In 1984, when I began my doctoral studies at Harvard, a professor confided about an unusual problem: This classics department had more money than it knew what to do with, far and away the largest endowment in the university’s Arts and Sciences division. Classics (Latin, Greek, and — before the Divinity School hived off — Classical Hebrew, the three languages that formed the time-honored routes to scripture scholarship) had more or less been the original Harvard curriculum, whose funding was now a nearly 350-year-old investment.

Clearly, the professor wanted me — a middle-class, midwestern, very young woman — to contemplate what a glorious opportunity I had been given, my small share in so much wealth, power, and prestige. And in fact nothing ever moved me to denigrate or pity classics as a discipline, though I had already seen, and would keep seeing, hardship of all kinds, phaseouts, and accusations of irrelevance and iniquity inflicted on institutional classics. (Heck, sometimes I have been on the attack myself.)

The Puritans founded Harvard to train ministers as community leaders, so the school could have done much worse than grounding itself on two subjects surviving from the ancient world, grammar (through which you can make original statements clearly according to shared rules) and rhetoric (through which you can expound and persuade); ancient languages, requiring comprehension of an alien world and mindset, give extra exercise to communications muscles. A young man who got through these studies at least had a mind that worked and had imbibed some sense of order and decorum. I heard the same goals summarized in 2007, when I showed up at Yale Divinity School to learn Hebrew: “We don’t allow people to run amok among the faithful.”

Far be it from me (would a grammarian call this a jussive or an optative expression?) to give a blanket defense of the Puritans on moral and political grounds. I’m a Quaker, so I know better than most people certain uses to which the Puritans put their impressive skills; how they could toggle between driving out Native Americans and driving out other sects, with an occasional pause for driving out each other.

But this is not the fault of the classics, which are just a set of sturdy and adaptable tools. No one, in fact, was better equipped to put the brakes on other Puritans than a man with an even better traditional education (from Pembroke College, Cambridge) than nearly all the rest had, which gave him the means to build on it using the latest legal theories: This was the father of American religious tolerance, Roger Williams. A century later, the Founding Fathers came to their clear thinking about governance by way of the classics. Martin Luther King Jr.’s mission is hard to imagine without the homiletics, or preaching science, he studied at Crozer Theological Seminary and the advanced theology he studied at Boston University — the one deriving mainly from classical rhetoric, the other mainly from classical philosophy.

The prevailing accusation in cancel-culture America is that the classics are inherently authoritarian, and never even a potential tool of liberation. But a look back at the beginning of the modern Western tradition, where classics merged with Christianity, suggests the opposite: Classics is tantamount to the prize itself, so that you might as well righteously resolve to keep money away from the poor. This is plainest in the most influential combiner of the pagan and Christian strains of learning, Augustine of Hippo.

Bishop Augustine (354–430), much unlike Dr. King (who looked to the classical model Socrates, and urged black students to pursue competitive excellence in the subjects on offer, as he had), was hostile to the Western educational tradition as it stood then. He was incensed at amoral classical literary works in the traditional curriculum (in which he himself had brilliantly excelled), and he shuddered at the purpose of his past profession as a teacher of rhetoric, which was to prepare young men for worldly competition, especially in the law courts. Greek philosophy had been critical to Augustine’s own early intellectual aspirations and later to the metaphysical insight leading him to conversion, and he continued to delight in ontological and psychological speculation; but he set his face against the palpable achievements of a field such as astronomy. The pagan culture we (with rather brutal shorthand) call “classics” was, to him, deeply inhumane — and there was plenty of hard evidence to cite, in gladiator shows and slavery by kidnapping, for example.

But what was he to do? Unknow the things that made him a highly influential and valued preacher, religious controversialist, and church administrator (and probably the person most responsible for saving settled, institutional society for the future during an age of invasions and burgeoning chaos)? What he could do was vigorously prefer that other people know a lot less than he did: only literacy, numeracy, and official religious doctrine — in short, they should just be listening to him. He often got his wish. Over the years, his growing intellectual isolation rendered his thinking rigid and self-defeating. Famously, his hostility to Jews overcame his commitment even to scriptural learning, and he slapped at Jerome’s mission to learn Hebrew and translate the Old Testament better. He stumbled largely unopposed to the conclusion that human alienation from God was bound up in sexual desire, and licensed the later church for orgies of misogyny and authoritarianism. He couldn’t have managed these moves without the notion that his pagan education was a monster to be kept half-starved in a cage rather than a docile mule that could plow many fields.

All of this was on my mind as I read about a present-day clash in the field of classical studies. In The New York Times Magazine, Rachel Poser writes about Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a Princeton professor of classics who “wants to save classics from whiteness” but has come to the brink of deciding that there is nothing in the field worth saving. He already deemphasizes the languages as qualifications, so that it would be hard to see how any of his students could make the kind of journey he himself made, from an undocumented immigrant child in homeless shelters to a respected expert on the Roman Republic. If you can master the hard, linguistic part of classics — the inner structure, as necessary as anatomy is to medicine — you are by rights the master, the magister or “teacher,” in the M.A. abbreviation; it would be tough for any racist politics to deprive you of that distinction. Without the language standard for advancement, classics becomes — has to some degree already become — a mere soup of feelings about the past and its influence on the present, a soup heated or cooled by whoever commands the institutional stove. In his classroom, Poser observes as Padilla directs a mash-up enactment of Roman power struggles, with a student in a football shirt eventually winning the empire by seven votes.

But rather than join the trolls who must be telling Padilla to evacuate classics if he thinks it’s irredeemable as such, I’m moved to claim that I get him — he will be livid at that, coming from me, but he should hear me out.

In rural Ohio in the Seventies, I had an adolescent depression that might have set a record among cases actually survived. I cried an average of perhaps four hours a day for six years. In an environment in which teenagers did pretty much everything (including raising livestock and paying taxes from the age of 13), I couldn’t do much of anything but embarrass myself. At 21, I still believed that it was okay to write a check in pencil, and I couldn’t reheat a pizza without the fire department’s having to rush in. I wish I could recount that I was despised and persecuted, but it was worse: Various people tried to help me but couldn’t, so I was largely left to myself. I was middle-class, but like most of the underclass, I was ignored rather than demonized, which deprives you of any power and is exasperating.

What saved me is that I could pick up languages as if I had just absent-mindedly forgotten them. When I fell in with the two classics professors left at Bowling Green State University, it was as if I had found, lying discarded and uncontested, a whole world of beauty, purpose, respect, patronage, and opportunity. The glory of classics continued for me at the University of Michigan, where I finished summa cum laude in three years. I’m sorry, but I do understand what it was like for the young Padilla to have someone (in his case a photographer who was semi-homeless himself) make sacrifices for the sake of his talent: I can’t count the number of hours of off-the-clock, one-on-one tuition and classroom auditing teachers gave me over the years. These people stocked my brain and pushed me forward. As I was finishing my B.A., Berkeley offered me the country’s leading fellowship for graduate study, but I matriculated at Harvard instead, as its placement record for new Ph.D.s was better.

The hardest lesson of “empowerment” is finally being presented with the evidence that you, you yourself, are not interesting after all. For me the crisis came when I started to teach. Language teaching is in fact the crucible of objectivity as well as of power in classics — social objectivity along with cognitive objectivity. Teaching Latin or Greek entails a lot of plodding work that the students, who in elite institutions are all celebrities, see no reason to do; as they view it, the best the work could achieve for them would be to make them into you, the teacher, with whom they are not impressed in the slightest.

The extra difficulty for me was that I thought I was the only celebrity there. After that first course of mine, I had a climactic breakdown and sulked off mainstream classics forever, though I did finish my degree and put in three years as a lecturer in post-apartheid South Africa. Ironically, I’ve had a better time pouting in exile from the American classics academy than many of my classmates have who stuck around. Typical teaching loads are three or more courses a semester, and the committee work is no joke. To the exile, the classics tools, lying idle on the floor, whisper (for instance), “Hey, kid, look: Those medical researchers can’t even spell — they need us for editing and rewriting. We can make money while we keep looking for something more fun.”

All this is not to say that I didn’t have valid complaints about the field. The Harvard Department of the Classics in the Eighties and early Nineties, before a harassment scandal that made it into the national press and instigated reforms, was brutally sexist. (Racism could be daintily avoided; none of us had ever heard of “minorities” except on TV.) I remember staring at a luscious graduate student from overseas, the mistress of a senior professor; another professor, sensing her embarrassment — everyone at this gathering was staring — soothed her by kindly inquiring about her travels. My mind squirmed through six or seven makeover possibilities for myself, but I knew it was hopeless: I could never have that personal pull, could never trade my desirability for a chance to publish my translations, for a good job . . . I then felt, quite straightforwardly, that I needed to die. In later years, the feeling became the purest rage. I wanted Boylston Hall burned to the ground and the whole classics faculty driven across the river to Roxbury and reduced to sweating over Burger King fryers.

Idiotic, to let them distract me from all the solid power that classics had given me. Most useful to me as a cultural journalist has been classical literature’s sheer duration. Writing systems of the eastern Mediterranean are the oldest in the world (and their literatures begin by subsuming long oral traditions); Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, because of those reviled hegemonic privileges supporting them, form remarkably continuous traditions, allowing concentrated and reiterative contemplation. The collective contemplation is a massive, history-spanning version of the individual classics career; both properly invite self-reflection and growth, and in time naturally crumble layers of rage and arrogance that form in the usual imbecilic human way.

Just look at this literature, and its sense of hardy, transgenerational, marvelously adaptive folly, showing up inexorably in people (and even divinities) who turn reality inside out, who define themselves as victims and give in to fury as soon as they have a chance — which often brings catastrophe for everyone. Hera’s outraged female jealousy (she loses a beauty contest to Aphrodite) as a cause of the Trojan War is reprised after the war in the murderous rage of Clytemnestra, who kills her husband the Greek conqueror when he returns with his captured slave mistress. Nor is that all that’s on Clytemnestra’s mind. On the way to Troy, the Greek fleet was becalmed by Artemis in anger over the killing of a hare that was under her protection, and to raise the curse, Agamemnon has sacrificed his virgin daughter. Agamemnon’s murder will be avenged by his son Orestes; this matricide excites a supernatural mob in the form of the Furies, who are not (as is often supposed) permanently tamed by the rule of law in the third episode of the Oresteia trilogy, the Eumenides. They are the same heavy-metal performers, and you can hire them for any number of parties, including the mayhem that Aeneas, a Trojan refugee, sends rollicking through Italy; this pious, family-values hero is not himself immune from the Furies’ allure and even stoops to sacrificing prisoners of war on the grave of a dead protégé. The Furies, Vergil assures us, will romp right down through Roman history into the civil wars of his own time.

It is a more grimly realistic view of the world than our American one. I was shocked — shocked! — to find in post-apartheid South Africa that oppression almost never ennobled; its victims, once free and empowered, disqualified their NGOs for foreign aid through “struggle bookkeeping”; the unemployed drove off both foreign and domestic investment by murdering managers and technocrats. Up north, in Zimbabwe, it was scorched earth. I struggled to see in any direction but down. But classics was deeply helpful to me. I’m not sure anything else did as much to convince me that the world is at least as beautiful and meaningful as it is violent, and that the effort to pull it together is an inherited duty.

I even found a certain congeniality between my classics enculturation and my Quaker pacifism. The fundamental decree of both is to just sit with it all — for a long while if necessary. Something beyond back-and-forth lashing out is bound to occur to people, and if it is serviceable, we can stick with it. To avoid spats, Quakers learned to leave a silence between each contribution to any important discussion. The Romans developed the concept of ius, or right, the thing that someone else is not allowed to invade, no matter how injured he feels, or is. But the ultimate gift is the ability to look at humanity, to watch ourselves behaving and, along with Pogo, to say, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”