Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Victor Davis Hanson (Author), Jeff Riggenbach (Narrator), John Heath (Author),

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For over two millennia in the West, familiarity with the literature, philosophy, and values of the Classical World has been synonymous with education itself. The traditions of the Greeks explain why Western Culture’s unique tenets of democracy, capitalism, civil liberty, and constitutional government are now sweeping the globe. Yet 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.

Acclaimed classicists Hanson and Heath raise an impassioned call to arms: 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.

Listening Length

11 hours and 28 minutes
Author

Victor Davis Hanson, see all
Narrator

Jeff Riggenbach
Audible release date

August 30, 2012
Language

English
Publisher

Blackstone Audio, Inc.
ASIN

B0093ZT7F2
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	11 hours and 28 minutes
Author	Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath
Narrator	Jeff Riggenbach
Audible.com Release Date	August 30, 2012
Publisher	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B0093ZT7F2
Best Sellers Rank	#90,716 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #73 in Ancient, Classical & Medieval Collections #146 in History of Civilization #155 in Classic Greek Literature

Customer reviews

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4 star		7%
3 star		6%
2 star		2%
1 star		5%

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M. A. D'Virgilio

The Greeks Aren't Dead After All

Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2017

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The authors end on a glum note, and maybe are justified when looking at the wasteland of higher education, but since the 1990s Homer has been resurrected in K-12 classical education! In fact, that's one of the few things that gives me hope for the future of the American republic. Home schooling has grown tremendously, and mostly focuses on a classical approach, Christian classical schools are flourishing, and charter (public) classical schools are springing up all over the country. The latter is especially encouraging to me because there is no greater antidote for postmodern relativism than a classical education, and in classical charter schools kids are being taught that Truth and objective reality exists. You can't get more counter culture in our day.

As for the book, I learned a lot I never really knew about the Greek worldview, or had it put a new way that I found enlightening. I didn't quite realize how much the Greed and biblical worldview had in common, and how much we need both in our culturally sick age.

41 people found this helpful

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reader

How higher education went to Hades.

Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2020

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Hanson, who is among other things a Professor of classics, explains the loss of Greek rationalism in higher education. He also explains the basics of classical Greek thinking. If you want to know why modern college campuses rarely teach the bedrock of western philosophy, this book will explain. The results are at your local campus and/or riot.

10 people found this helpful

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Martin Asiner

Who Killed Homer? It Was an Inside Job

Reviewed in the United States on November 9, 2008

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In WHO KILLED HOMER, Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath address the pressing issue of the rapid demise and death of classical Greek learning in the west. At the time of its publishing (2001), the dire straits that Greek thought and culture found itself in have not improved a whit. If anything, the trend is toward a total obliteration of the very foundation of western civilization. Hanson and Heath have plenty of blame to lay and fingers to point, but the bulk of their ire is surprisingly enough directed at their colleagues, all of whom were charged with keeping the immortal spark of classical learning alive. They are especially angry when their colleagues insist that there is nothing wrong at all with their profession. Such misguided academics most often point to the geometric increase in scholarly articles published and conferences attended. And that, Hanson and Heath insist, is precisely the point. The scholarly articles are written in the most opaque jargon-ridden prose imaginable with no one reading them. The conferences are attended mostly by senior tenured professors of Greek and Latin who hand over their few teaching duties to underpaid and overworked teaching assistants who can only dream of the day when they too will be able to enter the sheltered life of a tenured academic when they know only too well that with the shrinking pool of college students who choose classics as a major that that scenario is very likely not to occur. And it is not simply laziness or cupidity that has caused today's teachers of classics to abandon the very barricades that were their responsibilities to maintain. Much of the problem they see as a changing mindset in the very viability and desirability of thinking like the ancient Greeks. Hanson and Heath charge modern modes of thought like post-modernism, cynicism, nihilism, and skepticism as the collective root cause in subverting a two thousand year tradition in the belief of Eternal Truths like beauty, justice, and patriotism into a witches' brew of deconstructive thought that insists that there is no solid linguistic, cultural, or historical groundfloor under our feet. All that we used to call Traditional Values are now to be seen as slipping and sliding in ways that suggest that there was nothing special or enduring about the ancient Greeks at all. They note that it is trendy for cultural relativists to insist that all cultures in all ages are equally viable and worthy of emulation. If so, then why study classics in the first place. The answer, Heath and Hanson insist, is that the relativists are wrong. When Homer was writing his ILLIAD, there was nothing like Greek ideals of polis or thought available anywhere else in the world. This, of course, does not sit well with those who decry the United States as the primary source of all the world's evil. Those who claim that are also the same ones who deny Greece as the initial and irreplaceable source of current western concepts like egalitarianism, property rights, and religious tolerance.

As bad as things are, Hanson and Heath do not think them hopeless. In their concluding chapter, "What We Could Do," they list alternatives to the dissolution of their profession. Among them:
1) Re-introduce the classics into high school and college curriculums
2) Have senior tenured classics professors attend fewer conferences and teach more undergraduate classes
3) Reduce the time to complete a Phd in classics to five years or less
4) Scrap the traditional doctoral dissertation in favor of several broad papers of Greek culture
5) Give tenure only to those who teach a lot rather than publish a lot
6) Re-acquire the belief that the Greeks were a special people who have a great deal to say that is relevant today.

On the down side, both Hanson and Heath do not believe that any of their suggestions will be implemented anytime soon. As a result, when future Greek classes will be attended only by the doddering senior professors who will preside over a legion of empty seats, then it will be evident even to these soon to be retired professors that their profession has already gone the way of the dodo.

38 people found this helpful

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Silly Putty

Learn the Greeks - it will explain a lot

Reviewed in the United States on April 11, 2019

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Hanson & Heath collaborated to produce a stinging indictment of current non-teaching of classics, then offer a remedy. The weight of the writing addresses the decline of the academy and its rehabilitation, but there is much in the book that will invite the reader to consider the wealth to be found in classics study, connecting ancient and modern dots to give westerners appreciation for the culture they have inherited which, in turn, may have a preserving influence.

5 people found this helpful

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Chana Siegel

A book for specialists, but lucid and insightful for all

Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2013

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I spent 4 years studying Latin in high school in the 1970s and loved it, as did my brother and sister. We took Latin because our mother had loved it in the 1940s. I'm a big fan of Hanson and I knew this was largely a book for those in academia, but the authors mount a stirring defense of the teaching of the classics in general and how the field might still be saved.
Their advice for university scholars and mentors in the field is equally relevant to professors of the humanities now that college education is so very expensive.

17 people found this helpful

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Lan D

Important to understand

Reviewed in the United States on April 25, 2008

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It is important for all Americans to understand from which ancient cultures this country was ultimately formed. The government we live under, our way of life, our views about things good and bad were ultimately the result of Greek thinking. Not Chinese, not Persian, but Greek and to some extent Hebrew. In this age history is devalued to the point where it seems we don't even wish to understand our origins. Certainly other cultures have contributed to the American miracle but we MUST understand the Greeks and Romans in order to understand where we have been and where we are going. The picture these two authors paint of the Greeks isn't always a cheery one. They made mistakes, a lot of them, but since our nature was their nature we need to understand them in order to avoid their mistakes. That's really all the authors are saying.

31 people found this helpful

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Benni Chisholm

The book is erudite and full of wisdom.

Reviewed in Canada on February 20, 2021

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Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath point out that our constitutional government, free speech, separation of religion and politics, private property, civilian control of military, and free scientific inquiry originated with ancient Greeks. Greek writers themselves analyzed the good and bad of their systems. Classical education has much to teach us.

Philologikos Krokodeilos

Problematic, Flawed and Odd.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 6, 2013

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Potentially, I might have agreed with the book in that its central thesis is plausible: That the practice of professional academics are in some way harming the Classics. I still think that, however this book is eminently terrible and the fact that so many people think otherwise really testifies how few people know anything about classical antiquity. I'll stick to just a few essential points.

1) We need to think like Greeks. WTF? I doubt any anthropologists would agree such a thing is possible OR desirable. What is funny though, is that Greek somehow = right wing 20th century American. Not only is this naive it's dependent entirely on selectively (mis)reading our sources. Can we know how Greeks thought? Well it's highly dependent on class, polis, period etc (as well as the usual constraints!) but it's a world apart from this book.

2) Casual racism. Apparently modern Greeks don't speak good Greek!? British people are subservient and conniving? and so on...

3) Plaintive wailing: So much of this book is dedicated to basically complaining about complexity, apparently people use big words (wah), and scholarship is too complex. No s***, when dealing with complex topics complexity naturally arises. Not everyone is happy to treat classical Greek as modern American and getting beneath the skin of another people is very, very, difficult and tentative.

4) Rants against Evidence/Privileging own Viewpoint: What's really odd is how he'll occasionally attack the extant literature. Callimachus is bookish, Menander trite, Polybius second rate. Now what makes this hilarious is that he'll then tell us to read Virgil, heavily influenced by Callimachus et al, or Tacitus (who needs Polybius) and so on. Worse, the first two of these were some of the most important authors for the Greeks AND Romans. This is indisputable. Are we to assume that the authors are more Greek or Roman than they were themselves?

Idiocies like these abound. I've picked what I think are the most striking even to the untrained but you could easily open any page and lift a dozen more. It is, seriously, a terrible book. Which is a shame since a good expose remains a desideratum...this just isn't it, not even close. Instead we have is something terribly confused and misinformed, pursued with the vehemence of the fanatical and the ignorant.

6 people found this helpful

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