Classical Torture
For Page Dubois, the ancient world is a pornographic slideshow.

By Christian Kopf, author of The Devil Knows Latin from ISI Books & a professor of classics at University of Colorado at Boulder
June 23-24, 2001

Trojan Horses: Saving the Classics from Conservatives, by Page DuBois (New York University Press, 151 pp., $19.85)

he leftist hegemony in American classics has taken a severe battering recently in books that range from Mary Lefkowitz's devastation of Martin Bernal's Afrocentrism thesis to Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath's passionate j'accuse, Who Killed Homer?

Most hegemons decided that discretion is the better part of valor and, like Joel Chandler Harris's Tar Baby, "dey doan say nuffin'." With Trojan Horses, however, Page DuBois, a professor of classics and cultural studies at the University of California, San Diego, rides out of the west, like Zorro, to rescue the classics. But this Zorro is protecting not the field hands — hard-working students and teachers of Greek and Latin — but the field's evil multiculturalist commandants.

Page DuBois tries to show that conservatives have an "impoverished" vision of the ancient world, "lacking in complexity and nuance." To make this claim against such scholars as Mary Lefkowitz, Victor Davis Hanson, and Donald Kagan, however, is a task for which her flimsy feminist saber is wholly inadequate. She spends all of four pages misrepresenting Who Killed Homer? And she basically admits that Lefkowitz has refuted Bernal's Out of Africa thesis by writing, "Lefkowitz's outrage and insistence on denouncing inaccuracies draw attention away from the real need in American universities, to include the histories of Africa, for instance."

Unable to refute these fine scholars, DuBois spends pages denouncing a PBS series for children, developed from William Bennett's best-selling Book of Virtues. One episode tells of the myth of Daedalus, who had invented a way to fly, and his son, Icarus, who, ignoring his father's advice, flew too near the sun and fell to his death. Bennett uses the story to praise obedience. Why, DuBois asks indignantly, does Bennett omit the story of Pasiphae, the Cretan queen, whose affair with a bull produced the monstrous Minotaur?

Is DuBois seriously suggesting that PBS broadcast a cartoon for children about a woman having sex with a bull? It could be the start of a new feminist curriculum, in the tradition of Clinton's Surgeon General, Joycelyn Elders, who recommended teaching masturbation in elementary school: sex education, myths and literature about sex, and the history of the oppression of sexual minorities. Instead of E. D. Hirsch's core curriculum, feminists could develop a hardcore curriculum.

Its graduates would be ably prepared for DuBois's courses at UCal, San Diego, where she entertains freshmen with slides of Greek vases bearing "images of sexual activity that are still censored or censured in contemporary America." (She does not seem to have spent much time on the Internet.) Warned by the fate of a colleague who had been reprimanded for showing dirty pictures, she once asked students who would be offended to leave. "I waited: no one left. Peer pressure or interest? You be the judge." She then devotes a page to the content of the vases.

Many Americans know that politicized courses fill the pages of university catalogues. They are less aware of the pervasive obscenity, verbal and visual, that accompanies actual university lectures. Occasionally a student complains. There is much ritual breast-beating. The dean had no idea! A letter of apology is penned. ("Dear student, I never dreamed that using the F-word over and over again would offend anyone.") Then the beat goes on.

Only about forty pages of Trojan Horses are devoted to DuBois's shadowboxing with important scholars. Most of the book gives her various takes on sex, democracy, and gods in antiquity, derived from her undergraduate lectures: The ancients were polytheists, while we believe in one god, at most; the Athenians practiced direct democracy, while we have representative democracy; attic comedy contains dirty jokes, while our comedy, well, it does, too. This section may derive less from DuBois's ignorance of popular culture than from her extensive lecture material on sexually explicit vases. It would be a shame to let it go to waste.

Her depiction of the ancient world as a pornographic slideshow is not idiosyncratic, as the puffs on the book's dust jacket show. It is, in fact, the orthodox liberal view, promulgated by New York University Press and stamped with approval by the Dean of the Graduate School at NYU and the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Berkeley.

Incidentally, what does the myth of Daedalus signify? For DuBois the myth raises six questions, none of them the one that occurred to me: Can technology be used safely without maturity and self-control? The "Ode to Man" in Sophocles's Antigone shows that this question troubled the Greeks. For DuBois, however, the myth asks the question, "How is it that most of us have sex only among ourselves, and not with animals?"

A contemporary Doctor Johnson might ask, "Why is it that it's the professors with one-track minds who whelp most loudly about complexity and nuance?"