In recent years, my students of the subject "Classical World" that I teach in the first year of the Degrees in History, Philology, Philosophy and Humanities that we offer in the School of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Navarra have especially enjoyed reading a booklet by the Exeter professor Neville Morley graduate, in Spanish "The Classical World, why does it matter? In it, following a line of defense of the "evocative power of the classics" that would start from Werner Jaeger's "Paideia", the importance of the historical Structures of the Greco-Roman world, its languages and its bequest, "pillars of the knowledge" is valued. Although it insists on the misrepresentation that has sometimes been made of this bequest, it also underlines what it has lent to the training of thinkers, leaders and citizens of hundreds of generations.

committee In these days, the Royal Decree that will reform, for the umpteenth time, the teaching Secondary and the high school diploma and that, in spite of the abundant reactions against it from historians and professional associations of the university teaching and average it seems that it will go ahead thanks to this Government of consensus and moderation. These days, in fact, the Royal Academy of History has issued a manifesto in which it censured "the prioritization of Contemporary History over the history of previous eras" and regretted that, in the draft that has transcended, "it does not give space and relevance to the historical processes prior to the Contemporaneity".

Morley's booklet, which my students read with relish, and which provokes many interesting conversations in my office at School, describes -and for the Roman world so did Cyril Bailey with A in "The bequest of Rome"- some of the great institutions of the classical Greco-Roman past without which it would be difficult to explain not only the present but the very essence of History and that "democratic coexistence", "freedom" or "progress" that draft of the new Law claims so much. Among them, it seems appropriate to list at least two: the concept of the city-state as a space of rights, obligations and generous and sacrificial involvement of the citizens - the Greek "polis" - and the concept of a space of administrative dominion over a territory - the "imperium" - which Rome ended up managing as an imperial monarchy after Augustus. None of the "great historical progress" in which the new Law claims to aim to educate citizens can be explained without them, just as it does not seem possible to explain it with a History whose engines, as stated in the approach of curriculum, now turn out to be "identities", "beliefs", "ideas" or "emotions". The old Wert Law, reviled by the political sign of the party that proposed it, recognized that "the past is neither dead nor buried, but influences the present and the different possible futures". It is surprising, and painful, to see that the term "pólis" appears in the draft of the Royal Decree that is now going to be taken to the committee of Ministers only twice, the same number of times that "Roman Empire" appears. On the other hand, "Greece" is only mentioned on twenty-two occasions and "Rome" on fourteen. In the Law that will now be repealed, the terms "pólis" and "Roman Empire" appeared seven times and "Greece" and "Rome" were mentioned thirty-two and forty-two times, almost twice the number of times that both civilizations, key to our present and builders of the very idea of Europe, are mentioned in the draft that will soon be C. Moreover, if we look at the subjects in which these concepts are mentioned, we will be astonished to see that they are Latin, Greek or Classical Culture subjects which, for the most part, are present in Secondary Education, and not in the Secondary School, where, precisely, the study of these concepts is taught in the classroom. high school diploma where, precisely, in the study of History, and as we pointed out in a previous article , it is defended that "the achievements of our democratic coexistence" began only after 1812. It is a curious paradox that this extreme presentism claimed by the ideologists of this Government pretends to explain what "democratic coexistence" means without talking to those same pre-university students about Pericles, the "pólis" or the exemplary voluntariness of public offices during Antiquity, and replaces historical categories that, for centuries, have been recognized as the basis of "long duration" and "historical structure" with terms such as "gender", "sustainability" or "equality", which, in turn, have been recognized as the basis of "long duration" and "historical structure", with terms such as "gender", "sustainability" or "equality", "sustainability" or "equality" which, readers can make the test, fill the pages of this document that aims to do away with a millenary heritage, the Greco-Roman, which, however, will make its way as long as there are, as there are in my classes at the University of Navarra or in the archaeological excavations of which I am manager -and from which the photographs come from- students willing to be passionate about it.