IN THE PRESENT TENSE

"My grandfather had an enormous classical library, a Greek lexicon, and a Latin dictionary," recalls Donald White, a professor of classical archeology and senior curator at the university museum. "He was a dermatologist, but he and his father were fluent in Latin. It was banged into their heads when they were school children."

White is describing a time in the not too distant past when a classical education was held up as the highest form of learning, particularly at elite institutions. "That day is gone forever," he says with a mix of nostalgia and relief.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries more or less idealized the classical past, remarks Sheila Murnaghan, chair of the classical studies department. "In the twentieth century, the classical world has been taken off its pedestal." In recent decades scholars have paid greater attention to what might be called the seamier side of the classical world, examining circumstances like the plight of slaves. "How do you respond to a culture that we really admire but was founded on slave holding?" she asks. The ancients drew sharp distinctions between the free male citizen, exalted as the complete human being, and women, who like slaves and foreigners were thought of as flawed versions—and were treated that way. "[The Greeks and Romans] stated in very stark terms some ideas about the difference between men and women that we're still struggling to get away from."

Still, the cultures that flourished around the Mediterranean from about 1000 BC to 500 AD continue to hold a special fascination for us. "Almost everything we do," Murnaghan states, "in some way has roots in antiquity. Our cultural traditions, our literary traditions, our artistic traditions, our modes of scientific inquiry—all those things have been carried out in a kind of conscious relationship to classical antiquity. In their literature and in their mythology, you get extremely powerful statements of fundamental human problems: relations among the family, the place of human beings in the universe. Notions about democracy and the question of the rights of individuals in a political community are first stated with a particular clarity there."

Today, the classics are no longer worshipped like some idol on a pedestal. Ours is a more balanced and realistic appraisal. The ancients themselves instilled us with a high regard for the sense of limit, degree, proportion, relation, and contingency in our thinking, and perhaps they would have appreciated this more circumspect approach to our origins.

"There's a kind of tradition of 'the classical' that's embedded in Western culture," Murnaghan says. "What I think has changed is that we no longer believe the ancients had all the answers. We can see the first formulation of ideas that are so important to us, but we also see a culture that's really different. It's this combination of continuity and difference that makes the ancient world so endlessly fascinating and instructive."

The ancient idol continues to receive our homage even though we know its feet are made of clay.