Rebuilding the Classics

The current crop of professional classicists appears to disagree. In June, a professor of ancient history at the University of West Georgia, Nadya Williams, published an article in Inside Higher Ed comparing my husband, former Princeton classics professor Joshua Katz, to Socrates—and it wasn’t meant as a compliment. Socrates, Williams writes, was a groomer, not a gadfly. He claimed to be punished for his speech, but really, he was punished for his “unethical behavior.” Just as the Athenians correctly judged Socrates’s character, the argument goes, so should Americans judge the character of our public intellectuals.