in Books, Education | June 1st, 2026 Leave a Comment

If you grew up in the last few gen­er­a­tions, chances are you did­n’t get much of an edu­ca­tion, if any, in Latin or ancient Greek. One long-made argu­ment for phas­ing them out of cur­ric­u­la in Eng­lish-speak­ing coun­tries holds that room must be made for Span­ish, Man­darin, and oth­er lan­guages actu­al­ly used at scale in the mod­ern world. Nowa­days, when even those class­es face the pres­sure of extinc­tion, advo­ca­cy for clas­si­cal lan­guages exudes an ever stronger con­trar­i­an appeal. “Dead” though they may be, they also live on through not just the Romance lan­guages, but also the mighty hege­mon known as Eng­lish. Indeed, it makes sense to ask whether an Anglo­phone with­out knowl­edge of Latin or Greek tru­ly under­stands his own native tongue.

Nor, accord­ing to clas­si­cist David But­ter­field, can one learn Latin with­out hav­ing any Greek. Get­ting a han­dle on both of those lan­guages and their sur­viv­ing body of texts isn’t just the work of a life­time; it also fills a house, as evi­denced by the two-and-a-half-hour video tour of But­ter­field­’s per­son­al library above. (The sub­se­quent two hours con­tain But­ter­field­’s intro­duc­tions to a selec­tion of par­tic­u­lar vol­umes from his many shelves.) Youtu­ber Tim­o­thy Ken­ny has pre­vi­ous­ly uploaded quite a few such videos on the col­lec­tions of seri­ous bib­lio­philes, but this one he describes as the largest ever attempt­ed, includ­ing the com­plete Loeb Clas­si­cal Library, I Tat­ti Renais­sance Library, and Pauly-Wis­sowa ency­clo­pe­dias.