Who Killed Homer

 I read Who Killed Homer years ago after it came out in the 1990s, and I still love it. When I was a youth, back in the days when colleges would print up catalogs and supply them to high school seniors and juniors simply for the asking, I'd go through notebooks filling them with 4-year plans based on different majors. My one requirement before I grabbed any college's dead-tree catalog was, Does this school have a Classics Department?

My father squashed my dream of majoring in Classics with 'Yes, I see job ads in the classifieds all the time for Classics majors.' Well, as it turned out he had nothing to hold over me with respect to what I studied in college, seeing how he was out of work the year I went and could offer me no financial support. Even more final, I proved in my first, glorious semester of college that I wasn't ready. (You have to work hard to earn a 1.43 GPA while on an academic scholarship.)

As an adult, especially in the last 20 years, classics have shown up more and more in my reading. And in my language study (I toyed with Wheelock's Latin for a few months years ago...so much fun). Euripides, Aristophanes, love them all. The Iliad, read over a decade ago, enthralled me. Even more surprising, a retelling, full of anachronisms, by the genius Christopher Logue (War Music) was so incredibly moving and readable that I am pulled in its direction again, despite only reading it for the first (and only) time in August of last year. 

Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath, God bless 'em, were somewhat hopeful way back in the mid-90s. I think for nought. I don't think Classics Departments are thriving now and except for possibly Hillsdale, their plan for a proper university has not come to fruition. 

Next up sometime in the next month or so, Bonfire of the Humanities...because why not.