Virtually the only subject in which one could ever get a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge was classics. So I went to Oxford to study classics and, unlike Cambridge, it had a philosophy component, and I became completely transported by it.
I guess if you have had a good education as opposed to someone who hasn't been to school, you start off on this journey having studied Shakespeare for years and years or studied classics. I suppose why people see this big divide - the boarding school boys getting all the roles - is because they feel like some people have had a head start.
I wish I'd gone to a small liberal-arts college where I'd have read the great books instead of a large university where I majored in early-childhood education.
I wanted to know if the 'Iliad' in the original was as relevant and contemporary as it was in translation. I then started Latin. I had finally found something I enjoyed and was good at: dead languages!
People who have got to know Western educational methods always claim that the reading of the Classics was a useless waste of time and should be abolished. Such chatter is to be heard from hundreds of people and cannot be stopped. But it is a serious mistake.
I get letters from college kids who have read Percy Jackson when they were younger who tell me, 'I just passed my Classics exam.' The books are accurate enough that they can serve as a gateway to Homer and Virgil.
When I was 16, I was taught by a wonderful teacher who let me ignore the Greek syllabus and just read Homer.
I grew up in England and we spent most of the time on Latin and Greek and very little on science, and I think that was good because it meant we didn't get turned off. It was... Science was something we did for fun and not because we had to.
