The question “Why is Classics important?” feels almost as old to me as Classics itself.  

When I was about nine years old, my dad read bedtime stories to me from a book about Greek mythology. I still have the book today. The fly cover depicts Medusa and Perseus, it’s tattered and torn, and the binding is falling apart, but still it evokes such deep feelings of joy in me. The stories seemed so exciting and heroic to my young mind, and I firmly believe that they set the foundation for my lifelong love of Classics.  

I toyed with the idea of studying archaeology when I was 18, but eventually I went out into the world of work. Time passed and I did several different kinds of jobs. I worked as a manufacturing systems engineer, then in a range of technical and operational roles in publishing, culminating in running a customer service and despatch team. Then when I was around 30, I found myself revisiting the idea of studying for a degree. 

I knew I was going to have to study in the evenings, and that I was going to have to continue to work full time. I also knew that I needed to choose something I would really love. After all, if I was going to do this after hours, I needed to give myself the best chance of success. It took me about three minutes to settle on Classics. I finished the degree, and then I put Classics down again, whilst I had a family.  

Roll forward ten years and in the back end of last year, I had a very significant change to my personal circumstances. I was left wondering what on earth I would do with my life, and during a conversation with a close friend of mine, he, knowing about my love of Classics, suggested this might be a good time for me to reconnect with the subject.  

I found the Classical Association and took the plunge of becoming a member and booking to come to the annual conference. I was pretty anxious about it at the time. I didn’t know anyone. I wasn’t an academic. I thought there was a real chance I could show up and not understand anything I listened to, but I thought the worst that could happen was that I wouldn’t go again. So off to Warwick I went.  

I had an incredible time. Everyone there was friendly and welcoming and whilst I was there, I volunteered to help the CA’s mission. I’ve loved every minute of working with them since, and I was very moved when asked to write this piece. So, after all the above, why is Classics important?

To me, it’s important because it gives us a lens into the human condition thousands of years ago. That lens helps us understand much about the cycles we still find happening in the world today. Be they emotional, political, societal. For me, Classics is foundational. It’s a subject which comes from a time before human beings had categorised subjects into specialisms for study. I like to view thinkers in the ancient world as the original Systems Thinkers. Systems thinking is a way of thinking about something as part of a larger whole, and it’s pretty useful if you’re a business analyst, like me, developing processes or computer systems. Ancient philosophers thought about nature, and physics and ethics and aesthetics and emotions to name but a few. This way of thinking lets us observe connections between things that we might not otherwise be aware of. It’s vital to producing effective solutions to the world’s problems and I can see it all over the ancient world. 

Classics is important to me because it reminds me that technology changes, but people remain the same. I remember studying my undergrad in the run up to 2012 when the Olympic stadium was being built in London, and reading the views of people opposed to this use of taxpayer money and then finding similar views about Herodes Atticus’ Olympic stadium in 140 CE. Classics teaches us that the way that human beings respond to challenges in life, the anxieties they have, the things they worry about, remain universal and that is a source of great comfort to me.  

More recently, I have been interested in what Classics can teach us about authoritarian leaders. Given the rise of such leaders around the world in recent times, I am interested in the parallels of those kinds of personalities through time, what they sought to achieve and how they operated. It feels to me that the kind of insight Classics can provide into this continues to make it hugely important and relevant as a subject of study today.  

I’ll end by saying that Classics has helped me develop an understanding of storytelling and of critical thinking that I deploy in my job every single day. But more than that, Classics is a subject which inspires me. I use much of what I’ve learned about oracy in creating and telling stories in all sorts of formats, and often, we can see the tropes and themes of classical literature in many of our modern stories. These tropes and themes give us a common language of understanding with which we can communicate with and to each other, build communities, and bring people closer together, all of which is necessary for us to solve the problems we face in the world today. 

Bex Sleap-Ireland is a systems manager who has worked in data and analysis across the charity and university sectors; she is also a storyteller.