CLIMBING PARNASSUS
A New Apologia for Greek and Latin
By Tracy Lee Simmons
Foreword by William F. Buckley Jr.
List Item No. 314
ISBN: 1-882926-73-0 (cloth)
290 pages
List Price: $24.95
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Simmons first sketches the development of educational practice in the schools of the classical and Renaissance eras. He then presents a lively narrative of the fortunes of classical learning in the modern age, including accounts of the classical tongues' influence on some of the West's most prominent writers and statesmen, including, among many others, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Thomas Arnold, Theodore Roosevelt, Evelyn Waugh, and C. S. Lewis. Simmons demonstrates the personally cultivating and intellectually liberating qualities that study of the Greek and Latin authors in their own languages has historically provided. Further, by tracing the historical trajectory of Greek and Latin education, Simmons is able to show that the classical languages have played a crucial role in the development of authentic Humanism, the foundation of the West's cultural order and America's understanding of itself as a union of citizens.
In Climbing Parnassus Simmons presents the reader not so much with a program for educational renewal as with a defense and vindication of the formative power of Greek and Latin. His persuasive witness to the unique, now all-but-forgotten advantages of study in, and of, the classical languages constitutes a bracing reminder of the genuine aims of a truly liberal education.
What They're Saying...
"Apologists for Greek and Latin have lately dwindled. Yet in the past several years there have been some notable attempts to save classical education from utter extinction. …But nobody since the death of Auden has made a stand as delightfully instructive as the one we find in Climbing Parnassus."
—American Conservative
"[T]his world can try to dumb us down completely, but all is not yet lost. Like early Hollywood, there is still a reverence for intelligence. … A friend of mine, Tracy Lee Simmons, recently wrote Climbing Parnassus, a new approach to why learning the classical languages is worth the time and trouble. 'To learn Greek and Latin is difficult, but goes far toward orienting and refining the mind, inclining the soul toward those things which man, at his best, wishes, and ought to wish, to achieve.' …hear, hear!"
—Taki, The Spectator
"The author elucidates the values inherent in a classical education, i.e., the Greek and
Latin languages and literatures, and these ideals shape this intelligent, passionate, and articulate book."
—Choice
"Tracy Lee Simmons's book is a timely reminder of how much the West has derived from its classical roots. The climb up Parnassus is eminently worth making, and this volume worth reading."
—Weekly Standard
"[C.S.] Lewis was for 'ruthlessly aristocratic, shamelessly high-brow' education. So is Simmons…in a book that is mostly affirmative and not condemnatory in its argument, contrasting classical studies with garden-variety multiculturalism.
— Philadelphia Inquirer
"Comprehensive and eloquent without exaggeration."
—Jacques Barzun, author of From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
"Readers who automatically recoil at any book which contains the word 'apologia' in any part of its title, or who suspect Mr. Simmons' study is simply another lonely, fruitless call for the teaching of Greek and Latin in American schools will be pleasantly surprised."
— Washington Times
"Simmons's fascinating tour through the pedagogical history of the classics may be his chief contribution to the debate."
— Washington Post
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