For Whom Homer Tolls

 "Ask not for whom the bell tolls," advised John Donne, quickly adding, "it tolls for thee."  Yet we may well ask for whom Homer tolls, or more accurately, for whom his song still sings today.  Are his writings texts to be translated, merely "a bit of Greek construe" as a student once argued with Michael Redgrave in the classic film The Browning Version?  Are they works to be mined to support this or that idea or cause du jour?  And what has all this to do with the reigning question across social media at the moment, "How often do you think of the Roman Empire?

Rome On My Mind

It would seem, if we are to believe the polls being conducted by women with the men they know, that Ray Charles may have had the land of Augustus in his thoughts when he famously covered Hoagy Carmichael's 1930 song "Georgia On My Mind."

For reasons passing understanding, "How often do you think about the Roman Empire" is the fun question going around the land, and one particular response to it caught my attention.

First, this man's comparison of the ancient world with the modern is sound.  Second, he has remembered what he has learned well enough to be largely correct and able to speak meaningfully.  Yet how many would write him off because he is shirtless on his porch and speaking with a southern accent?  This man is precisely the person for whom Homer still sings, and I'll tell you why.

A Glorious Birthright

As the video shows, this man can speak about the issues of his day with reference to the past in order to better understand and respond to his world.  Would that our many preening intellectuals and elected officials could do the same.  Nearly twenty-five years ago, Victor Davis Hanson wrote Who Killed Homer?, a book that takes no prisoners in calling out the elitism of contemporary classical studies.

My copy is highlighted on almost every page, with margin notes that frequently include exclamation marks, so I will give you just a brief taste of what Hanson has observed.

All that is left to the career Classicist is to play the theoretical game, to reinvent the Greeks and Roman each year, to dress up Homer as a transvestite this fall, a syllable-toting accountant next spring.  To do something else, something actually important, to put stone and text together, to combine papyrus and coin, to make sense of some noble, big idea for the carpenter, teacher, and dentist, would require an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century scholar like Gibbon, Mommsen, or Grote.  They would be persons of action, of wide reading, of passion and prejudice -- "assumers" and "generalizers," in other words, who, like Homer, rarely nod, have a life outside the campus, and are not ground out of modern American doctoral programs.

Here, interestingly enough, is what most closely binds the High Classicists:  they disdain the average student -- and the entire American middle class for that matter.  Yet those burger-flipping students constitute the vast majority of students in our colleges and universities....  (pp. 149-150)

Why are Homer and the rest of the classical Greco-Roman authors important for carpenters, teachers, and dentists, for burger-flipping students, and for people like the man in the video above?  It is because the works of these ancient writers, beautiful and dangerous and enlightening and disturbing as they may be, have become world heritage works, the birthright of all who claim to be human.  They must not be hidden behind lenses of ideology nor made inaccessible through a thick blanket of obscurantist jargon.  Hanson again, "We read Virgil in Latin to learn, word by powerful word, of man's heroic struggle with a nature that in the long run will always win, of humanity's destined confrontation with its own limitations" (p. 187).

The Roman Empire For All

Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Spring, 1992 - Fall, 1993, Third Series, Vol. 2, No. 2/3, printed an article that had originally been published in Harper's Magazine in March of 1966.  It was written by the eminent classicist and translator William Arrowsmith.  A professor at Boston University, Princeton University, MIT, Yale, Johns Hopkins, NYU, and Emory, he also served as the chair of the Classics Department at The University of Texas, where I years later completed my M.A.  He was admirably qualified to write a piece called "The Shame of the Graduate Schools:  A Plea for a New American Scholar."  His words written more than fifty years ago echo in those of Hanson.

An alarmingly high proportion of what is published in classics -- and in other fields -- is simply rubbish or trivia. An alarming percentage of the subsidized books published by university presses have no business being published. An alarming number of the humanistic projects which yearly receive grants, fellowships, stipends, and support are not worth supporting. They represent the commitment of a given institution or university to support the humanities, in spite of the fact that the project is palpably unsound, or doubtful, or dull.  

There is no more sickening spectacle in the modern university than that of the men whose very natures have been violated in order to suit the requirements of a system.  But the damage to scholarship is nothing in comparison to the human waste involved.  Three out of four men in academic life are the victims of this wasteful and terrible system.... Three out of four men you meet in academic life are quite simply unfulfilled.  (pp. 165, 166)

Whether it is high school, undergraduate, or graduate education, the discoveries and products of mankind are the birthright of all people to explore, to be inspired by, and to build upon.  Human beings should not be, must not be, victims of a "wasteful and terrible system."  Any education that equips a person like the man in the video above is worthy of the name.  Any that does not should stop its masquerade as education and go out of business.

How, then, do we present, as Poe once wrote, "the glories that were Greece and the grandeur that was Rome," along with all the other thoughts and discoveries and achievements in the arts and sciences produced by the human race, to our children, both young and old?  Theologian, scholar, and translator Benjamin Jowett had an idea, which he shared in the preface to his 1881 translation of Thucydides.

The voluminous learning of past ages [has] to be recast in easier and more manageable forms, and if Greek literature is not to pass away, it seems to be necessary that in every age some one who has drunk deeply from the original fountain should renew the love of it in the world, and once more present that old life, with its great ideas and great actions, its creations in politics and in art, like the distant remembrances of youth, before the delighted eyes of mankind.

I stopped my graduate work in classics when I realized that my field and I were asking different questions.  Most in my field were exploring minutiae of philology, tracking the literary influence of one author on another, when I was asking whether what a given author said were true.  It proved to be a good choice, for it led me back to the secondary classroom, with occasional, subsequent stints at the undergraduate level.  For more than three decades I have been blessed with the opportunity to journey with students to the lands of the true, the good, and the beautiful aboard

Those Nicéan barks of yore,

That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,

    The weary, way-worn wanderer bore

    To his own native shore,

for truly the land of Homer and Vergil is the native land of all.