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E.B. Holtsmark: Thinking about Classics Thinking about Classics Erling B. Holtsmark In thirty-five years of teaching and writing about Classics I have never yet been invited to "write whatever you want" for any publication. It is therefore with great delight that I submit the following thoughts with my accompanying thanks to the editors of this volume for dieir kind solicitation. I begin with Miss [sic] Shade. She was the teacher I had in 1949 in the ninth grade at La Jolla High School, and in her elementary Latin course she was the first to illustrate that there was a life of deep and abiding interest beyond the endless summers of California surfing: she actually taught a subject and expected the students to learn it by doing homework every night—an exciting novelty in what even then was the academic wasteland of American secondary education. Both her seriousness about learning and the nature of Latin itself held enormous appeal for me, and indirectly I owe it to her that I ended up doing what I have done with my life. In the company of the many fine teachers I had in college and graduate school, Miss Shade still stands out in my mind as truly inspiring and exceptional. My enduring interest in Classics has always been the ancient languages themselves, and it wasn't until I started teaching that I branched out, so to speak, into the literatures and cultures. As a student I was both entranced by the detailed rigor of doing Classics and also troubled by its close-endedness. A friend of mine (who switched to English) once said the whole business struck him as an exclusive club oblivious to the outside world and with an impossibly high membership fee. Perhaps there still is a solipsistic unwholesomeness to some quarters of the discipline, a kind of academic narcissism; but surely the great change that has taken place in the study of Classics is its opening up to the larger community. This phenomenon we are all familiar with through the proliferation of sub-disciplines widiin the field and the kinds of courses that are now routinely offered. Classics has democratized itself to an extent unthinkable in the fifties, and in so doing helped to put the lie to that dreadful 2 Syllecta Classica 7 (1996) canard about its essential irrelevance (to the modem world?). Needless to say, however, there is much room for more progress in this direction.1 Desultory reading during just the past few months as of this writing offers perhaps some index to the way in which Classics has worked itself into the public consciousness. For example, in a recent issue of The New York Review ofBooks2 Gore Vidal attempts to place Mark Twain in context as a story-teller and opines that the "Western Storyteller . . . could have evolved from Homer or, later, from the Greek Milesian tales ofrun-on anecdote," and two weeks later the same organ3 has a review of the mushrooming O.J. Simpson meta-literature in which die football star's many honors and honorific medals are compared to "the odes and statues of the ancients." Commentary4 carries a full and laudatory review of Mary Lefkowitz's Not Out ofAfrica: How Afrocentrism Became An Excuse to Teach Myth as History. An essay by Jamie James in The New Yorker,5 coming to grips with the linguistic fecundity of Indonesia's national language used by Pramoedya Ananta Toer in his national epic, The Bum Quartet, contains the following observation: Just as the Homeric dialect helped formalize the concept ofGreekness by welding together the various idioms of the Aegean, Bahasa Indonesia was one of the principal forces that brought about the unity (such as it is) of Indonesia, where more than six hundred languages are still spoken. Currently the number one best-seller on the nonfiction list in America is Bad As I Wanna Be, the 'autobiography' of the theatrical and self-exoticizing Bull's player, Dennis Rodman. A recent reviewer begins his take on the book in the following way:6 If the doings of Achilles had been televised when I was growing up, I might have memorized the Iliad and pursued...

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