Who Killed Homer: The Demise of Classical Education and The Recovery of Greek Wisdom by Victor Davis Hanson

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An impassioned call to arms from two acclaimed classicists, Who Killed Homer? argues that if we lose our knowledge of the Greeks, we lose our understanding of who we are. With straightforward advice and informative reading lists, the authors present a highly useful primer for anyone who wants more knowledge of Classics, and thus of the beauty and perils of our own culture.

For over two millennia in the West, familiarity with the literature, art, philosophy, and values of the Classical World has been synonymous with education itself. The traditions of the Greeks explain why Western Culture is so uniquely dynamic and why its tenets of democracy, capitalism, materialism, personal freedom, civil liberty, and constitutional government are now sweeping the globe.

Yet at precisely the moment when the world has accepted the Western paradigm, the general public in America knows less about its cultural origins than ever before, as Classical education rapidly disappears from our high school and university curricula. Modernism alone is not the culprit. Rather, a new generation of Classicists—those humanists trained in the languages and literatures of Greece and Rome—forsook their responsibilities as stewards of the Western legacy. Either they saw the Classical World as shameful and exploitive and hence did their best to denigrate the Greeks, or they simply became careerists, abandoning the teaching of undergraduates in favor of esoteric and little-read academic research. Those who were to devote their lives to the Greeks have turned out to be entirely anti-Hellenic both in spirit and deed and hence have destroyed their own profession.

The failure of today's Classicists has meant that formal study of the origins of Western Culture is disappearing from American life at precisely the time when it is most needed to explain, guide, and warn the public about both the wonders and dangers of their own culture. This book explains what has been killed, who did it and why—and how we might still save Classics and the Greeks for another generation.