On Not Wanting to Know Ancient Greek
“Papou, eho na sou po kati.”
“Ti einai Jimako mou?”
(Sorry. I should translate…)
“Grandpa, I have something to tell you.”
“What is it, James?”
“I’m studying ancient Greek!”
“Ancient Greek? Why? Only Germans know ancient Greek.”
My father was raised just behind the archaeological museum in Athens — the one with that empty-handed Poseidon (or Zeus) and Schliemann’s beloved Mask of Agamemnon. Looking out from my father’s childhood balcony, just slightly to the right, you can make out the back side of this museum, along with the Acropolis just down the way.
In front of the museum is the periptero where I would buy my bus tickets. The same kiosk sells, like every one in Greece it seems, cigarettes and porn alongside Mickey Mouse comics and postcards boasting important ancient soundbites like γνῶθι σεαυτόν.
The old man whose conversation I just reported is—was—my father’s stepfather. He is the person who took me as a child to that archaeological museum and explained the significance of its artifacts to me. He is the one who translated the postcards for me into something I could understand. He is the same individual who used to cringe at my Cypriot-inflected American accent and then curse my parents’ unwillingness to teach me “proper Greek” (By the way, can’t we stop referring to it as “modern” Greek? It’s redundant. Greek is a living language. By definition, it must be modern).
This is the same old man who acted as though the language of ancient Greece was about as relevant to his identity — and by extension, to mine too — as Old High German is to an American’s.
At the time of that conversation, my grandfather was approaching his ninetieth year, each and every one of which — barring his time in the countryside fighting Nazis — he spent living in the cradle of classical Western culture. I did not expect him, of all people, to be the one to dismiss my attempts at learning the language of his city’s distinguished periptero postcards.
Last September Eidolon published “On Not Knowing (Modern) Greek,” in which Johanna Hanink argues that classicists’ dismissive attitude towards the modern tongue is eerily reminiscent of the colonial attitude that nineteenth-century philhellenes took towards the country they were lauding (and raiding at times).
Why do classicists commit so much of their lives to learning each and every bit of this language, except the parts that are still actively being used? They love Greece. They spend their vacations there. They probably do more than anyone to promote its legacy around the world. And they are also part of the reason why I never, ever, wanted to know ancient Greek.
Growing up, I avoided everything about the classical world. The language? Dead and done for. Myths? Mumbo jumbo. Homer? Sophocles? Overrated.
I wasn’t even that familiar with these words I was dismissing. Mine were not so much informed opinions as knee-jerk reactions to the kinds of things people would tell me when they would learn of my parents’ background:
“Wow. So your mom must have told you bedtime stories about Odysseus, right? You’re so lucky.”
(No, I learned about the Odyssey through more esteemed channels thank you … via Duck Tales.)
“Wow. So like your ancestors are Plato and Socrates? Your family must be very progressive.”
(Actually, my ancestors were diaspora merchants and peasant fishermen, and the Greeks I knew growing up — including many in my own family — were extremely narrow-minded on issues like race, gender, and sexual orientation.)
Over the years, it started to seem that the world simply did not care to know if anything had happened in that eastern European peninsula after Alexander the Great died. There’s nothing wrong with associating a culture with a distinguished past — but when that past comes to dominate a culture’s current identity, not only is that identity rendered fictitious, so is that past we keep distinguishing.
During graduate school I helped organize a conference. As usual, we student organizers took the keynote speaker out to lunch, and, as usual, he politely went round the table to ask us what we were studying and what languages we worked in — typical Comparative Literature department questions. When my turn came I said, “Italian and modern Greek.” He replied, “Huh … you should do ancient Greek too,” and then he moved on.
I felt … vindicated. I had been right all along, right to resent the world for ignoring this culture’s continued existence, right to resent the ancients for stamping their indelible impressions into world history, and of course, right to want to not learn ancient Greek, ever. Would that keynote speaker have told a student of Spanish or French to learn Latin? A Russianist to acquire Old Church Slavonic? Only Greek can’t do well enough on its own. Only Greek has to rely on the ancients to get some respect.
I know what you’re thinking: What a fool. A fool! That keynote speaker wasn’t being condescending. He wasn’t ignoring the modern world (maybe). He was advising me to know the modern world even better (this I could buy). Because it’s one thing to simply not know. It’s one thing to not have time to know what you want to know. But it is something else to not want to know. Which is why this essay may have begun as a diatribe, but it will end as a confession.
As a kid, I hated the Greek classes my parents begged my sister and me to attend at the church (the modern Greek classes, mind you). And ancient? I only began studying it at twenty-six because I was forced to, and at twenty-seven, I quit.
Over the years I’ve come up with a million ways to justify these choices — from dismissing a dead language’s usefulness to my career to resenting a living one’s relevance to my identity. Each justification — I admit — is an excuse. But it is an excuse that’s easier to fall back on if all your life you have been told by people (who don’t really know a thing about you) what exactly you are supposed to know. Not because if you don’t, you won’t get into college or get a job, but because without this magical knowledge you won’t ever really be… yourself. It’s hard enough becoming who you are on your own terms. It’s damned tiring doing so on another’s.
A first-generation kid’s relationship to the world his parents came from isn’t so different from the relationship any modern local has with the world their country’s ancestors came from. Both are dubious at worst, tangled at best. Trying to forge these relationships is like attempting to become more yourself by stepping into a world that isn’t really yours, but that everyone else assumes must be.
Some years back I confessed to a relative that I was losing my Greek. Expecting the usual “No! It’s great,” or the proverbial “Don’t worry. It’ll come back,” — as though it merely got lost on its way to the periptero — I instead got a reprimand: “You should be ashamed. This is your language. How can you forget it?”
No. It isn’t my language, and as much as I’ve always wanted it to be, it never has been. Not because it hasn’t always been there, waiting for me, but because even if it has, culture — for better and sometimes for worse — is never a birthright. Culture is an acquisition, made on behalf of other people’s expectations.
“You should be ashamed.” Strong words. I couldn’t help but think back to that very polite keynote speaker telling me to study classical Greek. Was his admonishment so different from my relative’s? Were either anything less than an attempt to define my identity according to another’s definitions of it? It would be like if a couple of Germans arrived in a country’s shiny new capital and designed its museum of antiquities according to their ideas of the other culture’s history. (Yep. You guessed it. That archaeological museum? Designed by Germans.)
But didn’t I say this article would end as a confession and not a diatribe? The confession of someone whose greatest regret in life is, and has always been, never learning well enough a language his dad is funniest in, his mother reminisces in, and his Athenian grandfather knew too well to speak deeply enough with his ignorant tourist grandson. A language which — like any language, nation, or individual — shouldn’t have to pretend it ever stopped being itself.
The lesson then, if lessons there ever be, is an ancient one: know thyself (γνῶθι σεαυτόν), even if achieving this wisdom requires learning the grammars you never fully inherited.
Because at what point have we actually finished learning about that people and that place that inspired our devotion? If you only care about speaking to your relatives, isn’t some chitchat vocabulary enough? And if the culture you’re devoting your career to seemed so much more interesting back when sirens lured its sailors, does it even matter that those seas are still being sailed? After all, we can, at the very least, locate them on a map. Isn’t that enough?
James Nikopoulos will on occasion teach ancient literature, in ignorance and with reverence, in translation.
