Yesterday’s discussion in the research seminar of Anthony Grafton’s memoir of Arnaldo Momigliano raised a number of important issues that could loosely be put together under the heading of ‘classics and cosmopolitanism’. I was very struck – doubtless as a result of spending last week giving some lectures in a couple of German universities – by Grafton’s (polemical) contrast of a lost world of real cosmopolitanism back in Momigliano’s time and the international English-speaking world in which we now live. It may perhaps be true that more British classicists are more familiar with the research of foreign scholars than was previously the case, because more of it gets translated or is written in English in the first place – but it would be dangerous to assume that all important work will automatically be translated and so anything that hasn’t been translated can’t be very important. It was suggested in the discussion that perhaps national traditions of scholarship are no longer terribly important – that differences between approaches in different universities are much more significant – but I’m not certain; at any rate I ‘ve found that writing in German does sometimes entail different ways of thinking, and that different sorts of questions may be considered most important. That also raises the question of how one keeps up with work in another country; you may have a fair idea of what’s going on relevant to one’s own specialist field – but what if people are developing an entirely new approach? And that’s if you have the necessary grasp of the language in the first place…
That then leads into the questions raised in general discussion about what skills classicists and ancient historians require (do we still need French, German and Italian?) and what we might do to ensure that our subject doesn’t become entirely parochial and marginalised – which might imply that we need still more languages (Sanskrit, Mandarin..?). What will be the basis for our continuing claim for the relevance and usefulness of academic study of the ancient world: the historical accident that classical antiquity helped shape the modern world, the marketability of the skills that a classical education can offer, the intrinsic and universal quality of the texts and artefacts we study, or the possibility that we can generate knowledge and understanding that is genuinely significant beyond our own discipline? How far, as Duncan suggested, is the existence of the discipline of Classics contingent and potentially ephemeral? Is the best response to marginalisation to continue to insist on the significance of our work for the rest of the world, or to change our approach so that we engage properly with the rest of the world..?
Sphinx 
Classics is still a pretty vast field and it depends very much on the kind of question you’re interested whether you will need to read some German (or French, etc.). Much of it remains untranslated. Much of it operates in a frame of reference different from others in small and big ways, and the differences engender reflection on one’s own practices. In general I do hope that a commitment to multilingualism would be strong in Classics, since it goes well with the subject’s deep-running links to all the western humanities and their traditions. For tactical reasons alone, multilingualism seems a good way to combat marginalisation.