Adrian: I appreciate your doubts about the uses that humane education can be put to. The best way to state my view is that a study of humanities might arguably be necessary to the development of a humane point of view, not sufficient for it. That is the strongest argument I can imagine a proponent of humanities could have. I suppose I would stress that looking for validation of political and economic movements in the past is a dishonest activity. I don't respect the practice of using literature like manure to spread over one's politics. However like the past may seem, and however applicable its ideas, the words that express them are frozen and detached from their creators forever -- the problem is that described by Socrates in the _Phaedrus_. Missing is the life which did much to shape their ideas.
The assertion that a work is relevant amounts to nothing more than the assertion that that work (in the speaker's view) validates his preconceptions. Your point about Lucretius is an interesting one, for two reasons. First, I think that he has been getting more (and more serious)attention lately (along with Epicureanism in general, Stoicism, and other "minority" schools of ancient thought). See Martha Nussbaum's _The Therapy of Desire_, e.g. Second, I think that this interest proves that ancient thought can continue to live, not as a means of validating our ways of thinking, but of testing, critiquing and - hopefully - enriching them. Lucretius and the Epicureans do indeed seem to write from a great distance above the frays that Virgil wrote about. But Virgil might have replied that not all of humanity is likely to be enticed into Epicurus's garden. So I don't think that the _Aeneid_ can be ejected from the canon. ............................................................................ .............. "In his reading (a serious pursuit, whether advertising or the Old Testament) he chose, not the disquieting road to serenity, but the serenely narrow path to eventual and total derangement." William Gaddis, _The Recognitions_ -----Original Message----- From: Adrian Nüssel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Thursday, October 21, 1999 2:26 PM Subject: VIRGIL: Re: Classics, the U.S., postmodernism Timothy Mallon's views will hopefully stimulate discussion between memebers of this group not only in the U.S. but also elsewhere. While I personally agree with his first point that Classics can possibly be studied only for their own sake, I have - with all due respect - very strong doubts about his second. The history of Classics in national socialist Germany should be a warning to all of us that reading for literae humaniores does not necessarily make a person humanior, i.e. more humane, or prevents him from subscribing to anti-democratic, racist etc. ideologies. Members of this list might remember that especially Virgil (and the Horace of the political odes) was exploited by philologists and teachers who were, to put it very euphemistically, time-servers if not convinced nazis (Cf. e.g. the still famous Wolfgang Schadewaldt's essay on Virgil, rpt. in his *Hellas und Hesperien* vol 2 (I quote from memory here), on his time-serving Sir H. Lloyd-Jones' obituary on Eduard Fraenkel in Gnomon (1970). While we are on the use and misuse of Virgil in education it occurs to my mind that any exploitation as I sketched above seems quite impossible with, say, Lucretius. Should we perhaps, rewrite our canons, in this respect (please, don't argue against my view that Lucretius is linguistically more difficult than Virgil. I am perfectly aware of this fact.)? ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
