The Remains of the Ancients

Classics, as taught by Humanists, gave untold generations canons for taking in the Beautiful and Sublime. Classically educated people learned what was seemly. Education at its higher reaches should be, according to English classicist R. C. Jebb, a matter of aesthetic revelation.

Once, educated people could pronounce upon Taste and Style, and by and large the education they had received had granted them the license to do so. Standards ruled. This never meant that all educated people always agreed about what was tasteful and stylish, only that they had canons to which they could appeal when disputes arose. They had benchmarks. That day also is done. But we should not allow our excursion to reach its terminus without touching upon the subtle power of aesthetic precept that the Greek and Roman classics lent to the Western mind.

Taste and Style were primary aims within sight of Humanists for centuries. Heraclitus once said that “masses of knowledge do not instruct a mind.” The civilized person had not merely to be knowledgeable; he had to own and wear that knowledge in a special way. Knowledge was as much a courtly acquisition as an arrow in a quiver with which to combat and conquer the world. A person’s inner nature had to be transformed. We might say that this vision is a “construct.” It is artificial. Of course it is. But we err if we thereby conclude that men and women, say, of the Renaissance did not know that Taste and Style were artificial. They did. So, they would have said, were manners. So was piety. So was an ability to dance a minuet or to sing a madrigal—or to parse an ode of Horace. So was any sense for the finer, more profound things. All of these had to be learned. They had to be constructed, made and re-made from the raw materials of mind, heart, and body. As Humanists saw it, we enter this life naked and hungering and brutal. We need civilizing. Such artificial attainments—such “constructs”—made and strengthened the very sinews of culture. The world certainly would have been survivable without them. It also would have been a lesser place.

Those elusive things called Taste and Style, though, must rest upon not-so-elusive standards. One must choose the norms by which he’ll be guided. Will one follow fashion and the personal whims of the moment? Or will one take his cues from what has been established as the best the world has to offer? Aesthetics is not an easy field to joust on; neither of these questions is easily parried. Personality will play a role in the struggle, and genius, as has been said, is a law unto itself. Yet those schooled along classical paths knew that they had been given an education as much aesthetic as it was intellectual. Humanism made sure of it.

The classical world bestowed upon all who served their youth in its purlieus a kind of parallel universe. It was at once a lens through which to peer and a code to break. Within its rich and peopled precincts we find personalities, high and low, and conditions, glorious and desperate, that serve as cultural compasses, showing us the distance we have still to travel before the flowering, the realizing, of our supreme ideals. They show us our proximity to perfection. No wonder the pursuit of classics was for so many centuries an erstwhile rival to religion—and why so many religious spirits bridled against it. Classics established yet another guide point, set another lodestar in the firmament, by which to steer our lives, intellectually, aesthetically, spiritually. Classical literature, thought, and art showed us the best of which we’re capable.

But what finally about this idea of Taste? Were the classics a source of Taste because they were naturally “tasteful”—or was classical literature automatically considered tasteful because it was classical? Certainly not the latter. Many judicious people over the centuries have excluded the Satyricon of Petronius from the ranks of tasteful works, as well as some of the poems of Catullus, to name but two authors. Not every work of classical literature has been roundly embraced through history, as we saw with the English Puritans of the seventeenth century. Greatness is not always tasteful. So what accounts for this association of Taste with classics? One explanation is practical: classics have been veritably defined as that which has survived. So the conflation of classics with Taste isn’t all that far-fetched when we recognize the high degree of selectivity involved in both the formal and informal sifting of classical literature. The sad fact is that most of what the a Greeks and Romans wrote has been lost. What remains is the list of Greatest Works, those pieces and fragments that successive generations of critics, scholars, and lay readers deemed worth preserving. The crème de la crème had risen to the top and been scraped off, leaving us with the best they had thought and said.

Yet this account isn’t quite complete. Certain qualities of character, good and bad, were thought to inhere within those Greek and Roman shards that two millennia of discerning spirits have considered to be the best of their kind. The jury is already in; judgment was passed long ago. Within Greek literature we find, along with all the mayhem of petty wars and nastily destructive domestic jealousies—all the meanness and pettiness of mankind—footprints of those grander traits of humanity: nobility, restraint, balance, harmony, proportion, generosity, grace. And these traits are aesthetic as well as ethical. Within the lines of Greek epic and tragedy, man finds the place assigned to him in the universe by the gods, a place he transgresses to his peril; the man or woman beset with hubris finds redemption in calm, opened-eyed resignation to fate. Later, the Romans showed us how man can acquit himself with dignity, even majesty. Chronicles of noble quests for order fill their pages. The long, straight Roman road is itself a telling symbol of the high destiny the Romans sought to fulfill. By the very nature of the task, wrote T. S. Eliot most tellingly, close reading of Greek and Latin classics over many years tends to engender “maturity of mind, maturity of manners, maturity of language and perfection of the common style.”

There’s no escape: Our aesthetic vocabulary has grown from the classical sensibility. It would not be far off the mark to say that the Greeks and Romans have best taught us how to think and feel. Their greatest medium was their words. And to weigh words in our hands is to measure both their logical power and beauty together. It is to know what they mean, and can mean, at full thrust. For Thomas Jefferson, the classics provided “models of pure taste in writing.” To Greek and Latin, he said, “we are certainly indebted for the rational and chaste style of modern composition which so much distinguishes the nations to whom these languages are familiar.”

“The remains of the ancients,” said John Witherspoon at the College of New Jersey in the eighteenth century, “are the standard of taste.” Well enough. But of course we need not take up Greek and Latin in order to acquire models of Taste and Style any more than we may for their intellectually formative ones. This aim is almost unheard of now anyway. Content is quite reason enough to sustain interest and justify their nest in schools’ and colleges’ curricula.

The point we might make, though, is that one can do so—and that these goals of intellectual and aesthetic shaping were more commonly pursued over the past several centuries than were the more scholarly ones of simple philological and historical inquiry. After all, the probing of chronological, sociological, and linguistic problems, however weighty and vital they may be for the life of scholarship, does not alter our mental natures. Forming the mind does. Perhaps a renewed ardor for the formation of mind and soul will once again give us a pass for making deft and shrewd aesthetic judgments. We may not be put off thereafter when someone says that any response of ours to a piece of literary or visual art is “just” our “opinion.” An opinion built upon established standards, after all, is not quite the same thing as a mere feeling. Such an opinion may be well or ill-founded, right or wrong, but it isn’t mere. It never was.

Tracy Lee Simmons holds a master’s degree in classics from Oxford and is the best-selling author of Climbing Parnassus, a case for classical education in America, from which this article is excerpted, and On Being Civilized, available now from Memoria College Press.