Was Alexander the Great a bastard of the Persian Shah? Why did Ancient Greeks find cucumbers droll? In their spare time did Indian concubines form a bodyguard of female archers? Like what song the Syrens sang, these are puzzling questions. But they are not beyond conjecture at the annual meeting of the Classical Association, which opens at Reading University today.

The Classical Association was founded more than a century ago, after protracted and passionate correspondence in The Times. It was feared that Latin and Greek were under threat from vulgar new academic subjects, such as English. The founding patres were elite, professors and head teachers. Prime ministers and archbishops addressed their conferences. Their subject was elite, the study of ancient grammar and texts from the narrow space and time known as the Golden Age. A headmaster congratulated his pupils on being set Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, because it was “a treasure-house of grammatical peculiarities”.

Times have moved on. The classics are still seen to be sidelined by more “relevant” subjects and the decrees of our educational overlords. Textual criticism is no longer their principal discipline. Study of the languages is still elite. But the interest is far wider than before, among hoi polloi who never aspired to reading Latin and Greek. Classical civilisation includes fields undreamt of in the philology of the founders. More than 300 young delegates at Reading include strong teams from America and continental Europe. They prove that classics are not irrelevant. They are still the roots of Western civilisation, all around us, whenever we open our lips and eyes.