There are plenty of humane people in the world who have never wittingly encountered the classics - whether Vergil and Homer, or the authors who are included under the rubric Classics in the bookstore in the mall. The humanities are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for making one more humane. What studying the classics makes you is - someone who has studied the classics.
But people (children, students, adults) at times ask questions which, officially, are the province of other departments of the university - where do we come from, how can justice be achieved, what is the nature of god, why do people act irrationally, why do different people practice different customs; and as it so happens, the texts and materials that we are the custodians of provide an especially rich trove of potential answers to these questions. Thus children and adults can get a real education on their own just by reading through ancient literature. And in the university, the needs and demands of professionalization sometimes bring it about that other departments never really try to confront these fundamental questions. That is why so many college students find classics courses to be so stimulating, a real breath of fresh air. But classics can only go so far, and we can only do so much as classicists. It depresses me, but a Nazi can read Vergil in the morning and murder in the evening. The man responsible for one of the shooting sprees in the US this summer, Benjamin Smith, had been taking Latin at college during the spring. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
