An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

by Daniel Mendelsohn

What, these philosophers were wondering, could studying the ancient classics possibly teach students in the present day? Locke, like many parents today, derisively wondered why a working person would need to know Latin. Wolf’s answer was, Human nature. For him, the object of his new literary “science”—“philology,” from the Greek for “love of language”—was nothing less than a means to a profound understanding of the “intellectual, sensual, and moral powers of man.” But to study the ancient texts and cultures properly, one had to approach them as scientifically as one did when studying the physical universe. As with mathematics or physics, Wolf argued, meaningful study of classical civilization could arise only from mastery of many essential and interlinked disciplines: immersion not only in Ancient Greek and Latin (and, often, in Hebrew and Sanskrit), in their vocabularies and grammars and syntaxes and prosody, but in the history, religion, philosophy, and art of the cultures that spoke and wrote those languages. To this immersion, he went on, there had to be added the mastery of specialized skills, such as those needed to decipher ancient papyri, manuscripts, and inscriptions, such mastery being as necessary, ultimately, to the study of ancient literature as the mastery of plane and solid geometry, of arithmetic and algebra, and, indeed, of calculus is to proper study of the field we call mathematics.