The Culturalist: The Death of Classics

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Hello and welcome to The Culturalist, a part of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

The Culturalist is dedicated to events and people past and present that have influenced the way we live and the things that we value.

And Victor, the namesake of this show, is the Martin and Ellie Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He can be found on various social media sites.

Parlor has his handle as at Victor Davis Hansen.

And Twitter, his handle is at V D Hansen.

And on Facebook, his handle is is V D Hanson's Cup for the Morning Cup and then also there is a Victor Davis Hansen fan club and they do a great job they're not associated with us but they do a great job collating all of his podcasts and his articles and all sorts of things even from the past so it's a really great fan club to be a part of as well.

The topic today is the death of classics.

So So we're going to look in to Victor, who is a philologist or was trained as a philologist in classical studies, is going to talk to us a little bit about the importance of classics.

And then there was the death of three very important classicists this summer.

So we would like to talk about their contribution to classics and the importance of classics to an education.

And then maybe what's happened to classics.

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Welcome back.

And we are on the subject of the death of classics.

And Victor, just so I can inform the audience, you've written a lot on classics and its decline in modern society.

You have a book with your colleagues, John Heath and Bruce Thornton, called Bonfire of the Humanities, which talks on various subjects about the decline of classics in universities.

You wrote Who Killed Homer, again, another book on the decline of classics at the university.

And then also a recent article for the new criterion, which is published by Roger Kimball's Encounter.

And it's called Classical Patricide.

So I was hoping that maybe we could hear first about the classicists.

I'm not sure which order you want to do this in, but the classicists that have died this summer that were such an important contribution to their generation.

and then move on to what's so essential to education about classics.

Well, not long ago, the Yale classicist Donald Kagan, who was a fixture there for almost 50 years in academic life at Cornell and Yale, passed away.

I think he was 88 or 89.

I got to know Donald Kagan through two ways.

We were in the same field of Greek history, and so we often wrote about the Peloponnesian War and referenced each other.

And then I was asked in my late 30s to write a comprehensive review of his four-volume work for the Journal of Military History.

And I read it again.

And then I spent an entire year with him.

We had offices next together at the Center for Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

And we were, I think, I think it's no exaggeration, the only two non-left wingers there.

So we became very close friends.

And then we corresponded.

I spoke at Yale a number of times for him.

He came out and spoke in Fresno.

I had a personal relationship, but why was he so influential?

And I think there was three things he did.

The first,

he was a masterful undergraduate teacher.

That's a gift, but he came as an infant from Lithuania as an immigrant, grew up in a poor Jewish family, I think in the Bronx or Brooklyn, one of the two.

And he had an empathy for the working class.

So he was at ease with people from the middle and lower classes.

When I was with him at the Center for Behavioral Studies, when I would walk in, he'd say,

how do you want a tractor?

And how do you harvest raisins?

And we'd talk about this all the time.

And we'd see a landscaper up in a tree and he'd go over and talk to him.

He'd say, Victor, is that chainsaw a good one?

And I'd say, Don, I am a classicist.

Come on.

But the point I'm saying is he was familiar with people and he had no pretensions whatsoever.

And he was blunt speaking.

That was very rare for an academic.

And so he trained in because of his perch at Yale, he trained the elite of the nation for 25, 30 years, came through these wonderful classes, and he had an enormous influence.

So he had a very loyal group of people.

And when you look at my field of classics, the stellar people in the field of Barry Strauss at Cornell, the great historian of fifth century Greece, Williamson Murray, the great historian of World War II and Civil War, Hallway, the great constitutional historian, Peter Krinz, the Davidson professor, all of these guys, and there were women as well, were students of him.

Second,

he was outspoken and he was a traditionalist, a conservative.

So he weighed in on almost everything and he was not afraid to weigh in.

If the Bass family gave money for Western civilization and the intent was distorted, he criticized the distortion.

If George Will had said that, you know, baseball is becoming a scientific technological medium and the old take me out to the ballpark non-scientific approach to the game.

He was talking, I think about Tony LaRusso and, you know, and now what it's become where we have an instant metrics of every type of pitch, every type of swing, all the percentages.

And Donald Kagan came out and said, no, baseball is more than a science.

It's a cultural phenomenon.

And it was very vigorous in his disagreement.

When there was a bright new superstar in academia, he didn't care.

He would take them on.

So when he was was at Cornell and we had the black militant movement that took over the administration building, he was one of the outspoken voices.

So he was a courageous conservative and a toll in an island of progressivism.

And then he was a classical scholar.

And what we don't do in the modern world is dedicate ourselves to a multi-volume history of anything.

Because if you do, It takes four or five years for volume one, four or five years, volume two.

And in the meantime, you're not publishing publishing articles, you're not publishing a lot of books.

But he took it upon himself to write a narrative history from the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War to the defeat of Athens, 27 years in a continuous narrative while he was teaching.

And he didn't believe necessarily that anthropology or social science or any of the new theoretical disciplines could enrich that narrative as much as a traditional mastery of Thucydides, Herodotus, Diodorus, Oxyrhynchus of Stoia and the relevant lives of Plutarch, the corpus of Athenian and indeed Greek inscriptions, 20,000 of them, the archaeological finds, weaving all of that into a narrative.

And that's what he did.

Was that different from his own contemporaries?

Yes, it was.

I was a graduate student when he started, and I remember I had to give a report, and I won't mention my thesis advisor by name.

You know, don't speak ill of the dead.

It's not necessary.

But I was said, don't read that.

He's a right-wing guy.

He's just politics, and he doesn't understand what the Finley School or the Peter Garnsy School or the Cambridge Anthropologist are doing.

He takes sources at face value, and he's writing about the internal politics of Apollos.

So when Corinth makes a decision against Corsaira or Athens, opposes Sparta, he talks about the dynamics between the oligarchic party or the independent party or the left-wing party.

And there is no such thing as parties or factions or their interests, but they had no concept formally and they had no concept of a formal economy.

They were primitive thinking.

And Don Kagan said, nope, they were very sophisticated.

They had monetized their economy.

We know that they had sophisticated accounting.

We know that...

their parties were pretty well organized.

And so what he did was, you read about the Peloponnesian War and you want to know why a particular decision happened.

Why did Sparta invade Athens?

Why did Athens back Corsair?

Why were the Corinthians always starting trouble?

Why did the Spartans send Gallippus to Sicily?

And he talks about the internal debate within that paulus.

And it's a very rich thing.

And it's in the tradition of these.

four great historians that had done that earlier.

One, of course, was the banker George Grote, the 19th century genius that for the first time wrote a history of Greece?

He was a very liberal reformer, very pro-Athenian, and he used ancient sources in Greek and he cited them with footnotes.

And he talked about archaeology and the primitive level, not primitive in the sense of backward, but infant.

I mean, it was a nascient field of epigraphy, the study of stone inscriptions.

And then we have these three great German historians, Edward Meyer and Bailock and Busolt.

And Bussolt's history is just staggering and it's still probably irreplaceable.

But he wrote in that tradition, but it took him 20 years.

And it sounds like his contemporaries' tradition, if we can call it that, was to start to rely on theory about things rather than on the sources themselves.

Is that what you're trying to suggest?

And I think they felt that the ancients were so ancient and foreign that we can't comprehend them through accepted modern political and military analyses.

In other words, they felt, well, they had gift-giving and they had anthropological rituals, and they didn't, they weren't materialists.

And Donald Kagan said, no, they're human.

Human nature is unchanging.

And so then, when you read his history, it brings in this whole wealth of experience as a comparative military historian of World War II or World War I.

And he wrote later, you know, the causes of war, about all wars.

But when you're reading them, he talks about things like deterrence, preemption, alliances, balance of power, the difference between unconditional surrender and armistice.

And these are not prominently focused and highlighted.

They're just implicit and they're natural.

So when I was asked to read that, I remember back in graduate school, and all I got was this negative, because at the same time he came out with his first volume, there was a brilliant British Marxist named Jeffrey Dayson Croix that wrote something, not the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, but called The Origins of the Peloponnesian War.

And if you look at Donald Kagan's volume one, it's about half the size of The Origins.

And The Origins is just full of 10 times the citations, huge bibliography, provocative, attacking all of the giants of the field.

You know, Kenneth Dover gets it, Gom gets it, and it was brilliant.

It was provocative.

And Donald Kagan's first volume, in comparison with that, for a lot of people that were young, did not seem so impressive.

And then when I gave reports on, you know, the the Battle of Delium or something, my professor would say, I don't want you reading Kagan.

It's too dry.

It's just, so that's what I was taught.

So then on my own, I went back and read it.

And then I was asked to review it and I read it word by word.

And I thought, wow, this history never got its proper appreciation from the field.

But of course, academics are irrelevant.

They're a small little clique.

but the field is not academic.

So that book, The History of the Peloponnesian War, the New History of the Peloponnesian War, because all four volumes are now collated into one magnum opus, but people in political science knew that book.

People in government knew that book.

And that formed the basis of the lectures he gave on the Peloponnesian War for years.

So it was a fantastic achievement.

He was a wonderful person.

He was kind.

He was practical.

He came from the lower middle classes, never lost the affinity with him.

And it's a tragedy that he couldn't have lived to 200 because we don't have people like that anymore in classics.

No, we don't.

I think we should move on to John Lynch here, but I did want to just ask one thing, and I don't know if you can answer it quickly.

Since he wrote three volumes on the Peloponnesian War, four volumes, four, oh, sorry, four volumes on the Peloponnesian War.

Did he have any large differences with Thucydides' account?

And I'll relegate you to just one since we should move forward.

But well, he dealt with a lot of the inconsistencies in Thucydides.

For example, when Thucydides says the fear of rising Athenian power made Sparta want to fight, but he also lists a lot of other things.

They were different, oligarchy, democrat, hoplite, navy versus navy, cosmopolitan is rural.

Or when he says various times that he gives a description of the sheer chaos in sending a fleet to Sicily.

Okay, why would you attack the Greek world's largest democracy when you have a little lull in the war with Sparta, but it's not resolved.

But he also says, but of course they could have won if the people had supported it.

So Donald Kagan was not bothered by that.

He was just saying that this is an aristocratic guy and he took notes during the Peloponnesian War.

And then he started to look at his notes and write the narrative.

But as he was writing the narrative of this, and he was living the narrative, then things changed.

And sometimes he didn't revise it probably.

So he's contradictory, but he pointed that you didn't necessarily believe that everything had to be gospel just because Thucydides said it at one point.

The other thing he did I think was very good.

He was able to criticize people that he liked, like Pericles, and he critiqued the forced evacuation into Athens that resulted in the plague and did not give an offensive, even though the seaborne raids, but it didn't give an offensive aura that Athens was going to strike at the heart of Sparta, which is what Apaminondas did, you know,

50 years later, and it was successful.

And, you know, nobody likes Cleon.

Donald Kagan said, you may hate him, but he had some pretty good ideas.

And when they went to Sicily, Alcibiades, Thucydides may have been right.

He was uncontrollable.

And, you know,

he was kind of like a Hunter Biden.

But...

Unlike Hunter Biden, he had talent.

And Lammachus, who was solid, judicious, professional, was without a clue and demosthenes who had this great reputation was not to be trusted so he praises people that he didn't approve of and he can criticize people that he did and that's what was so good about the history yeah and it sounds like so good about probably his teaching as well that he could understand human character as he was very he's very blunt

every afternoon in the spring of 1992 until summer 93, he came up to me, hey, Victor, he reviewed my book.

I didn't agree with all of it.

I liked it.

You were fair.

So here's the deal.

Not that he's talked like Joe Biden.

We're going to go have our lunch, and you're not going to be able to have lunch with these people.

So you come over to my place three days a week, and then your office is next to me.

And you'll come into my office and we're going to talk.

And I'm going to ask you 30 minutes about the other Greeks.

And you've got to tell me about the agrarian basis of the Greek city-state, the economy, viticulture, olive culture, grains, the triad of the agrarian grid, how big farmland was, what was the nature of hoplite war, all that.

And then you're going to stop and shut up, and then I'm going to tell you where I am on the causes of war.

How's that?

And it was fascinating.

And then just when we were going to finish, he'd say, and by the way, remember one thing.

It's your family that matters.

It's your dedication to undergraduate teaching that matters.

It's trying to write something that's innovative and original and readable and do not pay any attention to the consensus of your peers, especially your academic peers.

So I got this lesson about life, and I was in my 30s, late 30s.

For me, it was just wonderful experience.

And I think we were close friends, and his wife was wonderful.

He had two very successful children.

Donald Kagan was so proud of Robert Kagan,

the historian and political analyst, and Fred Kagan, the military analyst and head of a large group that studies the origins of war and the study of war.

So he was very proud of what he called my two boys.

And so every time that we would start to talk, first thing he said, what's your son doing?

And what's your daughter, your two daughters doing?

And he was always inquisitive.

And then he would tell me about the two boys.

I really liked him.

I can't emphasize that enough.

Yeah, that's brilliant.

I hope that his children are able to listen to this podcast because that's very sweet on his life.

But now let's move on to John Lynch, who you equally admired.

And he was probably more liberal than he was conservative.

And so a very different person.

He was very different.

He was actually a student of Donald Kagan.

I'm not sure they got along.

I met him when I was, I had just turned 18.

I went to this new campus called the University of California, Santa Cruz.

I don't know what it was about.

My dad said, well, your older brother is there.

And damn it, it's 160 miles away.

And I can put all three of you in the same place and save money it's uc so go and it was wide open it was crazy it was hippie it was just opened and very hard to get in i couldn't get in i mean

i had applied to pomona and no problem i applied stanford but i could not get into uc santa cruz that's so funny now people think it's not rigorous but then and i had to wait all summer long to get in my older brother got in my twin brother got in but i could not get in and we finally went there and he was in the dorm and i met him the first day and he was the preceptor he was 27 years old he had long hair and a beard about six three very soft spoken kind of shy almost rude and i i asked him what he was taking he said you're in my seminar you're in my western civilization core so i took that from him and it was wonderful and i wrote papers had to write five papers in 10 weeks and i turned them on every day and he would say you always turn your paper in it's never too short and he was very complimentary and then i said could i take latin or Greek from you?

And he said, it's too late.

They've already started.

I don't have time for independent studies, but I want you to take this class and this class.

So I took, you know, Greek history and translation and all of these literature classes.

And then he came up to me, said, I just discovered something.

I looked at your transcript and you went to this Selma high school.

And how in the hell did you get all these advanced placement credits?

And I said, I don't know.

I just took the exams.

There was about 10 of us that took them.

And he said, you have a whole year of college credit.

I said, so what?

And he said, well, you don't have to take any required subjects anymore.

So why don't you go to Yale for the summer and learn intensive Greek, come back, take nothing but Latin and Greek, and then your junior year, you'll go to a program in Greece that I know of and you can win a scholarship.

It's based on translation.

And it was called the College Year in Athens.

And I won the Ralphheodimius.

Everything he said turned out.

I looked at my transcript.

I saw it in the barn the other day.

It's Antigone.

It's Bacchae.

It's Medea.

It's Odyssey.

It's De Oratore, it's Tacitus, it's Juvenile, it's Satyricon, it's nothing but reading Latin and Greek in the original Latin and Greek, and then it's Greek composition, Latin composition.

And then I didn't know what to do with it.

My parents were kind of freaked out.

They thought, what the hell are you going to do with all this?

And so by the time I turned 20, I said, I think I'm going to go to law school.

My mom's a lawyer and she's a judge now.

I think I'd like to be a lawyer.

Oh, no, you wouldn't want to do that, Victor.

You would not want to do that.

You can go to graduate school.

I said, well, I don't want to leave California.

He said, well, you can go to Berkeley or Stanford.

I said, how will you ever get in there?

I said, you're not only going to get in, you're going to get your whole way paid for.

I said, how can you?

It's competitive.

And you know Latin and Greek better than most people because we trained you.

And he brought in, he started an entire classics program.

And he brought in Gary Miles, the very gifted woman historian and literature.

And he brought in this very wonderful teacher, Mary Caig.

Her name then was Orlandia, but her maiden name was Gamel, and and that's what she uses, I think, today.

And she was a magnificent teacher.

Dynamic.

And there was no jealousy among those three.

And then even brought back the sort of hard leftist, early postmodernist, I don't know what you'd call them, Freudian Norman O'Brown.

I had three classes from him.

And he was crazy and cruel to people, but I learned a lot from him.

I took a Lucretius class, Greek lyric poetry.

He did know, he had first in classics at Oxford years earlier.

He wrote Hermes the Thief.

He was a wonderful teacher.

The point I'm getting at this hippie stupid school, I took the most conservative traditionalist class.

I mean, nowhere at Harvard or Yale or Stanford would they allow anybody to take nothing but Latin and Greek.

And I was very narrowly educated.

And then I was only 20 years old and I got accepted at Stanford for five years of support.

And one of them included the American School of Classical Studies.

And I think he would call me or write me, John Lynch would.

And he followed me up all the time.

And then when there were no jobs I was 25 and I thought I was a complete failure and I was I had a PhD from Stanford and there was no jobs I mean it was the beginning of affirmative action and I remember doing a very I thought successful interview at the Naval Academy if I had a position in Greek history in 1980 and I remember the the officer coming out and put his arm around me after the interview and said, that was a great interview.

You got a great record, but we are not going to hire you.

And this is, I want to make this clear because everybody thinks these are angry old white men that concoct this, but there were 16 jobs in the United States for about 200 applicants.

So anyway, I went back and farmed and I thought that would be it.

And yet John Lynch called me about once every three months and came and visited me.

You know, I mean, I was a complete failure.

And then when I finally decided that raising prices crashed, we had no money.

I had three children.

My poor mother was starting to get ill and trying to support the ranch that she had inherited.

Raising prices went from $1,400 to $400.

I wrote wrote all about this in Fields Without Dreams and the Land Was Everything.

And then I went up to the local campus.

I thought, I've never been to Fresno State before, but I'm going to go up there and I tried to get a job and they hired me at $400 a month to teach part-time Latin.

And then all of a sudden, I thought, I can do this.

I had no confidence.

And then John said, yes, you can do it.

You can make that into a full thing.

You've got to start a program.

So I started a program and I spoke all around Fresno to Lions clubs, Rotary Clubs, the McClatchy Foundation, which helped fund it.

I just happened to bump into a brilliant classicist, Bruce Thornton, who'd grown up on a cattle ranch.

I hired him.

We created this program.

And guess what?

I remember that John Lynch was hired at 27 years old.

And I was 29, so I thought I'm not too far behind.

And he had nothing but himself.

And within five years, he had four or five professors.

So I said to myself, whatever he did, I'm going to copy.

Kind of like Joe Biden copying or plagiarizing Neil Kinnick.

First of all, I wore casual clothes like John did, and people called me by my first name.

And if some student came up to me and said, hey, Victor, I got evicted from my apartment and I only have one day to get out.

Could I borrow your pickup?

I said, take it.

Here's the keys.

Or somebody said, I can't afford the copy of the Odyssey.

Go in the office and take what you want.

I never locked my office.

I had a refrigerator.

I stocked it with food.

I said, come in, do whatever you want, just like he did.

And pretty soon it was chaotic, but we had enormous enrollments.

And so if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be where I'm at today.

If I had been successful, I would have been sort of a lawyer.

I don't think I would have enjoyed it had I been successful, but I'm not sure I would have been successful as a lawyer.

And then had I just continued farming,

I don't know what would have happened to me.

I tell you one thing just before moving on to the next one, the people I met in farming, believe me, they're far more gifted than academics because they're audacious, they have cunning, they understand economics, they understand labor, they understand human nature, they understand everything.

And some of the most brilliant, competitive, ruthless, but also wonderful people I've met in farming.

And I'm lucky I never had to compete with them.

Yeah.

So John Lynch sounds like he started you in your career

and stayed with you the whole time.

Very good guy.

Yeah.

So the last classicist who passed was Leslie.

His last name, it's St.

Yeah.

T-H-R-E-A-T-T-E.

That's a French name.

His family, I think, was from Gainesville, Florida.

And I got to know him.

He had been in the same class at Harvard.

He was a student of Sterling Dow

and as was John Lynch.

So when John Lynch was hired, the same year he was hired at UC Berkeley.

He's very different.

He was a little bit more conservative, but he was kind of flaky in a way that John wasn't.

But he looked like a hippie, and he would come down because we had a team called the Athonatoi, which was Greek for the immortals, a baseball team.

And he would come down on Fridays and watch it.

And then he and John and John's friends would go out and drink.

And then he would go back.

And so I'd say for two or three years, we'd all talked at Leslie.

And he didn't know anybody at Berkeley, but he knew us as well as he did his Berkeley students.

But this is what I'm getting at.

Of all the people I met in my life in classics, no one knew Greek better than he did.

I don't know.

He was a genius in the sense that he was a masterful piano player, but something about the Greek language, I got to know Greek very well, but it was very hard for me.

I had to work.

He didn't.

And it was natural to him.

And he came up with the idea from Sterling Dow that he was going to write a grammar of attic inscriptions, not a grammar of literature that comes through the manuscript tradition, but he was going to look at stone inscriptions.

And remember what that means.

They're all in capital letters.

The stones are defective.

They were published often in the 19th century, and some of them hadn't been published.

They had these rubber squeezes.

All the readings are disputed.

There's no punctual, I mean, there are punctuation marks, but there's no spaces.

They're not in minuscule.

They're hard to read.

But here's the advantage.

They reflect what the grammar and the syntax and the phonetics were of the Greeks at the time, not filtered through 2,500 years of manuscript tradition.

And there had been a German, I think his name was Meisterhans, the grammar of Attic Inscription, but it was very small.

So he decided that he was going to do a massive, I don't know, 2,000 words.

It was just like Donald Kagan, except guess what?

It was even more intensely grammatical, phonetic, syntactical,

everything, and it was very esoteric.

So it wasn't going to manifest itself into

a lot of students wanting to take a class on that, or his expertise, Greek philology, or Greek composition.

But he was absolutely brilliant and he loved Attica.

He was a student of Eugene Vanderpoel, the legendary topographer who had been interned in World War II in Attica.

And he and John Lynch and others would go the summer, but he was actually there in the summer.

So my wife and I, when I was at the American School of Classical Studies, we saw him again after we hadn't seen him in a while.

And he said, I have this apartment and I rent it out to people, but I'm worried about it.

Would you come in and clean it?

And we thought this was like a godson.

We were flat broke.

We had no money.

And I think my fellowship was $2,500 a year.

And we saved up about a thousand.

And so we went in and cleaned his apartment.

And then he said, I'm doing the volume one of the grammar and I've got it done.

And it was this huge manuscript.

Would you proofread it?

So we sat every night with a ruler and went word by word.

And then I would check sources for him at the American School Library.

And then on Saturdays, we would go on the Vanderpoel walks, and they were all over Attica.

You'd go up to Philae, where the cave of Pan that's in Menander's Duskylos, or you'd go to Sunium and see the Temple of Poseidon, and you'd get the literary references and et cetera, et cetera, and go to Marathon or the Tetropolis.

It was just wonderful.

We hiked all the way to Thebes and ended up.

at Avalona.

I had to take the train back, I think at 10 at night, a very famous hike.

But my point is with all this, that he was very approachable, but

he was very different than the other two.

He was very shy,

secretive, kind of sarcastic, but absolutely brilliant.

But just when you thought that he wasn't reaching out, the students at Berkeley liked him a great deal because he was actually very kind.

When he would come down and talk, people would say, well, what are you working on?

He'd say, you don't want to know.

And yet, when he would tell us, everybody was fascinated.

And in my case,

he encouraged me

when I was was at the American School of Classical Studies.

And then when I left classics, I got my PhD, he would write and say, don't give up on the field.

I know you're farming, you like that, but why don't I come down sometime when you go back?

I said, I'm not going to go back.

And then when I did, he wrote me a letter and said, I understand you're a part-time.

You need to make a full-time program.

And if you and your wife will pick me up at the train station, I'll come down.

Well, he was chairman of the classics department at Berkeley.

I was a part-time teacher at Fresno State.

So I told everybody, and, you know, being, you know, kind of parochial out here, and I thought, wow, classics chairman comes.

The Fresno Bee wrote an article.

He was on talk radio.

He told me he had never got such adulation.

And they whined and dined him.

And every time he did it, he said, you've got to have a classics program.

You have underserved minorities here.

The Hispanic population will love it.

The Asian, the Southeast Asian will love it.

And it'll be rigorous.

And I helped train Victor and he will not water it down.

It will be philological, but it will, and he kind of laughed, but he did this for two or three days.

And I remember when he left, we took him to the train station and my mom was a judge.

She was an appellate court judge in Fresno and the train station is near.

And she says,

I want to go talk to Professor Three because she had met him at dinner.

And so she walked up to him.

She shook his hand and said, Mr.

Leslie III, I don't know how to pay you back, but it seems like, you know, nobody would ever notice this.

But if you had not come down here, my son would not be hired because right during the process, the provost came to me and said, if the chairman of classics at Berkeley thinks that we should have a classics program, we should.

And I want you as a full-time lecturer, and then we'll go put you on tenure track if it works.

And I had just told her that.

So she drove away and said, if it had not been for you, he would never have gotten a chance.

And we owe you for the rest of the world.

And, you know, she was not a helicopter parent, and she's very reserved.

And he was very moved by that.

And so over the years, we communicated.

He was a wonderful person.

He also spoke modern Greek fluently.

And I learned it with difficulty and was not good at it.

And then when we were on walks, I'd always want to try it out on a shepherd.

And I'd say, you see,

farmers all around the world would know how to speak to a shepherd.

Leslie, you're an academic.

You didn't understand.

He said, he didn't understand a word you said.

Your pronunciation was terrible.

Your grammar was, it'd be like somebody coming up in English and he's just started laughing.

And then he would go there and just mellophilous Greek faster than a Greek could speak it.

And then he would come back and said, he's from Eastern Attica, by the way.

He could tell by the dialect.

So I don't think we're ever going to see anybody in our generation like these three professors.

I mean,

I think

everybody has people like that in their lives, but I was very blessed.

And I just picked them.

because they passed away.

They all passed away this summer and spring, and it was a tragedy.

And there were other professors, Mark Edwards at Stanford, Mary Kay Gammell at UC Santa Cruz,

that were very wonderful that I knew.

But there's, thank God, Mark passed away a few years ago.

They sound like they were slightly unique in their own time in their approach to teaching classics.

Would you say that?

Now we can shift into classics.

I think they embodied the best of the American classical tradition.

It was absolutely created antithetically to the Germanic, even though the philology in America emulated the German model of PhDs and philology, it was populist.

So the idea that you were going to go out to Fresno State or UC Irvine or

Idaho State, these small public and start classics would be unheard of in Europe.

They wouldn't do it.

And then in Europe, everybody would want to get to either Cambridge or Oxford, University of London, or University of Leiden, or University of Frankfurt.

Okay.

But in the United States, there was Stanford, there was Berkeley, there was UCLA, there was Harvard, there was Yale, there was Princeton, there was Duke, there was University of Texas with this huge program, University of Michigan, and they were all excellent.

So it was everywhere when I started to go.

And then it collapsed right in the middle of my studies.

partly because of the economy, partly because they had killed the field themselves.

Other people had.

So what is classics and what is philology?

It's just the idea that Western civilization starts with the Greeks and Romans.

And that seems easy, but it means that it didn't start anywhere else.

The Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Egyptians, the Amycenean Greeks were very different.

The tribal so-called white people of Western and Northern Europe were very different.

But in Greece, they created the idea of a citizen, a person who was responsible for his own governance, a person who voted on when and where to go to war, a person who owned title to his property and could pass it on as he felt he wished to an heir.

And they created this constitutional system, politeia, they called it, politics.

And out of that formula, that landscape came what?

Philosophical discussion, rationalism, literature, history, this self-critical consciousness, sarcasm, Greek word, cynicism, Greek word, skepticism, Greek word, satire, Roman word.

So it was a unique culture.

And then when you combine the idea of a free economy and private property with constitutional and orderly government, you get a human dynamism that frightened the creators of it.

And that study of it then became the basis of the original university.

We want to find out who we are and all the great text in the world came from there.

Thucydides, Herodotus, they created the word history, historia inquiry.

Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans,

the agnostics in the religious sense, the combination of Rome, Athens, Jerusalem, the scholarly traditions of the Judeo-Christian religious traditions, and

scientific method, whether it's Hippocrates or the pre-Socratics.

or the Romans, Galen, etc., in medicine.

And how do you study that?

You have to know the languages so you don't have a filter between you.

You know Greek and Latin, and they're not spoken today, Latin only in ecclesiastical sense, but it's very difficult to learn a non-spoken language.

And to learn it very well and get an active vocabulary, you have to know how to write it.

So you just don't see it on the page and say, ah,

agathos, good, that somebody has to say, what's the word for good in Greek?

Is it kalos?

Is it agathos?

And then you write it out.

So it's a very rigorous training and then it has these ancillary disciplines.

If you want to study the entire menu of what life was like, you better know something about numismatics, coins.

It can tell you everything about inflation, the content of the coin, the picture, the iconographic images on the coin, can tell you changes in politics or personality cult.

You should study inscriptions.

We call that epigraphy, written documents contemporaneously on stone.

You have to know something about papyrology because people did write on paper.

That's all they wrote about on until about the second or third century AD.

And it survives in places like Oxyrhynchus, Egypt.

But there's a science to be able to read it and know how it operates.

Usually it's, you know, laundry list or shopping list, but on the backs of it, sometimes people tore out pages from

papyrus.

So they bought it cheaply and then they just wrote over it.

on the back side.

And sometimes it's a menander play that on the other side will be, you know,

I have so many fish to buy.

And so you need epigraphy, you need archaeology and that's the physical remains of greece today of these 1500 city-states you can find them you can see the walls that were built you can study the classical architecture and then there's history and then there's literature and

you get 40 or 50 million words of this culture.

And we say classics, it's really essentially from the beginning of the city-state around 750, 800 BC to the end, the end of the Roman Empire in the West at about 500 AD.

And that classical Greco-Roman culture then has a continuum.

And it's so influential that our vocabulary of Romance languages, the syntax and the grammar, the Germanic languages like ours and German still have these Greek words.

The institutions of Europe, military, cultural, political, economic, and here in the north, they're all influenced by this.

It's not to say that China and India and the indigenous peoples and the Americas didn't have spectacular monumental cultures, but they did not have citizenship.

I'm not going to make a value judgment.

I'm just saying that for good or evil, all of the contradictions of citizenship and constitutional government in the West, one learns about from studying classics.

And there's a lot of contradictions, and they're the first to point them out.

combine free market economics with constitutional government and you give the citizen prosperity and affluence affluence and leisure, then that's a dynamic and dangerous combination.

And if you want equality, do you have an equality of result, which means government coercion?

And that's what Plato wants.

Or maybe Aristotle would say maybe equality of opportunity.

And so we think liberty, liberty, liberty, liberty, freedom, freedom, that's the same as equality.

No, they're not the same.

And in fact, they're opposite.

If you want equality, you're going to have to cut back on liberty.

If you're going to give somebody liberty and freedom, you're going to cut back on equality.

Did the ancients understand that?

Yes, they wrote about it all the time.

I mean, that famous passage in Plato when Socrates says, well, of course, I think it's in the Gorgias or Protagoras.

He says, oh, of course, yeah, we can have equality.

And then pretty soon, I guess the dogs and the donkeys will say, well, why don't I get to vote?

Because after all, they're living, breathing animals.

And so his point was that the idea of radical egalitarianism without qualifications or prerequisites is endless.

The logical trajectory is absolute,

I don't want to use the word dumbing down, but a leveling so everybody can participate.

But when you have everybody participate equally and you force equality on people who aren't equal, because we're not born with the same energy or health or ancestry or energy or what, creativity, then it can be very dangerous.

It requires a level, well, I don't have to lecture.

anybody because they've watched what Mao did in China or what Stalin did in Russia.

Doesn't that idea that equality is, that we're more or less born equal, begin with Thomas Hobbes, who says that about human nature, that one man may be stronger or one man may be more intellectually agile than the next man.

But when it comes down to it, those differences are not so great.

So we're essentially equal.

Well, he did say that, you know, bellum omnia contra omnes.

And we needed a Leviathan because

humans are different and they all have this Nietzschean idea that they're going to be the best and they have an overwhelming ambition.

And so without some discipline, they're going to fight each other all the time.

And they fight each other for Thucydidean ideas of what, honor, out of fear, and their perceived self-interest.

So, but classics, and we add in philosophy, and the philosophy starts, let's face it, it starts starts with the pre-Socratics and then Plato and Aristotle.

And people will say, well, there's a very rich philosophical tradition in India and China.

There is, but it's embedded deeply within theocratic ideological parameters.

I'll give you one example.

So if you want to understand military history and strategy and you want to look at early thinkers, you can take a brilliant Chinese thinker, Sun Tzu,

the art of war, and you can look at his contemporary in Greece, an anonymous person, Aeneas Tacticus, probably an Arcadian general.

We're not sure.

May have been from Megalopolis.

I used him as a character in a novel I wrote the end of Sparta.

But anyway, Sun Tzu is brilliant.

Aeneas Tacticus is pedestrian.

But when you look at the different traditions, the philosophical traditions, When you read Sun Tzu, you get the entire baggage of the yin and the yang and the hot and the cold and the now and the later.

And it's more subtle and explicit.

So if you want to take a wall and you read Aeneas Tacticus, you don't get any of that.

There's a wall, find the magnitude, find the construction, and here's how you go over it, here's how you go through it, and here's how you go under it.

And it's completely divorced from religious or philosophical extraneous ideas.

Whereas Sun Tzu is enriched by it, but it's a very different approach.

And that makes a lot of difference in the West today.

You can see that there's limitations in both schools, but as far as scientific inquiry, excellence, unfettered expression,

that tends to be much more exaggerated in the West than in the East from that tradition.

But all of this is classics, and that's what the field is, chronologically, geographically, Greece and Rome, and then typologies of all these different fields.

And then the classicist, as an undergraduate, takes these broad courses and Latin and Greek, and then they specialize and become, you can't do any of it unless you are a philologist.

That was the old idea.

You had to be a philologist.

And that discouraged a lot of people to do it because you got these professors that that's all they'd done their whole life.

You walk in a room and they'd say, hey, Victor, he'd point.

I remember Lionel Pearson would say, look at the ground.

What is the word for it?

I said, well, it's made out of wood.

It's sula.

Oh, no, no, no.

I want the word for not a wood floor.

I want the word for floral.

Oh, no, no, no.

Or I'd take a class with Anthony Robicek, a great historian.

I'd say the left wing was reinforced at the Battle of Lukta.

Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Is the word eunomia for left?

Is that what you're saying?

And what's the word for Keros?

You just get out of thin air.

I want you to tell me what's in the text.

I said, it's keros, horn.

Oh, then why didn't you say horn?

If you said wing, why wouldn't it be terra?

And so that training teaches you to be very careful what you say without evidence and that language is the key to everything.

I remember I mentioned this before, maybe in a podcast, but so I said once I got so angry and I was like a really mouthed off hick from selma really when i was 22 and he started on this i said so a word is reality and reality is a word said yes so i said

before isaac newton when you jumped off a building what killed you he goes what do you mean gravity i said there's no word for it there was no abstract word for gravity so it didn't exist until newton made the word is that it isn't that philological tyranny he said ah hogwash but um but these were the giants of that field And then people thought, you know, in the 1950s and 60s and 70s, we started expanding the university to sociology and anthropology.

And then it was studies, studies, studies, gender studies, race studies, Asian studies, black studies, feminist studies, leisure studies, peace studies.

These were all disciplines of classics, philosophy, history, etc.

And so there's a decline in interest.

So we had all these philologists that nobody wanted to take their classes.

And then the left came in in the 80s and said, well, we've got to spice up the field.

So we're going to take in Lacan and Derrida and Foucault, and it's going to be postmodernism.

And who are you to say that Thucydides said that?

Maybe he was trying to deceive you and he didn't mean that.

Or better yet, wasn't he a white male aristocrat that represented the oppressive classes?

So everything he says, or where are the people of color?

And Frank Snowden wrote that they were everywhere.

But my point is, today, what do we ended up with?

Princeton University has ended the Greek requirement to be a classics major.

That would be like saying, I'm going to study physics, but you don't have to study math to know physics.

It's crazy.

And most of the very elite, top-down, tenured, well-compensated, nine-months a year teaching classicists think that their careers, and now we're talking just what we did earlier about the military and wokeness.

Suddenly, these elitists that had wonderful advantages are saying, oh, this is a terrible racist field.

It was flawed.

It's a bunch of old white people from England, Germany.

It's not inclusive.

And I'm thinking, wow, where have they been?

Since 1984, when I started teaching, I would train classicists for 22 years.

And guess what?

If I had Joe Brown from Tulare and he got straight A's in Latin and Greek and he could write Greek, finally, we'd train him like he was Xenophon.

And he'd say, Professor Hanson, I want to go to Harvard.

And I said, well, you'd got to get an MA and then you'd have to learn French and German before we send you there.

And you don't want to do it.

Yes, I do.

And I'm working at the car wash and I will do it.

And I'd say, okay.

And I would call these departments, oh, white male, Presidentville State.

But if I had, you know, I had some brilliant students just as brilliant.

So Fernando Lopez, or if they were African-American or Asian, I would call these, oh, yes, give us more.

These are ethnic minorities.

And I think that was great.

But my point is, when they say that this is a racist field for 50 years they have been encouraging people with non-traditional backgrounds but not from poor it wasn't class it wasn't geographical diversity it wasn't intellectual diversity it was just race and for them suddenly to say that this is a racist field when they themselves in the case of some of them got a lot of extra help and then have no gratitude for that and hatred hatred when they say they want to abolish the field i i'm referencing now, Sammy, in the latest new criterion for September.

I have this article called Classical Parasite, 8,000 Words on What Happened to the Classics.

It's on our website, victorhanson.com.

And then I have the obits of these three professors and they're sort of bookend articles that come out in October.

All right.

Can I just read something that

includes this that you wrote for Roger Kimball's new criterion in the article Classical Patricide?

I think it sums up the whole thing that what you're saying about classics today in a nutshell.

You write, classics is now again in one of its periodic crises of declining enrollments, financial cutbacks, ideological rancor, and institutional fratricide, albeit this time more suicidal rather than homicidal, which sounds very ominous and as though you see it on the downside, but I noticed that you said it's one of its crises, as though you see it coming like a leviathan rising out of the sea.

Well,

remember, I'm looking at classics as an integral part of education, that when you have classics professors and they're disinterested and they're empirical and they have this knowledge of language and philology and history, then they're valuable on faculty communities.

They're valuable as advisors to students, as was John Lynch.

They're valuable as public intellectuals, as Donald Kagan.

And when you have students that go through that intellectual rigor, then they can be more astute.

I'm not saying, I mean, there's been some nutty classicists, believe me,

but they also have this sort of other tradition.

And what I'm saying, crisis.

So that academic version is dying.

But there's another version because everybody loves the ancient world.

They love the Mediterranean.

They love to read Homer.

And they don't have to read it in Greek.

They don't have to be an academic.

They love to hear about Antigone.

They like to look at the Parthenon.

Their excellence.

The Greeks, and to a lesser extent, the Romans, reached a point of perfect excellence.

When you look at the Parthenon, or the Temple of Olympian Zeus, or red-figure pottery, or you look at the Iliad, it's very hard to think how you would improve on that across time and space.

But you don't have to be an academic to know it.

So the great discoveries in classics, Michael Vintras, the deciphered linear B, he was an architect, architect.

He had cryptology training in the war.

That's what allowed him to be such a successful decipherer, or he broke the code of Mycenaean Greek and said it was Greek.

People didn't think linear B was Greek.

It radicalized the entire field.

Millman Perry was a classicist, but he was kind of a nut.

He carried a gun.

He went to the Balkans.

He thought he was sort of the Lawrence of Arabia, the Balkans, and he proved that Homer did not write the Iliad, Iliad, that he composed it orally.

So when you were a literary critic in 1910 and you said Virgil is so much better than Homer because Homer says, you know, Rosie fingered dawn and he fell and the armor clattered upon him and it's just a type scene and 30% of the Iliad is repetitive.

It wasn't because he didn't have imagination, because that was a sophisticated oral technique of epithets and formulae that the poet uses.

And it makes it harder to be original when you have to recite by memory or in hexameter.

Heim Schliemann discovered that the Iliad wasn't just La La Land, that there was a place physical called Mycenae, and it's where you think it would be.

And there is a place called Troy, and it's where, if you read the Iliad and the Odyssey, you think it would be.

And that was pretty amazing to say that these epics, exaggerated and mythical as they are, they have a foundation in the real history of Greece.

So what you're saying is that the John Lynch and Donald Kagan and Leslie Drietz aside, those guys aside, the modern classicist is killing off classics with their ideology and their theories and their woke

agenda, but that there's something inherent in classics.

You don't see it ever dying.

Is that what the...

Yeah, I mean, you can say a lot of things about T.S.

Eliot, his anti-Semitism, but he was a brilliant poet.

So when you read The Wasteland, he's got a quote from Sybil or Ezra Pound.

I don't think knew Greek,

unless he claimed he did.

He was a nut fascist, but he has some brilliant cantos that reflect that.

Tennyson.

So there are people outside of classics that draw on classics.

There are people who come into classics that enrich it.

So it's beyond the university.

And what we're doing now is the theory thing is sort of all these theories, what remains is philology and history and love of classics.

And then these theories, there was a Marxist theory in the 30s, and then in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, we got structuralism and then post-structuralism and post-modernism, where there are no facts and the authors just made it up for their own particular political.

And then now we've got woke theory that says we can condense and deconstruct everything down to race.

So

we don't want to enjoy literature.

We don't want to know if it has any lessons from us.

We just want to know why the person wrote it and how it reflects his privilege and who gets oppressed by it.

So then Thucydides, the brilliance of that historian, I mean, he's not Diodorus.

And I like Xenophon.

I put him in a novel as well, The End of Sparta, but he's not Thucydides.

But according to woke theory, it doesn't matter because they're both white, wealthy, aristocratic people who warp their histories to reflect their own class, but now racial interests.

And that's what they believe.

And they've taken everything that's rich and beautiful and complex and intricate and ironic and paradoxical, and they boiled it down to a boring, predictable binary.

And who wants to read about the oppressed and the oppressor?

And who is the white guy who's the victimizer and who is the non-white guy who is the victim?

Especially when the people telling you this are the Oprah Megan Markles of their field.

In other words, the most privileged people, the most protected, the most leisured and affluence in the field, academics.

And so it's going to blow up, but every time they throw these hand grenades, it weakens the field.

So we don't have 2 million people taking Latin like we did in World War I when we had a population of about 120 million people, 140 million people.

It's 150 million.

It's dying.

Yeah.

So I'm surprised you sound in this quote I just read almost like, well, well, it's just another crisis and it's going to, and like the wheel of fortune, it's going to come back around.

I think it will.

With all of them.

Yeah, I don't think you can kill class.

I don't know if it's going to come back in the university.

I think now when I look at things in the university, I don't see much.

And I go on the internet, I see a lot of crazy stuff, but I see classics everywhere.

Molan Labe, come and get them.

I got, there's a whole group of people that talk about in the military about thermopylae or they want to be Spartans or sometimes are alt-right, sometimes they're communists that believe in, you know, I think John Kerry who said that climate changes are thermopylae.

So everybody takes classics for their own particular purpose.

There's nothing wrong with that.

So it just resonates because again, across time and space, it reached a level of excellence that everybody can acknowledge, I think, in a way that other fields don't.

And I think everybody loves it.

They love Greek mythology.

They love Greek warfare.

They love Greek.

politics, they love Greek literature, history.

What's sad is they are the guardians and they are the stewards.

And their role is one, they are going to be the expert.

So when somebody like a T.S.

Eliot or somebody in the New York Times wants to write a story on the Parthenon or somebody wants to talk about a new development, where do they go?

They go to these universities.

But when you have classics professors and professors of ancient history saying, Oh, I told everybody that this is how you knock over an obelisk in the ancient world, and that will help you destroy an obelisk.

It's a privileged phallic symbol.

Or, you know what?

I work in a museum curator in a very prestigious classics museum.

If you're going to throw paint and wipe out a racist inscription of a racist general or something, then here's a better solvent that I've discovered that will help you.

I'm telling you the truth.

This is literal now.

So you have classicists that are competing with one another to deprecate their own field as racist.

And if they're going to do it, people will say, well, you've convinced me.

So John Heath and I wrote 20 years ago, 23 years ago, Who Killed Homer?

It was who killed Homer with a theorist, and then the philologists didn't know how to teach it and be emissaries, popularized.

But now it's weirdly suicidal.

Even the theorists said, we're going to save classics by making it theoretical.

And the philologists say, well, save it because...

we won't change and we have standard and i agree with that but they weren't able to appeal to non-traditional students But now these people who are classicists that make $150,000 a year with tenured job, they're saying, I'm going to destroy it.

Yeah.

And if you, everybody wants to read it and go to the website.

It's got a lot of controversy.

I name names, what they said.

I quote them on the record.

And I think they should be ashamed of themselves because when they destroy the field, who's going to pay?

The professor of classics at Stanford?

No, he'll just move over to Complit or history department.

He's tenured.

No, it's going to be the part-time teacher of Latin at $700 a month at Florida A ⁇ M or Cal State Bakersfield.

It comes in one day a week and teaches mythology.

It's going to wipe out all the, it's the most classicist or the most classist person we can see.

They don't care about the popular middle classes or the lower classes or the hierarchy within academia.

I mean, Part-time lecturers are treated worse than Walmart greeters are.

Walmart has more egalitarianism in the ranked employee system than the university does between full professor and part-time lecturer.

And that's who's going to get hurt.

And these people don't care because they're elitist.

And elitism will kill classics.

It was not elitist.

Homer was not an elitist.

Hesiod was not an elitist.

There were elitists who wrote, but the hoplite ethic or the georgoy

or the Roman legionnaire or the agrarians that Virgil writes about, they're not elitists.

It was a very popular middle-class culture.

Well, your optimism must be a small small peephole in a huge wall of theorists and ideologues because it just seems like they're bent on killing it and all the things that we see, whether it's at Princeton or at Yale.

So

I don't know what to say.

I feel like this is an optimistic field.

It adds so much and it's such the source of our culture.

And yet.

They want to destroy the past, I guess, is all we can conclude from this.

They hate the past.

They want to control the past in the present, as Orwell said, so they can control the future.

They want to rewrite the past now, and then they think it will be conducive.

Well, they want to use the postmodern standards of behavior and conduct and norms now to go back to a pre-industrial society where people had an average longevity of about 36 and a pre-industrial society and condemn them because, you know, these guys all go to sophisticated medical treatments.

They have sophisticated corrective lenses.

They have every scientific appurtenances and luxury and technology.

And they want to go back to some poor guy farming out in ancient Greece in 500 BC and say he represents white patriarchy as they go home to their nice condo in a big city.

And it's just, it's ridiculous.

It's just a joke.

It's a joke.

I'll end on this.

It's like the medieval court where you get these buffoonish gestures that go in and they make fun of themselves.

they pass win, they hit each other over the head, they expose themselves, they make a fool out of themselves, and then the court pays them for entertaining.

These people are court jesters.

They just entertain by saying these horrifically stupid things and then

people pay them very high salaries to destroy themselves and make fun of their own discipline and then everybody else pays a price.

Yeah, well, we'll end on that.

Classics is a circus today of sorts, a medieval circus.

And thank you very much for all of that.

Just amazing discussions on John Lynch, Donald Kagan, and Leslie Dreet.

Thanks so much, Victor.

And we'd like to thank the listeners too.

Be sure to tune in to the traditionalists and the classicists that Victor also has with his co-host, Jack Fowler.

Thank you very much.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen, and we're signing off.

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