I have chosen to focus on Greece and Rome in our homeschool. Not because I have any real convictions about it myself yet, (I certainly remain uneducated in this area), but because I have read arguments for it and I believe that it has merit. I believe spiritual knowledge is prime, but when it comes to secular knowledge, the civilizations of Greece and Rome take the cake and actually support our spiritual learning. The truth from their world is timeless and foundational to all that we know today. From the little that I have learned and read, I am finding that this is true, and that there is beauty and truth in these ancient civilizations, and valuable lessons to be learned.
Anyway, I found a great article that I wanted to post on here that really encompasses the link between the ancient and the spiritual knowledge, and the benefits of being immersed in the classics.
From Memoria Press:
Why Read Homer's Iliad? written by Cheryl Lowe
http://www.memoriapress.com/articles/why-read-homers-iliad (emphasis and notes mine)
"The heart of a classical education is the cumulative study of Latin and the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. In the Western tradition, education has always been synonymous with classical education. It began with the Greeks and Romans, was preserved and expanded by Christians during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and continued unabated until well into the twentieth century.
"I have said many times that Latin is not dead: it is immortal. Latin is truly the most influential language in human history. It has been immortalized in modern romance languages, in modern scientific languages,
and in its own great literature.
"The most difficult part of classical education for parents to understand is not Latin, but rather our classical studies curriculum. Why study the Greeks and Romans? They are all dead, their civilization is dead and gone, they were pagans, and they weren't even Christians. What do they have to say to us?
"Just as Latin is not dead, it is also true that Greece and Rome are not dead. They, too, are immortal in their architecture, art, law, government, languages, mythology, literature, and philosophy. The cultures of Greece and Rome live around and through us every day.
"Students who study Latin soon see that Latin is everywhere and that they have been speaking and reading Latin all of their lives. Likewise, students who study Greece and Rome soon see that those cultures are everywhere, and they have been living as Greeks and Romans all of their lives.
"The story of Greek and Roman literature begins with the story of Troy. Our students at Highlands Latin School read the
Iliad and the
Odyssey in the seventh Grade, and at first, the warrior culture of these early Greeks seems very alien. They were not sensitive and sentimental like us. They were not politically correct
at all. Achilles was certainly not a nice Christian gentleman like Robert E. Lee. We don't know many real facts about the Trojan War, and all those silly gods fighting and taking sides—ridiculous! Why don't we read something useful, like a book on the Civil War?
"But the
Iliad, we discover, is a book about the Civil War. It is a book about all wars, about the people and characters that you find in every war—actually, in every town!—the wise, the foolish, the clever, the noble, the base, the ambitious, the women, the old, and the young. It is about their pettiness, their heroism, their adventures, their sacrifices, and their sufferings. The
Iliad is mostly about people, not war, and it gives us unforgettable and universal character types.
"There is no passage in all of literature more moving than when Priam comes to beg for the body of Hector and kisses the bloody hands of Achilles, who has slaughtered so many of his sons. The two enemies, one old and one young, sit down and weep together over what they both have lost.
"Hector is the real hero of the
Iliad, and he dies at the hands of Achilles, who desecrates his body and drags it around the walls of Troy, Venus then restores his body to perfection before it is returned to Priam. And the
Iliad ends, “Thus was the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses." The
Iliad is a strange poem when you think about it. It is not at all what we expect from a story about a great war hero. Hector, in fact, is just the opposite of the John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, make-my-day kind of hero that we so admire. I'm sure the Greeks were just like us and would have much preferred a poem that showed that they were number one, that they were right, and deserved to win over the effeminate Trojans. But that is not what Homer gave them—or us.
Hector, in some sense, prefigures Christ, for he was not at all the Greek ideal of a hero, godlike in beauty and strength. Rather, he was a hero that was defiled and humiliated.
"I don't know any substitute for Latin for training the intellect and sharpening the mind. And I don't know any substitute for the
Iliad for humanizing and civilizing the young. There is no book on the Civil War—or any war—that compares with the
Iliad. And your children will be a little wiser and a little more human for having read it. Each year, our students at Highlands Latin School read the
Iliad, under the guidance of Mr. Wheatley, our principal, and knowing the death of Hector is imminent, they often express the fear that they are going to cry in class.
"The
Iliad and
Odyssey are the beginnings of Western literature. The story of that war and its aftermath continues in the
Aeneid, which our students read in the eighth Grade. Written by the great Roman poet Virgil, and modeled on the
Iliad and the
Odyssey, the
Aeneid tells the story of Aeneas, who was destined to escape from the burning city of Troy and found a new city, Rome.
And the destiny of Rome, Virgil tells us, was to civilize and rule the world. Rome brought an unprecedented two hundred years of peace and prosperity to the ancient world, preparing the way for the coming of Christ and the spread of the gospel to the ends of the known world. (And the link between Rome and America is made even clearer. As Rome prepared the way for Christ, so has America prepared the way for the Restoration of His gospel in these last days.)
"And the story continues in the ninth Grade when students read Greek drama and follow other heroes who return home from the Trojan War. The cycle of vengeance that is the curse of the House of Atreus, the unspeakable fate of Oedipus: the Greeks were certainly not afraid to ask the dark and hard questions about such matters. But in doing so, they prepared the way for the even darker and harder answer, the Crucifixion, too dark even for the Greeks.
"And the story continues at Highlands Latin School when ninth graders read the
Divine Comedy, written at the opening of the Renaissance, almost one thousand years after the fall of Rome. In this great Christian epic, Dante must travel through Hell in order to learn about the true nature of man and the reality of sin. And who is his guide in the afterlife but Virgil, Dante's symbol of human wisdom and, of course, the author of the
Aeneid. And who does Dante see on his journey through the afterlife but those ancient heroes of old, Achilles, Odysseus, Caesar, Brutus, and, of course, the saints and sinners of the Bible and of Dante's own age.
"I hope you can see that literature taught in this way is a continuous story. That is what literature should be but rarely is. And I hope you can see that the Greek and Roman classics first told those stories that reverberate through all of literature. The classics of Greece and Rome are not optional: if we skip them, we have no hope at all of teaching literature with any real understanding or meaning.
"The classics of Greece and Rome provide us with a set of connected stories and a cast of characters that teach us what it means to be human. They are also the basis of literature, teaching us about the natural man (man at his best and worst, but natural man).
They don't give us the answers that we find in revelation, but they do give us the questions.
"Chaucer, Shakespeare, and all of our great English writers take this basic canon for granted; references to it are everywhere. We can't really read English literature with understanding and profit unless we know this classical heritage as they did.
"At the turn of the millennium, there were many lists of the greatest works of the twentieth century. At the top of every list was James Joyce's
Ulysses. Ulysses, of course, is the Roman name for Odysseus. Twenty-eight hundred years after Homer wrote the
Odyssey, it still echoes through the words of the poets of the twentieth century.
As William Faulkner said, “The past is not dead, it's not even past."
