An Irreverent Defense of the Classics

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville outlined the utility of studying the ancients for certain individuals living under a modern democracy. The ancients, he explained, are not “irreproachable,” but their writings do “have special qualities that can serve marvelously to counterbalance our particular defects. They prop us up on the side where we lean.” In her recent work, Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old, Mary Beard opts for a rather different approach to justifying the study of the ancient world than that of the famed investigator of American democracy. Like Tocqueville, Beard does not think that studying the classics should be universally mandatory or that such a study would be good for everyone. But unlike Tocqueville, she harbors a deep skepticism towards any claims about the utility or formative character of an encounter with the classics. Her aim is to justify the classics in an altogether new way.