Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age

With humor, lucidity, and unflinching rigor, the acclaimed authors of Who Killed Homer? and Plagues of the Mind unsparingly document the degeneration of a central, if beleagured, disciplineclassicsand reveal the root causes of its decline. Hanson, Heath, and Thornton point to academics themselvestheir careerist ambitions, incessant self-promotion, and overspecialized scholarship, among other thingsas the progenitors of the crisis, and call for a return to academic populism, an approach characterized by accessible, unspecialized writing, selfless commitment to students and teaching, and respect for the legacy of freedom and democracy that the ancients bequeathed to the West.

Victor Davis Hanson is Professor of Greek and Director of the Classics Program at California State University, Fresno. He is the author or editor of many books, including Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (with John Heath, Free Press, 1998), and The Soul of Battle (Free Press, 1999). In 1992 he was named the most outstanding undergraduate teacher of classics in the nation. John Heath is Associate Professor of Classics at Santa Clara University. His books include Actaeon, the Unmannerly Intruder (Peter Lang 1992) and Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (with Victor Davis Hanson, Free Press 1998).

Bruce S. Thornton is Professor of Classics and Humanities and in the Department of Foreign Languages at California State University in Fresno. Thorntons books include Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality (Westview, 1997), Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge(ISI Books, 1999), The Humanities Handbook (Prentice Hall, 2000), and Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (Encounter, 2000).