Why Everyone Should Read the Classics

“The Classics” by Sean W. Malone | AI Generated

Once upon a time, a professor teaching a Great Books course asked me, a self-proclaimed librophile, along with my other classmates, why he bothered having us read Homer.

What could we, modern students, hope to learn by reading millennia-old tales of war and journey?

To my very great shame, I did not have much of an answer at the time. And neither did my fellow students, despite all of us being in the honors program and self-selected into academic rigor.

As a little girl who discovered Poe and Brontë and London and Austen on the living room bookshelf, I grew into the sort of adolescent who read Hamlet for fun (and as a flex) at age 12. I then grew into the teen who proudly claimed Joseph Conrad as the author of my favorite book, whose “trophy case” of titles featured Hardy, Hawthorne, Joyce, Wolfe, Elliott, O’Connor, Hurston, Dickens, Orwell, Kafka, and Shelley by the time I graduated high school.

And even so, after much class discussion of our Iliad reading, when the professor finally asked his question, I did not have a ready or adequate answer.

So, why would we read “the classics” in this modern age? What could we possibly learn from them, anyway?

I do have an answer to that question now, but before we get into why everyone should read these particular stories, we must first ask, why read stories at all?

Humans have been telling each other stories since before written records. 40,000 years ago, before agriculture, before almost anything, really, early humans — despite hunger and cold and danger outside in the deep, devouring dark — painted in caves. They daubed the shapes of animals onto stone, telling, in their own way, the stories of hopes and fears and dangers and desires.

Aurochs, Horses and Deer painted on a cave at Lascaux | Wikimedia Commons

From a purely practical standpoint, stories are the most efficient way to convey important information to an ignorant party so that it sticks. The psychology and biology of all that are topics for another day, but it is sufficient for our purposes to declare that stories do this in a way so that information is not simply known, but understood.

And despite the evolution of media and distribution methods over the course of tens of thousands of years, despite shortened attention spans in defiance of greater free time, we are still telling stories.

Which brings us back to the original question: if we are still telling stories, why bother with these stories?

What do the Iliad or Beowulf or even Pride and Prejudice have to do with the modern reader? What do I — a forty-something, married mother of two — have to learn from The Picture of Dorian Gray or Romeo and Juliet?

A great deal, as it happens.

These stories are not considered “great” simply because they have endured. They have endured because they are great.

Sure, the Iliad is a violent epic where heroes (and not the modern definition of such) take the time to spout off their various lineages at one another across the battlefield before committing wartime atrocities, all while the gods egg them on and take petty swipes at one another. That’s what happens, but that’s not what it’s about.

What it’s about, and what we can learn from it — to finally answer my professor’s question — is the price of pride. Agamemnon married Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, for pride. Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite demanded Paris choose “the fairest” among them for pride. Paris gave Helen the golden apple, enchanting her away from her husband, for pride. And for the slight against his pride, Agamemnon rallied the Greeks to besiege Troy for a decade.

Pride is not, and never has been, exclusive to ancient Greeks. And we see the perils and pitfalls of pride in each of the stories I mentioned above. All of them tell it differently, with the costs displayed in different contexts, circumstances, and severities. They each challenge the reader to consider pride in different ways. The pride of Elizabeth and Darcy looks very different from the pride of Beowulf, Dorian, or Lord Capulet. It remains, nevertheless, pride.

But how would we know if we didn’t read all of them?

Without the cognitive complexity of these works, particularly in comparison with each other, how could we recognize that the bloviating of the warmongering tyrant we see on the news is not so fundamentally different from the petty vanity of a coworker or classmate? And more importantly, how could we possibly begin to identify it in ourselves?

Externally, I bear no resemblance to Achilles. I am not a mighty warrior or a demigod. My mother never dipped me in the River Styx. But I, too, want to be remembered. And the empathy that comes of seeing something of myself in someone so very different makes the cautionary lesson much more personal. It is no bad thing to desire a legacy, but not at any price, and so I am more willing to bear the sting of some perceived slight lest I lose what matters most to me. A lesson, I daresay, Achilles would have benefitted from learning.

And that’s simply one example among countless. This is what makes the classics, well, classic. They have endured because, despite the settings, framings, and styles being intrinsically tied to the times and places in which they were created, their stories possess a timelessness. Not in what happens, but in what they are about.

This is why we still read the classics. This is why we include them on the Lexandria platform. Parsing the language of the denser works of Milton, Spencer, Dostoyevsky, and Cervantes is certainly an important part of academic rigor. But in doing so, we also gain incredibly valuable insights into ourselves and the world around us, a substance that simply cannot be replaced by any amount of spectacle-based, shallow entertainment.

Literature is not an afterthought in a classical education. It is a key element in understanding the past, the present, and what might yet happen if we are diligent or unwary. It is simultaneously both lens and mirror, demanding that we behold the other and behold the self — behold, and understand.

At Lexandria, we are committed to bringing classical education into the digital age. And great literature is a significant element of a classical, truly liberal education. Nothing exists in a vacuum — not history, not philosophy, and certainly not literature. When thoughtfully studied together, all of these elements create a more comprehensive understanding than when studied in isolation, encouraging students to think more critically and creatively.

In the coming weeks, you will begin to see a wider selection of great works of literature appear on Lexandria’s platform, expanding our collection beyond civics, economics, and history. Like everything else on the platform, these come at no cost to users, and their inclusion is designed to enhance students’ learning and understanding, not distract from it. Our goal is to make sure these timeless lessons continue to endure, to be accessed, and to be understood.