Paige Dewbrey
Winner of our 2025 Write | Speak | Design Competition, Paige is a student from the US, who delivered the following manifesto in response to the question ‘Why is Classics important?’
Against Justification: The Unruly Necessity of Classics
The question “Why is Classics Important?” is, at first blush, an offense—a query lobbed like a molotov cocktail into the salons of those who have long been drunk on the wine of antiquity. It presumes justification, invites an embarrassed clearing of the throat, and hints at the need to defend, as though Classics were a guilty pleasure, a relic of some ancestral folly. It’s not just a question; it’s a dare, laced with the suspicion that we’re wasting our time, clinging to the intellectual equivalent of vinyl records in a Spotify world. To answer it with sincerity risks pandering; to answer it with irony risks alienation. Yet, here we are, poised on the precipice of such a provocation, daring to articulate why the foundations of Western thought should remain more than an archaeological curiosity. Why, indeed, should we care? How can we care, in times like these?
Let us dispense with the predictable litany of boilerplate defenses: that Classics teaches us critical thinking, that it’s the cornerstone of Western literature, that it grants us access to “The Great Conversation”, whatever that means. While these things are probably true, they’re also deeply boring and sound suspiciously like we’re trying to sell you a subscription to something you’re not even sure you want. It reeks of a kind of desperation, a flailing attempt to make the discipline palatable to a world hungry for “relevance”— reducing the Classics to a commodity, as though what truly matters about Homer or Cicero is how neatly they fit into a PowerPoint presentation on transferable skills. These arguments are scrubbed of texture, passion, and color—much like those alabaster statues once painted in gaudy hues but now left a pallid white by centuries of well-meaning neglect. Classics is important not because it flatters the mind or adorns the CV but because it unsettles, disrupts, and even humiliates. It makes you feel small.
Uncomfortably, thrillingly, existentially small. It is not an ornamental pedestal but a mirror, and the reflection it casts is often grotesque, sublime, and deeply human. The texts are riddled with contradictions, omissions, and unspeakable violences, and therein lies their power. The importance of Classics lies not in its completeness but in its absences, in the spaces where we are forced to imagine, to reconstruct, to mourn. They aren’t sacred relics; they’re raw materials, unfinished and unfinishable. To dismiss Classics as irrelevant—as some do, branding it the purview of crusty academics and reactionaries—is to misunderstand its radical potential. Classics is not a shrine to be venerated but an autopsy to be performed, an excavation of power in all its naked, bloody forms. The Greeks and Romans were not moral exemplars; they were imperialists, colonizers, and enslavers. To study their works without acknowledging this is to engage in a kind of intellectual tourism. But to confront these realities head-on is to wrestle with the mechanisms of domination that persist today. The rhetoric of Cicero, the politics of Augustus, the spectacle of the Colosseum—all are templates for modern machinations. To know them is to know ourselves, our complicities, our vulnerabilities.
Yet, Classics is not merely a catalog of atrocities. For amidst the violence and ambition and moral hypocrisy lies something ineffable: wonder. The geometry of Euclid, the metaphysics of Plotinus, the comedies of Aristophanes—these are gifts that defy utility, existing for the sheer joy of thought and expression. To engage with them is to affirm that human beings are not merely tools of production but creatures capable of transcendent beauty and discovery. Classics affirm that we are not merely tools of labor or cogs in an economic machine but creatures capable of astonishing leaps of thought and creativity. It is a reminder that some things—perhaps the best things—exist not because they are useful but because they are true. This, too, is why Classics matters: it insists on the value of the impractical, the ineffable, the sublime.
But let us not sentimentalize. Classics can be maddeningly obtuse, exasperatingly elitist, and, at times, staggeringly dull. There is no denying that parts of the canon are tedious, that the fetishization of Latin declensions has driven many a student to despair. Yet even these aspects serve a purpose. To grapple with the impenetrable is to cultivate humility, patience, and a tolerance for ambiguity. It is a reminder that not all knowledge comes easily and that some truths must be earned through struggle. In a culture of hot takes, of TikToks explaining Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations in 30 seconds, and of audiobooks consumed at 1.5x speed, the Classics represent an outrageous affront. They demand that you slow down, learn new grammatical cases, and parse the subjunctive moods of dead languages. But why should we care about subjunctive moods or dative absolutes when we can have answers—not mere reflections—delivered in milliseconds?
The answer lies not in what the Classics give us but in what they take away. They strip us of our modern illusions: the illusion of mastery, the illusion of immediacy, the illusion that knowledge is merely information in fancy dress. The Classics remind us that understanding is an act of patience, that wisdom is not speed but sedimentation—a slow layering of insights, accreted through effort, frustration, and even boredom.
Imagine a world without unnecessary skills. It would be, at first glance, utopian: a sleek, hyper-efficient mechanism in which every action serves a purpose, every moment yields tangible results. But examine it closer, and it reveals itself as horrifyingly hollow. What becomes of play? Of curiosity? Of the peculiar joy of doing something not because it is useful, but because it is hard, and in its difficulty lies a kind of transcendence? It is precisely this difficulty that the Classics offer—not as a burden, but as a gift. They demand that we slow down, not because slowness is inherently virtuous, but because it is in slowness that we begin to think. They frustrate us, not out of malice, but because frustration is the crucible in which clarity is forged. They are inefficient, and in their inefficiency, they mirror life itself: messy, unpredictable, and resistant to easy solutions.
And so, to read the Classics is to practice a kind of spiritual disobedience. It is to say: I will not be reduced to a consumer of content; I will not confine myself to what is easy or digestible. It is to assert that some things are worth doing precisely because they cannot be justified in terms of utility or optimization. The subjunctive moods of dead languages, the labyrinthine syntax of Cicero, the aching beauty of Homer’s hexameters—these are not relics; they are revolutions. They teach us not only how to read but how to live: slowly, thoughtfully, and with an unyielding reverence for the unnecessary. And in that toil, there’s a kind of beauty—a sacred discomfort that forces you to confront the limits of your patience, your intellect, your willingness to care.
I remember this one afternoon in my school’s Latin Club when I somehow managed to keep the room’s attention, including a few stray interlopers who’d wandered in looking for free donuts. The text we were wrestling with was Catullus 101, a poem so old and sad and stripped of pretense that it felt almost indecent, like you were eavesdropping on someone mid-sob. The task, predictably, was to break it apart: meter, scansion, translation. What wasn’t predictable was the way the room fell quiet, people leaning forward like something in the bones of the thing demanded it. We argued over the rhythm, tripped over Latin words that weren’t built for our mouths, and tried to explain how a 2,000-year-old funeral poem could still punch you in the chest. It wasn’t about cracking the code—though that was its own kind of rush—but about theway the room shifted into this weird collective focus, all of us orbiting the same point for once. It wasn’t sacred, not exactly. But it stuck, the way good discomfort does.
Of course, there are problems with Classics: that Classics is too Eurocentric, too bound up with the narratives of white supremacy, for instance. This critique is not without merit; the discipline has often been wielded as a tool of exclusion and domination. But to abandon Classics on these grounds is to cede the field to those who would weaponize it. Instead, we must reclaim it, interrogating its biases, expanding its boundaries, and situating it within a global context. The Classics are not the exclusive property of any one culture; they are part of a larger, messier human inheritance.
And what of the common charge that Classics is irrelevant in an age of climate crisis, social upheaval, and technological acceleration? This, too, is a misunderstanding. The ancient texts are, in many ways, premonitory. The ecological devastation lamented in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the political corruption satirized by Juvenal, the existential despair of Lucretius—these are not relics of a bygone era but resonances of our own. Classics teaches us that the past is never truly past, that its ghosts linger in our language, our institutions, our imaginations. Perhaps the most compelling argument for the importance of Classics is that it resists easy answers. It is a discipline that thrives on tension, on the interplay of opposites. It is at once conservative and radical, timeless and timely, universal and particular. To study Classics is to inhabit these contradictions, to revel in their dissonances, and to emerge, if not wiser, then more attuned to the complexities of existence. And so, we return to the question: Why is Classics important? Because it is difficult, maddening, and essential. Because it confronts us with the best and worst of ourselves. Because it demands that we think, feel, and imagine beyond the narrow confines of our present moment. Because it refuses to be reduced to soundbites or bullet points. In a world increasingly obsessed with the new, the immediate, and the disposable, Classics is a reminder of the enduring, the profound, and the sublime. And that, surely, is reason enough.
©PaigeDewbrey
For further inspiration, enjoy this spoken word piece by Catherine Perkins, winner of the 25+ Competition
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