These issues are becoming particularly fraught across the pond. Towards 250,000 pupils in American high schools study Latin each year, although only 10,000 or so take the final examinations annually (SAT and AP Latin). The subject thus has a firm base in its traditional form, but thrives at college level especially through translation. Among increasingly diverse student communities, the immense differences of the ancient world are becoming difficult to stomach.

The world’s most widely read classical blog is the New-York based Eidolon, founded by Donna Zuckerberg, sister of Facebook’s Mark. Its “mission statement” is to make the Classics “political and personal, feminist and fun”. Not only has the site attracted a broad array of talented writers, but it has become the primary vehicle for asking agonised questions about the discipline and its objects of study. Among its most read articles are “The Bad Wives” (on ancient misogyny), “Avenging Lucretia” (on barriers to women in politics), and “Being a Good Classicist under a Bad Emperor” (on the need to protect the Classics from white-supremacist appropriation under a Trump presidency). The tone is urgent, and the battle cry earnest: the Classics are being weaponised to fight against perceived prejudice and injustice. But in the fray the dividing lines are becoming blurred: antiquity is being miscast as an enemy rather than an (admittedly complicated) ally.

Condemning the classical world is not a risk-free enterprise: with a few logical leaps scholarship becomes an exercise in curating the past to the tastes of the present, consigning its undesirable aspects to oblivion. The Classics don’t owe any modern inquirer an easy or comfortable answer. It is no part of scholarship to reshape history to please modernity; academics should research and reconstruct the ancient world as the evidence commands, relaying their findings with wide-eyed enthusiasm to anyone willing to listen.

The Classics should have the self-confidence to sail these stormy seas unshaken. The advantages of the discipline are self-evident, if impossible to quantify. A millennium’s worth of cutting-edge intellectual endeavour, artistic experiment, political vicissitudes and personal follies sheds informative light upon the crises, genuine and supposed, of our frenetic modernity. The “transferrable skills” (forgive me) that come from deep engagement with the Classics — confronting astoundingly different cultures; grappling with frustratingly difficult but resolutely precise languages; building plausible arguments from imperfect evidence; critically appraising controversial ideas — are enormous and unassailable. If someone must know where Greco-Roman texts become relevant, Classicists can answer standing on their heads: read Tacitus on the corrupting influence of power, Aristophanes on fake-news demagogues, Sophocles on the perils of pride, Plato on the reformative powers of education, Juvenal on the societal consequences of mass immigration, Catullus on the instability of love, Seneca on emotional continence, Vitruvius on architectural vice, Lucretius on the alarming consequences of atomic physics, and Lucian on the miserable ubiquity of cod philosophers.