Epic drop

A few months ago, it was announced that Oxford is proposing to drop Homer's Iliad and Vergil's Aeneid as compulsory first-year texts. I found this particularly interesting, since I did Classics at Oxford, and hence studied the two texts in question in my first couple of terms. In fact, though by the time I started college (2002), I don't think we were required to read the whole of the Aeneid in Latin (only 8 books out of 12, if memory serves), the whole of the Iliad in Greek was still compulsory. I believe that requirement was watered down as well the following year, to 22 books out of 24. I'm thus one of the last hundred or so people to have read the whole of the Iliad at Oxford in my first term (and the following vacation - I have a bittersweet memory of working through Hector and Achilles' duel on Christmas Day). And I'm definitely among a dwindling number of people anywhere who've read the whole thing in the original. Looking back, I feel quite ambivalent about the whole experience, as I do about my degree as a whole.

First off, it's worth pointing out how unusual it is to read that much Greek these days. Even when I was doing my PhD exams in the US, we weren't asked to read either of the Homeric epics complete, only a few books. Some European Classics undergraduates from outside of Oxford will have read that much by the time they finish their first degrees, but not many, and North American Classics majors will be lucky to have read more than a couple books all the way through in Greek. Is this a boast? In part, yes. Reading the whole of the Iliad through took me a lot of time and effort - at least an hour a day for months. It did give me a deeper experience of the work; nothing quite brings home the futility and horror of war like reading through endless descriptions of pitiless bronze slicing through people's limbs. But it was also frustrating and deeply stupid.

That is, the way we were asked to do it was. One of the problems with Oxford's Classics course is that it's still slowly coming down from a 19th-century high in which it could be taken for granted that anybody embarking upon it would have spent the lion's share of their schooling on learning the living daylights out of Greek and Latin. (My favorite example of just how nuts they went on that is Aldous Huxley's reminiscence of spending a full day every week during his time at Eton just on Greek composition.) In those days, first-year undergraduates probably could just read through Homer without much help. (William Gladstone would later look down on the undergraduates who came after him for being able to have recourse to cribs like lexica - he, of course, improvised his own vocabulary lists, which built character.) Nowadays, things are different, even among the two hundred or so undergraduates who turn up having done A-Level Greek.

I know, since I was one of them. I turned up with an A (the top grade in those days!) and having read Iliad 16 as a set text, and...couldn't really read the Iliad to save my life. I did make use of all the aids I could find - lexica (sorry Gladstone), commentaries, and so on. But Homeric Greek is quite hard, and I still think it makes very little sense to ask first-year undergraduates to read more than half of it on their own. In fact, I'm increasingly convinced of that, since I've been teaching Greek to undergraduates for going on ten years now, and (somewhat to my relief), they find reading Greek hard too. They need a lot of help, and there are a lot of things you might well want to ask about or discuss along the way, so we tend to move through texts quite slowly.

So it might be all to the good to move the Iliad to the second part of the course ('Greats'), where students particularly keen on Homer can work on it with more attention, and with their Greek in a better state. (The old 'Early Greek Hexameter' course would seem to be just the place.) That would also give students more choice in general. There's a macro version of this point that's been ably put by Solveig Lucia Gold: the Oxford Classics course is in general quite narrow compared to North American-style à la carte degrees. I'm definitely among those who think UK degrees could and should become more like that; in the meantime (as Gold notes), both systems have their strengths and weaknesses.

One of the strengths of the European system is that it allows students who want to to specialize much more quickly, and to get a really solid grounding in what they've chosen to study. That's nowhere more evident than in the Oxford 'Literae Humaniores' course, in which reading the Iliad and Aeneid has always been only the first step in a very extensive tour of Greco-Roman culture (especially its literary texts). And if you want a really solid grounding in Greco-Roman culture, it makes an awful lot of sense to start by reading a lot of Homer, who was always seen by subsequent Greeks as both the first and the best of their poets. Homer may not have quite been their Bible or their Koran (though theological readings of Homer were a thing, his text wasn't the Revelation of a monotheistic religion); but he was their Chaucer and their Shakespeare at once. The best comparison is probably to say that he was like Dante for the Italians.

It's also nice, I might add, to read whole works. I don't know if this is a dirty secret, but this is getting to be something that classicists very rarely do, at least at undergraduate level. I know, because I'm one of the instructors failing to get through whole texts in the time allotted to me. But I don't blame myself - it takes time to prepare and discuss these texts, and that means it can be hard to get through even a play in a single, six- or seven-week block of classes. Arguably, though, it does make sense for people getting majors in Greek literature (or even Greek or Classics) to have read one or two works all the way through in the original language by the time they finish.

That, of course, needn't mean it's the Iliad students have to read all the way through. They could read one or two shorter works entire. And shorter works make up most of the rest of Greek literature, including, come to think of it, the Odyssey. Why didn't they make me read the Odyssey in my first term? The conventional answer is that the Iliad was always considered the weightier and greater work in antiquity, and while that may be true, the Odyssey was hardly straight-to-DVD either, at least not to the point of justifying me being made to read 24 books of one epic and 0 of the other.

This brings us to one of the reasons that Oxford has given for proposing this change. The main reason I've seen is that this will make things easier for female students, for a range of reasons. One is that they might be less into all the killing that takes place in the Iliad than the lads. I think that's true - after all, preference for rough-and-tumble play is one of the most well-documented of the many natural differences in interest and disposition between men and women, and that seems to be reflected in differing tastes for things like violent movies. The most I think this argument would justify, though, is for students to be given a choice between the Iliad and the Odyssey. Then students, male or female, could choose to spend their time on what most called to them - the harrowing world of the Iliad, or the magical narratives of the Odyssey.

Oxford's main line of reasoning, though, appears to go as follows. More boys than girls take A-Level Greek and Latin. That's true, especially for Greek, with most of the 200 or so pupils who take A-Level Greek coming from all-male boarding schools (which was also, by the way, the case for me). Because of that, male students will on average have a big advantage in reading through the Iliad and the Aeneid in their first two terms. That's also true. Therefore, the argument runs, we shouldn't make understanding those two epics such a major part of the first phase of the degree ('Mods'). That's where I'm not so sure.

One reason is that if having done A-Level Greek gives you an advantage with Homer and Vergil, it'll also give you an advantage with all the other texts on the course (which has a lot to do with reading Greek and Latin texts). If students from certain schools have already read some Homer, students who haven't could be put at even more of a disadvantage by not having a thorough exposure to these fundamental works at an early stage. Besides, Oxford already has a series of variations of the traditional Classics course for students who've done A-Level Latin but not Greek, Greek but not Latin, or neither.

In the end, I don't really mind whether Homer and Vergil's martial epics remain compulsory for first-year students at Oxford. I don't think it would be a disaster if they didn't, and obviously there are bigger issues out there. But if the proposed change doesn't concern me all that much, some of the reasoning behind it does. In the end, it may be that reading Greek and Latin, like other advanced skills - chemistry, maths, or playing football or an instrument to a high level - is the kind of thing that you get better at if, for whatever reason, you've been able to spend more time on it. To what extent it might make sense to change the requirements of highly competitive training programmes for people who've done less of these things - well, that's a complicated topic, and one best left for another time. But the answer's probably not 'to an infinite extent.'