Classical Education

At Catholic Voice we would love to see all children educated according to the most tried-and-tested classical methods. These necessarily include (a) the mediaeval Trivium and (b) the Classics themselves.

(a) The Trivium consists of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric. These three mental arts are an indispensable propaedeutic for every other kind of learning. Those who have not yet read Dorothy Sayers' excellent apologia for the Trivium are in for a real treat: The Lost Tools of Learning.

(b) By the Classics we refer to thorough study of ancient Greek and Latin authors in their original languages. This contrasts with the neo-classical approach, which essentially involves reading Latin and Greek authors in English translation, perhaps obtaining a smattering of the original languages en route. Tracy Lee Simmons provides a powerful arguments (albeit humanist ones) for adopting the strictly traditional classical approach in his recent work Climbing Parnassus.
 

Ancient Greek

For those students who expect to study ancient Greek for more than two years, we recommend they begin with Homer, deferring the study of Attic Greek or Common Greek until at least their third year. To be convinced of the true wisdom of this apparently unconventional approach, one need only read the Introduction by Cliver Pharr to his excellent Homeric Greek - A Book for Beginners, available online and also available for purchase in a revised paperback edition.

Even more suitable for the younger student is Schoder and Horrigan's A Reading Course in Homeric Greek, a work for which we are currently producing our own online Answer Key, since the original version is out of print.
 

Latin

We strongly recommend Fr Robert Henle's superb 4-volume series. These four volumes, including the separate Grammar,  contain a total of 2275 pages. By dint of many carefully graded exercises, the disciplined student should be able to read authors like Caesar, Cicero and Virgil (not to mention the Vulgate) with relative ease within five or six years.

Like Frs Schoder and Horrigan, Fr Henle was an outstanding classically-trained American Jesuit from the early 20th century, well before Vatican II and the conciliar popes ravaged Holy Church and her educational ministry. The frequent inclusion of passages from Scripture (be it from the Septuagint and Greek New Testament, or from the Latin Vulgate) give a depth and warmth to the work of these priests that is lacking in other authors like Wheelock.

We would urge students to pronounce Latin as it is pronounced nowadays by the Catholic Church, irrespective of whether they are reading ecclesiastical or classical Latin. Dorothy Sayers also has some highly instructive comments on this.
 

Order of Latin and Greek Cases

The Byzantine grammarians placed the Accusative case immediately after the Dative. This is the approach still taken in the United States, and is reflected in the books recommended above. However, in Britain, Benjamin Hall Kennedy, in his Latin Primer of 1866, improved this sequence by placing the Accusative after the Vocative and before the Genitive. Since then, this method has been adopted consistently throughout Britain and several other European countries, and we strongly recommend its continuance. For, although it effects a gap between the Nominative and the stem-identifying case, i.e. the Genitive, it has the inestimable advantage of conforming to the natural sequence of General Grammar (in which the Direct Object closely follows the Subject), and, more importantly, of making the case endings (certainly in Latin) so much easier to learn, since the Dative and Ablative cases, so frequently identical in their endings, are now adjacent to one another.

British tutors using American classical textbooks should instruct their pupils, at the earliest possible moment, to read the declensions in the order proposed by Kennedy. After a few dozen exercises in skipping from the Nominative (position 1) to the Accusative (position 4) and then back to the Genitive (position 2), the pupil should do this automatically and will hopefully avoid contracting an aversion to American textbooks!

Timothy Peter Johnson
24 August 2006

Additional materials

Here are some e-texts (in MS Word format) of out-of-print schoolbooks still used by the OCR Board in their GCSE Classical Civilisation examination. These books are now virtually impossible to obtain second-hand at reasonable, uninflated prices. We hope they may be of use to teachers and students.

Empire and Emperors, Selections from Tacitus' Annals, translated by Graham Tingay; Cambridge University Press, 1983;  ISBN 0521281903.

Herodotus: The Persian War, translated by William Shepherd; Cambridge University Press, 1982; ISBN 0521281946.