My Take | Want to study Western classics? Go to China

In China, if you talk about the study of the classics, and of ancient Greek and Latin, the name of Leopold Leeb, a professor of literature at Renmin University in Beijing, will likely pop up. According to a recent profile in supchina.com, his textbooks and dictionaries are standard references.

Despite growing Western hostilities, the study of classical Western texts has been as strong as ever at China’s institutions of higher learning, and not only there. Leeb also offers popular annual summer Latin courses for teens and even preteens. He has been riding a wave of Western-civilisational interest in China as well as contributing to its popularisation, perhaps more than any scholar in the country.

By contrast, in the United States, if you talk about the study of the classics, and especially the “dead” languages today, the name of Dan-el Padilla Peralta will likely come up. A tenured classics professor at Princeton University, his main contribution to the discipline has been to denigrate, if not to kill it altogether. He himself has said as much.

At an academic conference in 2019, a critic of his called Mary Frances Williams, herself a classicist, tried to defend the Western classics as the political, literary and philosophical foundation of European and American culture. “It’s Western civilisation. It matters because it’s the West,” she said. This position, incidentally, is completely out-of-fashion in Western academia today. It’s no accident that Williams is an independent scholar; it’s unlikely you would find a young university scholar with a full-time job teaching in the humanities to make such a statement, at least publicly.

Peralta’s response was: “Here’s what I have to say about the vision of classics that you outlined. I want nothing to do with it. I hope the field dies that you’ve outlined, and that it dies as swiftly as possible.”