The classics and us

Link here. Who cares about the classics these days? Almost certainly they are mistakenly to be viewed either as 'contemporaries' of our present middle-classes - the notion that, for instance, Aristotle's doctrines can be subjected to critique from the POV of an A-level student at a grammar school - or as contemporaries of our elites, which is how the Marxist and historicist intellectual perceives them. Plato belonged to the master class of aristocrats; we thronging bourgeois are descendants of the freemen and slaves. We also mistakenly think that the slave class - if it existed today - would necessarily be composed of the antipodes of the middle classes, 'chavs' and career criminals. However, the foremost error in judging the ancients is quite the obverse; it is in casting them as bearers of enlightenment, law and tolerance, as humanitarians and social democrats. There is ample evidence to suggest that the beauty and elegance of Plato and Aristotle's works existed in a time more like Berlin in 1945 than Arcadia. Try Thucydides - cf. the Melian speech to the Athenians.

An education in the classics is not actually a remnant of the bourgeois class’s need to reinforce its ideals by referring to the example of the hedonism and grandeur of the ancients. It is obvious that the ancients, far from enjoying supine luxury without strings, lived under the constant threat of the most terrible barbarism and gave nothing greater credence (not even life) than the abstract ideal of honour or dignitas. They are starkly to be contrasted with our contemporary middle class, which believes only in the pursuit of self-interest.