{"id":1360,"date":"2026-07-16T19:46:36","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T19:46:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1360"},"modified":"2026-07-16T19:46:36","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T19:46:36","slug":"what-ancient-greek-is-good-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1360","title":{"rendered":"What Ancient Greek Is Good For"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through <\/em>The Atlantic\u2019s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

Read more Nobody Is Getting the Data-Center Water Question Right<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Late one night in 1925, a classics professor named Carol Wight came across \u201cone of the most interesting men\u201d he\u2019d ever met. In an Atlantic<\/i> essay, Wight recalled finding a mechanic reading Thucydides on the grimy floor of his shop, a bare bulb illuminating his page. The worker said that he read the ancient historian \u201cbecause he makes me think.\u201d As though testing him, Wight asked the question every student of the classics hears at one time or another: \u201cWhat good will that do you?\u201d<\/p>\n

I was a classics major in college, which means I got this question a lot, sometimes from concerned adults, often from teasing friends. Unlike Wight\u2019s mechanic, I don\u2019t have a trade, and it didn\u2019t help that my second degree was in philosophy. If college is an investment, then what I did\u2014spending four years reading ancient Greek\u2014seems like burying gold in the backyard.<\/p>\n

By the time I graduated last year, though, something strange had happened. AI\u2019s speedrun was rendering once-marketable skills obsolete. Graduates in \u201cpractical\u201d fields such as economics and computer science heard warnings of a job apocalypse. Suddenly, everyone was asking what their education was for. The doubt sounded familiar\u2014at least to those of us who had always been told that we were studying something \u201cuseless.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1955, the acclaimed scholar Gilbert Murray wrote a defense of classical education in The<\/i> Atlantic<\/i>. Many critics found it absurd, he wrote, to dedicate so much time to learning ancient Greek and Latin\u2014\u201ctwo languages which you never mean to speak, and would nowhere be understood if you did.\u201d What good will that do you? <\/i>Students were urged instead to study \u201cpractical technology,\u201d as Murray put it: \u201cLearn nuclear fission, learn medicine and surgery, learn modern languages, learn at least something new, and you will have some chance of meeting the most urgent needs of your generation.\u201d<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t always this way. When The Atlantic <\/i>was founded, in 1857, the classical languages dominated education. You could hardly get into college without knowing them, and once there, you\u2019d likely study little else. In 1866, an unnamed writer complained in the magazine that \u201calmost everything else has been subordinated in our college course\u201d to those languages\u2014including history, chemistry, and English.<\/p>\n

But things were changing fast. In the late 19th century, American higher education was becoming more liberal and more accessible, and advancements in scientific research meant there were more subjects than ever to study. In 1883, Albert S. Bolles wrote that any professor still clinging to the primacy of the classics was \u201cdreaming in the moonlight of the Middle Ages.\u201d Students could still choose <\/i>to study classics, but, as Bolles put it, \u201cthe complete curriculum of knowledge\u201d had been \u201crearranged so as to serve a more useful purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n

And as considerations of \u201cusefulness\u201d came to dominate conversations about higher learning, the study of classics fell further and further from grace. Charles W. Eliot, a pioneer of the modern university, argued in these pages in 1917 that Latin should no longer be a college-admissions requirement, because knowledge of classical languages was of \u201clittle use\u201d to modern people. It wasn\u2019t enough that new fields be added to university curriculums\u2014they should also replace the old.<\/p>\n

Read more Nobody Even Expects DOJ to Be Independent Anymore<\/a><\/p>\n

These charges have haunted classicists ever since. In response, \u201cthe advocates of the classics have often tried to defend them on the ground of practical utility,\u201d A. Lawrence Lowell wrote in 1941. But this is like \u201ccomparing the practical utility of a poem and a postage stamp,\u201d he explained. Arguing that learning Plato and Sophocles is as tangibly beneficial to the world as medical research will always be a losing strategy.<\/p>\n

Which brings us back to the AI age. Today, arguments about the usefulness of various human skills focus on whether AI can do them as well as we can. To hear the true AI evangelists tell it, human knowledge itself may soon be like Latin and ancient Greek: an important part of our history and a quaint intellectual exercise, but otherwise thoroughly unnecessary.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure that a large language model could be trained to parse aorist-passive verbs and third-declension nouns in ancient Greek better than I can. But the point of a classical education isn\u2019t to develop a rarefied skill. As the literary critic Irving Babbitt wrote in 1897, \u201cIn the classics more than in other subjects, the fact should never be forgotten that the aim proposed is the assimilation, and not the accumulation, of knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n

I remember a particularly late night in the spring of my freshman year. I was cursing myself for taking ancient Greek, because my friends were at a bar and I was in a library struggling to memorize some irregular verbs. It felt like a futile exercise: There were already countless translations of these ancient texts, and there were adaptations and summaries of those translations. So what was I doing?<\/p>\n

Restless, I took an ancient-Greek copy of The<\/i> Odyssey<\/i> off the shelf and began stumbling through its opening lines. I knew them by heart in English, but seeing the true, original words was something different. I thought about the generations of people\u2014schoolchildren and great thinkers alike\u2014who had read these words before me. It sounds strange to say, but in that moment, I felt more human than I ever had before. I wasn\u2019t learning anything new, I realized; I was learning something very old indeed.<\/p>\n

Aristotle wrote that every line of inquiry aims at some good. But usefulness is only one type of good. There is a kind of learning that helps you do <\/i>something, but there is also a kind of learning that helps you become<\/i> someone. Perhaps this is what the mechanic had in mind when he answered Wight\u2019s question:<\/p>\n

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\u201cWhat good will that do you?\u201d<\/p>\n

He had risen to his feet by now, and said, tapping his lathe: \u201cI can shape steel with this; and with this,\u201d holding out the small chunky volume, \u201cI can shape men.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more The Multistate Solution to the Middle East<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The point of a classical education is to learn something about being human.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1359,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-time-travel-thursdays"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Ancient Greek Is Good For - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1360\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What Ancient Greek Is Good For - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The point of a classical education is to learn something about being human.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1360\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-16T19:46:36+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1360#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1360\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"What Ancient Greek Is Good For\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-16T19:46:36+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1360\"},\"wordCount\":1054,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1360#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/72ebaf970b2c063cf311d2ee5c034960.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Time-Travel Thursdays\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1360#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1360\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1360\",\"name\":\"What Ancient Greek Is Good For - 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