A s a Classics student, I get a lot of questions about my major. They range from “Can you actually speak Latin?” to “You mean like ‘Moby Dick?’”
The Classics, in an academic sense, is defined as the study of Greek and Latin. It covers the history, literature and culture of the ancient Greeks and Romans. But that’s a definition that deserves its own column, and will get it later.
For now, I want to focus on a question, complex in its simplicity, that I get asked more than any other: “Why?”
That question used to bother me. But as my senior year starts and retrospection sets in, I have begun to think I should have to justify the choices I have made with my education.
As I face questions throughout the year — sometimes about the basketball team and sometimes about the meaning of life — I’m going to turn to the Classics to help me answer them.
I’ve found there are few questions that haven’t already been addressed; that’s comforting to me. But there are even fewer questions that have been satisfactorily answered; that’s humbling.
Today, I’m going to cheat a little. A. E. Housman wasn’t an ancient, but he was a famous Classics scholar (yes, there is such a thing) and a poet I greatly admire.
Housman once said: “Curiosity, the desire to know things as they are, is a craving no less native to the being of man, no less universal in diffusion through mankind, than the craving for food and drink.”
I’m going to run with the food analogy because it works on many different levels.
