But the self-contained pleasures of literature — and indeed learning — are the most profound. There are few greater thrills than challenging the mind without having to ask why. Why, indeed, should every aspect of a university degree — especially in the humanities — have relevance in the contemporary world? If some eyes roll or eyebrows rise at such a question, which only reveals my ivory-tower other-worldliness, just consider life outside academia. Who would stop a fellow passenger on the train to ask why they’re reading a novel? Who would prod someone entering a museum or art gallery to demand what their business is? No one of sound mind would or should. For the thrill of discovering fresh knowledge need not be followed by the grim words “so what?”. Scope should exist for researchers, at any level of academic inquiry, to delve into scholarly rabbit-holes in remote corners of far-flung subdisciplines, whether to solve long-standing puzzles, to tidy up loose ends, or just to revel in humanity’s insoluble complexities.

The newly-formed Office for Students may have other ideas. Its assessment of degree courses is informed by the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF). It has — naturally — no means of assessing what is challenging, thrilling, unsettling, inexpressible, or open-ended. But a third of its “core metrics” come from the notorious National Student Survey, which surveys some 300,000 final-year students in the UK. These questions concern undergraduate perceptions of teaching quality, feedback value, and academic support. These data are then combined with statistics about student dropout rates, future employment rates, and future earnings. All of interest and import, perhaps — but hardly the route to establishing and comparing “teaching excellence”. The humanities, it must be said, weren’t built for this.

For the time being, though, tuition fees — which realise themselves later in the day as a tax on employed graduates — price the teaching of UK university degree courses towards £30,000. Whatever the merits of that precise figure for the Arts and Humanities, it’s heartening that thousands of young people still find themselves so fascinated by the ancient world, and so rapt by the difficult questions it poses, to pay for wholesale engagement in the Classics. Very probably, their success in that degree will repay its cost through additional future financial earnings. But the humanities — least of all the Classics — don’t owe anyone a job.

The many centuries of successive scholarly toil and research upon the Classics are not an act of piety or a gesture of subservience to an idealised ancient world. It is both a worthy and pleasurable undertaking to reignite and reilluminate the brilliant lights that shone in antiquity. Since societal progress correlates so imperfectly with time, the Classics provide eloquent evidence that the human condition is less mutable than modern ideologues may suppose. Amidst a fug of supposedly “progressive” ideas about what contemporary communities should do and dictate others to do, looking backwards at the Classics can only sharpen the eye and the mind for how individuals and societies may wish to step forwards. Such lessons — whatever university bureaucrats and cynical philistines may cry — are in every sense of the term priceless.