The first time I finished The Iliad, suffering the stab of those final words “And so they buried Hector, breaker of horses,” I wandered out into the moonlight and cried over an age of heroism that had died long before my life ever began. I wept for Hector. I wept for myself. I wept for the past and for the future. Perhaps it strikes you as a silly thing to cry over a book which largely recounts a glorified bloodbath and the feats of ill-behaved characters, some of whom never existed. For my part, I can think of few better things to cry over, and I know myself to be in good company. Alexander the Great’s adoration of Achilles is well-documented, and, according to Plutarch, he slept with a copy of The Iliad under his pillow (Life of Alexander, 8). Keats composed a euphoric sonnet after reading a particularly delightful new translation of the work (“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” 1816). And countless men and women throughout history have drawn inspiration Homer’s epic for their art, poetry, films, and literature. The Iliad has never lost its capacity to reach through history and stab the human heart with a longing for glory, honour, and heroism.
Certainly, much about the epic can and has been debated ad nauseam, with critics and scholars tearing it apart layer by layer until the beloved poem lies in tatters. Such is the nature of academia. But for those of us who dabble little in Homeric criticism, The Iliad remains much as it always was, exquisite English translations proffering its delights upon the modern reader with little less beauty than the Classical Greek. Both Robert Fagles’ powerfully rendered opening lines (“Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, / murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, / hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls…”) and Alexander Pope’s poetic translation (Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring / Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing! / That wrath which hurl’d to / Pluto’s gloomy reign / The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain) capture something of the beauty of the original Greek: μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων.
Yet, it is not, I would argue, the poetic brilliance of The Iliad that has gripped the souls of readers separated by language and culture, across time and space. It seems to matter little whether one reads the original Greek or enjoys a graphic novel rendering—the effect remains much the same. The epic strikes at the very marrow of what it means to be human. The soul, forced to transcend from the confines of a single little life and see itself within the great expanse of history, longs, if only for a moment, to incarnate the greatest of what it means to be human. The Iliad is great not because it is imagination stirring, but because it is, at its most fundamental level, soul-forming.
I use the term “soul-forming” to quite literally denote the capacity of literature to make an imprint upon our transcendental souls, with which we are far too often careless. This is, no doubt, because we have largely ceased to believe in their existence. It is easy to overlook and abuse something you refuse to acknowledge. Unhappy couples manage to do this quite adeptly—the challenge is that their spouse does not disappear as a result, but merely grows bitter. Similarly, we do not, by ignoring our souls, banish their existence. We may corrupt, but we cannot destroy. The effects of this reality may be seen in the collective soul of our culture, which I have written about elsewhere and need not explore again here. We do profound damage when we treat as though it does not exist the part of ourselves which most fundamentally underpins our existence. Our souls will be formed whether we acknowledge them or not; the question is merely how.
In his dialogue Phaedrus, Plato describes the soul as a chariot pulled through the air by two winged horses, one noble and white, seeking to fly towards the heavens, and the other corrupt and black, attempting to descend towards the earth. A charioteer drives the horses, wrestling with their conflicting wills. If he puts before them what is good, true, beautiful, and just, the wings of the horses will grow and they will rise upwards. If, however, they are exposed to what is debased and corrupt, their wings will shrink until the chariot is inevitably dragged back to earth. So too, Plato suggests, the soul. It is formed by what it is fed. Either it will be sustained and elevated, or it will be tainted and made ignoble. Souls, in a very metaphysical sense, are what they eat.
This, then, brings me to the classics, though my thesis should by now be rather obvious. I read the classics because literature is soul-forming. It is well enough to read airport paperbacks to pass the time on a trans-Atlantic flight or while stretched out in the summer sun. I too love a good thriller. But how would I fare if my literary diet consisted strictly of thriller or fantasy? Over the course of a summer, perhaps the effect would be hardly noticeable. Even our physiques are the result of diet compounded over time. So too with the soul. It must be nourished if it is to be sustained, and nourished well if it is to be elevated. As vegetables are to the body, so are classics to the soul.
This latter claim demands a defence, partially because we no longer hold the presumption that classics are better merely because they are “classics.” Contemporary society is imbued with a hefty dose of what C.S. Lewis deems “chronological snobbery”—the presumption that new thinking, values, and beliefs are superior to the antediluvian modes held by earlier generations. Classics are, as a result, often regarded as outdated or irrelevant at best, and (increasingly) racist or misogynistic at worst, incapable of adding anything of value to our lives and worth little more than to be used as kindling for a fire. What is the value of teasing out Socrates’ convoluted questions on justice, of following Dante and Virgil’s journey into the inferno, of painstakingly translating Xenophon’s Anabasis from its original Greek? In a world marked by wars and protests, social transformation and technological progress, civic disunity and political polarization, why bother reading Plato or Petrarch or Locke?
To this, the answer is simple: we should read classics precisely because that is the world in which we live. Truth, goodness, and beauty are not transient. It is true, we do not live in the Graeco-Roman Empire, in Renaissance Italy, or in Enlightenment France. And yet, we nonetheless occupy at the most fundamental level the same world inhabited by Plato, Petrarch, and Locke—a world in which the questions “What is true? How ought we to live? How can justice be determined?” are no less important than they were at the dawn of human history. Where chronological snobbery demands we answer these questions ourselves, turning to the classics allows us to enter humbly into a timeless dialogue with those who have wrestled with such questions before us. The books that have survived from periods preceding our own, having been deemed by the democracy of mankind to possess sufficient transcendent meaning so as to be worth sharing and preserving, now make up the collectanea we deem “the classics.” Plato has not survived the ruthless winnowing of history because his dialogues are old. There was a time when not even Plato’s dialogues were considered classics. Rather, Plato has survived because his dialogues were deemed timeless, capable of transcending time and culture to shed light on enduring questions.
It may then be asked, “Very well, there may be value in classics that speak enduringly of the good, the true, and the beautiful, but what about the those that don’t? What about the books that say little, if anything, about such timeless virtues?” It is a just question. And yet, I would argue, there is even value in old books on the sole virtue of their oldness. I speak here as a scholar of history, having spent many long hours pouring over admittedly dry historical passages for the vague purpose of understanding some civilization far removed from me and with little practical interest to anyone else. Yet, the burden of reading history is imbued with its own meaning: that of learning to value the human experience during periods other than one’s own not because it is beneficial but because it is shared. I have little in common with the Qumran community of Second Temple Period Judaea—and that is precisely why reading the Dead Sea Scrolls is valuable. Doing so demands I transcend above the presumption that mine is the only world that matters. The stories of others are valuable on their own merits, regardless of whether or not they add explicit benefit to my own life, because they relentlessly remind me of shared humanity amidst striking difference.
Why, then, should we read the classics? In a word, because we are human. Because we have the same questions and curiosities of those who have preceded us and, indeed, of those who will follow after us. Because our stories are not the only stories that matters, and because it is important to transcend our little lives and dare, if only for a moment, to embody the greatest of what it means to be human—justice, courage, wisdom, charity. Because the things that matter most are the things that have always mattered the most. And, perhaps most importantly, because our souls will be formed—whether intentionally or carelessly—and because we are the charioteers who guide them.
1 thought on “Why I Read the Classics—and Why You Should Too”
Beautifully written! I thought the most interesting aspect of your article was how reading and pondering the classics are soul forming. How musing past ages through literature somehow anchors the soul with similarities of the past and discovering the true, good and beautiful. Is that what facilitates soul forming?
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