"Homer, whoever he was, still speaks to us"

As you know if you've read some of the posts here lately, we are deep into Greek history and literature this year.

So, I was happy to see this article in the Weekly Standard: "Greeks Bearing Gifts." (Most of the article is behind a subscriber wall... and I highly recommend subscribing!)

A few excerpts:

Children are enthralled by Odysseus's adventures with bizarre monsters; warriors are drawn to the violence of the Trojan battlefield; sentimentalists like the affair of Helen and Paris, or the tragic marital love of Hector and Andromache. Feminists, ancient and modern, are attracted to the clever ways that Penelope exercises sexual power over the suitors, and to the whiffs of a prehistoric matriarchy in the poems. (Why, after all, do the suitors think they have to marry Penelope in order to become king?) And entrepreneurial types like Odysseus's indomitable spirit and problem-solving techniques.

Yes! Exactly!

I read this passage aloud to the kids (making a subtle change from "sexual power" to "feminine power" for the sake of the younger ones), and it made me inordinately happy that they knew each of the characters named and could identify with the thoughts expressed by the author. They, too, had been touched by the tenderness of Hector toward his baby son, who cried from fright at the sight of Hector's helmet, and by the devotion of Andromache, his heartbroken wife; they had admired Penelope for her faithfulness and resourcefulness; they had delighted in the cleverness of Odysseus.

There is so much to love about these stories for those reasons alone, but there's more, of course:

The Odyssey, too, asserts the deep value of living a human life. Odysseus, offered the possibility of blissful immortality with the goddess Calypso, is inexorably drawn to return to his home, his son, and his wife. Homer presents us with no transcendent values, but he does celebrate this-world, human ones: the value of achieving excellence, and the value of love--of husband and wife, of father and son, and of one friend for another. Achilles, like most soldiers before and since Troy, finally faced battle not for some glorious, abstract cause, but out of intense devotion to a brother in arms.

At a time when the value of living an earthly life is under attack by violent, death-loving and suicidal religious totalitarians, when a twisted honor/shame culture drives fathers and brothers to murder their daughters and sisters because of perceived violations of family honor, we could do worse than to contemplate with Achilles and Odysseus--the founders of our own culture--what makes this life worth living.

This is why these great works should be part of every curriculum. We have the obligation to hand on the treasures of the past to the next generation; we put our own civilization in peril if we fail in that duty.