As an English and Classics major, I receive an interesting range of responses when I tell other people about my majors. Not about the English major, of course—that one’s pretty self-explanatory, but about the second one. The responses range from, “Wait, do you actually have to learn Latin?!” to “That’s a major?” to “Cool,” the last one in a rather uncertain, tentative voice. Incidentally, as a Classics major, I have to learn both Latin and Greek. Yeah. Even more telling is the fact that many people don’t know where Grosvenor House is, the location of the Classics Department and many Classics classes. It does look like a house, which many people assume is its only function. It’s not.
Perhaps I should explain a bit about my entry into the Classics major. Many Classics majors have taken Latin in high school, unlike me. I took Introduction to Latin during my first semester at Amherst, just for fun. I kept on taking Latin classes until I decided last semester to major in Classics, in addition to English. This semester, I’m taking my first Greek class—Attic Greek, not modern Greek—and reading Vergil and Horace in a Latin class on Augustan literature.
I enjoy reading Latin, otherwise I would have stopped after my first class. I say reading, not speaking, because I learn Latin not to communicate with other Latin speakers, Latin being a dead language—but to read and translate classical works. If this sounds dull-as-dishwater and dry-as-dust, I understand. It sometimes feels like that to me as well, usually late at night when I’m tired and staring crossly at my text, trying to untangle its grammar and comb out its meaning. At other times, I bask in the feeling of accomplishment when I decipher a particularly complicated sentence and start actually enjoying the text I’m reading. Even though millions have read the texts that I read for the first time, I still feel like the discoverer of new worlds and realms as I read the stories and philosophies that form the foundation of Western civilization and still affect us powerfully today.