Dream on

Alexander Nehamas

• Dinner with Persephone by Patricia Storace
  Granta, 398 pp, £17.99, February 1997, ISBN 1 86207 033 4

Adebate about language is currently raging in Greece. Should Classical Greek be a required part of the school curriculum, or should it be optional? Should the works of the ancient authors be taught only in the original, or should students study them in Modern Greek translation? The debate is intensely political. Conservatives insist that an education in Classical Greek is indispensable to educated Greeks, who cannot know their heritage and history without it. Liberals and radicals argue that such an education is reactionary, reinforcing an emphasis on the past and on the separateness of Greece from the rest of the world, particularly the West. It is easy to overlook the idea that is common to both sides in this debate: that reading Homer, Pindar, the tragic poets, the historians, Plato and Aristotle is an essential part of all Greek education. The debate presupposes that this literature, which few Greeks can now read in the original and many are unwilling to read even in translation, is their literature. Everyone agrees it should be taught; the only question is in what form.