<< message forwarded by listowner>> From: "Timothy Mallon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 08:45:25 PDT
I can't think of what need a liberalistic, capitalist society like the U.S. could get even from Athenian democracy. One could argue, with Nietzsche, that to study Classics is to think against the age, not to find some justification for it in the past. Maybe the only good reason to study the Classics is for their own sake, not for some supposed relevance to the present. Indeed, any study which is granted worth on relevance will someday again be denied it on grounds of irrelevance. One would better make the argument that education in the humanities is valuable simply for encouraging ... humanity. That has nothing to do with any particular politico-economic regime. As for the supposed guilt of postmodernism, I think that is overstated. At any rate, I think it is possible for one and the same person to have a real love of _Gravity's Rainbow_ *and* the works of Virgil. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, &c. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
