In March 2023, the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, a German economics research institute, released a discussion paper (i.e., a preliminary paper that is released for the purpose of discussion without being formally published) written in English by a group of four Italian economists Giorgio Brunello, Piero Esposito, Lorenzo Rocco, and Sergio Scicchitano titled “Does Classical Studies Open Your Mind?” The study frames itself as a response to the popular defense of classical studies which claims that studying the classics improves a person’s self-discipline, their ability to work hard, and their openness to others.
Directly contrary to this argument, the paper claims, based on an analysis of data from surveys conducted in Italy, that there is no statistically significant difference in the rate of conscientiousness or openness in students who studied the classics compared to students who studied STEM. Instead, the study claims that studying the classics significantly causally increases the likelihood of a person being neurotic and unhappy. I have already seen people on Twitter sharing this paper uncritically and I have a feeling that, in the coming years, people will probably try to use the paper to argue that people shouldn’t study the classics or even that schools and universities should stop teaching them altogether. The paper, however, has some absolutely glaring methodological problems, which I would like to point out in this post.
Background
In the Italian secondary education system, students who successfully complete scuola media (i.e., middle school) receive the option to choose whether to go to a vocational secondary school or go to a liceo (i.e., a “lyceum” or academic secondary school).
Vocational school is meant to prepare students who don’t plan to continue their education past secondary school for specific careers that don’t require a tertiary degree. A liceo, by contrast, is meant to prepare students for university. On average, students who choose to attend a liceo have histories of receiving higher grades and tend to come from more affluent socioeconomic backgrounds than students who choose to attend vocational school.
Students who choose to go to a liceo can choose between one of two main kinds. The older, more traditional, and more prestigious of these is the liceo classico or “classical lyceum.” The curriculum for this school focuses primarily on the study of Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek, and English languages and literatures, history, and philosophy, but also requires students to take some courses in mathematics, the natural sciences, and art history.
The other main option is the liceo scientifico or “scientific lyceum.” The curriculum for this school primarily focuses on science, technology, and mathematics, but also requires students to take some courses in Italian language and literature, a foreign language and its literature, history and geography, art history, philosophy, and sometimes some courses in Latin.
The discussion paper concludes, based on an analysis of data from a survey of liceo graduates in Italy, that there is no statistically significant difference in conscientiousness or openness between graduates of the liceo classico and the liceo scientifico. It did find that graduates of the liceo classico were 4.52% (nearly five percent!) more likely than graduates of the liceo scientifico to graduate college, but, on the negative side, it found that they displayed a 3.87% higher rate of neuroticism and a higher rate of self-reported unhappiness.
(About 15% of graduates of the liceo classico described themselves as unhappy, compared to around 12% of graduates of the liceo scientifico. The paper rather misleadingly describes this as an increase by “20.4 percent,” glossing over the fact that this increase amounts to only about three percentage points in absolute terms. Hat tip to Isaac Grosof in the comments section below for pointing this out.)
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the Liceo Classico Paolo Sarpi in Bergamo (left) and photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the Liceo Scientifico Camillo Cavour in Rome (right)
The influence of other variables
The first problem with the study is that, in order for it to actually assess the impact of studying classics on a person’s personality, it would need to have one group of students who were required to study a set curriculum and another group of students who were required to study the exact same curriculum with the only difference being that they were also required to study Latin and Ancient Greek languages and literature.
That, however, is emphatically not what the study had. Instead, they examined students who went to two entirely different kinds of schools with curricula, expectations, and reputations that differ substantially across many areas. As a result of this, a whole array of factors other than whether one studied Latin and Ancient Greek may be affecting the study’s findings.
This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that, as I mentioned above, students at a liceo scientifico are required to study Italian language and literature, a foreign language and its literature, history, geography, art history, and philosophy. Depending on the school, students may even have the option or even be required to study Latin. Thus, although students at a liceo scientifico are primarily focused on subjects in STEM, they are also required to receive significant instruction in the humanities, which includes a significant element of classics or closely classics-adjacent material.
The study only compared graduates of the liceo classico to graduates of the liceo scientifico and did not also compare them to students who chose vocational school or who did not attend secondary school at all. In doing this, the study sets up a false dichotomy that the liceo classico must either be teaching students consciousness and openness better than the liceo scientifico or it must not be teaching students those qualities at all.
In reality, though, it may be the case that the liceo classico does teach students to be more open and conscientious, but the liceo scientifico does so equally as effectively. If this is the case, then it simply means that the two institutions are roughly on par with each other in this particular area, which I would argue is not really a strike against either of them.
The problem of non-random selection
The second problem with the study is that which students chose the liceo classico and which ones chose the liceo scientifico was not random. This means that non-random selection factors may be influencing the study’s findings.
Although the study did make statistical adjustments to control for some demographic differences between students who chose the liceo classico and those who chose the liceo scientifico, including gender, age, and socioeconomic class background, a whole host of other demographic factors remain that the study did not make any statistical adjustments to account for.
Notably, the study did not track differences in the rate of LGBTQ+ identification between students at the two different kinds of schools or make any statistical adjustments to control for such differences. This omission is especially glaring when one considers that, due to a combination of various factors, for generations, classics has had a tendency to disproportionately attract LGBTQ+ people. As an anecdotal case, I’m currently in an MA program in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at Brandeis University and, of the ten students who are currently enrolled in the program, fully six of us are some variety of queer. That’s a solid majority of us.
As I discuss in much greater depth in this post from December 2021, queer people, especially queer youth, are disproportionately likely to struggle with anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues due to the specific kinds of prejudice and persecution that so many members of our community face.
The study also failed to take into account the possibility that students who are naturally predisposed for anxiety and depression might be disproportionately attracted to classics. Such an attraction would make sense given the fact that classics is, after all, the study of texts written in dead languages by people who have been dead for millennia that talk extensively about how the world is awful and life is suffering.
For instance, one of the most famous and memorable passages in all of ancient literature is the following speech that Achilleus says to King Priamos in the Iliad 24.524–533:
“οὐ γάρ τις πρῆξις πέλεται κρυεροῖο γόοιο:
ὡς γὰρ ἐπεκλώσαντο θεοὶ δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσι
ζώειν ἀχνυμένοις: αὐτοὶ δέ τ᾽ ἀκηδέες εἰσί.
δοιοὶ γάρ τε πίθοι κατακείαται ἐν Διὸς οὔδει
δώρων οἷα δίδωσι κακῶν, ἕτερος δὲ ἑάων:
ᾧ μέν κ᾽ ἀμμίξας δώῃ Ζεὺς τερπικέραυνος,
ἄλλοτε μέν τε κακῷ ὅ γε κύρεται, ἄλλοτε δ᾽ ἐσθλῷ:
ᾧ δέ κε τῶν λυγρῶν δώῃ, λωβητὸν ἔθηκε,
καί ἑ κακὴ βούβρωστις ἐπὶ χθόνα δῖαν ἐλαύνει,
φοιτᾷ δ᾽ οὔτε θεοῖσι τετιμένος οὔτε βροτοῖσιν.”
This means, in my own translation:
“For no profit comes from icy grief,
since, in this manner, the deities have spun the thread [of fate] for wretched mortals—
to live in grieving. (They themselves are without worry.)
For two pithoi [i.e., large storage jars] lie in the floor of Zeus:
the sort of gifts he gives, one of evil things and the other of good things.
If Zeus the thunder-enjoyer gives to a man a mixed lot,
he sometimes chances upon evil and other times upon good,
but, if he gives to a man from the miseries, he makes him treated with abuse,
and evil grinding misery drives him upon the godlike earth,
and he roams, honored neither by deities nor mortals.”
Thus, Achilleus recognizes that human beings can only hope for one of two different kinds of life: a life of suffering mixed with joy or a life of only suffering and no joy. No human being can ever live a life that is completely happy.
ABOVE: Priam Asks Achilles to Return Hector’s Body, painted by the Russian Neoclassical painter Alexandr Ivanov in 1825
Students of the classics are commonly exposed to passages like this even at the most basic introductory level. For instance, the textbook that I personally learned Ancient Greek from in the introductory course I took my freshman year of undergrad was Learn to Read Greek by Andrew Keller and Stephanie Russell (published by Yale University Press, 2012). The book includes sections of short excerpts from real ancient Greek authors for beginners to try to read. These excerpts include many which are reflective of the generally pessimistic vibe of Greek literature.
One example is this fragment (fr. 353) from the Athenian tragic playwright Aischylos (lived c. 525 – c. 455 BCE), which the book quotes on page 138:
“ὡς οὐ δικαίως θάνατον ἔχθουσιν βροτοί,
ὅσπερ μέγιστον ῥῦμα τῶν πολλῶν κακῶν.”
This means (in my own translation):
“How unjustly mortals hate death,
which is the greatest deliverance from many evils.”
On the very next page, Keller and Russell give us this little gem of wisdom (fr. 13) from the Athenian tragic playwright Sophokles (lived c. 497 – c. 405 BCE):
“ἄνθρωπός ἐστι πνεῦμα καὶ σκιὰ μόνον.”
This means:
“A human being is only a breath and a shadow.”
With these sorts of passages to advertise for our discipline, it would truly be a wonder if classics didn’t have a tendency to attract people who are predisposed toward melancholy!
ABOVE: Front cover of the book Learn to Read Greek by Keller and Russell, which was the introductory Ancient Greek textbook I learned from in undergrad
The problem of making sweeping claims
The third problem with the study is that it makes sweeping claims about classical studies in general, despite the fact that it only examined one specific kind of classical studies that occurs within one specific social and cultural context.
Studying the classics (like studying any subject) can take a wide variety of different forms and can occur in a wide variety of different cultural and social environments. I would argue that, although teachers can teach classical languages, literature, history, and philosophy in ways that do encourage more conscientious, open, and empathetic attitudes in students, this can only happen if teachers are genuinely committed to this goal and they teach the material in ways that are conducive to it.
Unfortunately, teaching these kinds of material can be very difficult and, although there are many teachers who are more than up to the challenge, there are also many teachers who do not possess the specific expertise, the pedagogy, and, most importantly of all, the empathy needed in order to teach them effectively.
On top of this, at least here in the United States, secondary school teachers are appallingly overworked and underpaid. Meanwhile, standardized testing requirements can basically force teachers to focus primarily on preparing their students for the test, rather than on helping them to use the material for personal growth and development that will help them further down the line.
As a result of this, it is far too common for teachers to teach Greek and Latin languages, literature, history, and philosophy ineptly. When someone does this, they can all too easily make the experience of studying these subjects a thoroughly miserable, soul-crushing, and unedifying one for their students through bad pedagogy.
I don’t know enough about licei classici in Italy to make an assessment of their classics pedagogy. Nonetheless, because the study did not examine any forms of classical studies other than the liceo classico specifically, even if we assume that its conclusion is correct that the liceo classico has no statistically significant effect on students’ openness or conscientiousness and that it only increases the likelihood of a student being neurotic and unhappy, the study cannot rule out the possibility that these outcomes are the result of pedagogical approaches or circumstances that are specific to the liceo classico as it exists in Italy currently, rather than classical studies in general.
ABOVE: The Pedant, caricature by Thomas Rowlandson (lived 1757 – 1827)
Should we really decide the value of subjects based on how happy the people who study them are?
Fourth and finally, even if we ignore all the study’s methodological problems and accept that its conclusion that studying the classics in and of itself makes people neurotic and unhappy is factually correct, the study’s presentation of this conclusion is still open to interrogation.
The study portrays students becoming neurotic and unhappy as a negative consequence of them studying the classics, but one wonders if becoming anxious and unhappy might be an entirely appropriate and valid response to learning about classic literature, history, and philosophy.
Indeed, I would argue that a major part of the value of these disciplines is precisely their ability to challenge people, force them to question their own preconceived notions about the world, and force them to grapple with hard realities about the nature of human beings, societies, life, and mortality. If society decides to regard knowledge that makes people unhappy as harmful, then what kind of society will we live in?
I am confident that, if one were to survey students who had just taken a climate science course that discussed climate change and its ramifications, a public health class that discussed mass pandemics, or a social science course that discussed topics like totalitarianism, extreme poverty, and mass killings, the students who took those courses would probably exhibit higher rates of neuroticism and self-reported unhappiness than students who did not take them. Nonetheless, no one in their right mind would advocate that students shouldn’t study those topics because they make people unhappy.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the Mangum Wildfire in the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona in summer 2020, the increased number of devastating wildfires in recent years being one of the many negative consequences of human-caused climate change
Thanks for the post, Spencer!
One additional comment I’d add is that “20% more likely to report unhappiness” is a lot smaller in absolute terms than it sounds. Looking at their data, it appears that about 15% of graduates of the classical school reported unhappiness, while about 12% of the STEM graduates reported unhappiness. It’s really not a huge effect.
Also, another important effect is how in touch with one’s emotions one might be. Someone who does a lot of introspection might be better able to realize and verbalize that they are unhappy, and that’s something we want to encourage.
This whole study seems pretty lackluster.
Yes, these are both excellent points that didn’t even occur to me. I will probably update the post to mention something about the fact that the liceo classico students were only more likely to report unhappiness by three percentage points.
That also struck me: the difference is hardly enough to proclaim that the humanities are a serious mental health hazard, so everyone should be a STEM major. But the internet loves a simplistic dichotomy, doesn’t it?
Ha! Well, just being smart, like a classical scholar would be, probably means you’re well-informed enough to realize what a mess humanity is in, which is pretty sobering. And you will have read about this being the case even thousands of years ago. Have we made that much progress? As someone must have said before, if you’re not disturbed and upset these days you’re probably not paying attention.
Another argument I find from people against the studying of classics is the fact they are old and ergo some of the information in it is outdated. While that is true, I’m not sure that’s a good argument to completely disregard them.
Aristotle seems to be one major scapegoat because of some of the things he got wrong, but I’ve also seen other authors being called out like Euclid. Here’s one response made by someone (who I won’t name) in reaction to the Elements being a recommended text in a Freshman College class that teaches Euclidean geometry:
“they’re literally studying Euclid’s Elements?!
99% of that book is outdated! math has progressed a LOT since the years BCE!
they’re WASTING an ENTIRE semester?!”
Disclaimer: my experience at the liceo Classico dates back to the 1990s, and there have been a few school reforms in the meantime, usually agreed to be in a direction that decreased the quality of teaching.
I’d add that the choice between technical school and one of the licei is (even today) done at around 13-14 years of age¹, and thus tends to be quite influenced by families and teachers at the previous stage of education.
At my time the liceo Scientifico still had mandatory Latin², so there was even less of a curriculum difference, and either school was considered suitable for teens who generally enjoyed studying³.
Among my peers the biggest predictor for choosing the Classico over the Scientifico seemed to be having parents (and in many cases grandparents) who had attended a Classico, often even the same Classico institute, and were part of the town elite.
Here in Italy private schools for members of the local elites are more of a thing at the earlier stages of education, with private high schools having more of a reputation of catering to bad students who need a degree, don’t want to earn it, but can afford to pay, so the place to be to start networking is taken by the public Classico.
And this is not really data, but I distinctly remember that in that category there were a few students who would have preferred to attend a different school (probably a technical one, not the Scientifico, however) and were there just for family pressure.
The other big predictor was having parents who were teachers, but I suspect that was also common at the liceo Scientifico, since that’s a big predictor for enjoying studying in general. This however influenced the choice when one of the two schools in one specific town had a temporary bad reputation (a bad principal, or a streak of bad teachers, which sometimes happens); I believe this kind of factors would even up between the two choices over the country.
Anyway, it wasn’t and isn’t uncommon for Classico graduates to continue studying in STEM, or for Scientifico graduates to choose Humanities at the university level, which is even more of a factor in saying that that study only really applies to those two kind of schools, rather than to the Humanities in general.
As for the quality of teaching, I think that there is still less of an overemphasis on standardized tests (but I’m afraid that they are more of a thing than they were at my time), but teaching is a relatively underpaid and significantly undervalued profession, often considered a last resort choice (although this applies significantly more in the STEM subject than the Humanities one), and bad teachers were and are definitely a thing that most people will meet in their school career.
¹ back then it was more common to have people who had already repeated one or two years, at this stage, but they would have probably chosen to continue at a technical school, anyway.
² right now I know Latin isn’t completely mandatory in all cases, but I believe that the standard Scientifico curriculum still has it, and most people who attend a Scientifico have to take it. I may be wrong on this point, however.
³ there is a third choice, the Magistrale (these days liceo delle Scienze Umane (Human Sciences)), historically it had an emphasis on preparing teachers for primary school, but at my time it had already started to lose that exclusive target and become simply a third liceo alternative with a mix of STEM and Humanities, but a bit more emphasis on modern rather than classical Humanities (Latin was still mandatory, anyway)
This is a really interested topic, which I did not expect to see on here! I think you made some very good points, especially about people attracted to Classics being more prone to melancholy by their own disposition.
Having spoken with our friend Wichiteglega on this matter (thanks so much for helping us contact each other!), he seems to have studied far more Latin and old literature at a *scientific* liceo in Italy than I did at the ‘humanities programme’ in Swedish secondary education (gymnasium). It will be interesting to see his own thoughts on this article
I tend to look, initially at the “Methods Section” of a paper like this and, let me say I am not terribly impressed. The authors state that, “Our data are drawn from the 2018 wave of the PLUS survey, produced by INAPP, an Italian national research institute”. This is nice but it tells me nothing about sample sizes, if the Classical vs Stem groups are roughly balanced or not, sex ratio differences and so on. I should not have to track down the PLUS survey to find out these basic details.
More horrifying is that the authors are basing their “personality” statements based on the results of the Ten Item Personality Measure (TIPI), which is a cut-down 10 item measure. According to the authors of the test:
Reliability in a psychometric test, especially in something like a personality test is very often partly a function of the number of items. Reducing a 240 item test to a 10 item test looks like a farce to me. Going as low as 40 seems dicey.
There is also this note A Note on Alpha Reliability and Factor Structure in the TIPI
I am interpreting this as, “Well yeah, the TIPI looks really bad on technical issues but, trust me, it really does work!”.
Whoever included the TIPI in the PLUS survey looks to have been incompetent and it appears these authors lack the expertise is psychometrics to understand the problem.
The fact that this “study” emanated from IZA Institute of Labor Economics (keyword: economics) is a red flat. Clearly these individuals need to check themselves into the nearest mental hospital. But we all know that won’t happen. LOL.
Sounds flawed to me. But, it’s easy to shoot holes into any study by the fallible, i.e., mankind. Even if they did EXACTLY what they should have done, random this, control group that, I would always have a certain degree of skepticism, as, I believe, should we all.
I remember my Sicilian father telling me about his youth as a voracious reader of everything. Book after book after book would he consume until his father would yell at him, telling him that his mind couldn’t withstand the volume of input my father was cramming into it. This old world point of view, it seems to me, although seemingly absurd on its face, may have some validity.
The classics, in particular, are filled with ethos and pathos, contradictions, denouement, climaxes, resolutions, quandaries, and so much elasticity of the mind is required to accommodate the bombardment of contradictory stimuli that it must often revert to storage in the unconscious, where subliminal rumination continues. This may be processed, necessarily unbeknownst to the scholar, by definition, who may eventually feel an inexplicable discomfort or unsettledness he or she is unable to fathom. Neuroses may or may not ensue. Psychological conflict may result in what can only be termed as “unhappiness”.
I wouldn’t at all be surprised that the host my be ill-equipped, unable to endure the onslaught of conscious and unconscious emotional reflexes and responses attendant to a prolonged regime of classical studies as factors defining readiness may play a significant role. There are alot of mixed up kids graduating these days. They may be so overwhelmed that they can ill-afford to consider morality, virtues, absolutes. For these would require yet another dimension demanded of the psyche that, were it not incorporated into their academic training by the educator, they would be, perhaps, devastated by the burden and dispense with it altogether.
And here, I submit, that sanity and happiness are yoked to a sense of wellness that can only be derived out of the peace to comes with reconciliation of the heart with what is ultimately decidedly “good” and “right” and “evil” and “wrong”. To be able to parse these opposites, to discern between these universal dualities, is to come to terms with the meaning of life. And THAT is the rest one finds upon the completion of each journey, whatever form that journey takes. And each of us must determine what our limitations are and adjust the pace of our life’s travels accordingly.
“Nonetheless, no one in their right mind would advocate that students shouldn’t study those topics because they make people unhappy.”
That’s just not true. Look at the parents who protest the supposed teaching of CRT in schools because it might make their kids feel bad or guilty.
I think that the parents you refer to here are objecting to so-called “CRT” in schools primarily because they (incorrectly) believe that the information teachers are teaching their students about race, systemic racism, and equity is false and many of them also believe (again, incorrectly) that it is deliberately designed to make their children feel guilty as part of a supposed anti-white agenda. I think that that’s a little bit different than someone saying that no one should study true information just because it might make them feel depressed.
If you are going to design a study along the lines as described (I didn’t read the study) it is imperative that you do a pre-test so you can compare how much change occurred based upon the educational process. Possibly the liceo classico students started out more unhappy and became less can’t just blame all of the post-education stats on the education. of their learning.
That was a most interesting read, I must say! As an Italian, it was even more interesting, I guess, and your analysis of the school system was to the point.
The only part of your article which I have some doubts about (without having done any research on the topic, mind you) is the one regarding the Classics having many more LGBT+ people than scientific spaced. I feel like this might be the case in America (and it is indeed true for some humanistic spaces in Italy), but I think that the stereotypical attender of a classical lycaeum is not very similar to the stereotypical Classics student in America. The classical lycaeum is a very prestigious school, and usually people going there come from rich families and the like (as Elena also points out) and being also heavily associate with Catholic studies, it’s probably not that LGBT+ friendly.
As Jaojao said (thank you for letting the two of us communicate!) I have attended a scientific lycaeum but I also have decent education in Latin, five years of that. Three of grammar, two of literature, I believe. Our professor was exceptionally interested in Latin though, so it might not be everyone’s experience with a scientific lycaeum.
Also, I can’t believe I had forgotten to compliment for your admission to Athens’ summer school, that is truly remarkable! You definitely deserve it!
Fascinating! Thank you so much for the clarification and further information.
The dominant stereotype of a classics major here in the U.S. (which literary portrayals like Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History have helped to promote) is that we’re supposedly all eccentric, depressed, white, queer aesthetes from upper-class or upper-middle-class families. I think that the stereotype may be a bit different here than it is in Italy because, as you may have gathered, classics doesn’t hold nearly as much cultural capital in the U.S. as it does in Italy.
Here in the U.S., a degree in any STEM subject, business, management, economics, or finance generally carries vastly greater respectability for most people than a degree in any humanities subject. Even among humanities subjects, a classics degree generally doesn’t carry much greater prestige than a degree in English, history, or philosophy. In fact, a lot of people over here, including many employers, unfortunately regard studying the classics in any capacity as useless and elitist. As a result of this, students are mainly attracted to classical studies by a genuine interest in the material, rather than by its prestige or cultural capital. As a result, classics students here are usually at least moderately eccentric artsy types and a disproportionately large number of us are queer and/or neurodivergent.
At the same time, though, students of color tend to be justifiably strongly put off by the fact that the field of classics is so closely associated with white supremacy and the ideology of so-called “western civilization.” As a result, the overwhelming majority classics students are white. On top of this, because most smaller, less expensive, and less prestigious colleges and universities typically don’t have classics departments and because students from less affluent families tend to feel greater pressure to choose majors that they (or their parents) think will more directly lead to a career, it is disproportionately common for classics students to come from upper-class or upper-middle-class families. (That being said, there are still a significant number of classics students who do come from working-class or poor families.)
And thank you so much for the congratulations on my acceptance to the ASCSA Summer Session. I’m very excited about it (and anxious).
Yes, I do believe the main difference is that the classics are not an ‘underdog sector’ in Italy. The stereotype you described, however, is rather more fitting for people studying in lower-ranked humanistic fields, like when I studied Translation in University.
I would say that the stereotypical Classics student is a so-called ‘figlio di papà’ (lit. ‘daddy’s son’), that is, someone who is able to achieve stuff academically and professionally because of their richness. They would be mildly right-wing, and nominally Catholic.
It should also be noted that, in my experience, I would say that the Italian Classics don’t encourage as much ‘creativity’ as Classics overseas. For instance, original Latin/Greek composition is extremely rare, most of the activity involves only translating from the primary source. The one time I had any experience of the contrary was that a group of students in my high school made a super short play in Latin based on Cinderella (like, 5 minute long), but that was about it. On the contrary, I feel like in America at least, studying prose composition at the very least is much more common.
What you say here about the reputation of the classics in Italy makes sense.
I actually don’t think that Ancient Greek and Latin prose comp is very common over here in the U.S. I’ve never taken a prose comp course and none of the universities I’ve studied at so far (which is admittedly only two so far) has ever offered one. I’ve at least heard of people taking prose comp classes, but my impression is that those classes are quite rare nowadays and only growing rarer.
There is also quite a difference between studying at the Classico high school (where the assumption is that you will have to attend university, but not necessarily in any field related to the classics) and studying humanities (not just the classics) at the university level, where the common stereotype is that you will be unemployed, underemployed or a high school teacher (with limited opportunities to actually get a job for a long time).
I studied at the Classico and then moved to Math at the university level, and while I was in a minority it was still a sizable one, nothing really remarkable. I believe other STEM subjects (even the well paying ones 🙂 ) had similar experiences.
OTOH, I don’t feel that classics really have a big cultural capital here: Latin is present in a lot of high schools, but is usually considered a bit of a waste of time, is often one of the subjects where most people forget everything they have studied on the day they graduate school¹, and often it’s removed from the experimental curricula that are tried now and then to make! school! more! modern! and! help! it! train! people! for! jobs!
¹ I know a lot of people who studied Latin at school, but very few of them (myself included) can actually read something like a plaque written in Latin in the 1800s (the easiest case I can think of that can be easily met in the wild)
Oh, yes, you raised some very good points! Studying ‘classics’ in high school (which is mainly for the prestige) is very different from studying the subject later (which implies you’re passionate about it, since it is not known for providing good job opportunities).
> OTOH, I don’t feel that classics really have a big cultural capital here
I agree with you. Probably also due to Italian being closer to Latin, Latin seems to me more prestigious in English-speaking countries; on the other hand, Greek is much less famous, so it’s hard to quote it and sound smart. I also agree that very few people would be able to read something in it without a dictionary, let alone write/speak in it!
> often it’s removed from the experimental curricula that are tried now and then to make! school! more! modern! and! help! it! train! people! for! jobs!
I do agree that cultural heritage is something worth preserving; I also think that a lot of the reasons people justify including Latin as a compulsory subject where it’s kinda out of place (like scientific high school) are very silly, like ‘it helps you think’ or ‘it’s a logical language’. This, of course, it’s a reflection of the utilitarian culture we live in, in which something it’s either pragmatically necessary or worthless. Latin is worth studying because it’s a very important language that many documents throughout European history were written in. That’s already more than enough reason for us to treasure such heritage.
(btw I have no problem with Latin being an electory subject in a scientific, of any, high school)
Once again, another inspiringly insightful post by you Spencer.
This is completely off-topic, but I ask a few questions regarding the pronunciations of Greek.
How was the letters Χ, Β, Η, and Ζ pronounced in Ancient and Medieval Greek? Disappointingly, I can’t seem to find much material regarding Medieval Greek that is satisfactory
Oh yeah, also the letter Υ, υ and its accented Ύ, ύ
In Classical Attic Greek and early Koine, the letter ⟨β⟩ was pronounced as the voiced bilabial plosive /b/ (like the letter ⟨b⟩ in contemporary English). A variety of pieces of evidence point in this direction. One piece of evidence is the fact that the Latin letter ⟨b⟩ derives from ⟨β⟩ and we know that it was pronounced /b/ in antiquity, which suggests that the letter it was based on probably represented the same sound.
Another piece of evidence is the fact that Athenian comic playwrights of the late fifth century BCE use the onomatopoeic expression βῆ to represent the sound of a sheep (e.g., Kratinos fr. 43 and Aristophanes fr. 642), which makes the most sense if we understand ⟨β⟩ as a voiced bilabial plosive. Meanwhile, Aristophanes in his comedy The Frogs ll. 739–740 riffs on the similar-soundingness of the words “πίνειν” (“to drink”) and “βινεῖν” (“to fuck”), which makes the most sense if we understand the letters ⟨π⟩ and ⟨β⟩ as both being plosives.
Evidence that Greek speakers still generally pronounced ⟨β⟩ as /b/ in the first century BCE comes from the fact that the Roman orator Cicero in his Epistulae ad Familiares (Letters to Friends) 9.22.3 cautions that the word bini meaning “two each” in Latin sounds like the Greek word βινεῖ meaning “he fucks.” At some point during the Roman Principate, though, possibly by the second century CE, at least some Greek speakers probably started pronouncing ⟨β⟩ as the voiced bilabial fricative /β/. Then, later, maybe in late antiquity or the medieval period, the letter shifted to a voiced labiodental fricative /v/.
The letter ⟨ζ⟩ was originally a double consonant that was most likely pronounced /zd/. Nonetheless, by the second half of the fourth century BCE, at least some Greek speakers had begun to pronounce it /z/. Aristotle (lived 384 – 322 BCE) seems to refer to this shift in his Metaphysics 993a when he says that some people would analyze ⟨ζ⟩ as a double consonant and others as a single consonant. The /z/ pronunciation seems to have become dominant over the course of the Hellenistic Period.
In Classical Attic Greek, the letter ⟨η⟩ was pronounced as a long open-mid front unrounded vowel /ɛː/, but its pronunciation had most likely shifted to a long close-mid front unrounded vowel /eː/ by the late fourth century BCE. It later shifted from /eː/ to a close front unrounded vowel /i/ sometime in late antiquity, maybe around the seventh century CE.
In Classical Attic Greek, ⟨χ⟩ was pronounced as an aspirated voiceless velar stop /kʰ/ (like the letter ⟨k⟩ at the beginning of most words in contemporary English), but, at some point during the Roman period, it shifted to a voiceless velar fricative /x/ (as it is pronounced in Modern Greek). It’s not super clear when this happened.
During the Archaic Period, the letter ⟨υ⟩ was pronounced as the close back rounded vowel /u/ (like the ⟨ou⟩ in the English word soup), but, in Attic Greek by the fifth century BCE, it had shifted to the close front rounded vowel /y/ (like the ⟨ü⟩ in the German word über) and it retained this pronunciation in Koine.
Educated, urban-dwelling Greek speakers in the medieval Roman Empire continued to pronounce the letter ⟨υ⟩ with its Classical pronunciation /y/ until at least as late as the eleventh century CE, but country-dwellers and less educated urban-dwellers were starting to pronounce it with its Modern Greek pronunciation of /i/ by around that time. The medieval Greek writer Michael the Grammarian in his Poem IV, which he most likely wrote sometime around 1030 CE, makes fun of a bishop named Philomelion, who came from the countryside, for pronouncing the letter ⟨υ⟩ the same as the letter ⟨ι⟩.
For more information on the ancient pronunciation of Greek, I recommend the third edition of the book Vox Graeca: The Pronunciation of Classical Greek by W. Sidney Allen, which is my main source for this reply.
YES, more knowledge and a source to boot! Thank you so dearly much! I always look forward your tremendously judicious work!
I feel like this study was commissioned by some scientist who had heard one too many times “the focus on STEM is killing our souls! The humanities uplift the soul and help you become a better person, STEM leaves it mired in facts and turns you into a calculator.”
So they turn around and say hey, if it uplifts the soul so much how come they’re more depressed.
Of course both of these are ridiculous stereotypes and the whole thing feels like immature bickering that academics should be embarrassed to participate in. I think both STEM AND humanities “uplift the soul”, because learning is always good. And many of the greatest scientists were also very wise philosophers — and perhaps that side of them is not given enough credit in popular culture.
I don’t disagree. I have massive respect for STEM fields and for many of the people who work in those fields. Most of the men on my Dad’s side of the family are engineers of various kinds, my Dad himself is a software engineer, and, when I was little, my parents expected that I would probably grow up to be a software engineer like him. That ended up not happening; by roughly the time I was in second grade, it had become clear that I took more after my Mom and that I was better in language and humanities subjects. My younger sister, though, is a computer science major and I totally support her decision to go into that field.
All this being said, I really wish that the humanities got our share of respect. I can’t tell you how many times people told me not to go into classics and history when I was in high school and in my early years of undergrad. My freshman year of undergrad, there was a business major who lived across the hall in the same dorm building as me who, when I told him that I was wanting to major in classics, reacted as though I had told him that I wanted to saw off my right arm. He begged me to change my mind and go into a field that would more directly and obviously translate into a career. He also told me that he himself originally wanted to major in philosophy until his parents forced him to switch to business.
I’m a retired EE who did a philosophy degree as my first big retirement project, and interestingly, my father was also an EE who later did a philosophy degree, so something seems to run in the family. So loads of respect for the humanities here, but I personally probably couldn’t do the kind of jobs that a humanities degree leads to. Engineering and comp sci tend to give you a well-defined career trajectory. My son has a Ph.D in Communications and was having no luck finding a job he wanted for the kind of money he wants to make, so now he’s doing a CS degree. His GF was an English major, but now she’s in a vet tech program, because again that’s specific job training.
Now you sound like you’re one of the few people who can make a success of an academic career in the humanities — a path to which more are called than are chosen. Best of luck to you.
What does EE stand for?
Sorry: electrical engineer.
I grew up in a very “hippie” area and when I would tell people I studied chemistry I’d get a lot of comments a long the line of “Oh, working for the man are you?” Or “don’t you know (insert conspiracy here) means what you’re learning is BS?”
I get the vibe the person who commissioned this study probably got in a argument along these lines at a bar and wrote this to retaliate. Like I said, very immature and once he sobered up he should have realized how embarrassing this looks.
Huh. I had always thought it was the other way around, with the humanities reacting to what some STEM people say. Usually that comes in the form of saying humanities isn’t actually essential or asserting that those in humanities won’t find a job (not that that’s necessarily true).
I don’t think anyone worth taking seriously tries to denigrate humanities or STEM. Besides, many STEM people themselves are heavily invested in the humanities. This is probably because of STEM’s association with greater job security and salary; people like yours truly choose a STEM major due to those concerns when they would otherwise study something like history.
My point exactly — the people who wrote these papers sound like immature goofball, and whoever ticked them off to inspire them to write it also were. Never should have been published.
As I note in my post, the paper has not actually been published; it was merely released as a discussion paper.