Apologetics ~ Tracy Lee Simmons

Extracts from “Climbing Parnassus – A New Apologia For Greek And Latin” by Tracy Lee Simmons, 2002

“Parnassus was one of the most holy mountains in Greece, hallowed by the worship of Apollo, of the Muses, and of the Corcyrian nymphs, and by the orgies of the Bacchantes.”

“Not to know Greek is to be ignorant of the most flexible and subtle instrument of expression which the human mind has devised, and not to know Latin is to have missed an admirable training in precise and logical thought.”
[Foreword]

“The classical languages can change and enhance one’s intellectual and aesthetic nature, shaping both the mind and the heart. And I am not the first to say so.”
[Preface]

“To ‘climb Parnassus’ was to strive after the favor of Apollo and the nine muses. . . . While representing the unattainable for most pilgrims, Parnassus also pointed to those treasures bestowed by the muses upon the faithful and diligent ones who wait and work. . . . ‘Climbing Parnassus’ eventually became a code for the painfully glorious exertions of Greek and Latin.”
[Introduction]

“A firm knowledge of the classical languages, history, and culture will not of itself create virtue. . . . But this knowledge can form the mind and light a path to understanding. For it is noble to rediscover and attend to the voices of the past. We ignore them to our peril.”
[Introduction]

“We drift without classics, floating on our own deracinated, exiguous islands. And we become fodder for demagogues. We need not a revolution, but a restoration.”
[Introduction]

“Whitehead claimed all modern philosophy to be mere footnotes to Plato. An expedition into the classical world will lead us to philosophy, that highest of human quests after the spiritual, and a pursuit Plutarch once called ‘the head and font of all education.’”
[Introduction]

“Parnassus can be scaled by anyone with intelligence and curiosity who is also possessed of a doggedness for detail. With so much of the climbing gear available now to the disciplined autodidact in the form of books, films and computer software, the vistas have never been accessible to so many.”
[Introduction]

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See also:

Edith Hamilton – The Greek Way [Book, 1930]

Charlotte Higgins – It’s all Greek To Me [Book, 2008]

Dorothy L. Sayers – The Lost Tools of Learning [Talk at Oxford, 1947]

Virginia Woolf – On Not Knowing Greek [Essay, 1925]

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Painting of Mount Parnassus from Edward Dodwell's Views in Greece, 1821
(Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)