Oxford has long played an important role in the world of classical academia. Feeney, Lyne, Griffin, Macleod, Murray, Hall, Osborne… the list of notable classicists who have studied here, if not even taught tutorials themselves, is immense. Surely it is only common sense that the University should continue this tradition, a duty both to itself and to the discipline of classics more broadly?
You would have thought so. But the changes to the Mods syllabus (the equivalent of Prelims, exams which classicists sit in Hilary term of their second year) make alarming reading for anyone invested in the subject. The most striking change is the removal of the Iliad and the Aeneid, two works it is vital to study because of their fundamental influence on all of the rest of ancient culture. They have been replaced by an anthology of texts, including such niche works as Terence’s Adelphoe and Lucian’s True Histories, interesting in their own right but surely not fitting to be studied by classicists at the very start of their degrees.
Whilst the Iliad and the Aeneid can now be sat as Finals papers instead, this still means that a classicist can go through their entire degree without reading the most influential texts in the classical world. To try and understand ancient literature without the Iliad and Aeneid is like trying to understand trigonometry without algebra first.
The language of these texts is also relatively easy for a first-year student to read, certainly far easier than that of Thucydides and Tacitus, two of the authors who will replace them. The Faculty generally seems to be very apathetic to the study of classical languages, so much so that they have not yet released any details of the form of the new language papers, the website only saying that ‘grammar work’ will play some role in the course.
Reports suggest that they intend to make prose composition (translating from English into Latin or Greek) optional, offering candidates an alternative comprehension paper on a text they have prepared beforehand, little more than a memory test. But writing in other languages is an invaluable skill, giving students an awareness of structure, style and idiom which cannot be gained simply from translating into English. Any languages student could tell you that for free, yet the Classics Faculty seems unable to appreciate it.
But, for anyone who has any knowledge of the faculty, this decision is entirely, depressingly unsurprising. The centralised language classes are known to vary heavily in their quality, with the worst being little more than a recap of grammar learnt at A-Level or even GCSE. Handouts often contain mistakes and the grammar tests focus on arcane, practically irrelevant forms. Yet the Faculty also disapproves of the language classes that individual colleges run for their students, set up precisely because of their failure; they have even rejected offers from senior college language tutors to help run faculty classes. This all seems to point to a faculty that believes classics can be taught without in-depth study of original languages, a notion which has gained currency recently but is undoubtedly absurd: it’s like the Old Testament without Hebrew, Dante without Italian — English students must even learn Old English before studying Beowulf. The simple fact is that so many fundamental aspects of literary criticism, from style to tone to word choice, cannot be properly appreciated in translation.
At this point an important caveat should be made: whilst no longer “the hardest set of exams in the world”, (as Cherwell once called it), the demands are still brutal, with candidates sitting more papers at Mods than at Finals. It is no secret that the Mods term is perhaps the most gruelling in the whole four years. Moreover, students with no prior experience of Latin or Greek at Oxford seem to be at a disadvantage: in the past three years they have made up a third of the intake, but only a fifth of the First Class results at Mods. But surely the fact that someone’s experience of languages before Oxford makes more of a difference to their result than the five terms of teaching they have received here is just another damning indictment of the faculty?
Indeed, this attitude is simply infantilising towards classics students, many of whom became interested in the subject precisely because of the linguistic side. It is especially patronising to those who have not studied Latin or Greek before: the enthusiasm and commitment to study a subject you have little prior experience of should not be underestimated. You are forced to ask: who do these reforms actually benefit? Clearly not the students, nor many of the professors, with some even using their lectures to show their sadness/disgust/indignation at the changes to the course. Even worse, one tutor noted that placing less emphasis on language will have a knock-on effect on schools and their teaching, just as the government has decided to pull the plug on funding for Latin lessons: any idea that these reforms will promote equality is simply naive and misguided.
The changes to Mods are detrimental to the study of both language and literature, demeaning to tutors and tutees alike, and will perhaps even be harmful to the teaching of classics throughout the country. This is a faculty that is unable to live up to the standards of its own staff and students.
