Ancient Greek, once central to a western European education, is on life support. Last summer, 206 pupils sat an A-level in ancient Greek. Of those, only a handful were state-educated.

So it’s farewell to the language taught in our schools since the 16th century. Farewell to the language of the New Testament; the language Roman nobles revered and the emperors spoke. Julius Caesar’s last words weren’t ‘Et tu, Brute?’ They were ‘Kai su, teknon?’ – ‘You too, my child?’

As A.N. Wilson recently wrote: ‘Someone once said that all western philosophy is just footnotes to Plato. All western literature is just footnotes to Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Homer.’

You end up with a diluted Greek GCSE that insults the intelligence of the handful of pupils who sit it

You end up with a diluted Greek GCSE that insults the intelligence of the handful of pupils who sit it

With the death of Greek in schools, so too it is dying in universities, with reading in the original language replaced by English translations. As one retired Oxbridge don put it to me: ‘The subject is becoming more like classical studies every day – an ancient equivalent of English literature.’

Of the 13 state schools that teach A-level Greek, most are grammar schools. Less than half are comprehensives. So the rigorous study of ancient Greek is almost entirely confined to selective schools – and the soft bigotry of low expectations strikes again. If you aren’t lucky enough to have rich parents, able to send you to private school, or if you don’t get into a grammar school, it’s almost impossible for you to study classical languages at the highest level at university.

Yes, Oxford and Cambridge admirably try to narrow the gap by teaching Latin and Greek to undergraduates who haven’t studied the languages at school. But how can they ever hope to close it? When I started classics at Oxford in 1989, I’d already done eight years, with long terms and long daily hours, of Latin and seven years of Greek at North Bridge House prep school and Westminster School. No one is going to catch up in the three or........

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