Classical Languages: When and Why?

It seems a generally agreed-upon tenet in certain circles that teaching your children Latin (and possibly Greek as well) is a Good Idea. This fits pretty well with my own inclinations, having been a Classics major and being fairly pleased with my time studying Greek and Latin.

However being currently possessed of rather young children, one of the things I'm less sure of is when to start these languages. My own learning of Latin had a number of false starts and eventually kicked-off for real in high school where I spend a couple years working through Wheelock's Latin, and then Caesar's Gallic Wars and a bit of the Aeneid. All very good stuff, and what grasp I have of formal grammar is definitely attributable to Wheelock. (No blame to my good mother and other teachers -- it's just that I successfully paid fairly little attention to grammatical terminology up to that point since my instincts were generally sound enough to face it.)

However, one of the sources to which I attribute the limits of my mastery of these languages (other than my own failure to apply myself further) is the fact that I started studying them so late, and when I was already very much locked into thinking via English grammar and (especially) vocabulary. (I managed to think in Latin grammar pretty well, but I could never seem to see Latin words as meaning things in their own right so much as "mean this, or sometimes this" sets of translational equivalents. Well, "never" is a strong word, but in most cases my vocabulary was shallow and unnatural.)

A lot of classical education writers seem to suggest kicking off with Latin quite young, perhaps around seven or eight. I can see this as being a good idea in many ways, but I do find myself wondering a bit: where do you go from there? I imagine that it still takes a good two to four years to reach the point where you can read most classical literature with ease, but if you have an eleven-year-old who is fully equipped to read Virgil, Horace and Ovid, that still leaves you with the question of whether a eleven-year-old is well equipped to appreciate those authors.

Maybe its because I came to these authors so late, and thus associate coming to understand them with coming into intellectual adulthood, but I do sort of wonder if having solid Latin and Greek skills at too young an age simply leaves on all dressed up with no where to go. Or, perhaps more likely, in St. Augustine's situation of having been brought to the point of being able to read the classics, but being bored by them and so writing them off more or less permanently.

I fear that much of Classical literature is a rather adult taste, both artistically and intellectually, so it seems like the challenge would be to come up with readings that would make classical languages interesting and rewarding to a younger child. (I suppose one could focus more on religious texts early on. The vulgate and Koine Greek are both fairly easy examples of their language, and there's a great deal in the scriptures which is quite readable at a young age.)

Some writers don't seem too worried about this because their primary interest in Latin and Greek is expanding one's vocabulary and mastering logical/grammatical concepts. But in our case, I'd definitely like to give our children at least a good chance of enjoying real Classical literature in the original language, whether that actually becomes their specialty or merely a background cultural literacy that they bring to the rest of their lives.