Why do the Classics matter? 

This month, we delve into something slightly different: why the classics matter and why teaching the ancient world remains relevant today. Our starting point is Italo Calvino’s celebrated essay Why Read the Classics? Calvino argues that a classic is not simply an old, prestigious book, but a work that continues to generate new meanings. Classics reach us carrying centuries of interpretations, adaptations and cultural associations, yet they can still surprise us when we return to the original text. Above all, they help us form our own relationship with the past rather than accepting what we think we already know about it. The same principle can be applied more broadly to the study of antiquity. Ancient texts, objects, buildings and landscapes are not static relics preserved at a safe distance from contemporary life. Each generation approaches them with new questions and finds different ways of understanding what they reveal about communities, identities, power, belief and everyday experience. Teaching the classics is therefore not simply about transmitting established knowledge or asking students to admire an inherited canon. It is about learning to read critically, compare different kinds of evidence and recognize how interpretations are constructed. It allows us to confront societies very different from our own while also asking how the ancient world continues to shape our languages, institutions, stories and physical surroundings. Over the month, we will explore how classical texts and material remains can be brought into everyday teaching, how they can open conversations between past and present and why antiquity continues to deserve a place in the way we understand the world.

Okay, I know I am biased here. Italo Calvino is one of my favourite writers ever. Being Italian, I grew up reading his books from childhood, first encountering their humour, imagination and apparent simplicity, and only later beginning to understand their extraordinary intellectual depth. Calvino is one of those writers who changes as you change. The stories I read as a child for their impossible characters and fantastic settings became, when I returned to them as an adult, reflections on identity, politics, history and the ways in which people construct meaning from the world around them. The books had remained the same, but I had not.

That experience lies at the heart of Why Read the Classics? First published as a collection of essays after Calvino’s death, the book brings together his reflections on writers ranging from Homer, Ovid and Pliny the Elder to Ariosto, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy and Borges. Yet it is much more than a series of literary commentaries. It is an exploration of how books survive, how readers change and how the past continues to speak within the present.

For anyone interested in antiquity, this is not an abstract question. Why do we still read Homer? Why return to Ovid’s transformations, Pliny’s attempt to catalogue the natural world or the ancient stories that generations of writers, artists and communities have repeatedly reshaped? Why should words composed in societies so distant from our own continue to matter?

Calvino’s answer is that a classic is not simply an old or prestigious book. It is a work that continues to produce meaning. His most famous definition describes a classic as a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

This does not mean that a classical work contains a single timeless message waiting to be uncovered. Quite the opposite. Classics endure because they cannot be exhausted by one reading, one interpretation or one historical period.

Returning to Ancient Texts

We often imagine rereading as repetition. Yet we never truly read the same book twice. A person encountering the Odyssey at school may remember monsters, shipwrecks and the long journey home. Reading it again later may bring different elements into view: displacement, memory, identity, hospitality, violence and the cost of returning to a place that has changed during one’s absence. The poem has not changed. The reader has.

The same is true of Ovid. The Metamorphoses may initially seem to be a collection of extraordinary stories in which gods, humans, animals and landscapes change form. A later reading may reveal more troubling questions about power, desire, suffering, gender and the instability of identity.

Ancient texts are not static objects. They form relationships with their readers, and those relationships develop over time. For Calvino, this capacity to generate new readings is not incidental to the classic. It is what makes a work classical.

The Classics Before We Read Them

Calvino also observes that classics often reach us before we have read them. Most people know something of the ancient world through fragments. We recognize the Trojan Horse, the Cyclops, Medusa, Narcissus and Icarus. We encounter them in paintings, films, novels, advertising and everyday language. Ancient stories have become so deeply embedded in modern culture that they can feel familiar even when we have never approached the original texts.

But this familiarity can be deceptive. The Odyssey becomes a story of adventure. Medusa becomes simply a monster. Narcissus becomes a warning against vanity. Complex figures are reduced to symbols, while stories are stripped of their ambiguity, historical setting and emotional force. Returning to the text can therefore be an act of rediscovery. What seemed familiar becomes strange again. This is one of the pleasures of reading the classics directly. We discover how much has been omitted, simplified or transformed by later tradition. We begin to see how every generation has remade antiquity according to its own concerns.

Ancient stories have never remained still. Romans reworked Greek traditions. Medieval writers gave them new moral and religious meanings. Renaissance artists reshaped them visually. Modern writers have used them to examine war, colonialism, sexuality, trauma and political power. Reading a classic means entering this long process of transmission and transformation.

Texts, Places and Material Remains

For those of us drawn to archaeology and the ancient world, classics acquire another dimension. They are not encountered only on the page. Ancient literature exists alongside temples, theatres, roads, houses, tombs, inscriptions and objects. Texts provide stories and voices, while archaeology reveals the material settings within which ancient lives unfolded. Neither gives us the whole picture. A literary source may describe ideals rather than ordinary experience. It may represent the perspective of a narrow social group. Archaeological remains are fragmentary, altered by time and often difficult to interpret. Yet bringing texts and material evidence together allows a more complex ancient world to emerge.

Reading Homer changes the experience of standing before the remains of a Bronze Age settlement, even when we know that poetry and archaeology cannot be matched directly. Reading Pliny can transform the way we think about Roman attitudes towards nature, technology and knowledge. Reading ancient accounts of cities, rituals and journeys can make archaeological landscapes feel populated again.

The reverse is equally true. Visiting an ancient city changes the way we read: distances become visible, streets acquire gradients and surfaces, buildings become part of neighbourhoods rather than isolated plans. We become aware of heat, light, water, movement and the effort required to cross a landscape. Monumental architecture is placed alongside workshops, drainage systems, kitchens and ordinary houses. The physical remains challenge the simplified ancient world constructed by literary tradition. They remind us that the past was inhabited not only by the figures whose names survive in texts, but by countless people whose lives are preserved primarily through objects, buildings and traces of daily activity.

Classics and archaeology therefore work best not when one is used merely to illustrate the other, but when each raises questions about the limits of the evidence.

Seeing the Present Through the Past

Calvino does not argue that the classics matter because they offer simple lessons for modern life. Ancient societies were not versions of our own, and their values cannot be transferred directly into the present: this distance is part of their value. Reading ancient literature means encountering societies organized around profoundly different ideas about citizenship, slavery, family, gender, religion and political authority. The familiar exists alongside the deeply unfamiliar. We may recognize grief, jealousy, ambition, fear or longing, but these emotions operated within social structures different from our own. Ancient characters are neither completely alien nor simply modern people in different clothing. Classics make us confront this tension.

They can also help us see that the present is not inevitable. The ways in which we organize communities, define status, use public space and understand the relationship between individuals and society have long histories. Ancient texts and archaeological remains show us alternative systems, including both their possibilities and their injustices. This is not about searching the past for ready-made solutions. It is about using historical distance to ask better questions.

The Classics as a Journey

Reading the classics is itself a form of travel: it moves us between periods, places and ways of understanding the world. It requires imagination, but also attention to historical difference. Like visiting an archaeological site, reading an ancient text involves reconstruction. We work with what survives, aware that much has been lost. We move between fragments, contexts and later interpretations. The experience depends partly on knowledge, but also on curiosity and the willingness to look again. A classical work does not remain alive because it has been placed on a syllabus or declared important by an institution. It remains alive because people continue to return to it. They translate it, reinterpret it, argue with it and place it in conversation with new evidence. They read it before visiting an ancient place, or visit a place and then return to the text with new questions.

Books That Continue to Speak

Calvino’s answer to the question posed by his title is ultimately simple: we read the classics because some works continue to speak. They speak from societies distant from our own, preserving their ideas, conflicts and contradictions. They speak through the many generations that have copied, translated and transformed them. They speak through modern literature, art and popular culture, often before we have encountered them directly. Most importantly, they speak differently each time we return.

For me, this is true of Calvino himself. I began reading him as a child because his books were imaginative, strange and enjoyable. I return to him now because those same books open questions about history, knowledge and the relationship between people and the worlds they inhabit. Perhaps that is also the greatest value of reading the classics of antiquity. They do not provide an uncomplicated route back to the past. They offer something more interesting: an ongoing conversation between surviving words, material remains and the questions we bring to them: the classics have not finished saying what they have to say because we have not finished asking them questions.

05/07/2026