The Classical Institute Goes Back to ‘Classical Roots’
Reading time: 15-18 Minutes
The Classical Institute has been hiding in plain sight for some time, just round the corner from Morrison’s at Five Ways. And it has also been living a lie, imagining that the word ‘classical’ could mean Classical Arabic and Classical Persian, whereas we all know it relates to the ‘classical world’ of Greece and Rome, of Latin and Greek.
So, it came to pass that a year ago that, despite my advanced age, I was asked – or I asked – to teach Latin and Greek, ab initio, ex nihilo – as we classicists say – to a small, but happy band of adults on a Sunday evening – round the corner from Morrison’s. Now, in response to this strange experiment, you might, dear reader, ask three questions.
The first of those questions is ‘Why bother?’
This is a question which has echoed down the classrooms of Europe for centuries. It is best presented in the masterpiece that is ‘How to be Topp’, a book which tells of the trials and tribulations of Nigel Molesworth, the anarchic prep school pupil of St Custard’s. Molesworth is the voice of all those doubting pupils.
‘Lat. master is always frightfully keen on lat. which he calls classicks amo amas amat gender rhymes bonus and hic haec hoc. Fancy a grown man saying hujus hujus hujus as if he were proud of it. It is not English and do not make SENSE…. Lat. masters are always convinced that lat. is easy quite pappy. They encourage you. It is so simple molesworth they cry if you will only try.’
Molesworth then asks the killer question of his besieged teacher:
Sir Nigel Molesworth QC: ‘What is the use of Latin, sir?’
‘er well er that er quite simple Molesworth. latin is er classicks you kno and classics are – well they are er – they are the studies of the ancient peoples.‘
Sir Nigel Molesworth QC: 'So what?'
'er Latin gives you not only the history of Rome but er (hapy inspiration) its culture, it er tells you about interesting men like J. Caesar, Hannibal, livy, Romulus remus and er lars porsena of Clusium’
Sir Nigel Molesworth QC: And the Gauls you do not mention the Gauls. Would you not consider them interesting?
O most certainly.
Sir Nigel Molesworth QC: I observe from the work of this class that the Gauls hav attacked the camp with shouts they hav frightened the citizens, they hav killed the enemy with darts and arows. Would it not be more interesting if they did something new?
Sir Nigel Molesworth QC has a point, not least that too many pupils have spent too much time reading Caesar’s Gallic Wars in the last five centuries. So, is there an answer to Molesworth’s eternal question? Yes. In fact, there are two answers.
The first is that Latin is a good game, and Greek is an even better one, as you will find out. Latin is a good place to play this game because it is both like and unlike English and many of the languages we know. We have to work out how a language works, how it makes meaning, we need accuracy and flexibility, attention to detail and imagination. Above all, we need to think logically and laterally, and learning to think is really what education is about.
The second is that Latin – and Greek – are not just a game. They lead us to a land where we can actually read what clever dead people actually wrote. This doesn’t have to be Julius Caesar, thankfully. It can be Homer and Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle, Herodotus and Thucydides, and one or two Roman authors, too. Of course, that reading can be slow, and it don’t come easy, but that is all the better because it gives us time to think carefully about what these dead people say, and how they say it.
And this leads on to the second question: how do you teach Latin – and Greek – so that students can really understand, so that they will be able to translate real Latin and real Greek?
Over the last fifty years, textbooks and teachers have tried to make the languages more accessible by hiding the need for grammar and by imagining that Latin can be learnt by reading, as if it were like French or Spanish. This is not the method we have adopted, because it doesn’t actually work. And it doesn’t work because Latin and Greek aren’t like French and Spanish. Those languages depend for meaning lesson on endings – ‘s’ for plurals, ‘-ed’ for the past tense – than on word order: ‘the dog chases the cat’, not vice versa. However, Latin and Greek are not like that. The meaning of each word and of each clause is dependent on the word endings and, if you don’t know your word endings, then it’s like trying to do sums without knowing your times tables: why is 8x7 easy and 17x9 not?
So, The Classical Institute has seen an approach unspoilt by progress, an approach, a method which was adopted in the 16th century. It was then that the teaching of Latin in the world beyond the Church and monasteries became a significant element in English education. After all, that is when Edward VI, the son of Henry VIII, created over thirty grammar schools, to teach grammar, which meant Latin – and Greek – grammar. It was at a grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon that the most famous product of a grammar school education got his ‘little Latin and less Greek’. That method stood on three commandments: ‘thou shalt learn thine endings’, ‘thou shalt identify the exact form of each verb, i.e. parsing’, and then, and only then, ‘thou shalt put the words together, i.e. construing.’
It was at precisely the same time that the terminology of teaching was invented, words which have tormented Molesworth and thousands of other children for centuries: ‘supine’ (1450), ‘ablative’ and ‘subjunctive’ (1504), ‘conjugation’ (1529), ‘declension’ (1565), although we had to wait until 1631 for ‘ablative absolute’ to be forged.
That was the way that Edward VI and his sister, Elizabeth I, and I were taught, although not at the same time. And if it’s good enough for them – and me – it’s good enough for The Classical Institute on Calthorpe Road. And, just as Molesworth’s Latin teacher was proud of his ‘hujus hujus hujus’, so it is good to hear Obaid reciting the Greek definite article – ‘ho, he, to, ton ten to’, and on he goes – and the students running spontaneous revision classes in which they use the word ‘parse’ and ‘strong aorist’.
Learning Latin – and Greek – isn’t easy, and learning Greek is harder than Latin, not because of the alphabet, but because it is so much more complex, sophisticated, diverse: the Athenians built the Parthenon and the Romans built camps. So, the third question is: how can we make it interesting, even if it is hard? I’d say that the third question has three answers. The first is that we have been able to link what we are doing linguistically with everything else that the students know themselves, whether that be the exploration of English etymology or the grammatical structure of Persian or Arabic. The second has been to show that reading the real Greek and Latin texts are not that far over the horizon: Homer and Plato and Virgil – and the New Testament – are using datives and genitives, aorists and futures, adding augments to verbs. It really isn’t rocket science. So, even within a year, on an hour a week, we have been able to read, for real, parts of Plato’s Apology and Crito, Virgil’s account of the death of Priam, Homer’s telling of the meeting of Odysseus and the Cyclops, and the enigmatic beginning to St John’s Gospel. And, finally, the third has been to use Latin and Greek as vehicles on which to travel across history. As a classicist, my detailed knowledge of history peters out towards the tail end of AD 69, and yet Latin and Greek only matter to European civilisation because of their revival in the 14th and 15th century, the Renaissance. The two great literary figures of the early 14th century, Petrarch and Dante knew no Greek for lack of a teacher and a textbook – if only they could have joined us. And yet, in the next two centuries, western literature and architecture and art were transformed, changed utterly, by the rediscovery of this Graeco-Roman world. So, every lesson has been an outing to Florence or Rome or Athens or Istanbul, a visit to the temple of Apollo at Delphi or to the Sistine Chapel or to the Marcian Library in Venice, a chance to read a funerary inscription of Count Bessarion’s letter to the Doge of Venice or the poem of Pope Pius II, aka Eneas Piccolomini, about the demolition of ancient Rome by 15th century Romans and, as ever, the great delight of teaching is that you learn so much on the way.
John Claughton - September 2025