If the humanities were not in crisis, threatened from within and without, they would scarcely be the humanities as we have known them since the days of Socrates’ Thinkery. This is perhaps too often forgotten in our anxious educational debates. Even so, there is a case for supposing that the late twentieth century is an exceptionally dangerous time for them, and particularly for the Greco-Roman classics that have long been at their core. A pen-stroke by a radically indoctrinated or financially strapped college administration is all that is needed to wipe out a department of classics, and in fact, within the last year, news has come in that some fifty such departments in this country are under threat of extinction. Clearly the time has come for our society to consider very carefully what classical literature is, and how its study can be justified. Neither question is easily answered; but in two new works, The Norton Book of Classical Literature and The Oldest Dead White European Males, Bernard Knox has heroically confronted both.

The Norton book presents, in translation, specimens of the Greek and Latin authors from Homer to St. Augustine; the specimens are preceded by a literary-historical introduction and are interspersed with Knox’s comments and (for the longer books) summaries of omitted matter.¹ Between them the introduction, the specimens, and the comments give a fair idea of the general course of classical literary history. Yet how far a reader (especially a reader coming new to