IN 1998, classicists Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath published a book with the provocative title Who Killed Homer? in which they argued that professional classicists
themselves were responsible for “the demise of classical learning.”
They claimed that the profession had

ceded the place of the classics at the center of Western civilization and failed to maintain the relevance of the classics, and in particular the “wisdom of the Greeks,” in contemporary American society. In the view of Hanson and Heath, the classics had fallen victim to a

combination of professionalism and postmodernism, diluted and distorted with feminist and queer theory (among other things) and shortchanged by the careerism of classics professors.
In the process, they argued, we had lost “Classical learning and the Classical spirit as an

antidote to the toxin of popular culture” and as moral ballast against “the rise of almost everything antithetical
to Greek ideas and values,” such as “the search for material and sensual gratification in place of spiritual growth and sacrifice”

and “a complete surrender to the present”
-- Rob Hardy