© Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo/The National Gallery
The Procession of the Trojan Horse into Troy
When I was in sixth grade, the English teachers at my New York all-girls' school started revamping the decades-old curriculum. First, they cut
The Catcher in the Rye (too masculine), then they cut
Jane Eyre (too feminine), and finally, much to my dismay, they cut Homer. I had been looking forward to reading the
Odyssey in class for years and begged my teachers to reconsider. "Don't worry," they said, "you'll all read Homer in college, anyway." This response, of course, was laughable. My high-school classmates went on to study such subjects as Mechanical Engineering and Media Studies, and if they read any literature in college, it wasn't, alas, Homer.
Knowledge of Homer is no longer expected in our technocratic and multicultural society. Although I believe everyone would benefit from reading the works that form the basis of our inherited tradition, the absence of Homer in particular from school curricula does not bother me all that much. My passion is ancient philosophy, and if it were up to me, I would make everyone read Plato. But knowledge of Homer is still expected in Classics departments —
or at least it should be. Homer was the beacon of a common culture across the ancient Greek world. Even as different city-states, speaking different dialects of Greek, waged war against one another, they were united by Homer, whose stylized language and mythic tales transcended their differences. Ancient poets, tragedians, comedians, historians, philosophers, painters, sculptors — all nod to Homer, implicitly or explicitly, in their works, hoping to build on a shared tradition and knowing that just about any audience would detect and understand the references.
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