Classical Association member, Margaret Thorpe, formerly Principal Examiner for Latin at WJEC, has shared why Classics is important to her, as part of our #CelebratingClassics Campaign. Now retired, Margaret enjoys reading Latin Literature with a group of adults at Shrewsbury Museum and Art gallery.

The Classics have enriched my life beyond measure. Not only have they given me a rewarding career but they have added to my appreciation of so many other aspects of my life.

If I struggled with the Latin language initially – and at the age of 13 or 14 my homework was to learn Horace’s Ode III.30 Exegi monumentum aere perennius by heart, without understanding very much of it, and to be prepared to recite it from memory in class the next day – there followed the thrill of learning Greek, a language with a different alphabet.

For me the language became a means to an end, to read the literature. I came to love those odes of Horace and their influence on poets like Housman, and to read the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek and to learn about the tradition of composing oral poetry, which has survived down the centuries in more remote parts of the Balkans and places like the island of Crete.

But it is not just the languages and literature that continue to give pleasure and instruct. The Classics enhance so many other areas of life. For the final year of my degree I specialised in ancient history and was fortunate to have the wonderful Joyce Reynolds as my supervisor for Roman History. She taught about the empire during the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian from the surviving inscriptions, mainly those in North Africa, which she visited every year until well into her eighties. What a revelation this was after the history books we had used at school! I acquired a lifelong interest in inscriptions and what they tell us about the people they commemorate. Now I introduce visitors to the inscriptions in the Roman Gallery at Shrewsbury Museum, one of which, the Wroxeter forum inscription, is unique to the UK. It commemorates the visit by the emperor Hadrian to Shropshire and is the only inscription found to date which stood over a public building in Britain.

Photograph of Margaret at Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery

The areas of modern life where the Classics have made a major contribution are too many to list, as most of western culture owes a debt to the Greeks or the Romans. To the Greeks and Romans we owe the classical style of much in world architecture. You can see classical architecture in Newcastle-upon Tyne as well as Rome, and through the architect Palladio it can be seen in some of our great country houses such as Holkham Hall in Norfolk and Harewood House in Yorkshire.

Then there is the Greeks’ contribution to science and philosophy. The early Greek philosophers were also scientists and mathematicians. We all learnt Pythagoras’ theorem at school and further investigation showed us that his followers were vegetarians because of a belief in the transmigration of the soul. I remember the fascination of Thales’ calculation of the distance of ships out at sea using similar triangles. Those early Greek philosophers correctly predicted an eclipse of the sun and first described a world consisting of indivisible atoms. Later philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle have had a much greater influence on European thinkers and continue to do so right down to the present day.

We should not forget the way a study of the Classics can enhance our appreciation of archaeology.  At the start of my teaching career I attended a course run by the then Ministry of Education at the British school of Archaeology in Rome for teachers of History and Classics. For two enjoyable and instructive weeks we studied the history, art and archaeology of that city from the Etruscans to Mussolini. We were taken beneath St. Peter’s Basilica by Professor Jocelyn Toynbee to see the tomb of St. Peter himself, we watched Etruscan tomb paintings being carefully lifted for restoration and I also fulfilled a long held wish to visit Horace’s villa in the Sabine countryside. I was accompanied on this visit by a fellow member of the course, later my husband.

Subsequently we had many holidays together in Italy and Greece exploring sites of historical interest as well as the wider culture of those countries. Then in retirement came the opportunity to visit lesser known provinces of the Roman Empire, some of which sadly can no longer be visited easily today, including Tunisia, Syria, and Libya. How wonderful to see the ancient harbour at Carthage and to remember Dido and Aeneas, who according to Virgil both landed there as refugees, or in Cyrene where we gazed towards colonel Gadaffi’s summer palace and remembered the silphium-bearing Cyrene of Catullus’ poem.

In my career as a teacher I found so many interesting topics to which I was able to introduce my students. Apart from the Latin and Greek language and literature there was ancient history and the huge variety of topics included in Classical studies. Most interesting of all however were the two years when I taught Roman technology across the entire year of a comprehensive school, one group at a time, as one of five different modules for GCSE information technology. Students chose a modern building and a comparable Roman structure and then looked at the problems which engineers had to solve.in constructing each building. This was more than twenty years ago but the course did not survive governmental rules, which said that an entire GCSE could not be based on course work, even though it was supervised entirely in class.

Now however I shall return to the most important point, which concerns the language. There is a lot of discussion today about the usefulness of studying Latin, quite apart from all the accompanying pleasures. The knowledge of Latin grammar and vocabulary is a great help in writing our own language and especially in understanding the precise meaning of words. About forty per cent of the words in the English language are derived from Latin. Greek is at the root of many medical and scientific terms and will often help you understand your doctor’s notes. Latin not only gives  us access to five further European languages, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian, which are all derived from Latin, but as an inflected language  it makes the learning of other inflected languages such as Greek, German and Russian very much easier. Why would you not learn Latin if you were given the chance? And this is why everyone today should have that chance.

©MargaretThorpe