Notebook February 2019
Naming things as they are
On A. E. Stallings’s new translation of the Works and Days.
In August 2017, during the Charlottesville riots, I was on the Gulf of Corinth for a two-week Ancient Greek seminar with a focus on Hesiod, when the old antagonism between letters and life reared its head again. American academics, musing aloud, wondered why we had chosen Classics over direct engagement: who cares about the minutiae of Dark Age wagon construction now? In Greece the murderously neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, bolstered by the financial and immigration crises, had finished third in the 2015 elections, but commiserations of the Greeks were little comfort. Few of us could recall a time when our own national attempt at Eunomia, good order, seemed so precarious, when the groundwork of achieved civilization felt more like a rug being pulled out from under our feet. (Needless to say, in the interim those anxieties have hardly diminished.)
We might have been...
New to The New Criterion?
Subscribe for one year to receive ten print issues, and gain immediate access to our online archive spanning more than four decades of art and cultural criticism.
Subscribe