Are the classics always timely?

(this mosaic is of Dionysus, the male god who - with his exoticism, passion, and dangerousness - was most closely associated with classical ideas of the feminine)

This week I start teaching Latin again. A year and a half ago, I resigned from my last Latin teaching position, thinking that I would probably never teach it again. I had come to question the relevance of learning this dead language. Sure, it's wonderful for preparing kids to ace the verbal section of the SAT, it's good background for doctors and lawyers, but is it really worth it? Isn't one huge point of learning a language to use it to cross cultural barriars, to communicate with people we consider "other"? Yet with Latin, one doesn't speak it or write it. One only translates.

And as a feminist, it bothered me that every Roman author I taught was a male. Even the stories in the first couple years of Latin were all heavily male oriented. I questioned then, and still do question, teaching a cannon that privileges males so completely. Not that we have much choice- there are simply no female authored literary texts in classical Latin that survived (with the exception of a couple of poems.)

I often wonder whether teaching a curriculum that is male authored, male focused, and often centered on war and politics alienates the girls in my classes. I wonder whether it teaches them that males' ideas and interests are more important, more weighty than females'. I wonder if on the rare occassions women do appear in the texts, filtered through the gaze of the male author, I am implicitly teaching them to be the object, not the subject of their lives. And I wonder if my girls ever even stop to question why they almost never see themselves in these texts.