Caelius’, Rhetorica, 7.4., 1989, p. 313-328.

* This question about cum was mine and dealt with this sentence:

Sed qui prima illa initia aetatis integra atque inviolate praestitisset , de eius fama ac pudicitia, cum is iam se corroboravisset ac vir inter viros esset, nemo loquebatur.  (Cic. Cael. 11).
However, when he has finally grown up and become a man among men, nobody would attempt to disgrace the name or the reputation of the person, who had passed through the first phase of his life pure and undefiled. 

Answer: the professor interpreted the subjunctive as conveying an iterative aspect, which does not occur as often in Latin as in Greek. If you want to understand more what I’m talking about, search for tense and aspect, but be warned for it is difficult linguistic stuff.