Who Killed Homer?
Dunlap, John R.
It's All Greek to Us Now Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath Free Press / 290 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY John R....
...Revelation...
...But Greek is more than just a "challenge" to 18-year-olds besotted with CDs, TV, and the culture of the mall...
...The monastic preservation of learning, the cathedrals, Magna Carta, Dante's terza rimas, Tintoretto's Last Judgment, the intellectual soil in which the Renaissance revival of the classics germinated: these were triumphs of Christian impetuosity, not classical symmetry...
...For the training of future classicists, scrap the seminars on minutiae, concentrate on Greek and Latin mastery through abundant reading in the important authors, replace the specialized disserta74 June 1998 • The American Spectator tion with a series of shorter papers on broad questions of antiquity, end all postdoctoral fellowships, make teaching a prominent part of graduate training...
...Well and good...
...One might add that irony is also of Greek origin, and the authors spot many instances of it in the academic Left's inadvertent use of Greek intellectual tools to trash the classical tradition...
...the Greco-Roman strand isn't so sure, but its neopagan devotees incline toward the tragic: It's more robust, more manly, more defiant in a universe of no ultimate meaning...
...the Iliad as superior to the Odyssey,and indulge a certain condescension toward the popular taste whereby almost everyone who is not a classicist prefers the Odyssey...
...The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath Free Press / 290 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY John R. Dunlap II t is likely," an old Jesuit teacher was fond of telling us more than thirty years ago in our sparsely enrolled Greek classes, "that the Greeks discovered as much truth about the human condition as can be discovered without benefit of revelation...
...The American Spectator • June 19 9 8 75...
...Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath lambaste the "elitism" of the contemporary academic grandee in classics, averring that Homer should be "accessible to, and the property of, everyone, more in the spirit of the true Greek polls...
...World Affairs Television Classifieds Conservative Book Club Country Home Products Crown Publishers p. 57 p. 11 p. 11 p. 59 p. 29 p. 17 p. 6 p. 73 p. 65 p. 19 P. 9 p. 2 p. 63 p. 13 p. 73 p. 87 P. 5 To learn more about the benefits of advertising in The American Spectator, contact: John Funk, Associate Publisher—Advertising...
...Yet some of that "elitism" peeks through their samplings of Greek texts...
...The Judeo-Christian strand of Western culture says that life is essentially comedic...
...Even so, their anger is sincere, and they have plenty to be miffed about...
...To affirm with Hanson and Heath the "tragedy of human existence as the bond that unites us all" is a way to be earnest and to flip off despair at the edge of the abyss...
...Future classicists aside, Hanson and Heath's objective is to bring the Greeks back to prominence in undergraduate education...
...We understood all this while sloshing through our assigned Greek readings, line by line...
...Read it before you send your kids to college...
...The Christian response to this pagan wisdom constitutes the rest of what we call "Western culture": Love thy neighbor as thyself, especially when thy neighbor is a twit...
...The murder of Homer is not our era's only academic crime...
...Why...
...Like most other professional classicists, for example, Hanson and Heath take JOHN R. DUNLAP teaches Classics at Santa Clara University...
...The latter types would joke that, in any case, classical scholarship requires more knowledge of German than of Greek or Latin...
...T he most important legacy of the Greeks and Romans, according to the authors, is the "uniquely Western urge to pick apart everything—every institution, tradition, and individual...
...The learned priest would rhapsodize about the Greeks, but always with a passing nod to the other strand of Western culture, the strand he had devoted his life to...
...Well, Homer's Odyssey is comedic...
...If the classicists had been faithful to their peculiar stewardship—if they had acted like the Greeks they were supposed to be studying and teaching—they could never have fallen into the twin academic con-jobs of multiculturalism and careerism...
...the Iliad is tragic...
...Teaching should count for kudos more than research, and research should be in service to good teaching...
...04 Advertiser Index By patronizing the companies and products posted in this issue, your positive response rewards them for advertising in one of the gems of American publishing, The American Spectator...
...Yet my own Greek sensibilities already are percolating with yes-but reservations...
...Advertiser Page # pp...
...every man gets as much of it as he can...
...There is also the simple matter of time...
...Their critique is not radical enough...
...Hanson and Heath's rugged exposition is very bracing, and they are very Greek in their fatalistic expectations...
...The hustlers are the "ideological demagogues" who pave lucrative career paths with the clichés of faddish leftism: ream after ream of articles and books (more than 16,000 titles in 1992 alone) blathering about psychoanalytical Homer, theoretical Homer, feminist Homer, environmentalist Homer, gay Homer...
...In short, honor the tradition by making it attractive to the next generation...
...They remind us that cynicism, skepticism, parody, invective, and satire are derived from Greek and Latin words...
...Among several academic reforms suggested by Hanson and Heath, the most interesting (and unlikely) are directed to the classical professoriate...
...instead, these weird people shun teaching and grind out "research that is not needed, unreadable, and antithetical to the ethos of the classical world...
...Johnson made jokes about its slippery accessibility: "Greek, sir, is like lace...
...Box 549, Arlington, VA 22216-0549...
...82-83 pp...
...The Greeks (and their Roman imitators) gave us to meson —the middle way, the way of moderation: a citizenry of self-reliant yeomen, private property and free economic activity, a militia under civilian control, consensual government, acknowledgement of moral absolutes, dissent and open debate, respect for cogency and clarity of expression, for the constancy of human nature, for the balance of freedom with responsibility, for the need to keep the inner Beast at bay...
...Ditch the conference, the jargon, the tithe, the pelf...
...The Folio Society Haverhills Ignatius Press Jackie's Junction Laissez Faire Books Lear Financial MIB Financial Prima Publishing Providence Plantation Company Quotesmith Corporation Thompson Cigar Valentine Research, Inc...
...Over the past three decades (chalk up another outrage for the sixties), the stewards of the classical tradition, the professional classicists, have created a subculture attractive chiefly to hustlers and nerds...
...With an implicit range far wider than its immediate topic, Who Killed Homer...
...But they understate the real difficulties of passing along the classical tradition...
...Like the priest, we took it for granted...
...Homer and the tragedians and the classical historians and philosophers were all bracketed historically by two Near Eastern events that impress more deeply on Western consciousness: the Sinai encounter and the Incarnation...
...But follow it up with a reading of, say, John Senior's Death ofChristian Culture...
...Hanson and Heath outline that ethos in a splendid chapter on "Thinking Like a Greek...
...Phone: 703-2433733, ext...
...dissertations on topics dominated by English scholarship...
...Hanson and Heath seem unaware that the postmodern nihilism they bemoan is the bastard child of the neo-pagan humanism they espouse...
...The nerds are the "elite philologists" who write arcane studies of type-scenes, formulaic phrases, trochaic caesuras—anything that nobody else wants to know about Greek literature...
...Between sixty and seventy percent of students who begin graduate programs in classics wash out within the first two years — mostly, in the authors' estimation, because the wash-outs are normal human beings drawn to the life of the mind and revolted by what they discover in the schools...
...And some students tried to get around all three linguistic hurdles by cagily choosing to write their Ph.D...
...is a great-hearted (Aristotle's term) paradigm (another indispensable Greek word) for any serious corrective to the present decay of higher education...
...But what if the tragic premise isn't true...
...Erasmus was dismayed by the difficulty of learning Greek, Shakespeare gave up on it, and Dr...
...you can't squeeze all that much into four years of undergraduate education...
...Their proper vocation is "to understand our Greek origins and thus how and why we are Western...
...Drastically increase teaching loads, and discourage specialization in favor of general learning...
...As the Latin dictum has it, Felicitas non habet aurem facilem: which, broadly translated, means that those who are nobly tough on themselves are inclined to impatience with the softness of others...
...In Who Killed Homer...
...In my graduate school years, the students who were fairly strong in Greek and Latin tended to be weak in their general knowledge of classical antiquity, while the students who came from undergraduate programs that stressed broad surveys were still clumsy with Homeric hexameters and clueless about Greek idiom and the metrical intricacies of tragic strophes...
...Address: The American Spectator, P.O...
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Vol. 31 • June 1998 • No. 6
