• Introduction
• Paul Allen Miller (bio)

The discipline of Classics seems always to be in crisis. It is hard to know when this began. Some might cite the famous statement published by Georg Luck when he became editor in 1987 of America's oldest journal in Classics, the American Journal of Philology (AJP). AJP is a journal that until recently sported on its cover "Founded by Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve," the pioneering American philologist, enslaver, and Confederate apologist who founded the Classics Department at Johns Hopkins. To many in Classics and in the popular media of the time (it was front-page news in the New York Times), Luck's manifesto was a reactionary salvo in the culture wars. It situated the journal firmly within traditional philology as practiced by Gildersleeve. It announced that it would reject articles that were "speculative" and all that was "fashionable and outré." "AJP Today" was an attack on critical theory, feminism, and any form of thought that sought to question the "scientific" foundations of classical scholarship, its centrality to humanistic scholarship, or the implicit biases that ratified it as a bastion of white, heteronormative, Eurocentric, and class privilege. A special panel was quickly organized by the Women's Classical Caucus at that year's meeting of the American Philological Association, and Luck's polemic became a cause célèbre. A subsequent book, Classics: A Discipline and Profession in Crisis? (1989), by Phyllis Culham and Lowell Edmunds, was published based on the panel and as a response to Luck.

Ten years later, Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath published Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (1998), a stunning diatribe against all developments among students of the ancient world that had sought to open up the past, to look at our disciplinary exclusions, to ask different questions. This book too received substantial coverage in the Times, with a piece titled "Not to Bury Homer but to Update Him," which bore the subtitle "Traditionalists Accuse Multiculturalists of Sabotaging the Classics" (7 March 1998). This article appeared on the bottom of the same page in the Arts and Ideas section as one titled "Could the Old [End Page 12] South Be Resurrected?" Gildersleeve was alive and well. Hanson and Heath were going to Make Classics Great Again. The politics behind their proposed Greek revival has since become only too clear, as Hanson, an advocate for agrarianism, went on to write such sober tomes as The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalism Are Destroying the Idea of America (2021) and The Case for Trump (2019). We are invited to imagine the forty-fifth president laying aside his Thucydides to go and tend to his olive trees in the manner of a traditional Attic farmer or as Cincinnatus at the plow.

As someone who makes his home in a Classics program at the University of South Carolina, I might well ask, "With friends like these, who needs enemies?" If this is the popular image of the discipline of Classics, is it any wonder that, in an increasingly racially and ethnically diverse nation, one whose sources and kinds of knowledge are profoundly pluralized, one in which income inequality makes the division between state-supported institutions and a small number of elite private high schools and universities even sharper, fewer young people are majoring in Latin and Greek, fewer see the relevance of the ancient world, and many doubt that a specifically "Western" culture needs "saving"?

Still, we may be asking the wrong question. No one killed Homer. To give priority to the forces of reaction, to claim erroneously that no one reads Cicero, Horace, or Plutarch—all of whom I teach every year—is precisely what these voices want. Moreover, by doing so we ignore whom they are attempting to shout down. We do the work of silencing for them. Rather, it is precisely because who, what, and how we study the ancient world is vital and changing, as you will read in the essays that follow, that scholars like Luck, Hanson, or more recently Joshua Katz (2022) have been hysterically sounding the alarm and manning the barricades. Homer is alive...

• 介绍
• 保罗·艾伦·米勒（简介）

古典学科似乎总是处于危机之中。很难知道这是什么时候开始的。有些人可能会引用乔治·勒克 (Georg Luck) 1987 年成为美国最古老的古典学杂志《美国语言学杂志》 ( AJP ) 的编辑时发表的著名声明。直到最近， 《AJP》杂志的封面上还标明“由巴兹尔·兰诺·吉尔德斯利夫创立”，他是美国语言学家、奴役者和南方邦联辩护者的先驱，也是约翰·霍普金斯大学古典学系的创始人。对于许多古典文学界和当时的流行媒体（这是《纽约时报》的头版新闻）来说，拉克的宣言是文化战争中的反动齐射。它将该期刊牢固地置于吉尔德斯利夫所实践的传统语言学之中。它宣布将拒绝“投机性”以及所有“时尚和离奇”的文章。《今日AJP》是对批判理论、女权主义和任何形式的思想的攻击，这些思想试图质疑古典学术的“科学”基础、其对人文主义学术的中心地位，或承认其作为白人堡垒的隐含偏见。异性恋、欧洲中心主义和阶级特权。在当年的美国语言学协会会议上，妇女古典核心小组很快组织了一个特别小组，勒克的论战成为了轰动一时的事件。随后的一本书《经典：危机中的学科和职业？》(1989)，由菲利斯·卡勒姆 (Phyllis Culham) 和洛厄尔·埃德蒙兹 (Lowell Edmunds) 撰写，基于该小组并作为对运气的回应而出版。

十年后，维克多·戴维斯·汉森和约翰·希思出版了《谁杀了荷马？》《古典教育的消亡与希腊智慧的复兴》（1998）是对古代世界学生的一切发展的令人震惊的谩骂，这些学生试图打开过去，审视我们的学科排斥，提出不同的问题。这本书也得到了《泰晤士报》的大量报道，一篇题为“不是埋葬荷马，而是更新他”的文章，副标题是“传统主义者指责多元文化主义者破坏经典”（1998 年 3 月 7 日）。这篇文章出现在艺术与创意部分同一页的底部，标题为“古老的[完第12页]南方能否复活？” 吉尔德斯利夫还活着，而且活得很好。汉森和希斯打算让经典再次伟大。自那以后，他们提出的希腊复兴背后的政治目的已经变得太清楚了，因为土地主义的倡导者汉森继续撰写了诸如《垂死的公民：进步精英、部落主义和全球主义如何摧毁美国理念》 (2021)等清醒的著作。 ）和特朗普的案例（2019）。我们被邀请想象第四十五任总统放下他的修昔底德，以传统的阁楼农民或辛辛那图斯犁地的方式去照料他的橄榄树。

作为一个在南卡罗来纳大学攻读古典文学课程的人，我很可能会问：“有这样的朋友，谁还需要敌人呢？” 如果这就是古典学学科的普遍形象，那么在一个种族和民族日益多元化的国家，知识的来源和种类极其多元化，收入不平等使得国家支持的学生之间的划分存在差异，这有什么奇怪的吗？机构和少数精英私立高中和大学的情况更加尖锐，主修拉丁语和希腊语的年轻人越来越少，看到古代世界的相关性的人越来越少，许多人怀疑一种特殊的“西方”文化是否需要“拯救”？

不过，我们可能问了错误的问题。没有人杀死荷马。优先考虑反动势力，错误地声称没有人读过西塞罗、贺拉斯或普鲁塔克——我每年都教这些人——正是这些声音想要的。此外，通过这样做，我们忽略了他们试图压制的人。我们为他们做沉默的工作。相反，正是因为我们研究古代世界的人、内容和方式至关重要且不断变化，正如您将在接下来的文章中读到的那样，像拉克、汉森或最近的约书亚·卡茨（Joshua Katz，2022）这样的学者已经歇斯底里了。拉响警报并设置路障。荷马还活着……