For well over two millennia remarkable claims have been made regarding the educational values of training in what we now call the classical languages of the ancient Mediterranean world, and in the literatures, history, and material cultures connected with them. In various eras and in line with varying presuppositions, these studies have been promoted for the sake of civilization and humane values; as the way to intellectual enlightenment and spiritual wisdom, even salvation; as indispensable for warfare, empire, statecraft, economic prosperity, and citizenship; and as a prerequisite for the other academic disciplines, even for the more practical learned professions of architecture, medicine and law. Such educational notions should not be seen as characteristic only of what some are pleased to call Western Civilization; many if not most cultures worldwide have based educational systems on the study of their ancient antecedents, and it is remarkable how often such education has concentrated on language, writing (often literally calligraphy), and literature, rather than, for example, practical or technical expertise.
To us, as to most classicists today, many of the old claims of the Classics seem merely self-serving, patently political, absurdly turgid, or just outdated; and yet we still cling to the claim that the classics major is one of the most superb instruments in the liberal arts panoply, both as a means towards general human cultivation and as a path to many academic careers. These, then, are our two main objectives: our major program should be directed both towards liberal arts education broadly conceived, and to certain preprofessional ends.
First, the liberal arts. Not only are they cultivated to develop the mental, physical, and social capacities of students, but also to draw us out of the narrow world into which we were born and help us become conscious, responsible inhabitants of our natural setting, conversant with universal human experience, and fellow citizens of many eras and worlds. A classics major is so quintessential an experience of the liberal arts because it includes a) extremely rigorous technical training, b) immersion in superb literature and art, c) remarkably challenging and sophisticated historical, philosophical and theological study. The field of classics, perhaps the oldest of academic fields, is also from a modern point of view the most experimental and novel in that it has always been an essentially interdisciplinary field. Not all professional classicists, let alone undergraduates, are equally adept at all the aspects of the field; but no classical study can ignore even one of these aspects, and our major curriculum is designed to give Carleton students some experience with them all. Here we would like to elaborate a bit on how the three aspects of the classics listed above are addressed by the major program at Carleton.
a) Technical rigor comes not only from the study of the ancient languages with their highly developed grammatical structure, but also from the formidable discipline of comprehending the thoughts of people extremely remote in time and place and giving expression to their ideas in modern terms. Ancient literary theory and practice also can be pursued only with an extremely elaborate set of technical terminology and concepts, no less than ancient art and architecture. The undergraduate classics major, just like the professional classicist, must start with and keep returning to the basis of our field, highly exacting work with the languages themselves and their surviving texts. This occurs not only in the elementary courses, but recurs inevitably as we advance to reading ancient authors.
b) The extraordinary thrill and privilege of reading the ancient authors in their own voices motivates classics students through yet more technical drudgery as they are suddenly plunged into the mature literature of a highly developed culture. Our majors choose from a range of advanced courses in most of the best-loved ancient authors, who are offered in considerable variety in rotation.
c) Our history courses are designed to give experience with interpreting at least a significant portion of the enormously varied evidence upon which ancient history is based: texts, not only historical but also oratorical, epistolary, legal, ritual, and literary; inscriptions on a huge variety of monuments and coins; archaeological, palaeological, and geographical remains. This evidence is fragmentary and often appears self-contradictory, so that critical judgment must be cultivated in interpretation. And the cultures which we try to reconstruct from these remains are profoundly different from our own.
Many people in academic circles adhere to the notion that there is such a thing as Greco-Roman Civilization, which is somehow the basis of a monolithic and comprehensible something which is called Western Civilization. In fact the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean world were many, not one, and can hardly be understood as the basis of the contemporary cultures of northwestern Europe and north America. In fact, the ancient Mediterranean cultures are much closer to being ancestors of a great many cultures of today's "Third World," with the result that in studying ancient history the classics major encounters a profound multi-cultural experience, and must develop a considerable multi-cultural imagination.
Although we do not require courses in ancient philosophy and religion, many of the former are available at Carleton; and as for religion, the literary texts are so imbued with it that it becomes familiar to classicists, and thus provides another aspect of liberal arts training. Ancient philosophy and religion have close connections indeed to contemporary European and American thought, and so offer the classics student a splendid opportunity to develop understanding of the spiritual aspects of contemporary life. But we should not forget that from the ancient Mediterranean world come also such significant non-Western phenomena as the group of "Eastern Orthodox" Christian churches, and the worldwide expressions of Islam.
As a preprofessional course, the classics major provides the prerequisite training for graduate programs in such interdisciplinary fields as classics, archaeology, near-Eastern studies, and ancient and mediaeval history. But a classics major, supplemented by courses in other fields, is also excellent preprofessional preparation for art history, English, Romance languages, comparative literature, linguistics, philosophy, history of religion, theology, and seminary training. Past Carleton classics majors of our acquaintance have entered nearly all of these fields.
The four major programs in Classical Languages, Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies, plus our concentration in Archaeology, offer a variety of experiences for classics majors. The four major programs move in the order they are listed from the most linguistically rigorous, which a student who wanted to enter a graduate program in the field should take, towards a program which allows a student maximum time to take more literature and civilization courses as an alternative to courses in Latin and Greek authors. Unfortunately, very few American students come to college prepared to plunge into reading the ancient authors; they must take elementary courses in maybe one but usually both of the ancient languages. This produces a troublesome conflict for us between the need for depth in learning languages and important texts, and the need for breadth in covering the great range of classical authors and the important topics of classical civilization. The purpose of the four-track program is to help us fit our courses to the various needs of our majors.
It may be useful to explain how both our upper-level courses in classical authors and our comps work to fulfill the two objectives of the major, the educational and the preprofessional. In order to help solve the dilemma of getting sufficient breadth as well as depth, almost all of the author courses involve reading one text or a portion thereof in the original Latin or Greek, plus reading a wide spectrum of the author's other works in English translation. To develop skills of judgment, interpretation, and appreciation these courses also require major papers either in addition to or as an alternative to a final essay exam; but during the course detailed technical challenges are regularly offered towards understanding the language of the text read in the original and developing language skills generally. The same two-prong approach can be seen in our cluster of comps exercises, which include basic skills hurdles in the form of sight translation exams in prose and poetry in each student's relevant languages, as well as a major paper involving both research and the exercise of the interpretive imagination