My classical education

 I took UCB Latin Workshop at age 18, between freshman and sophomore year in college. My dad thought that I should be a classicist, his dream not mine. I never regretted it. I took Greek workshop in summer between college and grad school.  In college, I took several Latin courses. Horace, Petronius, Catullus, I think. The other students in the classes were these four or five other young women who were Latin majors. I held my own with them. I never did anything with Greek, because I was in Grad school which required extreme specialization, despite being in Comp Lit.  

Most of the classical education was simply grammar and translation. You learned to translate and decide what kind of genitive, ablative, or dative it was. You matched up a noun with an adjective in the same case, subjects with verbs.  So you never got to do anything else,  like literary criticism or context, or see what the actual researchers in the field did with their time, aside from teaching grammar and translation to other people. It was all grammar/translation at the undergrad level. That's what my daughter's high school Latin was, too. They read Vergil, just I had done in 1978.  

My biggest interest was in prosody, and in seeing how Horace crafted a poem. I got huge earworms with certain Latin prosodical patterns. I don't know of anything the really matches Horace's craftsmanship.  It was a schooling for me. I think that that, among other things, allowed me to be reader of poetry at that advanced level. If you think a poem by WCW is crafted in the same way a Horatian ode is, then you must treat it with a certain seriousness.