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.
Yet according to Butterfield himself, a young man by the standards of his profession and specialty, he’s still got a lot of collecting to do. He’s only about 80 percent of the way to a full set of Oxford University Press’ Very Short Introductions, a series through which I’ve been gradually making my own way in recent years. Having found that its books offer “a really good view of whatever the topic or person is,” he decided to “collect all the volumes that interested me. And that emerged to be more than I thought, because I am interested in almost everything.” But with all of us, no matter how broadly curious, some of his interests are stronger than others, as one might expect from a man with the patience to amass a great amount of manuals for writing Greek and Latin prose and verse made for schoolboys (and, often, containing their doodles).
After spending a couple of decades at Cambridge, Butterfield crossed the Atlantic to go from one of the oldest institutions of higher education to one of the very newest. He’s now Provost of and Professor of Latin at Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia, which received its first cohort of students in 2022. With its master’s degree program closely focused on ancient, medieval and modern literature and art considered foundational to Western civilization, it seems like the kind of institution designed to attract someone like Butterfield, who was already winning prizes for his library in or shortly after his college days. “I can’t see myself relaxing until I have accumulated around 10,000 books,” he said in a 2008 interview. His home, as captured in Kenny’s video, now contains double that amount, but the thumos clearly hasn’t deserted him just yet.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
