{"id":7772,"date":"2014-08-15T05:00:11","date_gmt":"2014-08-15T12:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=7772"},"modified":"2014-08-15T08:59:29","modified_gmt":"2014-08-15T15:59:29","slug":"small-latin-and-less-greek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/small-latin-and-less-greek\/","title":{"rendered":"SMALL LATIN, AND LESS GREEK"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thornton reviews the book\u00a0<\/em>Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations, by Mary Beard. New York: Liverwright, 2013, 320 pp., $28.95 hardbound.\u00a0<\/em><\/h3>\n

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ NAS\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

This piece\u00a0originally appeared<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0the Fall 2014 issue of\u00a0<\/em>Academic Questions\u00a0(Volume 27, Number 3).<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Photo
Photo via wikicommons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Once the heart of liberal education, the study of Greek and Latin languages and literatures has unfortunately been reduced to a prestige discipline found mainly in elite universities rich enough to afford the luxury of a classics program. The once universal high school experience of memorizing Latin declensions and reading some Caesar is nearly extinct compared to sixty years ago. These days most people get their knowledge of antiquity from lurid cable television series like\u00a0Spartacus<\/em>, or historically dubious movies like\u00a0Gladiator<\/em>\u00a0and the more recent\u00a0Pompeii.<\/em>\u00a0The foundational ideas, ideals, literature, art, and philosophy of the West are increasingly becoming historical curiosities that like Egyptian mummies or Viking long ships are artifacts, detached from the society and the minds of citizens who continue to live off a cultural capital the nature and origins of which they know nothing.<\/p>\n

Those expecting an argument in favor of reviving the study of the classics from\u00a0Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations<\/em>, Mary Beard\u2019s new collection of book reviews, will find misleading the dust jacket claim that the book shows why the classical tradition \u201cstill matters.\u201d In this collection, Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge University and a regular on British television, is more concerned with the intramural professional disagreements and conflicting interpretations of ancient literature and culture unlikely to be of interest to a larger audience. Very few, if any, of these essays cover the ancient \u201cmonuments of unageing intellect,\u201d or the classical \u201cthings of beauty\u201d that have delighted and instructed the West for 2700 years. Thus these reviews will \u201cmatter\u201d mostly to the few hundred thousand academics and other cultural elites who subscribe to the\u00a0New York Review of Books,\u00a0<\/em>the\u00a0London Review of Books<\/em>, and the\u00a0Times Literary Supplement<\/em>\u2014the publications in which these reviews first appeared, and which have little influence on those outside the parochial Lilliputs of academe.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This blinkered vision is evident in Beard\u2019s self-proclaimed approach to the classics. In her introduction, which she calls her \u201cmanifesto,\u201d Beard embraces that narrowness. The \u201coverall strength of classics,\u201d she claims, is not to be measured by a wider study of Greek and Latin among the masses, but by \u201casking how many believe that there should be people in the world who do know Latin and Greek, how many people think that there is an expertise in that worth taking seriously\u2013\u2013and ultimately paying for it.\u201d You can find the answer to that question in the continuing decline of classics programs, the minuscule scale of those that still exist, and the dearth of jobs for those who finish their degrees and if they\u2019re lucky end up working as adjunct helots teaching general education courses in Greek mythology. And if classics \u201care embedded in the way we think about ourselves,\u201d as Beard correctly notes, and if the loss of classics would leave \u201cbleeding wounds in the body of Western culture,\u201d then why should the study of Greek and Latin be limited to a privileged few, with the rest of the people completely dependent on those few mandarins and their prejudices for the interpretation and definition of the \u201cway we think about ourselves\u201d?<\/p>\n

Nor is it clear why those people being asked to fund classics programs would find any value in an approach like Beard\u2019s that seemingly wants to pick fights with the ancients or earlier scholars\u2014or would understand why the classics have to be \u201cconfronted,\u201d as Beard\u2019s title suggests\u2014rather than understood and admired in terms of their beauty or insights into human nature and history, not to mention their foundational contributions to our civilization. Beard will have none of that old-fashioned recognition of cultural achievement from which we can learn. On the contrary, she writes, \u201cThe study of Classics is the study of what happens in the gap between antiquity and ourselves.\u201d She has no patience with those who defend the ancients because of their intellectual and artistic excellence. According to Beard, to do so is to keep \u201cviewing the ancient world through rose-tinted spectacles (as if it was a culture to be admired).\u201d As Beard admits, scholars have long acknowledged the \u201csqualor, the slavery, the misogyny, the irrationality\u201d of the Greeks and Romans. But those common human failings are ubiquitous in history, and to harp on them is to miss the unique achievements that justly demand our admiration.<\/p>\n

Obsessing over the sins of the ancients is, in fact, more than a century old, and just as obtuse today as it was then. As the great classical scholar Gilbert Murray wrote in 1921:<\/p>\n

We must listen with due attention to the critics who have pointed out all the remnants of savagery and superstition that they find in Greece: the slave-driver, the fetish-worshipper and the medicine-man, the trampler on women, the blood-thirsty hater of all outside his own town and party. But it is not these people that constitute Greece; those people can be found all over the historical world, commoner than blackberries\u2026.[W]hat constitutes Greece is the movement which leads from all these to the Stoic or fifth-century \u201csophist\u201d who condemns and denies slavery, who has abolished all cruel superstitions and preaches some religion based on philosophy and humanity, who claims for women the same spiritual rights as for man, who looks on all human creatures as his brethren, and the world as \u201cone great City of gods and men.\u201d It is that movement which you will not find elsewhere, any more than the statues of Pheidias or the dialogues of Plato or the poems of Aeschylus and Euripides.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

The sins of the ancients are the universal sins of humanity. But the virtues of the Greeks and Romans are unique, the direct ancestors of everything that is self-critical and marks the best in our own culture today. Explaining those virtues and their role in creating Western civilization is what has nearly disappeared from the classics, and partly explains the widespread indifference to the classical tradition in the larger culture.<\/p>\n

This urge to diminish or even demean the ancients, to see them not as teachers but as equals, or even inferiors, with whom we conduct a \u201cdialogue,\u201d as Beard says, is of course the default ideology of the postmodern university. It has been fostered by the introduction of various intellectual dogmas\u2013\u2013deconstruction, poststructuralism, Foucauldian historicism, and feminism, to name a few\u2013\u2013that practice a \u201chermeneutics of suspicion,\u201d a reflexive distrust of excellence and beauty that serves a resentment of authority, an egalitarian hostility to superiority, and a philistinism that cannot appreciate beauty. In the main, Beard herself avoids the woolier manifestations of this orthodoxy, particularly the political agenda that boils down to an elaboration of the Leninist motto \u201cwho, whom.\u201d The most readable of the reviews are those focusing on more popularizing works, such as Stacy Schiff\u2019s\u00a0Cleopatra: A Life\u00a0<\/em>or Philip Freeman\u2019s\u00a0Alexander the Great<\/em>, in which Beard provides a useful historical and scholarly context for understanding the authors\u2019 claims.<\/p>\n

Despite her own more traditional practice, however, Beard still thinks theory has some value in restoring classics. In her pointed attack on Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath\u2019s\u00a0Who Killed Homer<\/em>\u2013\u2013which in 1998 blamed the demise of classics on the careerism of elite professors, whether traditional philologists or promoters of theory\u2013\u2013Beard makes a preposterous claim. \u00a0Responding to Hanson and Heath\u2019s charge, Beard writes, \u201cMaybe it is precisely because professors of Classics have refused to engage with modern theory and persisted in viewing the ancient world through rose-tinted spectacles (as if it was a culture to be admired) that the subject is in imminent danger of turning into an antiquarian backwater.\u201d[2]<\/a>\u00a0The blinkered traditionalist hiding from daring theory was a raggedy straw man way back in the late nineties.[3]<\/a>\u00a0The profession of classics has long been dominated by \u201cmodern theory,\u201d now orthodoxy in most programs, and over those decades that dominance has accompanied the downward spiral of the profession. To think that jargon-ridden, pretentiously vacuous, intellectually incoherent theories are going to impress anyone in the real world beggars belief. It will no more attract students and others to classics than can the scholarly disputes and quibbles that make up most of the books Beard reviews. A key theme of\u00a0Who Killed Homer?<\/em>\u00a0was that the condescending grandee of the past who would not deign to defend or widen his discipline among the wider public has been replaced by the bookend postmodern theorist, whose conferencing, esoteric research, and reduced teaching load are camouflaged in faddish theory rather than philological gymnastics.<\/p>\n

On occasion Beard\u2019s own analysis reveals both these impediments to creating interest in ancient culture. Discussing an anthology of ancient Greek female lyric poets, she faults the editor for missing an allusion to Homer in Sappho\u2019s poem conventionally called \u201cHymn to Aphrodite,\u201d in which the poet calls on Aphrodite for help in how to deal with a girl who has spurned her. The point of that Homeric allusion, according to a feminist interpretation Beard endorses, is to focus \u201cour attention on the distance between the male world of epic heroism and the private domain of female concerns; it shows the poet reading and reinterpreting Homeric epic to give it a new meaning in distinctively female terms,\u201d appropriating the language of warriors to effect a \u201ctactical inversion of dominant male language.\u201d But this imposition on the aristocratic Sappho of modern bourgeois romantic and feminist obsessions misses what the poem is about\u2013\u2013the aristocratic concern for honor, dishonor, and revenge, and the destructiveness and danger of sexual passion. The girl who rejected Sappho must be punished for that dishonor by experiencing the pain Sappho is suffering, and the poet calls on Aphrodite for help in inflicting that revenge, just as in the\u00a0Iliad<\/em>\u00a0Diomedes prays to Athena for victory in battle. And given that other lyric poets such as Archilochus, a precursor to Sappho, uses Homeric battle imagery to communicate the destructive power of\u00a0er\u00f4s<\/em>, it\u2019s unclear why Sappho\u2019s sex makes her similar use some sort of \u201cinversion\u201d rather than the generic convention it is.<\/p>\n

Technical disputes over translation, a frequent pastime of classical pedants, also crop up in Beard\u2019s analyses. For example, she is unhappy that the famous Melian dialogue in Thucydides\u2019s history is a \u201cfoundational text of \u2018realist\u2019 political analysis,\u201d to her a misuse of the classics to legitimize an unsavory modern foreign policy \u201cagenda.\u201d So she quibbles over the best-known translation of the most famous sentence from that passage, Richard Crawley\u2019s \u201cThe strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.\u201d Beard endorses instead Simon Hornblower\u2019s version, \u201cThe powerful exact what they can, and the weak have to comply.\u201d But given that the Athenians will go on to kill the men of Melos, enslave their women and children, and confiscate their land for Athenian colonists, it\u2019s pretty clear in the context that \u201cexact\u201d and \u201ccomply\u201d communicate the same brutal realism communicated by Crawley\u2019s \u201cdo\u201d and \u201csuffer.\u201d The \u201ctruth\u201d of Crawley\u2019s \u201c\u2018jingle,\u2019\u201d as Beard sneeringly calls it, is indeed that of Thucydides.<\/p>\n

Beard is learned and readable, and compared to much of today\u2019s scholarship on the classics vastly superior. Yet she still cannot escape the constraints of professional deformation, leaving this book not very useful for restoring classics to its rightful place in liberal education, and avoiding the costs of that neglect predicted over a century ago by Jacob Burckhardt\u2013\u2013\u201csimply accepting our own decline.\u201d<\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a>Gilbert Murray, \u201cThe Value of Greece to the Future of the World,\u201d in\u00a0The Legacy of Greece<\/em>, ed. R.W. Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1921), 14.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[2]<\/a>Mary Beard, \u201cDo the Classics Have a Future?\u201d The Robert B. Silvers Lecture, New York Public Library, New York, NY, November 30, 2011, audio\/video,\u00a0http:\/\/www.nypl.org\/audiovideo\/mary-beard<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[3]<\/a>See, for example, my \u201cThe Enemy Is Us: The Betrayal of the Postmodern Clerks,\u201d review ofMan in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey<\/em>, by John Peradotto,\u00a0Innovations of Antiquity<\/em>, by Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden,\u00a0and\u00a0History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama<\/em>, by Barbara Goff,\u00a0Arion<\/em>\u00a05, no. 1 (1997): 165\u2013216. Reprinted in Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, and Bruce S. Thornton,\u00a0Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age<\/em>\u00a0(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2001), 137\u201391.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thornton reviews the book\u00a0Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations, by Mary Beard. New York: Liverwright, 2013, 320 pp., $28.95 hardbound.\u00a0 by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ NAS\u00a0 This piece\u00a0originally appeared\u00a0in\u00a0the Fall 2014 issue of\u00a0Academic Questions\u00a0(Volume 27, Number 3). Once the heart of liberal education, the study of Greek and Latin languages and literatures has unfortunately […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[844,87,842,22],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-21m","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6606,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bruce-thornton-on-secure-freedom-radio-with-frank-gaffney\/","url_meta":{"origin":7772,"position":0},"title":"Bruce Thornton on Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Seth Jones, Bruce Thornton, Peter Pham, Diana West October 9th, 2013\u00a0\u00b7\u00a0Comments SETH JONES, Associate Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, joins guest host DAN BONGINO, to help explain the terror threat from and historical background of the terrorist organization al-Shabaab. 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(Encounter Books, 2011 pp. 283) Winston Churchill famously said, \"An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile hoping it will eat him last.\" In\u00a0The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6594,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/prestige-and-power-in-statecraft\/","url_meta":{"origin":7772,"position":2},"title":"Prestige and Power in Statecraft","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 4, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"History teaches us that nations must always respond vigorously to an enemy's challenge, a lesson the U.S. should remember in Syria. by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0Defining Ideas President Obama, responding to widespread criticisms that his handling of the Syrian chemical weapons crisis was clumsy and ad hoc, said, \u201cI\u2019m less\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Syria"","block_context":{"text":"Syria","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/syria\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5295,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/so-much-lost-and-little-gained\/","url_meta":{"origin":7772,"position":3},"title":"So Much Lost and Little Gained","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 5, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Stone's leftist agenda robs\u00a0Alexander\u00a0of authenticity. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers A\u00a0movie as bad as Oliver Stone's\u00a0Alexander\u00a0usually would not be worth notice, but Stone has indulged several cinematic and political pathologies that are illuminating. Some of the film's flaws are curiously old-fashioned, redolent of studio schlock of the 1950s--the bombastic\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5339,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/troys-literary-offenses\/","url_meta":{"origin":7772,"position":4},"title":"Troy’s Literary Offenses","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 6, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers As a movie,\u00a0Troy\u00a0is okay.The fighting is fun, and the scenes with the ships arriving and those showing us the city of Troy are convincingly real. But as an interpretation of Homer's\u00a0Iliad, the movie is an abomination. Everything significant and interesting about Homer and his\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5363,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/spitzers-comic-fall\/","url_meta":{"origin":7772,"position":5},"title":"Spitzer’s Comic Fall","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 1, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"The understand the disgraced governor, brush up your Aristophanes. by Bruce S. Thornton City Journal Commentators are already calling the rise and fall of New York governor Eliot Spitzer \u201ctragic.\u201d The tragic arc, as the old Greeks articulated it, goes something like this: talent and drive lead to success, but\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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