Classics

The Iliad, Homer’s extraordinary epic poem, begins with Apollo, the god of light, zooming down from heaven “like night,” bringing plague to the Greek camp before Troy. Many days later, after the Trojan Hector’s funeral rites, the poem ends, at dawn. The light god brings darkness; dawn brings the doom of Troy. Such are the ironies that underpin the epic, revealing it as a work of supreme artistry, probably composed by one hand alone. For decades, I have lived in the light and shadow of The Iliad, reading it at first piecemeal in Greek, then in various translations, then all the way through in Greek (an experience both taxing and exhilarating). My Loeb edition, its prim English translation opposite the raw Greek, is never far from my side.

The astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus studied Plato’s writings in the original Greek, and found in him a kindred spirit. In his main work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Copernicus draws on what the philologist František Novotný describes as Plato’s ‘metaphysical heliocentric argument from the Republic’ — his characterization of the sun as the god and ruler of the visible sphere and image of the Good, the unifying source and highest principle of reality.

There was a time Classicists feared their subject was endangered because not enough people were taking it up. That fear has now been supplanted by anxieties over its manipulation by far-right groups and individuals with insalubrious intentions, like the white supremacist organization that employs images of the Roman gods and heroes to encourage its followers to ‘protect your heritage’. And this is just the tip of the Zuckerberg. In Not All Dead White Men, Donna Zuckerberg examines the abuse of Classics by by those who, in the political equivalent of the perceptual choice in The Matrix, have taken the ‘Red Pill’. Zuckerberg defines Red Pillers as ‘a group of men connected by common resentments against women, immigrants, people of color, and the liberal elite’.