James Allan Evans

Site 6, COMP 22, 721 Wilks Rd.,

Mayne Island, B.C. Canada V0N 2J0.

e-mail: jaxevans@cablelan.net.

The Classical Tradition in Canada.

I. The Dual Traditions.

There are two classical traditions in Canada, one

French and the other English. The first goes back to

New France, with its centre at Quebec on the St.

Lawrence River, where the Jesuits established a college

in 1635, two years before the foundation of Harvard,

and by the 1650s, this college was offering a

curriculum that included Latin as well as philosophy,

grammar, rhetoric, and arithmetic. The anglophone

classical tradition was initially the offspring of the

thirteen colonies that became the United States of

America after the American Revolution. Until the end of

the Napoleonic War, the English-speaking population in

Canada were largely emigrants from the United States:

either colonists who remained loyal to King George III,

or were happy to resume their loyalty. The earliest

degree-granting English-language institution was King’s

College at Windsor in the province of Nova Scotia,

where five clergymen from New York founded an academy

in 1788, which received a royal charter in 1802. These

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five were refugees from King’s College, New York,

founded by King George II in 1756, and reorganized as

Columbia College at the time of the American

Revolution, and the first principal of King’s College

at Windsor was a former professor of Greek and Latin at

King’s in New York. It was soon followed, in 1800, by

the ‘College of New Brunswick’, which would evolve into

the ‘University of King’s College’ and finally, in

1859, the University of New Brunswick.

Thus Canada took her classical traditions from two

separate sources. The earliest was transplanted from

France by the Jesuit, Paul Le Jeune, founder of the

Collège de Québec in 1635 with its model the Jesuit

college of LaFlèche. The anglophone tradition in Canada

was a transplant from the former British colonies after

the American Revolution, but it looked first to Oxford

for its model, and later, increasingly to the Scottish

universities, especially Edinburgh, Glasgow and

Aberdeen. Influence from the United States became

strong in the twentieth century, particularly after

World War II, when both French and English-language

universities were expanding rapidly and the anglophone

universities hired large numbers of American academics

to staff their classrooms. Education in Canada falls

within provincial jurisdiction, and there is no

standard curriculum for the ten provinces; nevertheless

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classical Greek had ceased to be an important part of

secondary school education by the early years of the

twentieth century. Latin continued to be taught in many

schools until the 1960s, when it fell victim to

educational reforms of often dubious merit.

J. A. S. Evans, ‘The Classical Tradition in Canada’,

Literary Review of Canada, 5/7, 1996, pp. 11-15.

Alexander G. McKay, ‘Classics’, The Canadian Encyclopedia,

Year 2000 Edition. Toronto, 1999, pp. 480-481.

II. The French Classical Tradition.

1. Classics in Québec, 1608-1760.

Jacques Cartier, on his second voyage to Canada in

1635 sailed up the St. Lawrence River and visited the

Indian villages of Stadacona at present-day Québec

city, and Hochelaga at Montreal, but it was not until

1608, when Samuel de Champlain built his Habitation at

Quebec that France made a serious effort to found a

colony. From the beginning it was markedly different

from the British and Dutch colonies further south,

which drew their settlers from the groups and classes

of people who were looking for the freedom that they

were denied at home. Some were convicts transported to

the colonies. By contrast, New France was from its

beginning an extension of France, and the settlement

was directed and sponsored by the French monarchy. The

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appearance of the colony bespoke its origin: the

earliest buildings were made of wood, for the settlers

had to use the material that was available, but the

construction techniques were European: timbers were

squared, joints were held together by mortise-and-

tendon and fastened by dowels in the European manner.

Stone began to be used particularly after 1664 when

Louis XIV made the colony a province of France, with

Quebec City the seat of a governor and an intendant,

and the style of the buildings constructed in the new

provincial capital reflected the classicism of

contemporary French architecture.

As in France, education was in the hands of the

Catholic church. The colony grew slowly: by 1628 there

were less than one hundred settlers, all living in the

town of Quebec, but two religious orders had already

reached Canada, seeking to convert the Amerindians. The

first were the Recollects, in 1615, and ten years

later, the Jesuits arrived: in 1635, Father Le Jeune

founded the Jesuit College of Quebec, which was

Canada’s, and for that matter, North America’s first

classical college. Initially it was an elementary

school, but within a year or two – certainly by 1639 –

it was providing instruction in Latin grammar and

literature. Sixteen students were enrolled by 1650, but

the number grew: by 1700 it was between one hundred and

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thirty and one hundred and fifty. Its curriculum was

based on the Ratio studiorum (1599-1603) and the Ratio

discendi et docendi, (1641-1646) which laid out the Jesuit

course of study in Europe, and it was thorough: five

years for grammar and literature, followed by two for

philosophy, including natural philosophy, that is,

science. The course was classical and largely secular,

emphasizing Latin more than Greek; yet the college

offered instruction to candidates for the priesthood

from the nearby Grand Séminaire, which was founded in

1663, and along with the residence known as the Petit

Séminaire, served as the novitiate for the clergy. The

Jesuit College remained New France’s sole secondary

school during the ancien régime, and it was the ancestor

of the classical colleges in nineteenth and twentieth-

century Quebec, which numbered fifty-two in 1965, when

the report of the Royal Commission on Education in

Quebec, popularly known as the ‘Parent Report’, swept

them into the dustbin of history.

A visitor to New France in 1760, the year of the

British conquest, would have found a French province

with between 60 and 70 thousand inhabitants, and a

loose collection of schools, all in private hands, most

of them elementary schools or petites écoles, and

supplementing these, the Jesuit College in Quebec, two

seminaries, the Grand Séminaire in Quebec and the

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Sulpician seminary in Montreal, which was more of a

residence than a seminary, and several vocational

schools. The petites écoles taught children reading,

writing, arithmetic and piety, of which the last was

the most important. None of them were co-educational:

girls’ schools, which outnumbered the schools for boys,

were run by the sisters of the Congregation of Notre

Dame, and by the Ursulines, whereas the Jesuits and the

Sulpicians staffed the petites écoles for boys. Some petites

écoles taught Latin to boys who hoped to attend the

Jesuit college, but no Latin was taught to girls. Not

until 1908 would a women’s classical college be founded

in Québec.

The French authorities permitted no printing press

in New France, and literature produced in Quebec had to

be published in France itself under the eye of the

royal censor. The Relations des Jesuites, annual reports

from the Canadian Jesuit mission for the years 1632-

1672, were published in Paris, but two of the

contributors were professors at the Quebec Jesuit

college, Paul Le Jeune and Paul Ragueneau. François-

Xavier de Charlevoix, author of a well-received history

of New France, (Paris, 1744), also taught at the

college. Classical training shaped the perceptions

which the Jesuit missionaries formed of the customs of

the Amerindians whom they sought to christianize, and

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Greek and Latin grammar provided the paradigms for

their study of aboriginal languages. The most learned

of the Jesuit missionaries was Père J.-F. Lafitau who

spent five years in the Iroquois settlement at modern

Kahnawake south of Montreal and published his Moeurs des

sauvaages amériquains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps in

Paris in 1724. Herodotus and Pliny the Elder are the

classical authors whom he cites most; in fact, his

anthropological research follows a Herodotean model,

though his general aim was to refute the atheists of

his day by showing that all people, including those

untouched by civilization such as theAmerindians,

believed in a supreme deity. Neglected in his own day,

he is now recognized as a pioneer anthropologist.

2. Classical Education in Québec after 1760.

James Wolfe’s victory over Montcalm on the

Plains of Abraham in 1759 affected education as well as

other aspects of French-Canadian life. The British had

little sympathy for Catholic teaching orders that

recruited their clergy in France, though they

recognized the good works of the women’s religious

orders in the hospitals and orphanages and treated them

more kindly. The British army appropriated most of the

building that had housed the Jesuit College, and in

1768, the College closed down and its teachers returned

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to France, except for nineteen who continued teaching

at the Petit Séminaire which had formerly served as the

Jesuit College residence. The Jesuits, Sulpicians and

Recollets, once the mainstay of education in New

France, were barred from recruiting new members in

Quebec, and by 1787, there were only four Jesuits left.

Womens’ religious orders, however, beginning with the

Ursulines, soon re-established girls’ schools with a

curriculum that was considered suitable for future

wives and mothers. Classical studies were not part of

it. Nonetheless in 1767, Montreal got its first

secondary school, the Collège de Montréal, established

by the Sulpician Order. It was the first classical

college founded after the Conquest, and others

followed: in 1965, there were forty-two classical

colleges for men and ten for women, and until the

1950s, the classical colleges were the only avenue into

the French-Canadian universities, which were, in

effect, graduate schools..

Except for the clerical connection – some 90

percent of the teachers were in holy orders – the

classical colleges were comparable to the lycées in

France and the public schools in the United Kingdom,

and like them, they educated an elite which provided

French Canada with its political and cultural leaders.

But the seven years that it took to attain the

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baccalaureate, and the high dropout rate – some twenty-

seven percent – made them anachronisms in late

twentieth-century North America. When the ‘Quiet

Revolution’ in Quebec which got underway in the 1960s,

bringing education up to date was one of its first

aims.

3. Educational Reforms: New Approaches, 1965-2005.

In 1963-63, there appeared a report of a Royal

Commission on Quebec education chaired by Monsigner

Alphonse-Marie Parent (the ‘Parent Report’) which

recommended far-reaching changes. The classical

colleges – all save three – were replaced by Collèges

d’enseignement général et professional, known as CÉGEPs from

their acronym, and little by little, these CÉGEPS

forsook the classical languages. The traditional

classical education that went back three centuries in

Quebec came to an end. Secularism, which the French

Catholic church had once recognized as its mortal

enemy, was taking over canadien society, as it already

had contemporary anglophone culture and society. In

1967, the last year that the classical college system

was still intact, the Université de Montréal became a

secular institution, and three years later, the

Université Laval followed suit. The rectors and

principals of Quebec universities assessed programs to

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see what savings could be made; classical studies was

not the only field to be scrutinized, but it was the

first on the list. One immediate result was that the

Université de Sherbrooke suppressed its classics

department.

Quebec classicists fought back. At Université

Laval, Maurice Lebel, Dean of the Faculty of Letters

(1957-1963), and one of the greatest classical scholars

Canada has produced, kept a classical studies program

alive, and he also was instrumental in founding the

Société des Études Anciennes du Québec in 1967 to promote the

classical legacy of New France. Its journal, Cahiers des

études anciennes, edited until 2004 by Pierre Senay at

Trois-Rivières campus of the Université de Québec,

aimed to be scholarly but with appeal for the

generalist, and it is an outlet for reports by Quebec

archaeologists working in the Mediterranean. Classical

studies in Quebec has changed radically in the last

quarter century. It no longer occupies the central

position in education that it once had. The ties with

the Catholic church have been cut: gone are the days

when almost every second classical college graduate

opted for a religious career. But classical studies

have adapted to the new secular Quebec society; besides

the Université de Laval, the Université de Montréal and

the Université de Québec at its campuses at Chicoutimi

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and Trois-Rivières offer lively classics programs. At

the bilingual Université d’Ottawa in Ontario, which was

founded by the Oblates in 1848 and secularized in 1965,

classics suffered terribly from budget cuts in the mid-

1990’s, but the department now recovering, and has

revived its doctoral program. Since 2004, it has become

the editorial office for Cahiers des études anciennes.

La Conférence des Recteurs et des Principaux des

Universités du Québec, Février, 1971, Enquête sur les études

anciennes dans les universités du Québec en 1969-1970..

Lucien Finette, ‘Les études classiques dans la région

de Québec,’ Cahiers des études anciennes, 32 (1995), pp. 81-

93.

Maurice Lebel, ‘Latin and Greek in Secondary Schools in

Quebec,’ Culture 5 (1944), pp. 40-47.

Maurice Lebel, ‘Les humanités classiques au Canada

français,’ Cahiers des études anciennes, 32 (1995), pp. 23-

31.

A. J. Macdougall, ‘Classical Studies in Seventeenth-

Century Quebec, Phoenix, pp. 7-21

Roger Magnuson, A Brief History of Quebec Education, from New

France to Parti Québecois. Montreal, 1980.

Roger Magnuson, Education in New France, Montreal/Kingston,

1992

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Roger Magnuson, The Two Worlds of Quebec Education during the

Traditional Era, 1760-1940. London (Ont., Canada), 2005.

Jacques Y. Perreault, ‘Les études classiques dans la

région de Montréal,’ Cahiers des études anciennes, 32 (1995),

pp. 77-80.

Michel Roussell, ‘Les Études Classiques dans

l’Outaouais,’ Cahiers des études anciennes, 32 (1995), pp. 57-

61.

III. The English Classical Tradition in Education.

a. The Maritime Provinces in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century..

1. From the American Revolution to Confederation (1867).

Five Loyalist clergymen from New York took the lead;

even before they left their homes for British North

America, they sent a letter to Sir Guy Carleton, the

British governor, expressing their concern for liberal

education in Nova Scotia. The result was the birth of

two colleges, for in 1784, the region north of the Bay

of Fundy was separated from Nova Scotia to form the

colony of New Brunswick with its capital at

Fredericton, and in 1787 a college was founded there,

and two years later, another was founded at Windsor,

Nova Scotia. Both were initially secondary schools, but

by 1807, King’s College at Windsor, was granting

degrees, while the College of New Brunswick (after

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1829, King’s College, New Brunswick) did not follow

suit until the 1820s. King’s at Fredericton has now

become the University of New Brunswick, while it

coeval, King’s at Windsor, has moved to Halifax and

federated with Dalhousie University.

King’s College at Windsor, opened bravely in 1788,

with a Latin oration by Dr.Charles Inglis, formerly

rector of Trinity Church, New York, and appointed a

year earlier the Church of England bishop of Nova

Scotia. Four years later it received a royal charter

and along with it, an annual grant of 1000 pounds from

the Colonial Office in London. The curriculum was

modelled on Oxford, emphasizing classical authors, with

a tincture of mathematics taught by the president, who

also taught divinity and Hebrew. Over Bishop Inglis’

protests, the college board took the Oxford statutes as

their model, and required applicants to subscribe to

the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England.

Inglis, having failed to convince the Board to be more

liberal, persuaded the Archbishop of Canterbury, who

was college patron, to exercise his right of veto, and

so by 1807, King’s reluctantly opened its doors to

dissenters. But it was fourteen years before the

revised statutes were published, and so King’s grudging

liberalism remained a secret among the general public

for a generation.

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The intransigence of King’s College had an

unfortunate consequence. In 1818, the lieutenant-

governor of Nova Scotia, Lord Dalhousie founded

Dalhousie University in Halifax, which made the

University of Edinburgh rather than Oxford its model.

During the War of 1812, the British had set up a

customs post at Castine in Maine, and Dalhousie secured

the revenues collected there from American shipping as

an endowment for his new foundation. The Colonial

Secretary urged King’s College to move to Halifax and

amalgamate with Dalhousie’s new university: if it did

not, it could expect to lose its annual grant from the

Colonial Office. King’s chose poverty over liberalism

and the Colonial Office’s subsidy ceased. Dalhousie

University’s early years were difficult but it has now

become one of Canada’s major universities. As for

King’s, after its main building burned to the ground in

1922, it federated at last with Dalhousie, relocated to

the Dalhousie campus in Halifax and now offers

Dalhousie degrees except in journalism, where it has

its own program. The interest in journalism has rubbed

off on classics at Dalhousie and King’s, where the

classics department publishes the annual Dionysius, and

the undergraduate classicists publish their

counterpart, Pseudo-Dionysius.

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The College of New Brunswick, or the University of

New Brunswick as it has been known since 1859, was only

slightly later than King’s at Windsor and like King’s,

followed the lead of Oxford. But when Lord Dalhousie

founded his university in Halifax, he made Edinburgh

his model, and Dalhousie’s first president, Dr. Thomas

McCulloch (1838-1843), a graduate of Glasgow

University, brought the Scottish curriculum to the

province of Nova Scotia. At the same time, New

Brunswick was also turning to Scotland for new faculty

members, and with them came a new emphasis on the

sciences and modern languages. The Scottish

universities were not so narrowly focussed on the Greek

and Roman classics as Oxford. ‘The inevitable law of

progress,’ said William Brydone Jack, professor of

mathematics and natural philosophy, with an M.A. from

St. Andrews, ‘seems to demand that classics and

mathematics should not reign the solitary and

unassailable despots they have hithertoo been

considered.’ But Greek and Latin still remained the

core of liberal arts studies.

b. Central Canada until World War II (1939-1945)..

Though the charter of McGill University in

Montreal dates to 1821, it began to teach Liberal Arts

only in 1843, offering a three-year degree course with

a choice between two programs, one in Classics, and the

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other in Mathematics, Logic and Ethics. A new four-year

course taking Harvard University as its model replaced

it in 1852, the same year that the Université Laval

received its royal charter. But whereas classical

languages took up forty percent of Laval’s four-year

course – in addition, philosophy was taught in Latin –

at McGill, after Sir William Dawson became principal in

1855, McGill placed greater emphasis on the sciences

and modern languages. Dawson’s successor, Sir William

Peterson, was a distinguished classicist, a student of

Cicero, but classics was no longer the indispensable

core of university education at McGill.

McGill was in Lower Canada, or Canada East as it

was known while Lower and Upper Canada were united to

form the Province of Canada (1841-1867). After the

Dominion of Canada emerged in 1867, Canada East became

the province of Quebec and Canada West, Ontario. There

are two other English-language institutions in Quebec,

little Bishops University in Lennoxville, founded in

1843 and requiring both Greek and Latin for graduation

up until the 1920s, and Concordia University in

downtown Montreal. Ontario, Quebec’s neighbor to the

west, has grown into Canada’s most populous province,

with a large number of universities, old and new, many

of them founded by various Christian denominations.

This was normal in nineteenth-century Canada; Dalhousie

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University in Halifax was exceptional in that it was

founded as a secular institution , with an endowment

funded by spoils from the War of 1812. In Upper

Canada, the Presbyterians founded Queen’s University in

Kingston (1842), the Anglicans King’s College in

Toronto (1837), the Roman Catholics Assumption College

in Windsor (1857), the Methodists Victoria College in

Cobourg (1842). The rivalry was bitter, for in 1767, by

the authority of King George III, a half-million acres

had been set aside as an endowment for schools, and a

college or university to serve Upper Canada. King’s

College, headed by the Anglican Archbishop John

Strachan who was a dominant figure in Upper Canada

until his death in 1867, claimed the royal endowment.

But King’s did not offer any instruction until the

arrival of John McCaul, a graduate of Trinity College,

Dublin, who came to Canada in 1839, married into

Toronto’s ruling elite, and became vice-president and

professor of classics at King’s in 1842, and six years

later, president. When King’s College was secularized

the next year as the University of Toronto, McCaul

became its vice-chancellor, and president of University

College, which was the teaching arm of the new

university. Bishop Strachan, who had fought the

‘Godless education’ represented by the new secular

university, retorted by launching a campaign to found a

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new Anglican university and within three years,

succeeded in founding the University of Trinity

College. The old King’s College building, a nice

example of Palladian classicism, became an insane

asylum. It is now the site of the Legislative Assembly

building of the Province of Ontario.

McCaul’s scholarship was – to quote his successor

in the chair of classics, Maurice Hutton, - ‘at once

ornamental – lending itself to happy renderings of the

orators of Greece – and erudite, insomuch that he made

himself a name for original research in the remote

sphere of epigraphy.’ Hutton took over the chair in

1880, and it is he who can take much of the credit or

blame for the Honours Classics course at Toronto, which

became the paradigm for the honours courses in other

subjects. Honours Classics was a solid but narrow four-

year undergraduate program which required secondary

school matriculation in both Latin and Greek for entry.

The model was no longer the classics program at Trinity

College, Dublin, but the Oxford Greats, and most of the

graduates of the program became teachers. A substantial

percentage went to the graduate schools of American

universities which were generous with fellowships, for

Toronto itself offered little graduate training; it

awarded its first doctorate only in 1930. Toronto’s

Honours Classics course lasted until 1969, when the

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university superseded all its honours courses with a

so-called ‘New Program’ which was superseded ten years

later by an even newer program.

Toronto was now the provincial university, the

sole recipient of the revenue from the royal endowment,

and the other universities were hard-pressed

financially. In Toronto itself there were now four:

besides the University of Toronto there were Trinity,

founded in 1852 by Bishop Strachan and continuing to

offer the old King’s College program, the Roman

Catholic college of St. Michael’s, and McMaster

University, a Baptist school founded in Toronto in 1887

with a substantial endowment. In Cobourg, there was

Victoria University, established by the Methodists in

1836 as a co-educational secondary school named ‘Upper

Canada Academy’, and in Kingston there was Queen’s, a

Presbyterian foundation. Pooling resources seemed to be

the answer, and Victoria took the lead. It had

developed from an academy into a university with a

royal charter, and in the process, banished women from

its classrooms – women did not re-enter Victoria until

1877. In 1892, it federated with the University of

Toronto, leaving its severe classical building in

Cobourg which, like King’s College in Toronto, became a

lunatic asylum, and moving to a corner of the

University of Toronto campus. Under the terms of

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federation, Victoria would henceforth confer degrees

only in divinity, and would teach only a selection of

liberal arts courses, including classics and Greek and

Roman history, but not classical archaeology which was

not yet of any importance. Victoria provided the model:

Trinity and St. Michael’s Colleges soon joined the

federation, and thus the University of Toronto acquired

four liberal arts colleges, each with its own classics

department. McMaster University went its own way; it

moved from Toronto to the neighboring city of Hamilton

at the head of Lake Ontario. At the University of

Toronto, the cadre of classics students were divided by

religion or inclination among four colleges which

taught the same courses and administered the same

examinations. Innovations in the curriculum required

skill in negotiation, and if the Toronto classicists

made stodginess in the classroom a virtue, it was

because they were barred from most of the others. By

the sheer size of its combined classics departments,

the University of Toronto was the center for classical

studies in Ontario, setting the standards and regarding

with lofty disdain the other Ontario universities where

the classics departments were relatively tiny, and

library resources sparse.

c. The Opening of the Canadian West.

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In Canada west of the Great Lakes, Winnipeg was

the major center in the late nineteenth century, and

the University of Manitoba was founded in 1877. The

model was the University of London, but the curriculum

and standards were taken from eastern Canada. Latin and

Greek were required subjects. French-speaking students

received instruction in St. Boniface College which

developed from a school that existed early in the

century. ‘Rupert’s Land’, the vast area where the

rivers drain into Hudson Bay, was given to Canada by

Britain in 1870, and out of a portion of this

territory, the provinces of Alberta or Saskatchewan

were created in 1905. In 1908, universities were

founded in Edmonton, the capital of the new province of

Alberta, and in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan’s capital. The

chair of classics at Alberta, the first chair to be

established in the new university, was filled by W. H.

Alexander, and two years of compulsory Latin was

prescribed for all Arts students. It was not greatly

different at the University of British Columbia in

Vancouver on Canada’s west coast, where the university

got under way in 1906 as an affililiate of McGill,

largely on the initiative of a young classical scholar,

Lemuel Robertson. Latin remained compulsory at the

University of British Columbia until World War II, and

it was considered an innovation when the rule was

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dropped. At the University of Saskatchewan too, the

Bachelor of Arts curriculum prescribed two classes in

Latin or Greek, as well as a second foreign language.

Yet administering compulsory Latin to unwilling

students was drudgery; and at Alberta Alexander soon

reduced the two years of compulsory Latin to one, and

in 1920, a new course appeared among the Alberta course

offerings titled ‘Classics in English 51’, which taught

the ancient Greek authors in English translation. Only

sixteen years later did a course appear on the Latin

authors in translation. Resources were tight;

libraries were pitiful collections of books. Alexander

spent his last, most productive years on the faculty of

the University of California, Berkeley, and his

colleague at Alberta, W. G. Hardy, gave up the struggle

to research learned papers and instead wrote novels set

in ancient Rome, which sold well. Yet the western

universities graduated some distinguished classical

scholars during this period; for instance, among the

University of British Columbia’s alumni are Homer

Armstrong Thompson, who became the director of the

excavations of the ancient Athenian marketplace for the

American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and

Malcolm F. Gregor, who was fortunate enough to be A. B.

West’s student at the University of Cincinnati when

West was killed in an accident, was brought in by

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Benjamin Meritt, along with H. T. Wade-Gery of Oxford,

to take West’s place in a new publication of the

Athenian Tribute Lists which Meritt and West had been

preparing. It becamd a landmark study for students of

the Athenian Empire of the fifth-century BCE, and

received the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit from the

American Philological Association for 1954.

McGregor returned to his alma mater in 1855 where

he was recognized as a ‘great man’ by his colleagues

and by himself, and spent the next twenty years as head

of the Classics Department, now the Department of

Classical, Religious and Near Eastern Studies.

McGregor belonged to the years when departments had

“heads” rather than “chairs”, and could distribute

promotions and other perks to favored underlings at

will. Both Thompson and McGregor how have endowed

scholarships named after them at their alma mater,

Thompson’s endowed by his family and McGregor’s by

funds raised by one of his successors as department

head, J. A. S. Evans.

d. The Graduates.

Isolation and restricted resources

notwithstanding, Canadian universities produced some

outstanding graduates in classics in the pre-World War

II years. The greatest portion of them became teachers;

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others went into law, or journalism or medicine. Some

went on to graduate school and won distinction as

scholars, though they often had to emigrate to do so,

for the university community was small: in 1940, there

were only 34,800 undergraduates enrolled in all

Canadian universities and only 1,600 full-time graduate

students. Among the notable emigrants were Robert

Bonner (1868-1946), a Toronto B.A. who became chair of

the Classics Department at the University of Chicago;

William Scott Ferguson, (1875-1954), a McGill graduate

whose career took him to Harvard (1908-1945) and

Herbert Jennings Rose (1883-1961), another McGill

graduate who became professor of Latin at Aberystwyth

in Wales (1919-1927) and then professor at St. Andrews,

Scotland (1927-1953). Of those who found posts in

Canada, the most notable were C. N. Cochrane (1889-

1945) whose Christianity and Classical Culture (1940) became a

classic, and Herman Tracy (1897-1986), who served in

the Royal Flying Squadron in the 1914-1948 war, before

becoming the mainstay of the Classics Department at

Queen’s University in Kingston (Ontario), and Norman

Wentworth DeWitt, professor of Latin at Victoria

College, University of Toronto, and a notable Vergilian

scholar.

24

Thomas B. Akins, A Brief Account of the Origin, Endowment and

Progress of the University of King’s College, Windsor, N. S. Halifax,

1865.

W. H. Alexander, ‘The Classical Discipline in

Education, 1899-1939,’ Transactions of the Royal Society of

Canada, 1939, section II, pp. 9-21.

W. H. Alexander, ‘Peregrinus sicut Omnes Patres Mei,’ Phoenix, 4,

(1950), pp. 31-46.

Pelham Edgar, Across my Path, ed. Northrop Frye, Toronto,

1952.

R. A. Falconer, ‘The Tradition of Liberal Education in

Canada’, Canadian Historical Review 8 (1927), pp. 99-118

Watson Kirkconnell, ‘Latin and Greek in Education,’

Encyclopedia Canadiana, Toronto, 1970, VI, pp. 78-80.

C. B. Sissons, Church and State in Canadian Education, Toronto,

1959.

III.. Expansion of post-secondary education after World War II.

a] The Retreat of Classics from the Core of Post-

secondary education to the Periphery.

In the half-century after the end of World War II,

the university population increased enormously:

undergraduate enrollment multiplied fivefold between

25

1950 and 1980. Pre-war universities expanded and new

ones were created to meet the demand. Church-affiliated

institutions secularized in order to qualify for

government funding. The first quarter century after the

war’s end was also a period of growth for classical

studies. In 1946, the moribund Ontario Classical

Association was revived and it, in turn, was the

godfather of the bilingual Classical Association of

Canada/ Société Canadienne des Études Classiques, which founded

a quarterly, named hopefully, the Phoenix, with Mary

White of Trinity College, Toronto, as its first editor.

The Canadian government began to support academic

research in the Humanities, first by founding the

Canada Council in 1957, which distributed government

funds both to the performing arts and to the academic

arts, and then, in 1978, by separating the two

functions and establishing a new Social Sciences and

Humanities Research Council to assume the Canada

Council’s role of funding academic research in the

Humanities and Social Sciences, while the Canada

Council continued to fund the performing arts.

One beneficiary of the government largesse was

classical archaeology. Whereas before World War II,

Canadian archaeologists in Greece or Italy were

dependent on the hospitality of the American or British

foreign schools – the American School of Classical

26

Studies in Athens was particularly generous to

Canadians – now classical archaeologists in Canadian

universities could obtain funds for excavations from a

Canadian source. A rash of excavations ensued in Italy,

Greece, Cyprus, Turkey and Tunisia where Pierre Senay

of the Université de Québec à Trois-Rivières headed a

team working on the site of Carthage. Canadian

academies were founded in Greece, Italy and Egypt. Of

these, only the Canadian Archaeological Institute in

Athens has survived, and it serves primarily as a

vehicle to obtain permits to excavate in Greece. The

Canadian Academy in Rome, the most promising of them

all, died a lingering death in a welter of

disorganization, without ever launching a campaign to

raise funds for an endowment.

By 1970, the prospects for classical studies began

to darken. In that year, the classics departments in

four colleges of the University of Toronto had a total

teaching staff of fifty-two. Yet in the secondary

schools, Latin was declining. In Ontario, a reform of

the post-secondary curriculum in the late 1960s, which

is now generally agreed to have been a disaster, was

responsible for a sharp decline but so was a change in

the entrance requirements of Canadian universities. A

generation of great classics teachers in Canada’s

secondary school was retiring and not being replaced.

27

On the university level there were ominous signs. When

British Columbia acquired its second university, the

University of Victoria, in 1963, it came with an

excellent classics department. However when the

province’s third university, Simon Fraser (SFU) was

founded, classics fell victim to a quarrel between

SFU’s chancellor and the University of British

Columbia’s department head, Malcolm McGregor, and SFU

was launched with no classics department. It has,

however, recently established a Humanities Department

and a distinguished classicist, David Mirhady, has

joined its staff. But British Columbia’s more recent

universities have followed SFU’s lead: no classics.

In the late 1980s, government funding grew tight,

just when the cohort of faculty that had been hired in

the years of expansion in the 1960s began to retire and

should be replaced. Most Canadian universities, who

were unused to fund-raising campaigns, lacked

endowments to cushion the shock of tight budgets.

Classics departments, which were perceived as passé by

university administrators, came under pressure, for it

appeared that one way of saving money was to amalgamate

departments. At the University of Alberta, classics is

now under the umbrella of the history department and at

the University of British Columbia, Classical Studies

and Religious Studies have joined forces. At the

28

University of Waterloo, Anthropology and Classics are

grouped into a single department, and at McGill

University, the classics department, which had thirteen

full-time members in 1970, has been reduced to a

corporal’s guard and courses in ancient history have

been assigned to the history department and art and

archaeology to the Fine Arts Department. At the

University of Windsor and Concordia University in

Montreal, classics is grouped into foreign languages

departments.

Classical studies has changed to meet the

challenge. At the University of Toronto, the college

departments were closed in 1975, and there is now a

single university department of classics with a staff

of seventeen in 2005, which still puts it among the

largest classics departments in North America. Classics

departments now purvey not merely the classical

languages, but more importantly, the culture, the art

and the thought of the ancient Mediterranean, and

departments which reformed early to meet the new

challenges have prospered: at the University of Western

Ontario, where the department of classical studies was

guided through its transformation years by Douglas

Gerber, it is now second in size only to the University

of Toronto. On the other hand, increasing student

enrollment does not secure a department’s future. In an

29

academic milieu which values clichés like ‘cutting edge

science’, classical studies has not yet shed its image

among university administrators of being wedded to an

obsolete past, and the perception is dangerous.

b] Postgraduate education.

Canada awoke in the 1960s to the fact that its

graduate schools could not meet the demand for new

faculty, and governments responded by tilting their

funding formulas so as to favor universities with

graduate schools. The University of British Columbia,

Alberta, McMaster and Ottawa all started doctoral

programs in classics. At the present time, the

University of British Columbia has developed a special

strength in the study of ancient Sicily, with two

research scholars in the field, Franco De Angelis and

R. J. A. Wilson. McMaster University established a

doctoral program in ancient history which was unique,

for it was created in the history department which was

headed at the time by E. T. Salmon, Canada’s foremost

Roman historian. Ancient history candidates could take

a field in the classics department, or if they wished,

in modern history, but like other graduate students in

history, ancient historians were required to take a

course in historiography where Herodotus and Thucydides

were studied in the company of great modern historians,

thus acquiring a perspective which many traditionally-

30

trained classicists lacked. The program produced a

string of distinguished graduates, the first of whom,

L. J. Sanders, was a student of the author of this

article. But after the McMaster Classics department

established a new doctoral program in Roman Studies,

the graduate program in ancient history was starved for

funds and after Salmon’s death, it was allowed to

lapse. Yet it was a promising experiment which

attracted a number of American students, and its

products fitted well into the new reality where

classics departments have been amalgamated with history

departments, or a Humanities programs.

Research has taken on new importance. Classics

departments are no longer considered repositories of a

body of knowledge that helped shaped the western

tradition; instead they are expected to expand the

boundaries of that knowledge. Directors of doctoral

dissertation are now generally required to be

publishing scholars themselves; one university has set

the bar at three refereed papers. The outlets for

publication have greatly increased; besides the Phoenix,

founded in 1946, the Classical Association of Canada

now supports a second quarterly, Mouseion, published by

the University of Calgary Press, which also publishes

another quarterly, Ancient History Bulletin. King’s College,

Halifax, publishes Dionysus, specializing in ancient

31

philosophy, and the University of Ottawa produces

Cahiers des Études Anciennes. The University of Toronto Press

and McGill-Queens University Press both publish books

in classical studies, and the University of British

Columbia Press has even ventured gingerly into books on

the ancient world intended to be accessible to the

general reader, and published two titles, The Athenians

and their Empire, by Malcolm F. McGregor, and Anthony J.

Podlecki’s The Early Greek Poets and their Times. The University

of Toronto Press also distributes books on classical

subjects published by Edgar Kent Inc., Publishers.

However the majority of Canadian classicists still look

to publishers in Europe or the United States.

c] Scholars of distinction.

The last half century has seen Canadian

universities become home to a number of classical

scholars with international reputations. G. M. A. Grube

(1889-1982) emigrated to Canada in 1928 and accepted a

professorship at Trinity College, Toronto, where he

produced books on Plato, Euripides and the Greek and

Roman critics. E. T. Salmon, an Australian by birth who

became Messecar Professor of History and head of the

department at McMaster University, won the Goodwin

Award of Merit for his Samnium and the Samnites (1967).

Maurice Lebel (1909-2006) was a scholar of towering

32

stature who was awarded honorary degrees by five

Canadian and two European universities, as well as the

Order of the Phoenix by the Greek republic. Douglas

Gerber at the University of Western Ontario is

recognized as an international authority on the Greek

lyric and elegiac poets, and at the University of

Toronto, Alan Samuel is known for his work on

Hellenistic history. Duncan Fishwick at the University

of Alberta is a recognized authority on the Roman

imperial cult. Anthony Barrett’s biographies of

Caligula, Livia and Agrippina, the mother of Nero have

reached a wide audience, and Barrett’s colleague at the

University of British Columbia, Gerald N. Sandy, is

recognized for his work on the ancient novel. At the

University of Toronto, John Traill is particularly

noteworthy. His book on the political organization of

Attica is a definitive study, and his ‘Athenians’

project aims to produce a prosopographical study of all

the Athenians known to us. Traill has made the

University of Toronto into a center for Greek

epigraphy, with a magnificent collection of squeezes.

At Université Laval, Gilles Maloney has produced a

five-volume computerized concordance of the Hippocratic

corpus, and at the University of New Brunswick, Mary

Ella Milham has produced the Teubner edition of

Apicius’ De re coquinaria. (1969).

33

All of these have now retired, and some are dead.

In the last ten years, the field of classics has been

renewed by a corps of young scholars who are bringing

new ideas and new research interests to it. Classical

Studies have changed enormously. Computers have

revolutionized research and the internet has made a

close-knit community of the scholarly world. The

classical tradition is better able to engage the modern

multicultural world than it ever has been.

James Allan S. Evans, ‘The Classics in English Canada,

‘ Cahiers des Études Anciennes, 32 (1995), pp. 33-43.

Douglas Gerber, ‘Canada – Greek and Latin Philology,’

La Filologia Greca e Latina nel secolo XX. Atti del Congresso

Internazionale, Roma, 1984, II (Pisa, 1989), pp. 797-808.

Robin S. Harris, A History of Higher Education in Canada (1663-

1960). Toronto/Buffalo, 1960.

Robin S. Harris, ‘The Establishment of a Provincial

University in Ontario,’ in D. F. Dadson, ed., On Higher

Education: Five Lectures. Toronto, 1966, pp. 5-35.

idem, ‘The Evolution of a Provincial System of Higher

Education in Ontario,’ in D. F. Dadson, pp. 36-62.

Iain McDougall, ‘Classics among the Fields of Grain:

The Discipline on the Prairies,’ Cahiers des études

anciennes, 32 (1995), pp. 51-55.

34

Alexander G. McKay, ‘Virisque adquirit eundo: Classical

Studies in Ontario,’ Cahiers des études anciennes, 32 (1995),

pp. 63-69.

Peter L. Smith, ‘Classics in the Canadian Far West:

Alberta and British Columbia’, Cahiers des Études Anciennes,

32 (1995), pp. 45-49.

IV. The Classical Influence in Canadian Architecture.

The conquest of New France brought with it Georgian

classicism. A good example is the Anglican cathedral

in Quebec city with its severe but balanced façade;

another is Province House in Halifax. Classical

architecture had been filtered through Rome, then

through Andrea Palladio, and from Palladio it reached

various handbooks for builders such as Batty Langley’s

The Builder’s Director, or Bench-mate, being a Pocket Treasiry of the

Grecian, Rom,an and Gothic Order of Architecture made easy to the

Meanest Capacaity (1767) which was used in Canada.

Federalist architecture was called ‘Loyalist’ in

Canada, but both had the same ancestry. Early Gothic

buildings appearing in the decades after the War of

1812, were classical buildings with Gothic details

taken from Batty Langley or some similar pattern book.

35

Even Notre Dame Cathedral in Montreal, built in 1825,

which, with its deliberate reminiscence of Notre Dame

in Paris, which symbolized the vitality and

distinctiveness of French Canada, was a classical

building with Gothic elements rather than true Gothic

Revival.

But in 1762, James Stuart and Nicolas Revett

published The Antiquities of Athens which published measured

drawings of buildings from the Greek classical period,

unadulterated by Palladio, and from Stuart and Revett

the drawings passed into practical handbooks such as

Asher Benjamin’s The American Builder’s Companion (1827), and

The Architect, or Practical House Carpenter (1847). In Canada,

neoclassicism seems to have been devoid of any

ideological meaning; in fact, its major contribution

was to reinforce the Georgian classical tradition at a

time when it was threatened by Gothic Revival. By

contrast, in the United States, neoclassicism became

the national style of the young republic: in

Washington it was the style of the White House and the

Capitol. It was a virile, democratic style,

symbolizing the liberty and the genius of ancient

Athens. Canada was aware of the symbolism and

approached it warily. When construction of her own

Parliament Buildings in Ottawa got under way in 1869,

the style chosen out of thirty-three submissions by

36

Canadian, and one American architect, was ‘Civil

Gothic’; two neoclassical designs which were submitted

were set aside as unsuitable. Gothic Revival had both

English and French roots, and neoclassical was by this

time unmistakably American. .

In the second quarter of the nineteenth century,

there were two types of neoclassicism in Canada. The

first type had learned from archaeology what correct

classical Greek architecture really was. Neoclassical

buildings of this type borrowed components such as

columns, entablatures and gables directly from

classical models, and their proportions are correct.

The second type cared less about authenticity.

Architecture of this second type borrowed neoclassical

elements and introduced them into the Georgian-

Palladian tradition, but it did not attempt to copy

antiquity. It made no clear break with Georgian

classicism. It was this second type that is more

common in Canada, whereas the best examples of the

first type are to be found in the United States.

However, the first type appears early in Canada.

The residence of the first governor of Upper Canada,

‘Castle Frank’, was built in 1796 on the plan of a

Greek temple, totally of wood. In 1826, the Bank of

New Brunswick, Canada’s first chartered bank,

constructed a stone building with a temple front. The

37

fire that devastated St. John in 1877 destroyed it

along with the other neoclassical buildings in the

city. Only slightly later, in 1831, St. Andrew’s

Presbyterian church was built in Niagara-on-the Lake

in central Canada, with a façade copying the Temple of

Hephaistos in Athens, with wooden Doric columns and

wooden entablature. However private residences in the

style of Greek temples were not popular, or practical,

in Canada, though there are a few good examples that

still survive, notably ‘Mt. Fairview’ in Dundas,

Ontario, built by a prosperous grocer in 1847 during a

brief period when Dundas anticipated a prosperous

future that failed to materialize. In the same year,

Dundas built a city hall which is a nice example of

Classical Revival of the second type: a Palladian

structure with neoclassical elements.

Beaux Arts architecture originated in the École

des Beaux Arts in Paris, but it came to Canada through

the United States. After the 1901 Pan-American

Exposition in Buffalo featured it, it became the

favorite style for grandiose public buildings, banks

and railway stations, which borrowed their

monumentality from the great Roman bath buildings.

Toronto’s Union Station, begun in 1917 and still a

busy transportation hub, is a good example. The

Canadian prejudice against Greek Revival (First type)

38

had by now evaporated and the Legislative Buildings

for the new provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and

Alberta, all begun in the years immediately preceding

the 1914-1918 World War, used Beaux Arts design.

Manitoba’s Legislative building serves as a

distinguished example: the architect was Frank

Worthington Simon of Liverpool (U.K.); the style was

Classical Greek and the walls were built of Tyndall

Stone, one of Canada’s first structural limestones.

The arches surrounding the Grand Staircase are

illuminated by lamps of Pompeian design and the

northernmost of these arches is supported by four

caryatids drawn from the Erechtheion in ancient

Athens.

Classical Greek was not the only architectural

legacy to reach Canada from the classical world. In the

1830s, Sir Allan MacNab, politician, businessman and at

the end of his career, a railway promoter, built a

Roman villa on Burlington Bay, overlooking the western

end of Lake Ontario. The villa type goes back to the

ancient Roman farmhouse and it gave rise to the

Italianate style of domestic architecture. The upstairs

hall of NacNab’s mansion, Dundurn Castle, is equally

Roman for the walls are decorated in Pompeian First

Style wallpainting. The colors are closer to Victorian

than Pompeian: MacNab’s architect, who was a local man,

39

must have known Pompeian wall paintings only through

steel engravings. However this is the first example of

Italianate Architecture in North America.

Eric Arthur, The Early Buildings of Ontario. Toronto, 1938.

J. A. S. Evans, ‘The Classical Influence on Ontario

Architecture,’ Canadian Geographical Journal, 64 (1962),

pp. 66-69.

John Bland, ‘The Development of Canadian

Architecture,’ Habitat 2/1 (1959), pp. 9-13.

J. A. S. Evans, ‘Canada’s Age of Elegance,’ Habitat

2/6 (1959), 20-22.

Alan Gowans, Building Canada. Toronto, 1966.

Harold Kalman, A Concise History of Canadian Architecture,

Toronto, 2000.

V. The Classical Influence in Canadian Literature.

There were no nymphs or fauns in the forests which the

early European settlers encountered in Canada. Mrs.

Francis Brooke, who wrote the first Canadian novel, The

History of Emily Montague (1769), imagines her heroine

writing home to England from a wintry Quebec, ‘I no

longer wonder that the elegant arts are unknown here;

40

the rigour of the climate suspends the very powers of

understanding; what then must become of those of the

imagination? …..Those who expect to see a new Athens

rising near the pole will find themselves extremely

disappointed.’ Mrs. Brooke did, however, identify one

of the themes of early English-Canadian literature:

survival. That is, the maintenance of European,

particularly English or Scottish norms of civilized

life in a harsh environment.

Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, gold medalist in

classics at the University of New Brunswick for 1878,

and one of a remarkable group of poets which that

university has produced, attempted a classical subject

in his Orion, a mini-epic, which was much admired in

Canada when it was published, but no one reads it now.

Roberts’ sonnets and other poems on the landscapes of

the Maritime provinces show him at his best, and the

same can be said of the poetry of Bliss Carman, another

gold medalist in classics (1882) from the University of

New Brunswick. Roberts also wrote a history of Canada,

which was used in Ontario schools, and it does not

deserve the oblivion it has encountered, for it was

written with Livy as its model with some of Livy’s

lactea ubertas, and it is a rare example of a readable

school textbook on Canadian history.

41

The launch of the new Dominion of Canada in 1867

did not produce a great burst of enthusiasm, for the

process of forming Canada out of British North America

was a long process which was completed only with the

entry of Newfoundland and Labrador into the federation

in 1949. However there was the sense that a nation was

being born. ‘It is possible that the hour of Canadian

nationality may be drawing near,’ editorializied the

Canadian Monthly in 1872, the year it was founded. Agnes

Maule Machar, one of its most prolific contributors who

wrote under the pseudonym ‘Fidelis’, used the classics

to put Canada’s history into perspective: her

historical sketch of the War of 1812, for instance,

which appeared in the July, 1874, issue, reached its

climax with the death of the lieutenant-governor Sir

Isaac Brock, leading a charge up Queenston Heights

against an American force. The monument that marked his

fall was a sacred place, she wrote, akin to Thermopylae

or Marathon. William D. Lighthall, editor of Songs of the

Great Dominion (1889) compared the flight of the thirty-

five thousand United Empire Loyalists to Canada after

the American Revolution to the flight of Aeneas from

Troy. The Canadian Monthly ceased publication in 1882,

giving various reasons, among them the ‘inchoate state’

of Canada as a nation and ‘the indifference of our

people to higher literature,’ but magazine’s interest

42

in the classics remained undiminished: its last issue

carried an essay on Sophocles by ‘Fidelis’.

Classical themes surface in twentieth-century

Canadian literature, but we have space for only a few

highlights. John Hugh MacLennan, (1907-1990), who was

the first anglophone novelist to attempt to portray

Canada’s national character with any success, graduated

from Dalhousie University in classics, went to Oxford

as a Rhodes Scholar and then to Princeton for his

doctorate. His first successful novel, Baronmeter Rising

(1941) is a drama of fate: its subject is the garrison

mentality of Halifax on the eve of the Halifax

explosion of 6 December, 1917, when a French munitions

transport detonated in Halifax harbor in the greatest

man-made explosion before Hiroshima. Jay Macpherson,

best-known for The Boatman, a collection of poems that

won a Governor-General’s award in 1957, published a

classical mythology for secondary schools, Welcoming

Disaster, and Margaret Atwood, who had already

experimented with adding a feminist perspective to

Greek myth by a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey from

Circe’s perspective, returned to the Trojan cycle in

her, The Penelopiad.( 2005), which recasts the heroic

myths of the war against Troy as Penelope may have

perceived them. Grant Buday’s Dragonflies recreates the

last weary days of the Trojan War imagined through

43

Odysseus’ eyes. It becomes a reflection on the inanity

of all wars.

The search for the direct influence of the

classical tradition on Canadian literature yields small

results. Canadian literature has only recently been

considered worth serious research. The indirect

influence of the classics, however, is another matter.

The classical tradition provided a literary matrix that

Canada shared with all countries where English or

French was spoken. The great men or women of the

Canadian past were never commemorated with statues

showing them wearing togas, but that does not mean that

the ghosts of the classical tradition did not provide

them with paradigms.

Roy Daniells, ‘Confederation to the First World War,

‘ in Carl F. Klinck, ed., Literary History of Canada2 I,

(Toronto, 1976), pp. 205-221.

A. J. M. Smith, ‘The Canadian Poet’, Canadian Literature

#37 (1968), pp. 6-14

44