“In low-class circles, more often than Latin, Greek was associated with extreme, other-worldly, intellectual prowess and arcane, even sinister arts”.[1] A reader reflecting on themselves, why pearls shouldn’t be cast before swine and the world of the classics – reflexive reading of Edith Hall & Henry Stead (2020) A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939 London & New York, Routledge.
This is not a review of Hall & Stead’s book but rather an exploration of a slant (which I’m thinking of as something more deeply structured into my personality than a ‘bias’) that caused me to read it. The same slant has guided my interests in life – in art, literature, and politics. That such a ‘slant’ existed became illuminated through reading this great book.
However, you need to know what the book is and why it might be worth reading for you. By the end of the book, and at points throughout, the authors stress its introductory nature as a text in the growing field of ‘Reception of the Classics’. That ‘modern’ sub-discipline studies how and why ancient artistic forms in writing or other plastic form were revised – in form or interpretation by contexts in later history.
Before going on it’s worth a reflexive pause related to my initially ‘innocent’ (in as far as anything can be independent of determination) use of the word ‘plastic’. Use of such an adjective illustrates one of the issues surrounding the continuing role of the classics in the way we live across the fragments of contemporary culture. Most of us now talk about ‘plastic’ in terms of describing, when used as a noun, an over-used polymer that is polluting our seas and land globally. As an adjective, it often bears the sneer of contempt that the lack of value ‘plastic’ now has for us – meaning a kind of over kitsch and unpleasant artifice.
The shifts in values attributed to different uses of the word ‘plastic’ – from that informed by Greek and that which is not – illustrates at least one of the issues surrounding the role of the classics. The role of Greek and Latin as a foundation of later languages and cultures offers a ‘gold standard’ of what constitutes an informed use of the word. Thus we begin to discriminate between those aware of approved and informed uses of words in the ‘classical’ (sometimes wrongly called ‘true’) origin and looser less informed and more democratic (or ‘plebeian’) uses of language. That structuring of deep uses approved by classical authority and defined as those of high culture are set against those of a less-valued more socially varied culture. Such distinctions ought to be abhorrent to a socialist but, as Tony Harrison’s poetry and drama show, they are a way that hierarchy are structured into both subjectivity and interpersonal interactions using language.
For most of us now talk about ‘plastic’ in terms of an over-used polymer that is polluting our seas and land globally. Yet the origin of the word, particularly as an adjective as I’m using it in my ‘educated’ and’ informed’ sentence derives in a line of knowledge reception described by Lexico, an online Oxford Dictionary: “Mid-17th century (in the sense ‘characteristic of moulding’): from French plastique or Latin plasticus, from Greek plastikos, from plassein ‘to mould’”.[2]
Any doubletake in a reader about how and why I get away above by calling writing ‘plastic’ is eased when that reader shares a flexible metaphor that allows us to read the word to mean ‘moulded’ because of that derivation from a concept in another language, and especially an ancient ‘classical’ one. Such readers share a culture that apparently validates their worth over other readers who do not access this lexicon of deeper meanings so easily. It is rife with a class, as well as ‘classical’ value system, one demanding a canon of basic knowledge only accessible to that class, whether by dint of birth into privilege, the role of an autodidact (hard relatively unsupported work) or plain luck.
If any reader can admit the possibility of there being a time when s(he) had never heard the word, the relative difficulty of such a memory search may access the location in their lived life where transmission of an authorised and canonically higher culture was passed to them. Yet learning cultural values is like this and is a much more conscious process, even today I’d guess, for working-class people who are mono-lingual.[3] In England, the classics became, through the long and complicated history told here, associated with class and rank, with a high culture that has dominated and been held to embody a natural superiority in those who merely had the good fortune to have access to it.
Access to skills and content in classical knowledge was controlled precisely because its worth and value (in all senses of these words) is, like that of pearls (real or metaphoric) which cultural parables tell us, cannot be appreciated by people of a low-class. This parable is seen in Western medieval format in the Brueghel painting prefacing this piece. In Biblical metaphor lower classifications of people, those not worthy of valuable and sacred knowledge, are called ‘swine’. The book traces how that allegorical tale from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:6) came to be applied to holding back classics from those unworthy of them, those of insufficient class, rank, intelligence or moral worth. Most often all those issues get conflated.
Hall and Stead show a version of the moral allegory used by Breughel above that specifically shows Blind Homer in the role of casting his pearls in a ‘blind’ (in the rather oppressive metaphorical sense of ‘undiscerning’) way from Thomas Bridges (1797) A Burlesque Translation of Homer.
The association of the Classics with something rarefied has justified than it be made even more inaccessible that it might have seemed merely by requiring the work to master the language. Associating the Classics with the private and ‘public’ schools is clearly readable as a strategy for preserving the view that learning belonged only to those already in control of society and its resources. It did this by assuming those people to be the only ones capable of such learning. As I looked at myself and my own history I found a reflection of that attitude and it is this I want to explore.
What I have said already about this wonderful book over-simplifies it, especially the wonderful section 1 dealing with a much more elaborated form of what I merely point towards. It develops the notion of a form of classical knowledge that also established a canon of knowledge and of its literature of what was best for the guidance of the nation and for the ‘best’ persons within it. Other sections go on to show that this was not the whole story and tell how the classics were taken on by people from the working-classes or those which preceded classes which preceded it and were its raw materials in country and town before the birth of a large proletariat as such.
It ensures we have examined some of the myths of a widely distributed knowledge of the classics in Ireland, as is implied in Brian Friel’s wonderful Translations play, but it also asserts the local truths underlying the myth.[4] It shows the differences present in Ireland and Scotland in exploring the radical and revolutionary implications of republican biased classical literatures in theatre, painting and writing through Robert Tressall and Thomas Carlyle respectively,[5] whilst also showing the infusion of the classics into bourgeois and workers’ near-revolutionary movements in England. It also shows the lengths to which individuals from lower classes went to acquire the classics. That was often in order to raise their own class status, with some effect of roots-based thinking lingering on, but also to fire and validate collaborative revolutionary movements. For those reasons alone I’d recommend this book. It can be read selectively because it covers such a wide range but read straight-through it is a great set of stories about what class and personal and class group transformations and metamorphoses mean.
Yet it is Part 1 (‘Canons, media and genres’) which stimulate my reflexive interests. The remnants of the story of classics in current education are no longer a necessary portal to what are described as ‘classical’ values, taste and status. Indeed some may feel them to be historically redundant now. They are reducible in some accounts to the tone of petty entitlement in the speeches of William Rees-Mogg or modern parables such as that of Boris Johnson reciting the opening of Homer’s Iliad in a popular programme’s interview with him in order to display his ‘learning’.[6]
Individual biographies however can sometimes be only effectively examined to find the possible origin of wanted and unwanted attitudes in our subjectivity and group life. For me, this book caused me to reflect on my continuing issues about class and identity. In every part of my life after primary school I now reflect, the ‘classics’ played a part in both determining ideas about the values associated with ‘learning’ and ‘being learned’, the mixed concepts of social class and value-status, often in hierarchically ‘ranked’ forms and of what constitutes better or worse values (‘the best that has been thought and said’) in language, literature and life. [7] Of course I now see these values as, at the least, versions of ideology, but growing up embodies them in ways full of pleasure and pain. The two instances are:
- The role of ‘grammar’ schools in the creation of class and status differences. The ‘grammar’ in grammar schools was first intended as a reference to highly ordered grammars thought to be associated with Latin and Greek as taught in language primers and was the royal road to understanding English grammar. Such knowledge became equivalent to academic aptitude.
- The role of classical language in determining notions of the ‘best’ knowledge available to the ‘best’ learners: those with the supposed capacity for it. A correlation of the best with class gradations was not unknown, to say the least.
So to apply the first instance to my own life. When I first went to grammar school I lived in a council estate situated next to the secondary modern school. My route to and from the bus that went to the grammar school in another (distant) small town (called Honley, Huddersfield). I could use two routes to different buses but both were routes also for young people to use when attending secondary modern. On each, both in the outgoing and incoming route involved meetings between me (alone) and what a seemed a large number of people (because of the relative statistics of selective education) going in the opposite direction. I flitted between routes as a way of avoiding encounters and often took circuitous paths through woods. None worked and indeed when the avoidance was perceived it was read as a symptom of elitism.
As a result I was exposed to being -and often was – beaten (when it was boys) or ‘kegged’ wherein one’s trousers were stolen and flung to uncomfortable places (when it was girls). Gender tended to determine these reactions too but not in obvious ways – ‘kegging’ was the most feared fate to the first-year boy of 11 or 12. Bullying happened in comprehensive schools of course, after my school years, but was not as obviously related to pernicious status distinctions rather than class. As a working-class boy I felt more vulnerable.
In applying the second instance mentioned above you need to look at how the preference for micro-applications of ranking students were symbolised in the grammar schools. By the 1960s Greek was no longer as available although offered for ‘special’ students in the sixth form only. The stress was now on English grammar, though that itself waned. Some of my teachers, the Classics teacher in particular attributed the importance of English as the standard of academic competence because of the support offered to it by Latin grammar description. He would quote Winston Churchill, who had not been thought clever enough to study Classical languages at school. Churchill used this anecdote of his education to justify the lesser importance, though still important enough, of classical languages:
Naturally, I am biased in favour of boys learning English. I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat.[8]
But even Latin was rationed. The school was streamed into four ranked groups. The top two groups studied Latin, the bottom two studied German (1LA, 1LB, 1GA and 1GB being the resulting names of the reception classes). Movement between streams was possible at year end and equated with opposing effects on self-esteem whether the movement was ‘up’ or ‘down’. What was clear was that the hierarchy was thought a normalised and valid way of discriminating what was appropriate for each rank, based on their ‘assessed’ ability.
Though I clung to the LA groups throughout school I was never that good at Latin and cringe when I remember the boredom and incomprehension associated with the names Nisus and Euryalus in our set book (Book IX of Virgil’s The Aeneid it must have been). Struggling with self-esteem and constant failures to come out as gay, it never occurred to me that this pair of Trojan lovers, in the beauty of Virgil’s treatment as I now see it, might have been a potential help to a possible identity, although the martial element seems to have made that unlikely – I never was a very ‘masculine’ sort of kid and hated competitive and physical games.
Tum vero exterritus, amens conclamat Nisus, nec se celare tenebris 425 amplius aut tantum potuit perferre dolorem. “Me me, adsum qui feci, in me convertite ferrum, O Rutuli, mea fraus omnis; nihil iste nec ausus nec potuit, caelum hoc et conscia sidera testor, tantum infelicem nimium dilexit amicum.”
TRANSLATION
Then, terrified indeed, out of his mind, Nisus shouts out, and no longer could he hide in the darkness or bear to continue such deception. “Me! Me! I’m here, I did it, turn your steel on me, O Rutulians, It’s all my trick, that boy there did not try anything nor could he – I call this sky and the stars as my witnesses – all he did was to cherish his unlucky friend too much.”[9]
But the important bit here was that, though I as a young working class boy, teenager and youth, I often experienced class-based distinctions as a kind of continuing set of painful separations involving being singled out from others. It was only because of this fact that I was the first person in my family to go to school beyond 14 or 15, to go to university and now be retired from my ‘careers’, chequered as they may have been.
When I retired, apart from some part-time associate teaching for the Open University, I have grown to love small encounters with Classical texts and art but now cut off from what I think are very disturbing associations of ‘otherness’ that bore shame, guilt and pain in their wings or which, like angels also, honoured you, like Jacob who could only be honoured as ‘Israel’ by virtue of being wounded in the leg. So the advantages of an education based on hierarchies, division and selection have never seemed so straightforward to me. The instances I give are trivial, partly because others are more painful.
If I had to spell out the areas in which the classics and class have harmed me, I think I’d say they contributed to feelings of being:
- A class and educational ‘impostor’. There is not room to flesh that out and a link to Wikipedia will suffice. The ‘classics’ offered a home of that thing that one failed to possess as those in homes accustomed to learning and books seemed not to need to develop. Hence my educational and working life contains evidence of ‘glittering prizes’ won or possible but lost through massive failures of self-belief and self-efficacy. As I look at it I feel that even here I could have ‘done better’ to combat these feelings – they are well known and are not usually pathologized.
- A need to compensate for some ‘lack’ or ‘deficit’ by hard work or inauthentic performance. The whole point about the ‘classics’ in education was that they were a ‘gold standard’. If you are a swine, no ‘pearl’ in the world will really look good on you and may be little more than a pretence.
- A rebelliousness of nature against unseen structures that someone make you seem like Don Quixote tilting at the windmills. This can be experienced as ambivalence about authority, which seems as invalid in those who claim it as in one’s own attempts.
- That together with having acquired, so deeply that it seems innate, an inner cognitive correlation of education through ‘hard work’ with unacceptable and major stress.
- Finally, a sense that knowledge is the prescribed right of those who set systems rather than those who adopt them and a suspicion of those who would adopt them for what are judged improper purposes, such as acquiring status or ‘image’
Now, this list makes me seem an exceedingly difficult sort of personality, and to some extent I am, but they also contain insights to how mechanisms in the building of hierarchies necessitate unnecessary distinctions between people and groups. For that reason, they are allied to politics. This is the outcome too of reading this book as it introduces you to a series of political movements where classics have played the part of an image that liberates from conventional ideas and contemporary restriction of the many by the few.
Stories of individuals really impress.[10] Stories of groups of miners or pottery workers amaze.[11] But stories of liminal arenas of insurgence, resistance and rebelliousness go even further, as in the story of the criminal cant called ‘St. Giles’s Greek’.[12] From this section on hinterlands of language comes my title quote: “In low-class circles, more often than Latin, Greek was associated with extreme, other-worldly, intellectual prowess and arcane, even sinister arts”.[13] What really pleases me is that these same classes were able not only to ape the exclusion of themselves by languages in the possession only of their ‘betters’ but to build languages on the same principles of exclusion that challenged those people who felt that they were better by right. This may have served crime in the examples in this chapter but excluding languages also served oppressed groups (as ‘Polari’ did for gay men in the 1940s and 1950s) to build subjective differences or popular dramatists building a political language so dangerous it had to be censored or banned by the ruling classes.[14]
You may get different things entirely out of this book. But do read it.
Steve
[1] Hall & Stead (2020: 324)
[2] https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/plastic
[3] Of course let’s acknowledge that, apart from in England and then not in toto, the working-class as such is not globally a monolingual entity now or in the past, as the chapters on Irish and Scottish contact with the classics shows.
[4] ibid: 212
[5] ibid: 224ff, 245ff. respectively
[6] See Beard M. (2020) ‘Boris Johnson and the Classics’ TLS Available at: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/boris-johnson-and-the-classics/
[7] See the way in which classical culture defines high culture and values in Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy in Kalantzis & Cope (2020) Matthew Arnold on Learning ‘The Best Which Has Been Thought and Said’ Available at: https://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-7/matthew-arnold-on-learning-the-best-which-has-been-thought-and-said#:~:text=Amongst%20his%20books%2C%20perhaps%20the,industrialism%20and%20individualistic%20self%2Dinterest.
[8] Winston Churchill (1930) from My Early Life 1874 – 1904. Full and relevant quotation available at: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/54427-b-y-being-so-long-in-the-lowest-form-i-gained
[9] Latin text and translation from https://classicalanthology.theclassicslibrary.com/2015/02/17/virgil-aeneid-9-420-449-contributed-by-jane-mason-and-gcse-latin-students-aged-15/
[10] Ch. 23 ibid: 476ff
[11] Ch. 22 ibid: 460ff., Ch 21 ibid: 440ff.
[12] Ch. 16 ibid: 324ff.
[13] Hall & Stead (2020: 324)
[14]For instances of last see Ch. 13 ibid: 272ff
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3 thoughts on ““In low-class circles, more often than Latin, Greek was associated with extreme, other-worldly, intellectual prowess and arcane, even sinister arts”.[1] A reader reflecting on themselves, why pearls shouldn’t be cast before swine and the world of the classics – reflexive reading of Edith Hall & Henry Stead (2020) A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939”