Are classics majors a dying breed?
Sure, I joke about it with my friends who frequent more popular majors. There will never be a lack of English majors, or a dearth of pre-med kids. I pretend that I alone am carrying the wisdom of thousands of years on my shoulders. I recognize the slow extinction of my kind, and I bear the mantle of the classical tradition on my shoulders with a quiet dignity.
No, I'm kidding, I try not to be a self righteous asshole most of the time.
But in reality, the classics are safe. In this fantastic article, Mary Beard points out that the classicists' obsession over our own mortality (which happens to be a classical theme, so we're just going in circles here) means that, because we are hyperaware that they may die, they won't.
This is vain, but the other reason that my future is secure is simply this: the classics are just too damn important to die. They are pervasive, running through modern culture like a virulent strand of smallpox, disfiguring those who they come into direct contact with (myself included) and even irrevocably changing those who don't even know that they were affected. You can barely get a few words into this sentence without tripping over a Greek or Latin remnant. Pop culture references Oedipal/Electra complexes and Achilles' heels. I make it a practice to connect everything I can to the ancient world.
Greek is a living language, but there is a direct and tangible tie with the ancient language that Homer spoke and Plato wrote. It's not like Latin, watered down into the Romance languages. There is a direct lineage that connects them. In a similar way, even though it's not always easy to see, the classics are here to stay. Forever.
We read the Classics because they teach us to remember how to remember. Our memories have voices (thank you, Stephen King--and you didn't think I'd go there, did you?) and the Classics are the way we hear them. But only if we are willing to listen to all they have to tell us.
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