Emerson Brooking | I came, I saw, I majored

When I came to Penn, I couldn’t tell you the difference between Plato and Cicero. Moreover, I wasn’t sure why it mattered.

A lot can change in three years. Today, I’m a bona fide Classics major. I’ve fulfilled my foreign language requirement in Latin and waded through thousands of pages on the respective histories of Greece and Rome. Along the way, I’ve encountered 2,000-year-old treatises on everything from democratic theory to the nature of man to the best places to pick up women in ancient Rome. It’s been an immensely rewarding experience, and one that’s shown me — above all else ­— that a couple of old dudes in togas can teach you more about the world than you’d ever think possible.

This is a lesson more folks could do to learn. Despite a recent resurgence in the popularity of high school Latin classes, contemporary America shows dismal appreciation for the Classics. Even here at Penn, our Classical Studies program boasts only about 40 majors, relegating it to the status of a “niche” concentration among giants like Political Science. That’s a particular shame because the classics have a profound ability to show us where we’ve been — and where we’re going.

According to Undergraduate Classical Studies Chairman James Ker, “Students enrolled in our program often end up with a deeper understanding of the sense in which ‘we’ have inherited something from the Greeks and the Romans — both the good and the bad. Recently, for example, students of Classical Studies have been responsible for valuable scholarship on both the present and future of American empire.”

There’s good reason for this. Many of the problems our own culture struggles with today — from the question of committing soldiers to foreign soil to persistent fears of moral decay — were the same issues addressed thousands of years ago by men like the historian Tacitus or the statesman Cato. Through only a handful of extant sources, we witness themes and trials that transcend millennia. Accordingly, how these ancient figures dealt (or didn’t) with these challenges offers a valuable resource for our own age.

It’s little surprise, then, that study of the Classics continues to be pertinent some two millennia and dozens of empires later. “In early American times, it was understood that a classical education helped people. We find this because Classical authors generally have a very inclusive view of human life — they don’t oversimplify or draw their accounts of human behavior from one source,” said professor of Classical Studies John Mulhern. “Most seminal thinkers from the post-Classical period like Marx or Machiavelli were trained primarily in Classical tradition, and we can understand them if we understand their Classical education. Hence the Classics have been ‘passed on’ and stayed relevant in the centuries since their inception.”

In today’s torrent of media and lightning-fast pop culture, the staying power of the Classics has only become more impressive. I’ve always been amazed by the fact that — as late as the 16th or 17th century —it was possible for a well-educated individual to have read nearly every book and treatise existing up to that point. Given the proliferation of the printing press and more recent advent of the Internet, that’s a feat no one could (or would want to) replicate today. Yet at the heart of it all, then as now, lay the collective works of a few dozen Greek and Roman thinkers, writers, poets and pols. The field of Classical Studies may not encapsulate the whole of Western thought, but there’s certainly no better place to start.

Advance course registration still has a week to go. Explore the Classics, from the history of Greek athletics (CLST 270) to the evolution of ancient constitutions (CLST 310). Try something new — and investigate one of the longest-lived and most important fields history has to offer.

Emerson Brooking is a College junior from Turnerville, Ga. He is a member of the Undergraduate Assembly. His e-mail address is brooking@dailypennsylvanian.com

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