A passionate reexamination of the ancient world and the lessons we can draw from antiquity
In today’s turbulent cultural moment, it is all too common for conservatives to invoke the wisdom of the ancient Greeks in the name of timeless virtues. At the same time, critics have charged that multiculturalists have hopelessly corrupted the study of antiquity itself, and that the teaching of Classics is dead.
Trojan Horses is Page du Bois’s answer to scholars and theorists—such as Camille Paglia, Allan Bloom, and William Bennett—who have appropriated antiquity in the service of a conservative political agenda. She challenges cultural conservatives’ appeal to the authority of the Classics by revealing their presentation of ancient Greece as simplistic, ahistorical, and irreparably distorted by their politics. In its devastating critique of these pundits, Trojan Horses presents a more complex and more accurate view of ancient Greek politics, sex, and religion. In her incisive examinations of figures such as Daedalus and Artemis, du Bois eloquently conveys their complexity and passion, but also unearths actions and beliefs that do not square so easily with today’s conservative values. As du Bois writes, ‘Like Bennett, I think we should study the past, but not to find nuggets of eternal wisdom. Rather we can comprehend in our history a fuller range of human possibilities, of beginnings, of error, and of difference.’
In these chapters, du Bois offers readers a view of the ancient Greeks that is more nuanced, more subtle, more layered and in every way more historical than the portrait many of today’s scholars strive to display in our classrooms. Sharp, timely, and engaging, Trojan Horses portrays the richness of ancient Greek culture while riding in to rescue the Greeks from the new barbarians.
About the author
Page Du Bois is Professor of Classics and Cultural Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her books include Sappho is Burning, Torture and Truth, and Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women.
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