Teaching a Humanities or Western Civ course, an instructor using some of the textbooks on the market might find his students wrestling with a sentence like “Let not aught vex thee” — in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius — and quickly a discussion of late Roman Stoicism becomes a lesson in Elizabethan vocabulary.
Certainly, it is proper for students to learn to negotiate the language of Edmund Spenser or John Donne. But Marcus Aurelius didn’t write in Elizabethan English, or any kind of English for that matter. He wrote in Greek, despite the fact that his mother tongue was Latin.
In some fantasy world, high school juniors and seniors, and university freshmen, might be able to negotiate the Greek of the Meditations, and negotiate it well enough to engage in the thought contained in the text, rather than get bogged down in the grammar and vocabulary.
In the real world, students are already quite challenged by the antiquated English of the translation, and challenged to the point that it impedes their exploration of Aurelius’s mental world. Which begs the question: Why are students confronted with a translation that hides thought in obscure language?
In the mid nineteenth century, Britain, and to a lesser extent America, had a bumper crop of classicists, many of whom brought translations of the Greco-Roman canon to the publishing marketplace. As a stylistic flourish, these translations were cast in what was already archaic English. When, e.g, George Long offered his rendering of Marcus Aurelius into English, it was an English that was already antiquated in the nineteenth century when he published it.
The language was a deliberate affectation, which may or may not have served a purpose when it appeared, but over a century later constitutes merely an obstacle to the student.
Why, then, would a contemporary publishing company bring to market an anthology containing texts which are needlessly obscure?
The answer: Copyright fees.
Such textbooks typically contain a large number of short excerpts, including many from classical Greek and Latin texts, along with medieval writings. Depending on the scope of the work, texts from the Ancient Near East may be included prior to the Greco-Roman material, and extracts from post-medieval works afterward.
Major texts from the canon are constantly being translated afresh: The Meditations by Aurelius were rendered into contemporary American English, e.g., by Gregory Hays in 2002, and by Scot Hicks and David Hicks in the same year. These texts make the thought of Aurelius accessible to the students, and allow them to explore the ideas, rather than the vocabulary.
Including these recent translations, however, costs money.
Older translations from the nineteenth century are usually in the public domain, not requiring modern publishers to obtain permission or pay fees.
When it comes to textbooks, caveat emptor. Affordable anthologies may be filled with classical texts translated into an affected antiquated pseudo-Elizabethan English rather than into twenty-first century American idiom.
