When I told my sister-in-law the title of this presentation, she told me that it sounded rather self-serving. Granted, she has never been one to mince her words, but there is nonetheless a good deal of truth in what she said. You see, I began my career in education not as a Latin teacher but as an adjunct professor of philosophy, and while I would like to say that I devoted all of my time in graduate school poring over the works of the classical philosophers, the fact is I was at that time far more interested in Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida than I was in Epictetus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Cicero, and Seneca. This is not to say that the latter names were unknown to me; far from it, in fact. I had studied all of them in college, and I even spent a good deal of time reading Lucretius, Cicero, and Seneca in Latin. But I was very young back then, and Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God had a much greater appeal to me than did Lucretius’ adaptation of the atomic theory of Democritus. It wasn’t until I started teaching Latin that I took a more careful look at the classical philosophers, especially those who wrote in Latin.
During my first few years as a Latin teacher, introducing my students to works like Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura or Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations or Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones was a sort of guilty pleasure. A part of me felt that I could be using the time much more wisely, introducing my students to larger portions of the more canonical works. Another part of me recognized, despite my relative inexperience, that there may have been a deeper significance to the fact that I enjoyed teaching the more philosophical works – something beyond my own fascination with philosophy. For not only did I enjoy teaching the philosophical works; my students enjoyed learning about them as well. Of course, one must be careful when assessing a curriculum based upon the pleasure one’s students derive from it; many of my students would be quite content, I think, if we spent four years reading the model sentences and stories at the ends of chapters 1-10 of Jenney’s First Year Latin. That said, I have heard a number of students say that of all the Latin authors they’d read over the course of four years of Latin study their favorite was Lucretius. Now, one might fault Lucretius for many things – his excessive melancholy, his rather lofty attitude, his abundance of neologisms – but I doubt anyone in their right mind would accuse him of being too easy. So why on earth did my students enjoy reading and discussing him? I would even go so far as to say that studying Lucretius and the other Roman philosophers was a guilty pleasure for them as well. It was not at all uncommon for them to plead with me for an “off-day,” by which they meant, not a day of watching Troy or Gladiator but a day of studying philosophy. What was it – what is it – about philosophy in general and Roman philosophy in particular that resonates with them? This I have asked myself for many years, and in what follows I shall attempt to articulate what I believe is the answer.
Let’s begin with philosophy in general. Ever since the time of Socrates, young people have been attracted to philosophy, and while Socrates was perhaps the original “corruptor of the youth,” it seems likely that elders were urging the young people of their communities to ask questions long before he came along. We can chalk this up, partly at least, to youthful iconoclasm – but only partly. It would be hasty and overly facile, I think, to dismiss young people’s enthusiasm for philosophy as nothing more than a will to bring down the hallowed walls of tradition. To return to the figure of Socrates, it is undeniable that a good measure of his seductive power, particularly for the young, lies in his ability to make pompous men look like idiots. At the same time, however, Socrates was no sophist, and although he seldom if ever provided answers to the questions he asked, he was always perfectly clear about why he asked his questions: he always held before him the hope that he was coming ever closer to discovering how it is that human beings ought to live. And the example he thereby set for his students resonated with them to such a degree that we find Plato, his most gifted pupil, naming Socrates - well after his youthful fervor had dissipated - the wisest, most just, and best man he had ever known.
It would seem, then, that the philosopher – and the study that she or he represents – has an appeal for young people that runs deeper than mere intellectual bravado. But what is that deeper appeal?
This is where the Roman philosophers come in. Traditional scholarship maintains that the Romans contributed little or nothing to the enterprise of Western philosophy. After all, the Romans, unlike the Greeks, who created philosophy, were a hard-nosed and pragmatic people; they had no time for lofty metaphysical speculation. One is reminded of that famous passage in Book VI of Vergil’s Aeneid in which the poet speaks of the accomplishments peculiar to the Romans – the very practical accomplishments of war and governance – or of Cato the Censor’s admonition to the Roman people of the potentially corruptive influence of those three philosophical ambassadors who came to Rome from Athens in 155 b.c.e. Whether or not it is true that the Romans made no positive contribution to Western philosophy (I happen to believe that it is not true), it is certainly the case that the Romans were overwhelmed by the cultural achievements of the Greeks, philosophy among them. And while the Romans may well have been practical by temperament, the philosophy of the period in which they rose to eminence in the Mediterranean world – the so-called “silver age” or “Hellenistic” period – was likewise practical. To all the great schools of that period – Stoicism, Epicureanism, etc. – questions of physics and logic, metaphysics and epistemology were considered ancillary to questions of ethics: what is happiness and how does one go about achieving it? Now, without going into a lengthy exploration of the various reasons for this shift away from “ivory tower” philosophy and toward a “philosophy for the people,” it should suffice for our purposes to note that such a shift did occur and that our practical Romans found themselves presented with a philosophy to which they could relate.
But what does all of this have to do with the question of why my students dig the study of philosophy in general and of the Roman philosophers in particular?
At the risk of sounding trite, let’s consider for a moment the kinship between our time and the time in which figures like Lucretius, Cicero, and Seneca; Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius were making their ideas known to the people of the Roman world. To begin, we, like Rome, are a superpower, and just as we are at once revered and reviled by the global community, so was Rome. We find ourselves looking back nostalgically to a time when life was simpler and our values more genuine; so did the Romans. We deplore materialism outwardly but inwardly suspect that our lives will improve in proportion to the amount of wealth we acquire; so did the Romans. We have become obsessed with spectacles; so had the Romans. I could go on and on, citing one example after another, but I believe the point has been made. We are the new Rome.
There is one difference, however – an important one. While the Romans could, if they wished, turn to the Hellenistic and Roman philosophers for direction, we have no real contemporary equivalents. Our philosophers have been relegated to the academy, and it would seem that they wouldn’t have it any other way. They divide their time between the careful analysis of language and squabbling over largely inconsequential problems, and woe to the student who looks to them for guidance on life’s most pressing issues. This is not to say, of course, that no one is addressing these issues; talk show hosts, radio personalities, and newspaper columnists grapple with them every day, and I would venture to guess that not a single week passes without the publication of a new self-help book. These latter, and not our contemporary philosophers, are the modern-day’s answer to the Hellenistic and Roman philosophers.
The trouble is that there are a great many who find the reflections of these latter-day “philosophers” not just unsatisfying but downright nauseating. Who in their right mind would deliberately send their children to Jerry Springer, Howard Stern, or even Chicken Soup for the Soul in their quest for answers to life’s big questions?
The good news is that by and large “life’s big questions” do not change, and the answers provided by the Hellenistic and Roman philosophers are every bit as relevant today as they were two thousand years ago. I would contend, in fact, that they are more relevant today than they were a hundred or even fifty years ago, given the remarkable likenesses I mentioned between our world and that of the Romans.
Consider, for example, the question, “What is the goal of human life?” When I raise this question for the first time in a class, my students look at me quizzically, clearly wondering what this has to do with Latin. Once I’ve explained to them that language study involves a whole lot more than memorizing forms and vocabulary and requires an engagement with the culture in which a language is (or was) spoken AND that coming to terms with the sorts of questions the Romans asked and with the answers they provided to them is an important part of grasping the cultural backdrop of Latin, they begin to think about the question. Is there a goal to human life? If so, is it the same goal for all human beings? And my students can be remarkably savvy. One might say that life-goals are relative to a given culture, that what we Americans living in the twenty-first century believe to be the goal of human life is not the same as what the ancient Romans believed. Another might consider the question from the point of view of biology and say that the goal of human life is survival, both personal survival and the survival of one’s family and/or species. Here I might point out to them that the Roman philosophers believed, following the lead of Aristotle, that the goal of human life is happiness, and, more often than not, all but the most irascible of students will concede this point: we all want to be happy.
The next question, of course, is, “What is happiness and how do we go about achieving it?” In response to this question, at least half of my students will say that money will make them happy – and who can blame them? They are fed this rubbish every day of their lives. But there’s always one student who raises her hand and says that she knows of at least one person who has a whole lot of money but is nevertheless miserable. Very true! The class agrees. But if money will not make us happy, what will? Fame? No, there are plenty of famous people who are completely wretched. Well, maybe a life full of pleasure and pleasant things will make us happy, another student says. Aha, I say – that is precisely what Lucretius believed. Oh, we like this Lucretius fellow, they say; anyone who believes that the best life is one dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure is OK in our book. Ah, but what is pleasure? Certainly, food and drink can bring us pleasure, but too much food and drink will bring us pain. As it turns out, a life devoted to a maximization of pleasure would necessarily involve a strict moderation – nothing in excess, Horace’s “mediocritas aurea.” And so on and so forth.
What this hypothetical class has shown, I hope, is that the Roman philosophers, introduced into a Latin classroom, can get students thinking about questions they would do very well to ask – especially in this day and age, when the conventional answers are not just hackneyed but downright destructive. More than this, the Roman philosophers will provide them much better guidance in their attempt to formulate their own answers to these questions than most if not all of what is otherwise available to them. Finally, such an introduction will serve to bring the ancient Romans – those who spoke and lived the language they are studying – much closer to them.
And so what I once indulged in as a guilty pleasure has become an integral part of my curriculum, as central as the poetry of Catullus, Horace, and Vergil, the orations of Cicero, the history of Caesar, Livy, and Tacitus, and the letters of Pliny.
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