The thing that, above all others, has prompted me to write this article is need. I have recently had the pleasure of discovering the joys of older writings and therefore found for myself a new outlook on the world and how we must teach about it. Originality is a limited blessing, and we have thoroughly reaped its rewards in years gone by, and any substance that younger works possess is most likely the residue of some older text, filtered and watered down by its journey through history.

All I ask is why? Why must we read endless American works, stuck fast in events like the Great Depression, when we can read the very theories that shaped our modern society – those of democracy, freedom, and their opposites? Why must we read new works that talk of the rights of women, thinking our feminism creates a fresh chance at a purer, more equal society when, two and a half millennia ago, Euripides wrote in “Medea”:

“We [women] bid the highest price in dowries,

Just to buy some man,

To be dictator of our bodies,

How that compounds the wrong.”

And finally, why must we turn to modern verse, or even prose, that scrapes and drags on the mind that reads it, when Homer and Ovid write flowing works, and Juvenal provides us with laughter.It is evident to the thinking mind that water is purest at its source, the river flowing bright and clean from the spring. Classical literature can tell us what we are, how to live, and where we have come from. And so, I finish with one final piece of advice, not from my young mind but from Juvenal who, like many satirists, carries a deep truth in comedy. This is a passage on what you should wish for, from Satire 10.

Ask for a heart filled with courage, without fear of death,

That regards long life as among the least of nature’s gifts,

That can endure any hardship, to which anger is unknown,

That desires nothing, and gives more credit to all the labours

And cruel sufferings of Hercules, than to all the love-making

All the feasting, and all the downy pillows of Sardanapalus.

The prayer I offer you can grant yourself; without doubt,

The one true path that leads to a tranquil life is that of virtue.

If we were prudent, you’d possess no power, Fortune: it’s we

Who make you a goddess, and grant you a place in the sky.