A Taste for the Classics

Anyone with a professional, or at least a serious, interest in what we are used to calling ‘classical literature’ is liable nowadays to encounter problems of definition. At the extreme, they can be formulated along such lines as: What implications does a value-term like ‘classical’ carry in contemporary English? What does ‘Classics’ as a discipline suggest, if not the traditionalist attitudes and assumptions of an elite past culture, offering a badge of membership in a no longer sought-after club? And if one tries substituting ‘ancient’ for ‘classical’ (as in ‘ancient history’) that too raises questions. Why privilege Greece and Rome over Egypt or Persia or China? Why speak confidently of ‘the ancient world’, as if it were coterminous with the Roman Empire? Finally, literature itself has become a problematic category for contemporary criticism – and the Greeks and Romans, in any case, didn’t have a word for it.