GREEK AND LATIN MATTERS

“It’s all Greek to me,” is considered a wise-guy remark when a person doesn’t know something and tries to slough it off with a joke. Greek and Latin, those stalwarts of Western language and learning were the foundation of the education of our American forefathers, like Adams, Jefferson, and Monroe. Lectures at Harvard and other major universities at that time were given in those languages. John Adams encouraged his son, John Quincy Adams, to master the Greek language so he could enter Harvard as he had.
During a time I had attended The Army Language School in Monterey, California one of my classmates who was from the CIA, had mastered Latin at his Catholic schooling. As a consequence of his fluency in Latin, he was able to complete courses in Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Albanian in record time and went on to learn the languages spoken in Vietnam, where, incidentally, he died during that war. (Will man ever learn what a waste war is?) I never asked him if he knew Greek, but I bet he did.
The scholars of ancient Greece and Rome left a treasure trove of literature that has yet to be exhausted. Homer, Plato, Socrates, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius and countless others gave us a litany of work that has been used ever since as the basis for poems, plays, and novels that have delighted the very souls of the succeeding generations of mankind. It is humbling to study that era of long ago.
The oeuvre of these ancients laid the groundwork for the thinking employed by Western modern man. Aristotle summed it up with his formula of Ethos, Logos and Pathos, which has become the very essence of literature. A good plot has to contain these three elements: Ethos means credibility; Logos is the logic; and Pathos supplies the emotional element. A story lacking believability, reasoning and feeling has little chance of success with its audience.
What did we learned from the Greco-Roman experience? Our present day Western modern society is based on the Rule of Law formulated by those times. They gave us a belief in reason and science, the concept of separation of church and state, as well as the idea of individual freedom born of liberty. They laid the foundations for astronomy, mathematics and medicine. Our calendar, alphabet, code of law, the Olympics, philosophy, literature, the jury system, the ldea that the accused is innocent until proven guilty, the election of leaders, a legislature representing all classes, paying for labor, the list goes on and on of things we have inherited and adopted from the age of Greco-Roman societies.
Now that we have moved into the world of technology that includes the internet, Western modern man has become inundated with trivia, texting mindless messages to one another out of keeping in touch but not physically. How much ethos, logos and pathos are contained in those brief, personal text communications is questionable. I’d like to believe that over time, users would become more mindful of reaching out to others in a more serious fashion where they physically meet, shake hands or hug and sit down to a cup of java together and communicate eye to eye. Of course, it will be a sacrifice to miss out on a lot of trivia and rumor, but I for one believe it will be worth the price. Every day it has become common to read accounts of terrible accidents, including train wrecks, because the driver was texting at the time. Addiction is a fathomless curse that grinds the mind into a whirling vortex from which few emerge unscathed. It reminds of that old joke about the guy who cleaned up after the elephants at the circus. When someone heard him complain about his job, it was suggested that he quit at which point the employee retorted, “What, and give show business?”