Laudator Temporis Acti

Philology is tied to text, and text is tied to language. And language, it seems, is a major problem. It is of course the case that there is much more to the Ancient Greek and Roman world than language. If you don't have respect for colleagues who painstakingly excavate in the Athenian Agora or study Roman portraiture of North Africa or examine waste to learn the diet of soldiers at Hadrian's Wall or study Alice Oswald's contemporary transformations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, you are an idiot. But you are also an idiot if you don't have respect for colleagues who pay close attention to Greek and Latin and their linguistic and philological niceties. It is undeniable that studying a culture without knowing its language—or, in most cases, languages—is to ignore its core and render one especially vulnerable to the charge of having no idea what one is doing. What is happening in Classics is turning the subject inside out—and then, to add insult to injury, hurling abuse at what is now on the outside.