Vew from the chair: Speeches of Richard WL Austin

kagathos, and the Romans that of the man with gravitas, qualities all too rare today at all levels of society. The classics are not only the fountainhead of European culture, but they help to clarify many modern problems and answer many modern questions concerning the ordering of the lives of individuals and communities in our own country. We cut ourselves adrift at our peril from influences such as these. The Russian poet Pushkin is on record as saying: 'How often do I tear my hair for not having had a classical education'. Coming closer to home, some wit once observed: 'It is not absolutely necessary to know Greek or Latin to have a conversation with Gough Whitlam, but, by God, it helps!'. Pushkin and the unnamed wit are not alone. Only a few months ago there was an interesting letter in the Courier-Mail headed 'Life with Latin', from Dr Clement Semmler, for many years Deputy Director of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, in which he said: The decline of Latin teaching in our schools is one of the great tragedies of our modern education system. Its primacy as an arts subject par excellence, parallel to the primacy of mathematics for science, rests on the fact that Latin was the common tongue of educated Europe for centuries.' Without Latin it is difficult for anyone to become a serious student of history or literature. But its value lies not only in the doors it opens. No living language (far less Asian languages) can replace it as a tool for teaching the analysis of meanings and ideas in sentences, and no other language, living or dead, can replace it as a basis for acquiring other modern languages. Moreover, the decline of Latin is a major cause of the increasing illiteracy and verbosity so apparent in everyday writing and speaking, and especially of bad spelling. The detractors of a classical education (Latin or Greek) claim its defect to be its seeming irrelevance to modern life. But this very irrelevance makes necessary the deliberate adjustment of pupils' minds to the language, ideas and forms of two highly articulate, vanished civilisations which, unlike Asian, are the basis of our own culture and civilisation. One thing at least is certain. The year of Our Lord 1992 will be remembered, if for nothing else, as the year in which the whole of the English-speaking world was made aware of two Latin words, annus horribilis, the phrase used by Her Majesty the Queen to describe the year then drawing to a close. It might well have been otherwise. If only the more junior members of the Royal Family had recalled a few lines of poetical Latin and the Royal servitors at Windsor Castle had known one phrase of practical Japanese, the year might have been remembered not as an annus horribilis but as another annus mirabilis. If only more weight had been given to Catullus's words: 'sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua' (but what a woman says to her lusting lover had best be written on the wind and in swift running water)-a caution which applies equally to a man. 2 I suggest the modern translation would be 'use a scrambler telephone'. 163