Virginia Woolf's essay, like most of her writing, is densely layered and ironically subversive. Among her several layers one finds a gently devastating critique of privilege (gender, class, ethnicity), critical yet bold imagination, vivid insights into characters, and a range and command of literature rarely equaled elsewhere. All in 5,500 words, give or take. (For a fine discussion see R. Fowler's 1983 article.)
Start with the title. Far from not knowing Greek, it is quickly apparent that Woolf knows Greek exceedingly well. Her knowledge sets her apart in her time. In Victorian and Edwardian English upper middle classes, Greek was taught to "public" (prep) school boys as a formal or expected requirement to Oxford or Cambridge, the universities of the ruling class. Knowing Greek was a badge of membership in gender and class. It was part and parcel of the cultural colonialism that brought ancient Greek art to the British Museum, an attitude shared with German and French rivals (and others), and founded British academies in Athens and Rome. A British schoolboy or undergraduate, with ancient Greek, was imagined or supposed to understand the ancients better than modern Greeks. They had become lazy southerners, who had somehow missed all their shots since at least the Byzantine Empire. On the surface, not knowing Greek is exactly what the essay is not about.
Woolf challenges that exclusive attitude of privilege in her first paragraph:
For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and
tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition.
Privileged English males hold the same position as everyone else. School and university study of Greek does not convey a special knowledge shared by the elite: we're all in the same boat, at the bottom of any class of schoolboys. At several points Woolf drives the point of the "tremendous breach of tradition," or elsewhere, "The Greeks remain in a fastness of their own."
Woolf's crucial argument is simple: we don't know how Greek sounded. The written language only hints at the spoken, and the spoken had to be direct. Sophocles had to speak with an instant immediacy: "every sentence had to explode on striking the ear, however slowly and beautifully the words might descend, and however enigmatic their final purport might be." With knowing how ancient Greek sounded, we truly lack a means to comprehend them fully.
Woolf's Greeks lived in an outdoor, public, sunlit life transacted in the street during those months of warmth and fine weather: their speech mirrored their environment of earth and stone. Such a life required and produced an oral, performative culture. Woolf's remaining English prejudices lead her to imagine that such an outdoor life inspires "that sneering, laughing, nimbleness of wit and tongue peculiar to the Southern races" that is "known to all who visit Italy." (One thinks of Forster's A Room With A View.) She compares such a life with "the slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors." Her life as a sheltered, upper-middle-class young woman apparently shielded her from the rough-and-tumble British street life portrayed by Dickens, Chesterton, or even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Those outdoorsy ancient Greeks certainly excelled stuffy English households bifurcated between upstairs and downstairs.
Woolf saw in Plato an exception, insofar as "winter fell on these villages, and "There must have been some place indoors where men could retire" and where "they sit and drink, where they could lie stretched at their ease, where they could talk." Enter the symposium: "some handsome boy ventured a question, or quoted an opinion, and Socrates took it up, fingered it, turned it round, looked at it this way and that" and "brought the whole company by degrees to gaze with him at the truth." She alludes to Greek homophilia, not to say homo-eroticism (exactly what is Socrates fingering?). At the end of this extended scene, "Truth, it seems, is various; Truth is to be pursued with all our faculties." Socrates' sense of beauty was never simply ornament. "Naturally, living in the open, it was not the lip or the eye that struck them, but the carriage of the body and the proportions of its parts." A male body, one might add. "Thus when we quote and extract we do the Greeks more damage than we do the English."
Woolf brings us round to her first observation: the Greeks "could say, “If to die nobly is the chief part of excellence, to us out of all men Fortune gave this lot; for hastening to set a crown of freedom on Greece we lie possessed of praise that grows not old." —"But again (the question comes back and back), Are we reading Greek as it was written when we say this?" The cultural chasm has never closed, "Does not the whole of Greece heap itself behind every line of its literature? They admit us to a vision of the earth unravaged, the sea unpolluted, the maturity, tried but unbroken, of mankind. Every word is reinforced by a vigour which pours out of olive-tree and temple and the bodies of the young." The distance admits more mistakes and errors: "Back and back we are drawn to steep ourselves in what, perhaps, is only an image of the reality, not the reality itself, a summer’s day imagined in the heart of a northern winter." The unapproachable language itself both extends the Greek's binding influence and our misunderstanding.
We can never hope to get the whole fling of a sentence in Greek as we do in English. We cannot hear it, now dissonant, now harmonious, tossing sound from line to line across a page. We cannot pick up infallibly one by one all those minute signals by which aphrase is made to hint, to turn, to live. Nevertheless, it is the language that has us most in bondage; the desire for that which perpetually lures us back.
The language is both our means of approach and evidence of our inability to approach the Greeks. "Greek is the impersonal literature; it is also the literature of masterpieces. There are no schools; no forerunners; no heirs. We cannot trace a gradual process working in many men imperfectly until it expresses itself adequately at last in one." Woolf's examples: "Thus we have Sappho with her constellations of adjectives; Plato daring extravagant flights of poetry in the midst of prose; Thucydides, constricted and contracted; Sophocles gliding like a shoal of trout smoothly and quietly, apparently motionless, and then, with a flicker of fins, off and away." Finally we have the Odyssey, the "triumph of narrative . . . the instinctive story-telling of a sea-faring race." Its people are full-grown, "crafty, subtle, and passionate." Its world of the sea "separates island from island has to be crossed by little hand-made boats and is measured by the flight of the sea-gulls." Its characters "actions seem laden with beauty."
. . . They do not know that they are beautiful, have been born to their possessions, are no more self-conscious than children, and yet, all those thousands of years ago, in their little islands, know all that is to be known. With the sound of the sea in their ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, they are even more aware than we are of a ruthless fate.
The characters in the Odyssey stand in the shadow of that fate, and yet are "alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure." The concluding sentence of this dense essay finally voices Woolf's thorough critique: "it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own time."
At the beginning, Woolf succinctly dissolved the élite privilege that pretended that we are not all in the same boat: "in our ignorance [of Greek] we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys." In the end, she critiques the whole comfortable, English ideological structure of Empire, Church, and University. Her mention of John Paston, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith (a Radical Liberal), Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen range her with relative outsiders to the ideology of Crown and Mitre. One can forget how marginal and dubious these authors may have been in a conventional upper-middle-class English household. Woolf was raised in stultifying Victorian and Edwardian Anglican Christianity which did so much to restrict her intellectual development and personal freedom as a woman.
The Greeks offered Woolf a way out of this plush tomb, and prepared Woolf for the kind of reader that she hoped or imagined for her writing. The startlingly clear-sightedness of the Greeks let her see her own oppressive, imperialist society for what it was. Knowing Greek, a presumed mark of élite education and privileged position, is in fact the basis for the devastating social critique implicit in her novels. Knowing Greek, as the official mark of high status, reveals truly not knowing Greek, for the real knowledge of Greek demands a clarity of vision that will completely discount the pretense of privilege.
"On not knowing Greek" equals "on not knowing yourself and your society," against Socrates' watchword: know thyself. Like Socrates, Woolf brings her reader by degrees to gaze with her at the truth. "What matters is not so much the end we reach as our manner of reaching it." A fitting epigram for this most remarkable and insightful author. How much she would have loved that life outside that she idealizes in her essay.
The secret of knowing Greek, then, is to critique the very society that pretends that the person who knows Greek accepts his place (and I do mean his). Knowing Greek is a deadly arrow against the pretense of a tradition shot from directly within that tradition. Knowing Greek—on "not knowing Greek"—is an inside job.