When There Were Giants: Three Great Classicists

Classics is not just an abstraction of values, legacies, literature, and history. Whether it comes alive or stays moribund in the modern age hinges on the success or failure of classicists in the classroom, in public fora, and in print. In that context, classics has suffered a great loss this year, with the death of three quite different but equally gifted and dedicated classicists. The Yale historian of Greece Donald Kagan died in early August, and he leaves an enormous void that will be impossible to fill. A number of obituaries by scholars and former students have surveyed his magnificent life. A few journalists have added occasional epithets such as “neoconservative”—an odd sobriquet when it is hard to detect any contemporary ideological bias in his signature four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War and other works.