Don’t Cancel the Classics—We Need Them More Than Ever

“Those who are adamant that love will trump hate, heal the world, and divinize us are not articulating anything new. The Greeks are still singing to us the songs of humanistic love as the spirit that will heal the world.”

Do the ancient Greeks have anything left to tell us? Anyone who deals extensively in the humanities, and especially the classics, inevitably must ask themselves this question. Apart from being eclectic or a renaissance individual, if the Greeks have nothing important to teach us, why bother wrestling with them at all? That seems to be the new prevailing spirit, notwithstanding the iconoclastic attitudes to ban, or “exclude,” anything from that critically endangered species classicist Bernard Knox called Dead White European males.

Greek literature is one of the triumphs of Western civilization—not merely because it is the seed of our literary garden but because it captures the tensions of the human struggle to find meaning in the cosmos and our place therein. Greek literature is the battlefield of our restless hearts seeking comfort and serenity in an often cold, dark, and pitiless world. Indeed, the entire dialectical movement of Greek literature is a working out of the moral cosmos and its relationship to the polis—or our civil and political life.

The Hesiodic Cosmos

The Greek cosmos is not, initially, moral. It is, however, filled with pathos. It matters not whether Hesiod composed his poem before or after Homer. Giambattista Vico, in my mind, conclusively shows that poetic metaphysics begins with the violence of the sublime. Hesiod’s Theogony is the quintessential sublimely violent poem and, therefore, draws on a tradition much older than Homer. The work, as we know, is an account of the birth of the gods.