Princeton Eliminates any Reason to Hire its Classics Students

A friend sent me notice of a (slightly garbled) news report from Princeton. Apparently it is true. According to the Princeton Alumni Weekly, Princeton has eliminated "the requirement for classics majors to take Greek or Latin." 

In classics, two major changes were made. The “classics” track, which required an intermediate proficiency in Greek or Latin to enter the concentration, was eliminated, as was the requirement for students to take Greek or Latin. Students still are encouraged to take either language if it is relevant to their interests in the department. The breadth of offerings remains the same, said Josh Billings, director of undergraduate studies and professor of classics. The changes ultimately give students more opportunities to major in classics. 

Since Greek and Latin are the basis for any major in classics, a classics major who graduates knowing neither does not qualify as a classics major.

Back in the nineteenth century, both Greek and Latin were required to be admitted to college. First, the general requirement for entrance was dropped, but one could at least expect a classics major to know them. Now, apparently, Ivy League classics graduates can graduate without knowing either. Does this mean that Princeton classics graduates are guilty of false advertising, or is it Princeton itself that is?

Many years ago, BYU had that problem (long ago rectified) and Hugh Nibley had a withering critique of it:

The indispensable key to the past is language, and in our Utah schools we have always affected a unique and intense interest in the ancient world. We have tried to open the lock without the key: only in Utah can you take advanced courses in the fine points of Greek literature from a man who does not know a word of Greek, but who, in the name of scholarship, has driven hundreds of young people from the Church (I have run into them everywhere); only here can you attend public lectures on the Dead Sea Scrolls by savants who cannot read a line of them; only here can you study classical and Near Eastern civilization and thought under experts to whom a line of Horace or the Talmud might as well be Chinese; only here can you listen to discourses on the philology of the Tower of Babel by authorities who know no language but English, and so on and so on--it is unbelievable. (Hugh Nibley, "Nobody to Blame," Eloquent Witness [Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 2008], 132-33).

This may not necessarily be true of BYU now (though it is still true of Mormon historians), but apparently, this will now be true of Princeton and Princeton graduates.

You speak for others when you protest that you are wasting your time taking required courses that never go very deep and keep you from learning the things you should. Such courses exist in all graduate schools--for the sake of the teachers, not the students. The idea is that a large number of courses and a large staff teaching them make a good college. But forty sparrows do not make an eagle, forty house cats do not make a lion, and forty survey courses do not make a scholar. Moreover, if you bring together forty men, each of whom knows a little Latin or math, the result is not the equivalent of consulting just one person with a good knowledge of those subjects. (Nibley, "Nobody to Blame," 135.)

Apparently consulting forty Princeton grads will not be the equivalent of consulting just one person with a good knowledge of Greek or Latin.

Perhaps the Princeton alumni had the most interesting comments. Mark Davies noted:

“Classics lite” would be a good description of this major, but perhaps “classical civilization” would do, in order to distinguish the “classics” majors who are literate in both Greek and Latin. How elitist! Pardon my cynicism, but a classics faculty about three times as large as the one I knew clearly aims to increase enrollments for its own benefit. The paucity of minorities in traditional classics is a matter of economics, not racism.

Stephen William Foster claimed:

It is difficult indeed to understand how that change would “provide new perspectives” or “make the field better.” Apart from keeping these languages as our collective cultural heritage, attracting students who have not had Greek or Latin in high school is no argument for the change; many high schools have not offered those languages in decades, while this change would make that even less likely due to fewer people being able to teach it. . . .

Eliminating the language requirement is a deterioration of rigor rather than an improvement. It undermines Princeton’s mission as a standard-bearer of excellence in scholarly endeavor. Shame on the faculty for its shortsightedness.

J. David Garmon argued:

Undoubtedly, the humanities have faced increasing challenges over the years attracting students; and the rigors of even intermediate proficiency in Latin or Greek are well known to anyone who has attempted it. However, for the classics department to abandon the foundation of its discipline is like an engineering department abandoning mathematics and physics — two notoriously rigorous areas of study — in hopes of creating a “more vibrant intellectual community.”

A truly vibrant and intellectually honest community must always demand rigor and integrity in its self-examination, which in this case would require acknowledging, however heartbreaking it might be, that the classics department is no longer able to attract the intellectual horsepower it once did and that it is dumbing down its curriculum in keeping with the current “tastes” of undergraduates. Evading a clear statement of this difficult realty is a departure from the values of integrity and honesty that are the bedrock of any intellectual endeavor and is a disservice to the community of scholars who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of truth.

In my experience, "creating a vibrant intellectual community" is a euphemism for "a wholesale abandoning of intellectual rigor in pursuit of a political ideology."

Then again, this is the classics department at Princeton, whose classics professors have been involved in questionable conduct (here, here, here, here, and here), and accused of sexual harassment. So perhaps one should not be surprised.

I can list some of my own reasons why Greek and Latin are worth learning.

1. There are only a handful of languages which will unlock the key to thousands of years of history in multiple locations (which sadly eliminates Egyptian): Akkadian, Greek, Latin, Chinese, and Arabic.
2. If you know Latin, you can wander all over Europe and actually read inscriptions left at places.
   
3. When your child comes up to you and asks the meaning of this song that he is singing, you might be able to answer him.
4. In graduate school, we were assigned to read a particular manuscript, the introduction to which was written two hundred years ago, and so, of course, was in Latin. As the only Egyptologist in the room who had had any Latin, I had to provide a translation at sight.
5. I use Greek constantly. Working in Greco-Roman Egypt, Greek is simply a necessity.
6. While many of the texts are translated, it is usually more difficult to find a translation than the original text. For some texts, however, there are no translations.
7. Knowing the original language makes it possible to determine when some of the translations are wrong, or suspect. 
8. When working with a text like the Septuagint (which is an ancient translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek), every reason that one would want consult the Septuagint is only available in Greek.
   

I recommend studying Greek and Latin given the chance. I cannot recommend doing so at Princeton.

My reaction to the news was to go do the one thing that a Princeton classics graduate will not be able to do. Go read some Latin.

The Interconnected Ancient World I: Chinese Influence on Roman Policy

The late Hugh Nibley once observed: “There are no fields—there are only problems!”—meaning that one must bring to the discussion and solution of any given problem whatever is required to understand it: If the problems calls for a special mathematics, one must get it; if it calls for three or four languages, one must get them; if it takes twenty years, one must be prepared to give it twenty years—or else shift to some other problem.[1]

Fields of study compartmentalize the ancient world into discrete areas that make study more manageable. Once one has learned Latin, for example, a brave new world of literature has been opened to view. Thousands of previously inaccessible works await the eager reader. One can make a discipline of Latin studies and limit it to works written in Latin. Everything is neat and discrete and contained. The only problem is that the ancient world was never neat, discrete and contained. Anyone who has studied much Latin can tell you that Latin was constantly interacting with Greek, to the point that classics majors find they must study both Greek and Latin to understand the Roman world where the vast majority of the bureaucratic apparatus was established by the Greeks and simply taken over by the Romans who continued it mostly in Greek.

But surely the Roman world, centered on the Mediterranean, was isolated from remote regions such as Xin Dynasty China! Alas, such was not the case. Therein lies a tale.

After the death of the dissolute Han emperor Aidi (7-1 BC), Wang Mang took charge of China. After his two puppet emperors died untimely deaths, he made himself emperor of a new dynasty, the Xin dynasty. Wang Mang initiated a number of reforms such as redistributing the land and banning the sale of slaves, both of which he was forced to take back because many of his “reforms did not actually improve the economic position of any class.”[2] They made him so unpopular that when a rebellion broke out in AD 23 he found himself without friends and was killed.

One of Wang Mang’s reforms is of particular interest. The emperor took gold money out of circulation and insisted that all gold must be exchanged for copper. The effect of this regulation was to take gold out of circulation and concentrate it in the hands of the emperor. Indeed, when Wang Mang died the Chinese treasury held more gold than the entire supply in circulation in Medieval Europe.[3]

In the Roman world, gold coins started to be used in 46 B.C., after the Romans had siphoned off the precious metals of the Mediterranean and the gold coins of “Macedon, Carthage, Ptolemaic Egypt, and Gaul had ceased to circulate.” [4] Gold coins became the norm when one wanted to convey large sums of money, or to more easily conceal one’s money, or when one wanted to trade outside the Roman Empire.[5]

By the Han Dynasty, eastern China was producing a wide variety of silk which, as a light and easily transported luxury good, found its way from Korea to Syria.[6] By the first century B.C. a fortified silk road had developed between China around the Taklimakan desert to the Sogdians and Parthians took over and took the silk to the Roman empire.[7] Alternate trade routes developed, partially as a means to insure trade in case the Parthians and Romans were at war, which they frequently were.[8]

The Roman writer Seneca wrote, “I see silk clothes, if they can be called clothes, which can protect neither the body nor the modesty.”[9] The emperor Tiberius complained that the women’s dress was diverting Roman wealth to foreign nations.[10] In the middle of the first century, Roman taste for exotic imports cost the empire 100,000,000 sesterces to the East of which 55,000,000 sesterces went to India alone.[11] Since the Romans had nothing besides gold that the Chinese wanted and the Chinese would not allow the gold to circulate, gold going to China was gold going into a black hole. Under such circumstances, Tiberius supposedly banned the wearing of silk.[12] The Chinese emperor was affecting decisions by the Roman emperor.

Even in the ancient world, the world was interconnected and a change in one part of the world could cause a chain reaction elsewhere.

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[1] Hugh W. Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Abraham (Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 2009), 49.

[2] Homer H. Dubs, “Wang Mang and his Economic Reforms,” T’uong Pao, 35/4 (1940): 220.

[3] Ann Paludan, Chronicle of the Chinese Emperors (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998), 42-43.

[4] Christopher Howgego, “The Supply and Use of Money in the Roman World 200 B.C. to A.D. 300,” The Journal of Roman Studies 82 (1992): 2, 5, 10.

[5] Howgego, “Supply and Use of Money in the Roman World,” 11-12.

[6] Michael Loewe, “Spices and Silk: Aspects of World Trade in the First Seven Centuries of the Christian Era,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2 (1971): 169.

[7] Loewe, “Spices and Silk,” 172.

[8] J. Thorley, “The Development of Trade between the Roman Empire and the East under Augustus,” Greece and Rome 16/2 (1969): 215-16.

[9] Seneca, De Beneficiis, 7.9.5.

[10] Tacitus, Annals 3.53.

[11] Loewe, “Spices and Silk,” 173.

[12] Paludan, Chronicle of the Chinese Emperors, 43.

Reading the Gospel of Judas VII: Contemporary Conspiracy

If Dante consigned Judas to the lowest circle of hell, gnawed by the devil himself, two other figures shared the same fate: Brutus and Cassius.[1] In the time of Jesus these two were the most recent and thus best known examples of treachery. Because of the pivotal role they played in Roman history, they would continue to be well-known figures inspiring such literary works as Dante and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Gaius Cassius and Marcus Brutus were Roman senators. Julius Caesar, the first Roman emperor, did come off occasionally as arrogant. The Roman Senate felt that Caesar insulted them by not standing to greet them.[2] Though Caesar had declined the title of king, some of the senators wanted to press the title anyway.

Because his enemies shrank from agreeing to this proposal, they pressed on with their plans for his assassination. Several groups, each consisting of two or three malcontents, now united in a general conspiracy.[3]

And so,

More than sixty conspirators banded together against him, led by Gaius Cassius and Marcus and Decimus Brutus.[4]

The latter two Caesar had treated like adopted sons since their mother was his favorite mistress.[5]

And so, on March 15, when Caesar was visiting the Senate for a meeting, he was stabbed twenty-three times. The physician Antistius concluded at the autopsy that the second wound, to the chest, killed Caesar. That blow had been delivered by Marcus Brutus, to whom Caesar is said to have spoken his last words: “You, too, my child.”[6]

The death of Caesar, however, had not been the end of the plot:

It had been decided to drag the dead man down to the Tiber, confiscate his property, and revoke all his edicts; but fear of Mark Antony, the Consul, and Lepidus, the Master of Horse, kept the assassins from making their plans good.[7]

Instead the result was another Roman civil war where one adopted son, Octavius, defeated the other adopted son, Brutus, and went on to become the emperor Augustus, in whose days Jesus was born (and likely others of the apostles as well).

This would have been the story of treachery that would have come to the mind of most citizens and subjects of the Roman empire when Judas betrayed Jesus.

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[1] Dante, Inferno 34.61-69.

[2] Suetonius, Julius Caesar, 78-79. I will quote from Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, The Twelve Casears, trans. Robert Graves (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1957).

[3] Suetonius, Julius Caesar, 80.

[4] Suetonius, Julius Caesar, 80.

[5] Suetonius, Julius Caesar, 50.

[6] Suetonius, Julius Caesar, 82.

[7] Suetonius, Julius Caesar, 82.

An Outside View

In the early years of the Twentieth Century Theodor Hopfner assembled a massive, five volume, collection of all the Greek and Roman sources discussing Egyptian religion.[1] Looking through his compendia it is hard not to be impressed with Hopfner’s diligence and erudition. He seems to have read and extracted everything conceivable on his subject. Not only are all the major classical authors included but even the most obscure authors are as well. His thoroughness is daunting. Yet for all his effort, his work gathers dust on the shelf. The only time I can recall it ever being cited is in Hugh Nibley’s works. It is not because Hopfner is not accurate or encyclopedic but for another reason.

Classical authors writing about Egyptian religion are outsiders, not insiders. We have thousands of documents written by insiders who knew their religion better and actually understood it. There is thus no reason to rely on accounts written by outsiders who clearly did not understand the religion correctly. Hence Hopfer is neglected because his work is largely irrelevant. Outsiders rarely get details correct. One of the few outside accounts given any credence is Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride. One cannot help wondering why this fanciful tale is trusted because it is not corroborated by native sources. It is probably because Plutarch spins a good yarn even if it isn’t accurate.

Plutarch is a sympathetic source. Other authors were downright hostile. One Egyptologist, for example, dismisses one such by saying: “Juvenal . . . is not relevant to the present discussion, since . . . he is a satirist for whom ridicule — directed indifferently toward Roman, Greek or Egyptian —was an occupation, . . . he was . . . not disposed to be particularly charitable, and . . . he had been expelled from Rome precisely for his propensity to compose offensive remarks.”[2] These remarks, coming from a source well-known for directing ridicule and offensive remarks indifferently, is ironic, but it is still wise counsel. In looking at religion we do well to avoid paying heed to those for whom ridicule is an occupation, who are not disposed to be charitable, and who have a propensity to compose offensive remarks.

These considerations should apply not just to ancient Egyptian religion but to the study of all religions, and particularly to Mormon studies. In looking at Latter-day Saints, with so much insider information are outsider accounts really necessary? Are those who are not disposed to be charitable relevant? Studies giving preference or even credence to such accounts seem less interested in characterizing Latter-day Saints as in caricaturing them.

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[1] Theodorus Hopfner, Fontes Historiae Religionis Aegyptiacae, 5 vols. (Bonn: A. Marus and E. Weber, 1922-25).

[2] Robert K. Ritner, Jr., “Implicit Models of Cross-Cultural Interaction: A Question of Noses, Soap, and Prejudice,” in Life in a Multi-Cultural Society: Egypt from Cambyses to Constantine and Beyond, ed. Janet H. Johnson (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 1992), 290.