History and Politics @ AU

Oxford's Classics program recently proposed removing the study of Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid, according to The Oxford Student. Dr. David West, Assistant Professor of History here at AU, weighs in on this controversial decision:

Oxford's Classics program is apparently planning not to make the study of Homer and Vergil compulsory anymore to... Classics majors.  This means that the History and Political Science majors in my course this spring on Homer's Iliad and Vergil's Aeneid are getting a better education in the Classics than students of Latin and Greek at Oxford will going forward.  Another victory for Ashbrook and Ashland University!  Although students don't read these epics in the Greek or Latin original in this course, they do, nevertheless, read the epics, and engage with foundational ideas about honor, courage, heroism, warfare, political power, the nature and role of divine power in human life, the human passions, and the place of human beings in the cosmos.  Homer and Vergil's poetic exploration of these themes has continuously elicited responses from the greatest minds of the Western tradition, from Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero to Dante, Milton, and Nietzsche.  

Among the opponents of the plan to eliminate the Homer and Vergil requirement in Oxford's Classics program is an undergraduate who, in an interview with The Oxford Student, stated the problem quite eloquently: "Removing Homer and Virgil would be a terrible and fatal mistake. {The proposal} would mean that firstly, Oxford would be producing Classicists who have never read Homer and never read Virgil, who are the central authors of the Classical tradition and most of Classical literature, in one way or another, looks back to Homer and interacts with the Iliad. Removing it would be a shame because Homer has been the foundation of the classical tradition since antiquity and it is impossible to understand what comes after him without studying him first..."

To learn more about AU's History and Political Science program, visit our website.