I had a friend ask me what a classical education was. The answer is much more complex than it seems.
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| Isocrates born 436 BC died 338 BC |
Classical education depends on which date you ask the question. St. Augustine was classically educated, but he died around 400 A.D., so he could never have studied any author past that date, and yet he still had a ‘classical education.’
It gets even more interesting when you consider that people that actually lived during the ‘classical’ time period, really the Hellenistic age of Greece, roughly between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the rise of the Roman Empire in 31 BC, had varied views on what it meant to be educated.
Some thought the first order of education was to establish character (virtue), others thought education should be about helping to form a perfect state with perfect citizens, while others thought it meant to live the good life and to find sound judgement. And that was just in their own time period! Renaissance educators would change the idea of what classical education meant in their own time, and then even further out, the likes of Thomas Jefferson in 1785, had his own ideas, too.
So where do you start?
Let's first define what a classical education means. Classical education is classical emersion into the classical culture. And what was classical? Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome.
They are not classical because they were old. They were classical because they achieved a standard that has never been matched.
Plato thought an education must be based on virtue, and it can’t be about the group, but about the individual. Isocrates, a contemporary of Plato, thought that virtue could not be taught, but it may come about through the learning of literature. Isocrates thought the end goal of education was to have ‘sound judgement’.
I lean more towards Isocrates.
Isocrates was the real source of a classical education. It was he that would have his students read the best literature. For in the best literature, you had the best values, ideals, stories, and insights into what it actually means to be a human being.
And there was more. It was not enough to just read these eloquent ideas. You also had to compose them yourself. That’s what being a man of ‘letters’ meant. You could read the Greek and Latin for yourself, the letters in that language, but you could also compose letters to others where you could eloquently state your mind and your opinion.
"Letters are the beginning of wisdom, letters standing for knowledge of language, the ability to convey the complexity and subtlety of thought and sense with words."
"The cultivated man was, in a real sense, the literary man, the man of words."
You were a cultivated and civilized human being, the one real trait that separated us from brute animals and barbarians, you could read the thoughts of others, and you could write your own thoughts. Barbarians could not do this. Barbarians could not read, and they could not write. They were not civilized. In fact, the ancient Germani, the ancestors of the German people today, did not write their own history. Tacitus and Julius Caesar did, because they had a culture that valued reading and writing.
"Culture meant books, because from books we learned about what is best."
Isocrates taught that to be educated meant to read books, the best books, and their own culture's books, before they were called civilized.
That’s where I would place my chips if someone were to ask me what the point of a classical education was and how to attain it. Classical education meant to read the best books from the best authors, and then write like they did. Finally, the point of all that education would be to acquire sound judgement.
Sound judgement comes when you have a broad context of experience from which you can draw upon your own conclusions. Without this context, how do you know if your decision is wise? How do you know if this experience really warrants these actions?
If all we have to drawn upon is our own experience, our well of experience is very shallow indeed!
By reading the best books from the best cultures, we expand our well. We dig deeper where the water is purer, clearer, and healthier. Our context expands to include not just our own understanding of our modern times, but also the circumstances and understanding of the past, the deep past where human beings had life so much harder than we do today.
From that deep well, we draw the water of life’s experience from the source. That’s why we read classical texts.
"so that descendants will not be left to rediscover human truths already endured and expressed by eloquent forbearers”
Here are the authors to read to get a classical education, double plus points if you read them in their own language, Latin or Greek:
History:
Livy, Sullust, Caesar, Cicero’s epistles, Suetonius, Tacitus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Anabasis and Memorabilia, Cicero, Baretti, plutarch,
Poetry:
Virgil, Terence, Horace, Anacreon, Theocritus, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles. Read also Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakspeare, Pope’s and Swift’s works, Epictetus, Xenophontis Memorabilia, Plato’s Socratic dialogues, Cicero’s philosophies, Antoninus, and Seneca
Rhetoric:
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, Aristotle,
1. Tacitus on Germany: Get a taste of how an ancient author writes about the ancient people of Germany, the tribes of the Germani. Great insight into how the Germani lived and what type of character they had.
2. Julius Caeser's Gallic War - You can get a sense of the past by reading Juluis' writings about the ancient Gauls. 50,000 slaves sold in one sale.
3. Livy - history of Rome 01-08
4. Sallust - Conspiracy of Catiline and the Jurgurthine War
5. Cicero's letters - on friendship and old age, on the gods and the commonwealth, the orations, his letters,
6. Epictitus - lots of great wisdom
8. Seneca -
9. Marcus Aurelius
10. Suetonius - the life of the Caesars
I’ll update the list as I find more classical authors to read.
One more note
It's not really possible to understand the ancient classics until you've read the modern classics from your own culture. Doing this will help you in two ways:
First, it will help you to understand the major currents in your own culture. Each modern culture writes about themes that are important to them, which have consequently shaped the culture you are in now. It also provides a mirror to see what the values are in the society you are in. For instance, if you read To Kill a Mockingbird, you'll see how much the values of justice, equality, racism, and childhood are all themes in that story.
Second, reading your own culture's classics will help you understand if they are actually worth the paper they are printed on. Do these cultures stack up with those of the past? Do they give you more insight into who you are as a person? In one word, it gives you context. Context to judge. Context to see what is really good and what is not so good.
One more note
It's not really possible to understand the ancient classics until you've read the modern classics from your own culture. Doing this will help you in two ways:
First, it will help you to understand the major currents in your own culture. Each modern culture writes about themes that are important to them, which have consequently shaped the culture you are in now. It also provides a mirror to see what the values are in the society you are in. For instance, if you read To Kill a Mockingbird, you'll see how much the values of justice, equality, racism, and childhood are all themes in that story.
Second, reading your own culture's classics will help you understand if they are actually worth the paper they are printed on. Do these cultures stack up with those of the past? Do they give you more insight into who you are as a person? In one word, it gives you context. Context to judge. Context to see what is really good and what is not so good.
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