Reading the Aeneid

Classicalteacher is a second-year high school teacher in Brooklyn.

Not long ago, a visitor to my 9th-grade classroom took issue with my students’ reading of the Aeneid. Now, I might be mistaken but most educators would be overjoyed that high school freshmen are reading a text that many of us don’t tackle until college. But as this particular visitor, however, surveyed a classroom of students busily researching Virgil’s use of figurative language, she clearly did not appear pleased with my choice of literature.

As she noted, many of my students were non-white: given the number of black, Hispanic and Asian students in my classroom, how could I give them a work that was so unabashedly from the Dead White Male tradition? Not only that, but we had just read Homer, yet another member of that oft-maligned club, with Sophocles and Shakespeare to follow shortly. The visitor wanted to know how I could have the gall to be so culturally insensitive to the supposed needs of my diverse student body.

Though neither student nor parent had made a similar complaint during the entire year, I should have seen it coming. After all, at our school we pride ourselves on a rigorous education steeped in the classics that, we hope, will get our students into the best colleges (we don’t yet know, since this is the school’s first year) and prepare them for intellectual exploration at the highest level. We require our students to take Latin for four years, study classical literature, and partake in declamation, the public speaking exercise mastered by the great Roman orators Horace and Cato.

Our students come from all over the city, and hour-long commutes are the norm. They travel from parochial schools in Queens, neighborhoods in the Bronx I’d never heard of, gifted programs on the Upper West Side. Regardless of race, class or any other determining factor, students are attracted to the school because of a particular kind of intellectual enrichment that the aforementioned visitor, unfortunately, glossed over all too quickly.

Like her, too many educators believe that there is no reason to teach the classics in this day and age, especially in an urban environment where reading Homer might not have any apparent practical value. I couldn’t disagree more with this kind of thinking. What critics of a classical education miss is its radically uniting function, its ability to bring people together in the most critically important space a school can ever hope to create: the marketplace of ideas. Of course it has to be done correctly, and trumpeting Homer just because he’s Homer isn’t going to cut it, not with the kind of questioning and inquisitive students that I am lucky enough to teach. But this year – my second as a teacher, but my first teaching at this school – has confirmed that the classics can bring young minds together like no other subject matter.

In fact, it is the classics’ very age that seems responsible for their appeal. The value of the classics is that they are the bedrock of our civilization, and to study authors like Plato and Homer carefully is to truly discern the ideas that continue to inform our lives. The debates over popular opinion and war were no less salient for the Roman emperor Augustus than it has been for President Bush; the vitriolic discussion over what is moral that has settled permanently over Congress begins with the wine-fueled symposia presided over by Socrates and recorded dutifully by his student, Plato.

Reading the Aeneid or Republic in school is hardly the intellectual whitewashing that the visitor to my classroom not-so-subtly alluded to. Rather, it is the best kind of empowerment, an intellectual experience that gives students the tools to be inquisitive, knowledgeable thinkers in today’s highly-competitive professional world. What the visitor to my classroom, and many other educators, neglected to discern is that the salient ideas of antiquity have no color, race or social class – rather, we can all find umbrage under their astonishing longevity.