Who Killed Homer? : The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom

Encounter Books, April 2001. Paper Back. New. The ideals and political and cultural institutions of Western civilization grew in the soil of ancient Greece: this truism used to make it imperative that any well-educated citizen be familiar with our classical heritage and even with Greek and Latin languages. More, it used to inspire an admiration for that heritage, a recognition that its genius enabled our own civilization to flourish, nurturing science and technological prowess, human rights and freedoms, tolerance, and other virtues that non-Western cultures desire. But thirty years of cultural relativism and deconstruction -- and the cynicism and embarrassment concerning the West that followed in their wake -- have brought classical education and its academic undergirding nearly to ruin. Hanson (who left the academy and now farms) and Heath (still soldiering on as a teacher) wrote this book to restate the glory of the Greeks and to issue a wake-up call to their fellow classicists to recognize and halt the deterioration of their discipline, and return to their primary responsibility of transmitting the knowledge of our classical forbears to the young. Without this awareness and appreciation, they believe, the future of the West itself is in doubt.