Customer Reviews

Trojan Horses: Saving the Classics from Conservatives

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Beautiful-looking book. Nice broad margins, nice clear font. Nice narrow lines, and not too many of them. Not too many pages, either...

Wait a minute. I estimate 250-300 words per page x 140 pages. That's something like 40,000 words, tops. Put 12 words on a line and 36 lines on a page (neither of which would be at all unusual) and this book would stretch to all of 90 pages!

I know how important it is for academics to publish, but in this case I really think Page Dubois should have held back - maybe until she'd written a whole book.

Although we are given to believe that DuBois is mightily upset over those darn conservatives and their dastardly plans (plans which she is both oddly reluctant to describe and/or believes her readers already know about - bad call) for the Classics, by the end of this book, the reader wonders what the fuss is all about. I learned nothing in this book that was either shocking or a surprise. The Greeks enjoyed man-boy love? Women didn't have the same rights as men? (Yet DuBois patently ignores the broad power they held in the domestic arena, which is inexcusable and anti-woman.) Sappho liked women? I already knew all of this through reading the source texts. Finally, DuBois looks absurd through her assertion that Allan Bloom and William Bennett are threats to the Classics or Western Culture. The works she cites are up to 14 years old and nearly forgotten. Much as _Trojan Horses_ will be.

This book is crucial reading for anyone interested in the political uses of the classics and their enduring relevance to the present. In marked contrast to recent conservative treatments of the classical world, DuBois restores antiquity to its challenging strangeness, its enduring multiplicity of meanings. Filled with fascinating and often unsettling mythical examples, powerfully and clearly written, this book brings the classics back to life. It will be of interest to anyone interested in classical mythology, and/or the contemporary culture wars.

I read this book in two spell-bound sittings. A thoroughly enjoyable and exciting book, I recommend it to anyone interested in contemporary culture. You don't have to be a classist to get something out of it. Page Dubois, in a wonderfully generous voice, explains why we should care about the endless rants of neocons who misread the classics to serve their own limited worldview. And yet this is a book that does more than merely "respond" to a bunch of tired conservative ideologues, some now dead, or simply chime in on debates on multiculturalism that have come to seem dated. In Trojan Horses, Page Dubois shows us how the ancient world was too complex and dynamic to be reduced to cliche. This is a book full of passion and love for history, literature, and culture written by a scholar at the top of her game.

Page duBois is the warrior goddess of classical scholars. In Trojan Horses, she does battle with conservative commentators who distort and delimit the ancient world in the name of "traditional values" and morality. As against the conservative version of classical culture, duBois reconstructs the sexual, religious, and ethical complexity of the ancient world. All of this she does in elegant, wonderfully inviting prose.
Let duBois guide you through the ancient world. It's a brilliant, beautiful trip.

Trojan Horses is a great read and should stir things up a bit. Ms. duBois has returned the discipline of classics to the modern world and its debates. Her history neatly shows how a long running bias in field of classics has hijacked the study of these important books and this history in order, in the long run, to serve a conservative agenda, which was once complicitous with the justification of slavery and racism and which is now ballyhooing our own social and economic horrors. It's nice to see someone turn the tables on all those self-satisfied conservative commentators who still believe in the myth of disinterested disciplines, and show it just ain't so. In a very real sense, her book liberates these ancient texts and this past from the dominion of all those musty minded classicists who spend far too much time in denial. Ms duBois is a voice of sanity speaking for those of us, (classicists and otherwise), who really like these books and respect the complexity of history. Anyone interested in classics, the study of the ancient world, or the politics inherent within any academic discipline will appreciate this work.