Some 45 years ago, I was sitting in Washington Park, a quiet refuge in downtown Charleston defined by Broad, Meeting, and Chalmers Streets. The park was my favorite place to read and to engage in what was then every young man’s hobby: brooding about girls. Sitting there, I be- came aware of an annoying presence— another student whom I knew slightly. As I got up to leave, he asked, “What are you doing here?”

Never one to resist a challenge, I replied, “What are you doing in my park?” In truth, everyone who has ever lived in Charleston for some time has his own claim on the city, his own vision, and I cannot pretend that mine is better than anyone else’s. Real cities, Charleston and Siena and Edinburgh, are a great deal like nations: Each has its own identity celebrated in songs and stories and a peculiar slant on history. After the Revolution, there were many such cities in America—Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, Baltimore and Charleston—but, by the early 20th century, cities and states in the North were being swamped by immigration and sacrificing their identity to the ravenous destructive changes they called progress. This is reflected in the dearth of folklore, historic sense, and celebration of, say, Rockford or Des Moines. Authentic cities have jokes that seem very much like ethnic jokes. Why are Charlestonians like the Chinese? Both eat rice and worship their ancestors.

People from a real place, whatever their politics, can be recognized by their manners and the way they dress. Stephen Col- bert was once asked how he learned to play the super-straight guy on The Daily Show. He replied,

I am a super straight guy. I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, and I am perfectly comfortable in blue blazers, khaki pants, Brooks Brothers suits and regimental striped ties. It’s just genetic. I love a cocktail party with completely vacuous conversation, because I grew up in it.

One of the most famous Charleston jokes was the observation of the jurist James Louis Petigru on the eve of the War Between the States: “South Carolina is too small to be a Republic and too large to be a lunatic asylum.” Though Petigru is invariably described as a unionist, his devotion to the Union was based only on practical considerations. His young kinsman and protégé, James Johnston Pettigrew, was a Confederate hero.

Washington Park’s only resident, the poet Henry Timrod, had studied law with Petigru, but he gave up law to pursue a career in classical studies, hoping to land a professorship that never materialized. The war destroyed his fragile health; Sherman destroyed his home and his job in Columbia; and Timrod lingered on after facing the death of his beloved son Willie. There is no telling what he might have done if the war had never happened or if Union generals had not been war criminals.

On the eve of the attack on Charleston, Timrod gives a memorable description of the city preparing for war, wondering if, come spring, the city will still “Rest in the strong arms of her palm-crowned isles, / As fair and free as now?” It was a rhetor- ical question. Charleston was about to endure one of the most brutal sieges ever inflicted on a great and civilized city. When Northern gunners trained their artillery on the spires of Charleston’s historic churches, the steeples had to be painted black as if in mourning. The city was blockaded and first attacked by land in May 1862, but, incredibly, Charleston held out until the war was virtually over— bloodied, blackened, but unbowed. The story is told in one of the best books about the war, Milby Burton’s Siege of Charleston. As a whippersnapper, I thought of Mr. Burton, the director of the Charles- ton Museum, as a tedious old windbag, and, by the time I began to realize what a superb historian he was, he was dead.

Timrod had grown up in Charleston’s Golden Age, when William Gilmore Simms reigned supreme over a group of the younger men who gathered at Russell’s Book Store—among them, Basil Gildersleeve and Timrod’s good friend Paul Hamilton Hayne. Hayne was a nephew of Sen. Robert Hayne, who had engaged in a famous debate with Daniel Webster. Every American schoolboy used to know Hayne’s speech, since it was included in a McGuffey’s Reader. Paul Hayne was also a collateral descendant of Revolutionary War hero Col. Isaac Hayne, brutally executed by the British without a trial and over the protest of many loyalists. To complete the insult, Colonel Hayne was not given the dignity of a firing squad but was hanged like a common criminal. This was one of the most scandalous actions in a disgraceful campaign. On the way to his execution, Hayne had promised to return, and, for over a century, his footsteps were heard at night outside his house and climbing the stairs.

Although I went to the park to read French and English literature, I studied only the minimum of English literature. After my requirements were out of the way, I studied nothing but Greek, Latin, French, and German. Both of my Greek teachers, each an eccentric in his own way, impressed upon me that they had been taught by students of the greatest classical scholar America had produced, Basil Gildersleeve, and that I was there- fore the heir to a rich tradition.

Gildersleeve was born in Charleston, the son of a Presbyterian minister who taught him Greek at the age of five and an Acadian mother who communicated to him her affection for Shakespeare and Walter Scott. He entered the College of Charleston in 1844 but left when the family moved to Richmond and eventually graduated from Princeton at the age of 17. The young Gildersleeve had always wanted to be a poet. “I only drifted into classical philology,” he once remarked. “I am a litterateur manqué.”

Gildersleeve’s love of German literature led him to Berlin in 1850, where he became a student of the magisterial Greek scholar August Böckh. However, not find-ing the other American students—most of them Yankees—congenial, he moved to Göttingen to be with Charleston friends. After returning to America, he accepted a position as professor of Greek at the University of Virginia, but the war soon interrupted his philological career.

Gildersleeve said that he rode with Jeb Stuart in order to earn the right to teach Virginia’s youth. Since he was seriously wounded and left with a permanent limp, his students later said they were always reminded of his valor by the “choliambic rhythm of his majestic gait.” Gildersleeve, as a student of Greek meter, would have enjoyed the joke: The choliambic is otherwise known as the limping iambic. He taught for 21 years at UVA before accepting a position at the newly created Johns Hopkins, where his lofty manner, imposing presence, and long, white beard so impressed the students that they referred to him as “Zeus.” Gildersleeve became not only the greatest classicist produced by America but probably the greatest American scholar in any branch of humane learning.

Gildersleeve was a dyed-in-the-wool Southern regionalist. He said, apropos of the Greek poet Pindar, that “The man whose love for his country knows no local roots is a man whose love for his country is a poor abstraction.” He never ceased writing essays to defend the South, which he could not help seeing in classical terms. Already in 1867, Gildersleeve had noted the beginning of the war to eliminate Greek and Latin from the curriculum. The revolution picked up speed at President Eliot’s Harvard when, early in the 20th century, all requirements but French were eliminated.

On the other hand, the College of Charleston—Gildersleeve’s first alma mater—only at the end of the 1960’s abolished the Greek and Latin requirements for any arts degree. Charleston’s attachment to the classics was partly the result of Southern political conservatism, but it was as much the cause. Gildersleeve saw the matter clearly two years after the war, and he understood that the South’s national identity, which derived sustenance from the classics, was threatened by the materialist and servile educational practices being imported from the Northeast.

The president of the College of Charles- ton, during my first two years, was George Grice. Dr. Grice was so deep-died a conservative that he regarded the John Birch Society as a nest of fellow travelers, and, with his flamboyant p.r. director, Jack Leland, he founded Charleston Alert, an organization whose purpose was to ferret out communists in Charleston County. I knew all the radicals quite well, and I have to say that, with their resources and tactical abilities, the Charleston Reds would not have been able to take over a West Ashley convenience store, much less the county.

Jack Leland went on to become a beloved columnist at the Charleston newspaper, and I used to see him at the annual Brick Church picnic near McClellanville. We would sit upon ancient tombstones, drinking cocktails and watching the little children play among the graves of their ancestors. Jack was a master of exaggeration, and, while his stories always contained a grain of truth, they did, as Huck Finn would say, include some stretchers. A few years later, when V.S. Naipaul was researching his dreadful and dishonest book on the South, I told him to go see Jack, which he did, and, gullible cynic that he is, Naipaul swallowed every one of Jack’s stretchers hook, line, and sinker. Jack always said his tombstone would read, “Have One on Jack,” and (as one of his relatives told me) they had drinks at the graveside.

I have sometimes thought that Charleston bred nothing but eccentrics. One bright afternoon, I went to the Library Society to see what they had of Heraclitus. As I entered the building with a friend, Samuel Gaillard Stoney was coming out. Mr. Stoney, with blazing eyes, his fine goatee, and the socks-and-sandals combination that he wore when riding about town on his bicycle, looked a bit like a bohemian Mephistopheles. “Well, boys,” he asked in his usual self-dramatizing manner, “what are you doing, going to a library?” When we explained our purpose, he drew himself up, looked off into the distance, and said, “You know, I have lived over 70 years without ever reading Heraclitus, and I don’t think it has hurt me one bit.”

Sam Stoney was the embodiment of the Carolina Low Country. Architect, novelist, local historian, expert on the Gullah dialect, Mr. Stoney was said to know the story of every tree in Charleston. This was clearly an exaggeration, since I think his perfect knowledge probably only extended a block or two north of Calhoun Street. Naturally, I thought his ignorance of Heraclitus proof that he was a fool, a shallow local antiquarian who was only truly at home at evening receptions in Charleston, but he could have gone anywhere and succeeded at almost anything. Beneath the cheerful surface of his carefully designed persona, there was a brooding mind that knew all too well that he and his kind and the world they lived in were doomed. Only Evelyn Waugh could have done justice to such a character.

I did not spend all my time at the College studying Heraclitus. My first Greek professor recommended the Persian formula for a gentleman: “Ride a horse, shoot straight, and tell the truth,” but he added that a Southern gentleman had to be able to drink bourbon whiskey, which he did in considerable abundance. Although I am a poor shot and a worse horseman, I have followed his advice.

South Carolina’s drinking laws—a conspiracy between Baptists and bootleggers—could not be enforced in Charleston. Several of the saloonkeepers and bartenders were friends of mine—George Gruver at Henry’s and John Canady (a former New York Giants linebacker), the proprietor of Big John’s who once saved me from getting my just deserts after I picked a fight with a large and very homicidal U.S. Marine. Even John’s imposing size did not deter the Marine, who, when told to leave, sneered: “You and who else is going to throw me out?” John replied, “Me and my friend,” by which he meant not me but the .45 he pulled out from under the bar.

Charleston saloons were always the setting for memorable scenes, not all of them so life-threatening. As a freshman, I was challenged to a duel by a fellow student who did not appreciate my account of his family’s arrival in South Carolina. This encounter, which would have taken its place in a series of local duels, was finally resolved when both parties agreed to some face-saving language that had been devised by our seconds.

As years went on, the would-be assassin and I became friends. He had been taken to Europe for some time after his high-school graduation, and he told me that, although he had seen many fine cities, he had seen nothing finer than Charleston. Although this statement, taken at face value, was an exaggeration, it is not ridiculous. The city has been around for 300 years, and much of it feels older and prettier than Paris and London. For a small city, it has witnessed an amazing amount of history—the wildness of its early decades as a frontier town, war and revolution, and more than once a cultural center in North America. My friend the duelist could understand the mind of the Sienese, who loved their city to the point of folly, better than any scholar who has never learned to love a place that is his home. Every great civilization is provincial.