8/CHRONICLESnPERSPECTIVEnNO LATIN, MUCH LESS GREEK by Thomas FlemingnIn pondering where the modern age went wrong, writersnhave pointed to as many answers as there are systems ofnthought. For conservative editoriahsts, the problem isnMarxism or its hfeless reflection, Uberahsm. Irving Babbittnblamed the Romantics, while Richard Weaver nailed hisnthesis on the door of nominalism; and there are still literarynscholars who pepper their hermeneutic exercises withnimprecations at the gnostics. The poor gnostics. Ever sincenHans Jonas—a brilliant scholar—and Erich Voegelin,nconservatives have attempted to lay all the sins of humannfrailty at their door.nIt is not that in some sense the ancient heretics didn’tnanticipate the moderns. Thomas Browne observes (in ReligionMedici) that, “Heresies perish not with their authors,nbut like the river Arethusa, though they lose their currentsnin one place, they rise up again in another.” There is asnmuch in Browne’s aphorism as in whole volumes ofnpolitical exegesis. Browne’s liability, for moderns, is the factnthat he was a learned gentleman who wrote for othernlearned gentiemen. He did not have to drag out his insightnin volume after volume of labored analysis or rub our nosesnnnin his erudition. He assumed that his readers would get thensignificance of Arethusa, a river that was supposed to gonunderground in Greece and pop up again in Sicily (andnthereby hangs a tale). Browne took for granted not only annacquaintance with that tale but a familiarity with ancientnheresies and modern religious sects. Put simply, he assumedna classical education.nNot everyone in 17th-century England possessed suchnattainments, obviously, but it was a century in which BennJonson could deride his friend Shakespeare’s small Latinnand less Greek, when the Dean of St. Paul’s filled his satiresnand elegies with learned allusions that render them unintelligiblento professors of English. It was also the age ofnDryden’s remarkable essay on satire as well as his masterfulntranslation of Vergil (stih the best in English), Ovid, andnJuvenal. A hundred years later, Samuel Johnson went tonFrance and spoke only Latin. (His French accent wasnatrocious, and anyone worth talking to was fluent in Latin.)nA century after Johnson, Alfred Tennyson was composingnpoems like “Lucretius” and Matthew Arnold built a reputationn(in part) by writing essays on the translation of Homer.nEven in the earlier 20th century, poets like Eliot and Poundn(to say nothing of the great Latinist A.E. Housman) must bena real puzzle to those who can make nothing out of thenconstant stream of allusions. Of course, they can alwaysnturn to the notes (often wildly inaccurate) that disfigureneditions of English poets. But reading a note on “Mithredatesnhe died old” or “To KaAoi’ is decreed in thenmarketplace” is a great deal like having a joke examined.nYou may understand, but you still don’t “get” it. Smallnwonder that almost the whole of English literature is anclosed book to English majors, or that Stanley Kunitznappeals to scholars who cannot read Milton.nIt used to be said that no one ignorant of the classicsncould be considered an educated person. After two generationsnof searching for alternatives, not much has changed. AnPh.D. in physics or sociology is simply a barbarian if hencannot tell who dragged whom around the walls of whatncity, because a scientist unfamiliar with the Iliad is an aliennin his own civilization. In the little village of the educated,nwhere everyone knows the names and family connections ofneverybody else, the classically illiterate intellectual is ann