Who Killed Homer? the Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom'
by Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath: notes

Aging Ancient Greek Crime History (non-USA) Language and Linguistics Natural History Philosophy Political Science Psychology USA Modern History

New books on writing poetry. Books read.

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

See also

• Homer's "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey": A Biography by Alberto Manguel. [Much preferable to the Hanson/Heath whining Who Killed Homer?.]
• Learn Ancient Greek:
  • Greek I: Introduction to Ancient Greek.
  • Greek II: The Saga Continues in Ancient Greek.
  • Greek III: in Ancient Greek.
• Other books on Ancient Greek and Greece (for NaNoWriMo 2007 project).
• Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in Ancient Greece.
• Who Killed Homer? the Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom
  by Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath.
• Who Killed Homer? book list.

From Alpha to Omega by Anne H. Groton

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

The main value of this complaint about the dramatic decrease of education and interest in learning the language and knowledge of the Ancient Greeks is its book list).

Three arguments to the book [pp. xviii-xx]:

1. [Comment: as the Greek civilization was slave-based and as it disenfranchised women, I am unlikely to embrace this argument for the Greek model as the one for the third millennium. JZ.]

   " Hellenic culture — an idea not predicated on race — is not just different from, but entirely antithetical to any civilization of its own time or space." The polis is ... an institution in deliberate opposition to Eastern approaches to government, literature, religion, war, individual rights, citizenship, and science. ... Greece ... was not Tyre, Sidon, Giza, or Persepolis, nor was it Germania, Britannia, or Gaul. The core values of classical Greece are unique, unchanging, and non-multicultural, thus explaining both the duration and dynamism of Western culture itself — culture that we as Western intellectuals must stop apologizing for but rather come to grips with, as the sole paradigm which will either save or destroy the planet."

2. [Comment: as this is more fact-based than the previous item, it has some prospect of convincing. JZ.]

   " The demise of Classical learning is both real and quantifiable. "

3. [Comment: Based on my experience, I am not sympathetic to this argument. My experience with the brilliant and generous Classics instructor Thomas Walsh in Greek I: Introduction to Ancient Greek not only led me to complete this class. Indeed, as a result of his skill and enthusiasm, I took and completed Greek II: The Saga Continues in Ancient Greek and Greek III: into Ancient Greek text.

   " Our present generation of Classicists helped to destroy classical education. While their hypocrisy in living their lives differently from what they advocate, their obscurity of in language and expression, their new religion of postmodernism, theory, social construction, and relativism are neither novel nor profound — the next century will scarcely notice their foolishness — they are nevertheless culpable and they must be cited and condemned. ... Our generation of Classicists ... failed utterly, failed to such a degree that the Greeks now play almost no part in discussions of how the West is to evolve in the next millennium. Worse, the dereliction of the academics was not just the usual wage of sloth, complacency, and arrogance — even to destroy — the Greeks, to assure the public that as Classicists they knew best just how sexist, racist, and exploitative the Greeks really were. "

Dipped into the book, including their subsection on Homer and Literary Theory:

" Literary theory offers unlimited ways to argue that the texts do not say what they appear to say. Rather than speak on meaning, themes, or images, or even structure, the emphasis now is no 'rhetoric' and 'discourse' ... Even studies of something as concrete as Homeric similes get lost in the theoretical jargon. "

And so on.

But good parts are:

• [p. 161-208] "Chapter 4: Teaching Greek is Not Easy". This seems a little more factual and a little more practical than the other chapters:

  " Greek comes at a price. The ancient Greek verb has over 350 forms. It appears in seven tenses ... Only with mastery of these action words do you realize that such arcane statutes are often broken: the Greek verb is, in short, a mess. ... Almost every Greek noun appears in about ten different forms. Adjectives — which adopt any of three genders — triple that number of spellings. ... Introductory Greek, then, is largely, we must confess, memorization, from declension to conjugation, spiced with vocabulary drill and rudimentary grammar. "

  But even this chapter has an annoyed tone and bossiness that makes one glad to skip over this chapter to the final book lists.

Who Killed Homer? book list

• [p. 259-265] "Ten Classics to Read". Many of his annotations include comments aligned with their own writings, such as this for Demosthenes:

  " In an [i.e. this] age of complacency, ... it is valuable to revisit Demosthenes and to relearn that hard talk alone warns us that things are not just OK, but far worse than we think. "

  His annotated list shows:

  1. Homer's Iliad. Translation by Richmond Lattimore (1961).
  2. Hesiod's Works and Days. Translation by M. L. West (1988) in Theogony and Works and Days.
  3. Archilochus' Poems. Translation by Richmond Lattimore (1960) in The Greek Lyrics.
  4. Sophocles' Ajax. Translation by John Moore (1957) in Sophocles II.
  5. Euripedes' Bacchae. Translation by W. Arrowsmith (1959).
  6. Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War. Translation by Richard Crawley (1996) in The Landmark Thucydides.
  7. Old Oligarch (pseudo-Xenophon)'s The Constitution of the Athenians. In John Moore's (1975) Aristotle and Xenophon on Democracy and Oligarchy.
  8. Aristophanes' Lysistrata. Edited by W. Arrowsmith (1969) in Four Comedies by Aristophanes.
  9. Plato's Apology. Translation by G.M.A. Grube (1975) in The Trial and Death of Socrates.
  10. Demosthenes' First Philippic. Editing and translation by A. N. Sanders (1980) in Greek Political Oratory.

• [p. 266-269] "Ten Things to Read About the Greeks"

  "Ten one-volume books ... They are rather specific and scholarly investigations of particular aspects of Greek culture, history, and literature that broaden rather than narrow our interests, that use the esoteric tools of classical scholarship to enliven rather than stultify wonder about the past. ... That eight of the ten works were written by authors from the United Kingdom might suggest how impoverished Classics has become in America, where high salaries have not ensured that our own grandees can either write or think broadly"

  shows:

  1. Adock, Frank's The Greek and Macedonian Art of War (1957).
  2. de Ste. Croix, G. E. M.'s The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (1972).
  3. Dodd, E.R.'s The Greeks and the Irrational (1951).
  4. Finley, M.I.'s The World of Odysseus (1956).
  5. Green, Peter's From Alexander to Actium (1990).
  6. Griffin, J.'s Homer on Life and Death (1980).
  7. Knox, Bernard M.'s The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (1963).
  8. Vermeule, Emily's Greece in the Bronze Age (1972).
  9. Williams, Bernard's Shame and Necessity (1993).
  10. Zimmern, Alfred's The Greek Commonwealth (1931).

They seem to prefer authors like de Ste. Croix whom they say is "someone now angry, now exasperated". For all the author's claims to the high ground of logic, they made two errors (20%) in alphabetizing this 10-entry list!

Some vocabulary of Books

Glossary: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z.

Timeline of Foundations of Western Civilization.

See:

• Timeline of Foundations of Western Civilization from lectures by Thomas F.X. Nobel
• lectures by Thomas F.X. Nobel from the Teaching Company.

Links. Home.

Copyright © 2009 by J. Zimmerman (except for quotations).

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