It feels like something really weird happened at least to classics scholarship around 1920 or so. It went from high-quality-but-stodgy-puritanical-Victorian to pathetic-and-almost-willfully-blind within a few years. Maybe mass media turned everything stupid around then. Maybe the loss of a generation of young men was too great a blow for scholarship to survive. Maybe the Iliad's psychic pull is fading as we enter a new age. Maybe it's just my personal prejudice! But in any case, I'm with you, this stuff is only really accessible if A) you learn Greek or B) you learn Victorian English; and neither of those are very easy...
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2025-04-06 03:43 pm (UTC)It feels like something really weird happened at least to classics scholarship around 1920 or so. It went from high-quality-but-stodgy-puritanical-Victorian to pathetic-and-almost-willfully-blind within a few years. Maybe mass media turned everything stupid around then. Maybe the loss of a generation of young men was too great a blow for scholarship to survive. Maybe the Iliad's psychic pull is fading as we enter a new age. Maybe it's just my personal prejudice! But in any case, I'm with you, this stuff is only really accessible if A) you learn Greek or B) you learn Victorian English; and neither of those are very easy...