Taggart - A Classical Education: The Stuff You Wish Youd Been Taught at School

My heartfelt thanks, again, to Silvia, Ana, Toby and everyone else at Michael O'Mara for making these books happen; to Jamie Buchan and Dan Crompton for enthusiastic nit-picking; to Glen for designing at the speed of light; and to the enormous number of friends and relations who seem to have got almost as much enjoyment out of the whole experience as I have. A friend when you're having fun is a friend indeed.

Two things: a decision and a question.

The decision, with a book like this, is what to include and what to leave out. For most people, `classical' means the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and I have stuck to them except when they banged up against people such as the Persians or the Carthaginians who couldn't be ignored. The first great Greek writer was Homer, in around the ninth century sc, while the last great Roman ones wrote in the second century AD; most of the famous philosophers, inventors, politicians and emperors lived in between. Obviously the mythology came before Homer - because that is what he was writing about - and the Roman Empire went on for a bit longer, so don't hold me to those dates, but they are my rough parameters.

The question is `Who cares?' After all, it was all a very long time ago, it has no relevance to us, and it isn't as if the Greeks and the Romans were the world's first civilizations anyway. And it's all sooo boring... isn't it?

True, Buddha and Confucius both died before Socrates was born, so the Greeks can't claim to have invented philosophy. As anyone who saw the Tutankhamen exhibition knows, the Egyptians were doing some pretty sophisticated stuff with gold in the fourteenth century sc, and building pyramids over a thousand years before that. The Babylonians created huge stepped structures known as ziggurats, and topped them off with temples, in around 2000 Bc; the Assyrians had magnificent palaces by 800 sc. The Sumerians had a written language as early as 3500 Bc, as did the Hittites 2000 years later - but that was still 600 years or more before anything was written down in Greek. So the Greeks didn't invent art, architecture or culture, either - why all the fuss?

I suppose the answer is that they invented our art, architecture, culture and philosophy. In the twenty-first-century Western world, there are classical influences all around us. A civic building that looks serious and important is likely to be in the classical style. Whether we know it or not, we put together a logical argument following principles laid down by Aristotle. We do geometry and trigonometry because the Ancient Greeks showed us how. (Perhaps not the strongest argument in their favour.) Our language is full of references to Herculean tasks and having the Midas touch. Judges still ad lib, comedians hold sessions in camera - or should that be vice versa? Even if we don't study the classics, there's simply no getting away from them.

Unlike most of the earlier, Middle Eastern, civilizations, the Greeks and Romans also left us a massive amount of writing. We know what their lives were like, we know about their wars and their politics, their crimes and misdemeanours, their wives and lovers. Quite a lot more than is any of our business about their lovers, actually. We know that they were just like us. Lines such as `We are just statistics, born to consume resources' might have been written yesterday, and `You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she'll be constantly running back' might have come straight from the mouth of Alan Titchmarsh. Yet they are both Horace, writing (and gardening, evidently) in the first century sc.

Which brings me to the not insignificant point that the classical writers are fun. Admittedly there aren't many laughs in the Greek tragedies, but anyone who tells you that the classics are dull hasn't read Herodotus, Ovid, Horace or Tacitus, or seen the plays of Euripides or Sophocles performed. And, if I may mention this without lowering the tone too much, Aristophanes, Catullus and Juvenal all produced a considerable amount of pure filth that still has the power to amuse or arouse.

Yet in the last twenty years, the number of students taking Latin GCSE has reduced by almost half, almost nobody learns Greek, and even Classical Studies - where you can read the texts in translation - is very much a minority interest. It seems a shame, because there is so much in the classics that speaks to us today.

Still, nil desperandum. Perhaps some of the snippets in this book will encourage you to seek bona fide sources and overturn the status quo. As for me, this introduction was the last bit of the book to be written, so nunc est bibendum - in other words, I've finished, so I'm off to the pub.

At a conservative estimate, about half of modern English derives from Latin, and a lot of that has Greek origins, with the result that just under a third of the words in an average English-speaker's vocabulary are ultimately drawn from Greek. So, although very few people learn either language these days and most of us would be hard pushed to tell an ablative from an aorist, we nevertheless blithely babble away in these ancient tongues all the time.

But it has to be said that there is something slightly offputting about your first glance at Greek...

This is a very different beast from the Roman alphabet we use today, although the Romans evolved theirs from a classical Greek original.

Most people are content to sail through life without bothering about this, but if you do any amount of maths or science you will come across at, p, 0 and many others; if you read the Bible you will find `I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending' - which is just the Greek way of saying `I am A and Z, not to be confused with a street directory'; and if you are an outstanding scholar in the US you might be honoured with the 1 BK (Phi Beta Kappa) award. That said, what really matters to most of us are not the letters but the words.