Why the Classics Matter (and how they matter to me)

As a child, I self-studied random things:

• The geography of South America, which I painted on a thimble, complete with mountain ranges modeled in paste, rivers, and capital cities I painted with a brush the size of a No. 2 pencil point;
• Shampoo ingredients from the beginning (water) to butylphenyl methylpropional (no idea what that is, other than euphonious);
• The Greek alphabet, because it was in the dictionary, and I read the dictionary prefaces.
  
• The Second Speech Against Verres, which thoroughly demonstrated the niceties of Roman insult as well as the flexibilities of Roman law. Courtroom drama would be reality TV if we tried cases as the Romans did; judges would go hoarse ordering jurors to "disregard that last remark."

I've returned to this earliest of my youthful obsessions-and-interests: classical Greece and Rome, but not to mythology and Cicero as much as to the plays and poems, and to the writers who explain that world to this one. Anne Carson (The Plainwater Essays) and Adam Nicolson (Why Homer Matters) have hooked me all year, and yesterday I could not stop myself from buying a cheap edition of Juvenal's Satires after flipping open a few pages and reading his savaging of new laws:

• "All low income citizens should have marched out of town, in a body, years ago" (and I think of Hurricane Katrina and the 9th ward of New Orleans, and who lives in a FEMA camp, and who doesn't).
• "What poor man is ever hired by the Office of Works" (and I think of the letter I got from the unemployment department, predicting that I would be unemployable if I didn't start my own business: they would never have a job that fit me).
• "Must I always be stuck in the audience, never get my own back after all the times I've been bored..." (and I think of the endless cycle of church dinners, where the acceptable topics are children, grandchildren, medical maladies, travel, and minutiae; but was told that a discussion I had with another member at the table on church history was "so boring").

I was expecting Juvenal to yield something along the lines of the master gossip Suetonius. However, these literary classics, translated by poet-scholars, do not date themselves. They are so particular as to be universal. Change the names, and you could be anywhere in the world, in any time of the world. Shakespeare's insults were put on a mug; as much could be done for Juvenal, who is significantly briefer (more insults to the inch! And more quotable).

For a while I worked on the crowdsourced Ancient Lives Project, which digitized thousands and thousands of papyri that were crumbling faster than they could be translated. It also provided a cool tool for those who did not study the Greek alphabet in elementary school: the most common letters of the Greek alphabet and variations on how they could be written, with practice tutorials on actual papyri. My relatively mild OCD kicked in and I spent an evening on Greek dipthongs and the full alphabet just to see what I was missing. I was hooked for months.

I never decoded anything to the point of being able to prove it was a grocery list, graffiti, or a scrap of Sappho. But it was fun. And I wondered what I'd missed by not having an education in the classics.

Perhaps what worked on the papyrus would also work on the translated pieces. What if I wrote 300 words or so on a scrap of something that someone had translated? Such as, "A Sudden, Unspeakable Sweat Flows Down My Skin:"

I am much put off by this poem, if it's that, although translator Anne Carson calls it an essay. Many titles describe their content, summarizing it, anchoring the point. This essay's title seems to be the start of a third-person dialog. If I'm sweating, is it unspeakable because Beautiful People don't sweat, or because the reason I'm sweating is socially unacceptable? And if the title's in the first person, what does the first line accomplish by being in the third person? Who is speaking in the later lines?

Does gazing open the door to blaming? Does looking, to judgment?

That jumping bunch of arteries in my hand, like that thimble with its dendritic rivers jumping down the mountains, what sends me behind their borders? Is that stone in each eye a coin for Charon the ferryman? Perhaps the speaker is dying of the pneumonic form of bubonic plague--which in England was also known as the "sweating sickness."

These questions are like the bones of the eyes: they have strange orbits, they break my usual way of thinking and speaking. And when I do break into speech, I recover a little of the beauty of my own tongue in the rhythms of my language's parents.

And this is why the classics matter to me.