PROLOGUE
Xanthus, why do you prophesy my death?
There is no need for that.
Homer, Iliad
(Achilles to his horse)
"How far is Athens from Sparta?" (silence)
"Why did the Mycenaean world collapse?" (silence)
"Why did the Athenians sponsor dramatic performances?" (silence)
"What are some Western values that began with the Greeks?"
We no longer ask these questions of recent Classics PhD's at job interviews, whose mastery of the Greek and Latin languages and literatures was supposed to explicate the origins and complexity of the West to the rest of us. Instead, more likely we are asked the following by young academic candidates who study the Greeks:
"what is the teaching load like?"
"Are there opportunities for junior faculty research grants?"
"Should I tell you something about my dissertation?"
Why is this so?
These freshly minted Classicists are bright, young-and, increasingly, not-so-young--men and women. They read Latin and Greek, and they even read about Latin and Greek in French, German, and Italian. They have often visited Greece and have walked through Rome. They can usually scan hexameters; they know something of rhetoric and ideology; and they are ready to quote French theorists like Michel Foucault.
Most would-be professors of Classics are products of the best universities that America has to offer. Many are polite and erudite. Most are desperately afraid that after nine to fifteen years of formal university study of the Classics they will find no real job--and the majority will not. Those who emerge from graduate school--well less than half of those who entered--have done exactly what they were told, read precisely what was assigned, and modeled themselves closely after their advisors. And they are eager to publish, keen to belong to the new school of criticism, and confident that they can now "do theory". Each new cohort of potential Greek and Latin professor looks, talks, acts and dresses like those who have taught them.
Thus often they know very little of the Greeks --and act and think like Greeks rarely or not at all. A very few may have successful careers as Classicists, but most will be failures as Hellenes, as explicators and stewards of Greek wisdom. You the public will never know who they are, read what they write, or listen to what they say. To watch the bustle of the annual year end convention of the American Philological Association--the official brotherhood of Classicists--is to learn of this great divide between the ancient Greeks themselves and the profession of Classics.
Over a four day period there are over three-hundred papers presented and panels convened on everything from ancient tranvestism to trimeters. More than five-thousand university press books and monographs will be listed or on display in a huge exhibit hall. A few hundred unemployed PhD's stand transfixed at a small chalkboard where jobs for Greek and Latin professors are listed every half hour or so. They browse there in the dozens hoping that one of the years very few job-hiring universities--the great majority offering one semester or one year sabbatical replacement work only at the lowest university wage. No Classicist, employed or not, seems to notice the millions right outside the hotel doors who know nothing--and care nothing--of the Greeks who inaugurated the very culture that ensures them a liberty, bounty and security found nowhere else. (Free Press, 1998)
So many PhD's in Classics, so little employment. So little teaching of the Greeks, so much writing about them to so few. So many new approaches, new theories, so many cleverly entitled talks, books, articles, and panels; and still almost no jobs--because there are almost no students---because there is really no interest the Greeks in or out of university. So much effort for so few, so little for so many. If only we who teach the classical worlds had as many undergraduates--or just interested Americans--as there are professors and graduate students! But then we would need people who think and act like Greeks, not Classicists, to teach us about Greece.
In short, to understand what has killed the formal study of Classical antiquity, you can spend four days among the nations top Greek scholars, usually in a very cold east-coast city right after Christmas, and hear little about who the Greeks were, much less why anyone on the planet should care to think or act like a Greek. It would be cruel, but not untrue, to confess that most of these senior professors, the architects of present-day Classics, who hurry to presentations, network and trade gossip do not look like those who held the pass at Thermopylae. They do not talk like the condemned Socrates or see the world at all as Sophocles saw it. There are no doomed Achilleses here, no mournful Sappho, and surely no tough amateurs waiting for the Persians at Marathon. America's stewards of the Greeks are not flippant like Archilochus; they lack both the humor of Aristophanes and the solemnity of Thucydides. How did we grow so utterly distant from those to whom we have devoted our lives?
This book investigates why the Greeks are so important and why they are so little known. Why do professors of Greek and Latin teach us that our present Western notions of constitutional government, free speech, individual rights, civilian control over the military, separation between religious and political authority, middle class egalitarianism, private property, and free scientific inquiry are both vital to our present existence and derive from the ancient Greeks? We two (Hanson and Heath) have been curious about this bothersome paradox--wonderful field, no interest--for over twenty years, and believe that we now can provide a few answers.
Who Killed Homer? then, is a story of why we should all care about the vast gulf between the vitality of the Greeks and the timidity of those who are responsible for preserving the Greeks, between the clarity and exuberance of the former and the obscurity and dullness of the latter. Yet it is not another analysis (academic or popular) of the decline of The University. Nor will you find here a direct engagement in the Culture Wars. Those so serious books--philosophical essays and journalistic exposes--have all been published. Perhaps too many times. Since the publication of Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" in 1987, both well-deserved indignation and self-serving vitriol--usually accompanied by statistics redolent of the social sciences--have been directed at modernity in general and in particular at the liberal ideology that permeates higher education in the United States. But here we are more interested in the behaviour and the culture of the Classicist than in his politics. If we are critical of current ideology and theory, it is not merely from political disagreement, but more often because of dissimulation and hypocrisy--the wide gulf between what Classicists now say and what they do, and because such methodologies do little to interest middling students or the public in the ancient Greeks, and because they have not saved but helped to ruin Classics in its eleventh hour.
Instead Who Killed Homer? is more about the death of a hard and peculiar way of looking at the world--the way the ancient Greeks viewed their universe. This is our first and primary story: the meaning and significance of this ancient Greek vision of life--what we mean in our title by "Homer" --and consequences for the modern world of its near abandonment. Homer is the first and best creative dividend of the polis, and so serves as a primer for the entire, subsequent world of the Greeks. But because classical antiquity no longer has much life of its own in America--that is, because the ancient Greeks and Romans are for the most part solely encased in something called the Department of Classics at the local university--Who Killed Homer? must also be about the death of an academic discipline, the oldest field (once the only field) in higher education.
(EMPHASIS ADDED)
guys and gals.
