Adam Smith as a teacher on classical subjects

In this chapter, it is not my intention to consider Adam Smith as an educator in a general way. Instead, I will simply try to understand the role that the classics played in his lectures and how he managed to convey them to his young audience. On the whole, we find that Smith mostly used the classics to illustrate the topic that he was discussing at the time. Even in his lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres (Smith 1983, LRBL) where the classics play a substantial role,2 Smith uses them in order to explain how to obtain certain effects in the composition of the different literary genres.