The heroic Bernard Knox

The great classicist Bernard Knox has died, aged 95. Read an obituary here, which contains this defence of Greco-Western culture and repudiation of multiculturalism:

‘Today our literary curriculum is under attack by educational reformers who... are planning to abolish the cultural tradition on which the West’s sense of its unity and identity is founded. They propose, in the name of multi-culturalism, feminism and political correctness, to replace such patriarchal and racist texts as Homer, the Bible, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe and Flaubert with works that will presumably direct the eyes of the young forward to the new world of universal sister- and brotherhood.’

I strongly recommend Knox’s book, The Heroic Temper, an eminently readable account of the tragic hero in Sophocles, which includes a fascinating theory that suggests the rise and fall of Oedipus is a metaphor for the rise and fall of Athenian empire and society.