Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom.

Homer, RIP?

Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom, by Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath (Free Press, 320 pp., $25)

Mary Lefkowitz, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College, is the author of Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History.

WHO killed Homer and brought about, as the subtitle of this book puts it, "the demise of classical education"? We did, according to Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath. "We" in this case is the profession of classical scholars like themselves, and me. How did we do it? By becoming professional scholars in the manner of other humanities professors: instead of concentrating on the education of our students, we are more concerned with self-advancement and the approbation of our peers. Masses of articles and books are produced by classical scholars today, and many conferences offered, but, in all that, Professors Hanson and Heath can discover little or nothing which bears on the real reasons for studying the Classics.

Instead, they insist, we need to remind ourselves and our students of the central importance of the Classics. Hanson and Heath offer a vigorous discussion of "Greekness," reminding us of why we need to keep alive the memory of the ancient Greeks and their ideals: the separation of science and philosophy from religion, civilian control of military power, constitutional and consensual government, faith in the wisdom of the average citizen, protection of private property from government interference, and the notion of dissent against religion, government, and the military. Try finding examples of the same values in other ancient Mediterranean civilizations, such as those of Egypt, Persia, or Palestine.

It is certainly true that those who teach the subject need to believe in "Greekness" and to be willing, with the stamina of ancient citizen-soldiers, to teach it by guiding their students through the works of the great Greek writers in the original language. Their students need a matching degree of courage. Studying ancient Greek is hard, and harder now that students have so little background in English grammar. Students have to confront grammatical gender, cases like the genitive, and, worst of all, the Greek verb. The latter has six principal parts and three grammatical voices (along with active and passive there is a middle, which has no analogy in English); there is an optative as well as a subjunctive, an aorist as well as a perfect, and with it the notion of verbal "aspect," in addition to tense. It takes something akin to religious devotion to be enthusiastic about all this, four or five days a week, at eight-something in the morning.

Both because Greek and Latin are so good and because they are so hard, Hanson and Heath want to put them back at the core of the core curriculum. They rightly point out that current multicultural orthodoxy presents a distorted picture of Greece and Rome, by crediting them (rather than Egypt, Persia, and Palestine) with the institutions of war and slavery. The authors also want to reform the professorate. They recommend paying high salaries to the people who teach the languages and the introductory courses in civilization, and not to the bigwigs who keep turning up at chic conferences. They want to restore honesty to the profession and shorten the PhD course to four years. They want professors to stop talking to other professors and instead reach out to the wider community -- the high schools, the talk shows, the newspapers.

Will Hanson and Heath succeed in their noble quest? Of course not. First, because even if it could be shown that reviving the study of ancient Greek would bring about a massive moral improvement, there are too many forces in the universities that would prevent any such change. Classicists these days are lucky even to be tolerated. Then also, the put-upon tone of the book is hardly likely to appeal even to those most inclined to sympathize with the authors. Why, for example, haven't they called more attention to some of the really exciting work that has been done in Classics? Why not point out that some of us professors actually profit from listening to one another, because listening to experts is one of the most efficient ways to learn about new approaches, discoveries, and ideas? How can they be sure that the professors who deliver boring theoretical papers at conferences are also poor teachers, if they have never visited their classrooms?

I can't help thinking that Aristophanes would have put the case for "Greekness" more effectively, if only because he knew how to be funny. His play The Clouds scrutinizes the efforts of Socrates and other sophists active at the time. It makes a case for good old-fashioned morality. It stages a debate between the Unjust Argument and the Just Argument. Justice triumphs in the end. The play's protagonist, Strepsiades, burns down Socrates's think-shop. But Aristophanes also makes Strepsiades and the Just Argument appear blundering and obtuse. It would have helped if Hanson and Heath had had a sense of humor about the good guys in their account of Academe, including first and last themselves.