Because the Classical world offers a greater variety of interesting topics than any other - not just a language or a body of literature, or a study of political or social history, but much more. There are more plums, and more different plums, in this pudding than any other.

The Greek and Latin literature which has survived is worthy of comparison with any other in the world, ancient or modern. The humanity and tragic intensity of Homer’s poems: the stunning theatrical force of Aeschylus: the interplay in Aristophanes between erudite satire and outrageous crudity: the energetic curiosity of Herodotus, whose digressions are longer than his text: all these richly deserve study, and all are totally timeless. Thucydides’ account of factional strife in Greek communities is chillingly evocative of Bosnia and Northern Ireland.

What is justice? Does a man act rightly by nature, or because he has been taught to do so? Why should he anyway? What is the best form of government? All the most important moral and political questions are raised by Plato; any philosopher who has aroused such admiration in some and such violent hatred in others must surely be interesting. He goes deeper than that, too. How do we ‘know’ something? Are there things which we can not know? How can we tell true knowledge from beliefs and opinions which may be false? All this he investigates.

The Greeks were not ‘flat-earthers’. They knew that the earth is spherical, and that its gravity acts towards its centre; they even estimated its size quite accurately. Some of them suggested that the sun was at the centre of our system. Almost every branch of modern science has roots which go back to the Greeks - medicine, physics, acoustics, geography and much more. As for mathematics, Euclid was the bible of geometry for hundreds of years, while Archimedes calculated limits for the value of pi , and found a way of measuring the area of a segment of a parabola.

What of the Romans? Their greatest poet, Virgil, has probably exerted more influence on European literature than any other individual. Much of the work of Greek writers and thinkers came to the rest of Europe via the medium of Latin, which was the lingua franca of Europe for many centuries; a pity, perhaps, that there is no longer any such language. Hadrian’s Pantheon is one of the most revolutionary buildings in the whole history of architecture; its dome was the biggest in the world until late in the nineteenth century, and the number of modern imitations is past counting. By the first century A.D. the Roman aqueduct system provided that city with a better water supply than any city in Europe before the late nineteenth century, and their legionary camps in Northern England had water-flushed loos. the design of their military hospitals shows more efficiency, and more sensitivity, than some of the Victorian buildings still around today.

The principal remains of Greek art are the thousands of vase-paintings in museums all over Europe, which not only trace the development of the painter’s art, but also give us valuable insights into the ritual, domestic (and sexual) lives of the Greeks.