Homer’s epics–the Iliad and the Odyssey–like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides’s tragic dramas, form part of what we call bonae litterae, a Latin phrase that can be translated as “good letters,” “good literature,” or “great texts” and which is traditionally described as referring to “the best things that have been written or spoken” by the most authoritative writers and thinkers in the Western tradition. This is the type of instruction practiced and perfected by the exceptionally learned Humanist teachers of the Renaissance. Instruction in bonae litterae still forms the core of arts and humanities instruction today.

The study of bonae litterae is the traditional domain of the grammarian. Late medieval teachers of grammar were responsible not only for instruction in the noble classical languages but also, therein, for moral instruction through the correct interpretation of the classical poets. The poets were considered to “direct themselves towards ethics” which is to say that their works pertained to “moral science, a branch of practical philosophy”. Concerned with ethical persuasion and thus with interpretation as a guide to action, grammar “was an art of living as well as an art of language, and the single method of instruction was the explication of the poets” (Alastair Minnis MLTC 14).