Ancient Worlds

The discipline of “classical” literature has long been associated with social gatekeeping. The mastery of Latin and ancient Greek—or at least enough of an acquaintance to be able to trot out a well-worn tag from Horace and prompt knowing chuckles over the brandy—has often provided a useful qualification for passing as a gentleman and keeping out the plebs (Latin for “common people”) or hoi polloi (ancient Greek for “the many”). It is understandable that George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver eagerly whizzes through the Latin textbooks neglected by her idle brother Tom, or that Thomas Hardy’s Jude, hoping in vain to escape the obscurity of provincial poverty, slogs through his Greek dictionary until late into the night. For these fictional characters, like many of their real-life equivalents, ancient languages and literature provided the most visible bar against entry into a “higher” social class.