Ilead a local library group that is reading Herodotus’s Histories, an ancient Greek account of the Greco-Persian Wars. Last week, one of the members emailed me after he saw the New York Times Magazine profile of the Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta. “So painful to read,” he commented. “There is so much anger about this field of study.”
That message got me thinking about why so many people care so much about what is happening in the field of classics. Among humanities disciplines, classics is probably second only to American history for the size of its nonacademic fanbase. Trade books on Greek and Roman history consistently pepper the lists of major publishing houses. Media outlets cycle through think-pieces comparing this or that modern phenomenon to some aspect of classical antiquity. Was Trump a new Nero? Is the coronavirus pandemic like the plague that killed Pericles?
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