A Reading from Homer (1885) by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

A civilization confident in itself reads the Iliad. A civilization in decline denounces it. Guess which one we are.

A confident civilization does not quake at the sight of Homer. It does not avert its gaze from Pericles or issue trigger warnings before mentioning Caesar. It does not treat the Iliad like some toxic spill to be cordoned off by hazmat crews. Yet ours does. As Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath warned in Who Killed Homer?, the gravest threat to the classics is not public indifference but professors themselves—men and women who, having ceased to teach Homer, now cower before him.

The new orthodoxy insists the ancients are perilous. Donna Zuckerberg, sister of the better-known Mark, solemnly warns that the “alt-right” is mainlining Plato as a gateway narcotic to fascism. Curtis Dozier and Patrice Rankine join the chorus: To admire Achilles is apparently to goose-step straight to Charlottesville. Mary Beard, once a formidable scholar, now devotes her days to rebuking anyone rash enough to suggest the West owes anything to Greece and Rome. Donald Kagan, who for decades taught Yale undergrads their Thucydides, foresaw this decay—the impulse to regard antiquity not as civilization’s accumulated wisdom but as an ideological contaminant, a cultural bat virus to be locked down and quarantined.

“To abandon the classics is to abandon liberty itself.”

The refrain never wavers: Beware the Great Men. Admire Homer and you’re already under suspicion; quote Cicero and you might as well be spray-painting swastikas. Antiquity itself is now treated as cultural contraband.

Why the Ancients Matter
This is not about dusty history. It is about whether the West still has the confidence to know itself. Greece and Rome are not museum curios. They are the source code of our civilization. The Chinese, who are not fools, read Homer because they know it is our source code. A people that deletes its code becomes prey to every passing fad.

The Americans at their founding understood this. Washington was hailed as Cincinnatus, the general who returned to his plow. Adams devoured Cicero. The Federalist Papers throb with Roman precedent. The founders knew liberty’s language was Greek, its framework Roman.

And the lessons endure. Homer teaches that war is tragic yet sometimes necessary. Themistocles that guile and courage can save free men from tyrants. Solon that law restrains chaos. Caesar embodies both the grandeur and the ruin of ambition. Alexander shows the restless energy of the West, forever straining beyond itself.

And then there are the Gracchi brothers, who fought to defend Rome’s small farmers, driven from their plots by vast slave estates. The parallel to modern America is glaring. Citizens are displaced again—not by slaves, but by low-wage migration. The result is the same: the citizen hollowed out, the republic weakened, the elites enriched.

The Phantom Menace
So why the panic? Because a handful of internet misfits post Roman busts with edgy captions. Because Steve Bannon once likened Trump to Caesar. From this, professors conjure warnings about the “Antiquity-to-Alt-Right Pipeline.” Joshua T. Katz, himself hounded out of academia, noted that the real pipeline runs the other way: from once-great departments of classics into jargon so shrill they can barely teach a freshman how to scan a line of Homer.

The truth is simpler: Antiquity does not fit the progressive catechism. The left cannot bear Homer’s world, where men are men and fate is cruel. They cannot abide Aristotle, who insists virtue is real. They cannot stomach Cicero, who still thunders against tyranny. So they invent a convenient bogeyman: the alt-right. It is not that Homer might be misused by fascists. It is that Homer himself cannot be endured.

The Unforgivable Sin
The ancients’ unforgivable sin is their greatness. They still tower over our cramped, bureaucratic age. They remind us that “dead white males” built a civilization whose achievements remain unmatched. Roger Scruton often observed that what makes them intolerable to progressives is precisely this sense of scale—they oblige us to see our lives as small, our slogans as petty, our bureaucracies as grotesque parodies of civilization.

So Homer is rebranded as a proto-feminist, Caesar shrunk to a colonial administrator, Alexander repackaged as an “inclusive” globalist avant la lettre. And when such contortions fail, the texts are condemned outright. This is not scholarship; it is desecration—the intellectual equivalent of spray-painting the Venus de Milo. It is vandalism dressed as virtue, a cultural Reformation minus the courage of faith. The past must be smashed because it refuses to be domesticated. That, in the end, is the ancients’ crime: They refuse to be small.

Memory and Freedom
To abandon the classics is to abandon liberty itself. Athens dared first to speak openly in the assembly. Rome turned law into a shield for the citizen. Our freedoms are not accidents; they are the fruits of centuries of struggle, nourished by the examples—and the warnings—of antiquity. Peter Heather reminds us that Rome’s collapse was a failure not only of legions but of cultural confidence. Forget who you are, and conquest is merely the next item on the agenda.

Strip away Homer, and you lose not merely a poem but the first great meditation on human fate. Forget Pericles, and you erase the grandeur of democracy. Forget the Gracchi, and you forget that free citizens must be defended against elites bloated on cheap labor. Forget Caesar, and you forget that republics can die. Forget Alexander, and you forget that a civilization can aspire to greatness—not just to comfort, handouts, and the next taxpayer-subsidized festival of “equity.”

Conclusion
The left’s war on the classics is not really a war on Homer, or Pericles, or Cicero. It is a war on memory itself. Hanson and Heath, decades ago, called for a “Reformation” in the academy, a Luther to nail demands for substance to the faculty door. That Reformation never came. Instead, the vandals now run the temple—and grade the papers.

They warn that admiring the ancients is dangerous. In a way, they are right. It is dangerous—but not to civilization. It is dangerous to those who would swap memory for ideology, history for dogma, liberty for surveillance. For once men remember Pericles and Solon, Scipio and the Gracchi, they may also remember that freedom is their inheritance—and that civilizations fall when they forget it.

The real danger is not a toga-clad Twitter troll quoting Homer between memes. The real danger is that we heed the modern Vandals in the academy, topple our own statues, and delete our own source code. Then, when the storm comes, we will have tossed aside the sword and shield that once saved us.