Ian Hislop on the importance of Classics

I think the classics should be told both the language because it's a fantastically useful that's tool and it sets you up in so many ways for the rest of almost all education my genuine believe that helps I think it's vital to keep the literature read because it infuses so much of our civilization and whenever I find I'm dealing with contemporary issues there is always classical resonance and that's because a lot of what we think and argue and feel was put you to flee or was initiated in a very specific Classical period I mean we are we are standing on their shoulders in a sense not necessarily always as they knew better than we did or everything they did was great but I think it's difficult to to maintain this current civilization without a knowledge of where it came from my interest in the classics was fired by a teacher when I was eight who read us the Odyssey and she didn't say this is a very important cultural work she said this is a story and she used to read it at the end of the day and I'd never heard anything so brilliant and we didn't know it was meant to be good so we thought it was fabulous just as a story and it was read in extracts probably a bit like it would have been done orally you got another bit and I think I got hooked then and then I learned Latin and Greek at school which I enjoyed hugely it was taught absolutely by rote I mean all the things that are meant to be unacceptable and don't work but it was a way in and once you'd learnt it there was the pleasure of discovering the texts the accepted wisdom now is that teaching by rate is boring and unimaginative and puts people off and I must be peculiar cuz it didn't I liked learning by rote it it made it quicker and then you'd get on to the interesting bit which was translating works and actually reading these texts in in Latin or in Greek and we had a in a very strict Latin teacher who just picked on someone and there to get up and decline a word and the one I was hoped for was bellum which was war because I could remember that and you just got our backs till Dave's balloon balloon bloom believed below below blah blah blah Laura beliefs beliefs and if you made blah blah blah sound like blah blah blah um you were slightly undercutting the lesson and you might get a laugh so I was always keen for that the great thing about the classics is if you don't buy the argument about the civilization or the philosophy or the politics there's always the stories and the most fabulous stories we have which you know we're endlessly recycling and retelling I mean there's there's Homer's The Odyssey which you know I can't remember how many films I've seen recently about Troy um there's always that story there and the other one the other great one is of it and I remember we would read the metamorphosis all those stories about people changing into something else the story of narcissus looking at himself in the water until he fades awakes he's in love with himself I mean for our culture people are in love with themselves it's got quite a good story you

Channel: Classics for All

Views: 39,920

Rating: 4.9351354 out of 5

Keywords: Ian Hislop, Classics for All, Latin, Odyssey, Homer, Ancient, History, Classics, Penguin books, Little Black Classics

Id: ieXlOBHHad4

Length: 3min 46sec (226 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 07 2016