Sir, - Vincent Browne's perceptive comments on the Greek historian Thucydides (August 21st) provide convincing proof of the relevance of the classical Greek and Latin writers to the world we live in. Without mentioning the impending closure of the Classics department in Queen's University - he may not even have had this in mind - he has lent powerful support to those of us who are greatly saddened by that prospect.
As a first-year student in Queen's at the time when the Cold War was in a particularly nasty phase, I was amazed to find how relevant was Thucydides's account of the Greek world, dominated by two great powers, and how the problems of neutral city states such as Corcyra were exactly those of unaligned countries in the 1950s.
Vincent Browne and Denis Tuohy - in a recent Irishman's Diary - have shown how the classics, in the original or in translation, can still grip the human imagination. As a former classics teacher any claims I might make could be met with, "Well you would say that, wouldn't you?"
But it has given great pleasure to know, from the recent correspondence in your columns, that the classics have the poets and dramatists on their side. If Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Atholl Fugard are for us, do we need to worry that Prof Bain and his dreary minions are against us? Queen's is now a place where ideals, vision and a regard for truth have been replaced by subservience to strict accounting principles and a reliance on "spin".
If Prof Bain needs to make savings he might look at his administrators, whose numbers have greatly increased since he took over as vice-chancellor. The number of academics relative to administrators has fallen, and classics is just the latest in a number of closures, which include Semitic studies, Russian studies and Italian in the humanities faculty alone. - Yours, etc.,
A.B. SCOTT, M.R.I.A.,
Emeritus Professor of Latin,
Queen's University, Belfast.