It may be a relic from a bygone era, but there is no finer test for the intellect than classical Greek, says Max Davidson

'Daddy, guess what?" I waited glumly for the punchline. Fourteen-year-old girls have a way of springing nasty surprises on their parents. I assumed the brace position and kept my fingers crossed that nothing worse than alcopops was involved.

"I want to do Greek for GCSE."

At which point, I must admit, tears welled up in my eyes: partly out of sheer relief, but also for more primitive reasons. I felt a surge of atavistic pride, as if something in my genes had suddenly, and against all the odds, manifested itself in my child.

I read classics at university in the dim and distant days when people did read classics at university, but I felt like a dinosaur even then. Tempora mutantur, as we used to say in the beer-cellar of my Oxford college, and part of those changing times, as we saw it, was that we were a dying breed, soon to be rendered extinct by the winds of change blowing through the education world.

No way would our children plough their way through Homer, Aeschylus and Thucydides the way we had. They would be in thrall to the sciences, to social studies, to psychology, and to Spanish, Japanese and Arabic - languages that people actually spoke.

They would go backpacking around the Greek islands, but think Sappho was a pop singer. They would eat moussaka but know nothing of Menander. A pity, but there it was.

But fate, whose unseen workings so fascinated the Greeks, had a delicious surprise in store for me. Clara, my daughter, is lucky enough to attend a school - Cheltenham Ladies' College - where classics are still taught, albeit only to a small core of zealots, fewer than 10 in a class.

At 12, she took up Latin and fooled around happily with the language in an undemanding amo-amas-amat sort of way. I never imagined for a minute that she would continue with the subject, still less that she would take up Greek, an even more arcane language.

But it is the Greek - she is giving up Latin next year - that really excites me. For Greek as an academic discipline, as a challenge and a stimulus to the mind, beats Latin into a cocked hat.

The language is harder to master, as there is a new alphabet to learn; but once you have overcome that hurdle, you find yourself face to face with a civilisation that makes the poor Romans look like also-rans.

Everything the Romans did, from poetry to athletics, from vase-painting to constitutional government, the Greeks did earlier and did better. Virgil is no match for Homer, nor Seneca for Euripides, Livy for Thucydides or Plautus for Aristophanes. The whole course of European civilisation, the values we cherish and the principles by which we govern, were set in Athens in the 4th and 5th centuries BC.

It was a period of extraordinary, some would say unparalleled, creativity, when new ideas were buzzing about like flies. Nothing in my own education matched the excitement of reading the great Greek authors in the original and watching those fertile minds at work.

I was entranced by Herodotus, pole-axed by the brilliance of Aristotle and reduced to tears by the Iliad, which I devoured like a whodunnit. And to think of Clara embarking on the same journey, thrilling to the magic of rosy-fingered dawn and the wine-dark sea, makes the heart sing.

It has also sent me clambering into the attic and getting covered in cobwebs, to reach my mouldy treasure-trove of old Greek textbooks, volumes I never expected to open again. Moths had nested in the Sophocles and a column of ants was crawling down the spine of my 1882 Liddell and Scott, the Wisden of Greek scholars. But what memories the books brought back once I had run a duster over them!

They were memories not just of my own studies but of my grandfather, a man of Olympian intelligence, who studied classics at Oxford before the First World War. I inherited many of the books from him, and his neat scholarly marginalia, in faded black ink, were like the Ghost of Learning Past.

"Who was Longinus?" asked my daughter, disporting herself among the books like a lamb in springtime. "Is Ulysses the same as Odysseus? What are the Pythian Odes? Was Oedipus the one who married his mother? Which is the best translation of the Iliad?"

Question after question after question. It is so long since I studied Greek that I could barely answer half of them. I hope her teachers do better. But happy times lie ahead: father and daughter bonding over a little light Aeschylus.

When I look at her chemistry homework, I am lost - it is Greek to me. But when she comes to me with questions about genitives and datives and irregular verbs, I feel useful again, the custodian of an ancient wisdom handed down from generation to generation.

I just wish my grandfather could see me.