Last week I wrote a tweet.

A great many of you responded by 'liking' this tweet without comment. I will assume that all of you agreed with it completely.

(j/k, why you liked it is your business).

Others received it differently:

I didn't engage with the replies last week because I was very busy with other things, but I'd like to expand on my original tweet in this thread.

The first part, "Classics has never been less relevant," refers to the historical purpose of a classical education in Western Europe and the United States from the 18th century to the present.

The purpose of an education in the Greek and Latin classics was to mark someone as a member of the upper class.

For example, here are the 1792 founding regulations of my undergraduate alma mater the University of North Carolina:

"None be admitted into the first literary class as students, until they shall have passed a competent examination by the faculty on Caesars Commentaries, Sallust, Ovid, & Virgil or Other Latin Books equivalent & the Greek Grammar."

(Read them all here: https://docsouth.unc.edu/true/mss01-02/mss01-02.html)

1st year: "Roman antiquities & such parts of the roman historians, orators, & poets as may seem necessary to the Officers of the University"

2nd: "Grecian, Antiquities and Greek Classics"

(Years 3 & 4 were spent on science and philosophy)

This is one of many examples I could have used to make my point: An education in classics served to mark someone (in this case, the children of the southern slaveholding aristocracy) as belonging to the upper class.

Greek and Latin are hard and learning them takes time, which is why being able to read them was a marker of status - a sign that your parents had time and money to spend educating you in things without immediate practical benefit.

Fast forward 230 years, and this world no longer exists. Sure, getting a classics degree from an Ivy or elite SLAC may still suggest that you are upper class, but not in the same way. It's not a requirement of entry. You can be upper class without knowing a word of Greek.

Being able to quote Horace in the original Latin marks you as a nerd, not as a member of the highest social class.

Yes, many people still read classical authors. But they are not the cultural status markers they once were.

So if Classics has lost its original purpose, why do people still study it? Because they want to.

I guarantee that there are very few Classics majors in the US today who are there for any reason other than love for the material.

But that's the key: The broader public does not view knowledge of Greek and Latin the way it once did. People view an interest in Classics as a personal eccentricity, not the bedrock of high status education.

When there is no reason to do something other than "I like it," there is no reason why other people should value the same thing.

This is why Classics has never been less relevant.

A side effect of this shift (which has been unfolding over the past ~150 years) is that Classicists spend a lot of time trying to prove their discipline is still relevant by writing about how classics can "speak" to various present-day issues.

For example, @SarahEBond wrote last week about the ridiculousness of writing articles comparing Donald Trump to various Roman emperors: https://twitter.com/SarahEBond/status/1296511259224023040

Another example is much of the work of @eidolon_journal offering Classics-informed takes on current issues.

I'm just going to take a step back and point out what seems obvious to me:

A professor of Classics in 1800 didn't have to argue for his discipline's relevance. It was already assumed from the social environment in which he lived.

There are disciplines today which don't have this problem. No one has to argue that biotechnology or chemistry are relevant, for example. There have been broader shifts in what we value most as a society.

But that's beside the point, because there's another half to my statement:

"...ancient history has never been more important."

What do I mean by this after trashing the Classics for a thread? Stay tuned.