A Classicist's Works and Days
There is something incongruous about the study of Greek and Latin and the dirty life of the farmer. The former requires pouring over obscure texts with complicated syntax and forgotten vocabulary — the latter hours riding a smoky tractor or shoveling dung out of a barn.
But beyond the modern dichotomy that so separates the world of the academic from the larger muscular one outside, there shouldn't necessarily be a divide in the case of classics. After all, nine out of 10 ancient Greeks were rural people. The majority of them were farmers. And that truth is reflected in many of Homer's similes in his "Iliad" and "Odyssey," Hesiod's "Works and Days," Aristophanes' "Acharnians," or the vast treatises of Theophrastus, where so often Greek thought is expressed through the life of agriculture.
The late David Grene's small memoir (University of Chicago Press, 169 pages, $30) tries to explain how, at least in the case of one exemplary life, farming and classics enhanced each other. At the outset, we should note that this is an atypical autobiography by a distinguished classicist. So there is nothing on the evolution of the field, turf battles won or lost, and books written or not — of the sort that we read in the long lives of a J.K. Dover, E.R. Dodds, or Gilbert Murray.
Other than brief sketches of those who taught the young Grene at Dublin — J.G. Smyly, George Mooney, and Sir Robert Tate—there is little here about the nature of Grene's own research and scholarly interests. There is almost nothing offered about his two wives, children, or family life in general, or the nature of his own intellectual development once he began his long career at the University of Chicago. And Grene was, in modern terms, hardly a successful, or even a typical, farmer. He seems to have lost money raising small herds and flocks, tending to his pasturage, avoiding machines when possible, and lamenting the steady mechanization and corporatization of agriculture while tending the three farms he acquired over his 88 years in both Ireland and Illinois.
Most of the labor, as he describes it, was dirty and back-breaking — and one could argue came at the expense of scholarly publication. Today we associate Grene's legacy with fine translations of the Greek playwrights and a few incisive articles and short books, but not with any magnum opus of classical scholarship, or even doctoral training of the great classicists or shaping of the public intellectuals who passed through Chicago over the more than half century of Grene's tenure there.
There is no index, only a brief bibliography of Grene's work, and a few abbreviated eulogies from his peers and colleagues. Dust jacket blurbs rightly describe the author or the book's contents with words like "quirky," or "idiosyncrasy."
Grene's memoir focuses mostly on his early education in Ireland. There are nice reflections on the nature of his work with animals and his efforts to foster broad general education, especially during the stormy tenure of Robert Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago and the creation of the Committee on Social Thought. There are some good asides on Allan Bloom, Harpo Marx, and others he met — though nothing on Richmond Lattimore, with whom Grene edited the Chicago translations of 5th-century Athenian drama. His worry over the end of shared knowledge of great texts and ideas dovetails neatly with a similar lament of the decline of small farming.
There is a reasonable defense of fox hunting ("Long may it flourish — and I believe it will"), castigation of the Chicago Stock Yards, vignettes about actors and directors that reflect Grene's love of the theater, and a balanced sketch of the great strengths and frailties in the Great Books approach at Chicago. Throughout shines his understated love of America that befriended him at an early age, "After all the years in between, this my beginning sentiment of admiration and awe about America has never entirely faded."
In all this, Grene reminds us of two crucial aspects of modern life exemplified by this rare individual. First is the symbiosis between the life of contemplation and action — and just how it is that hard physical and dirty work offers real value in rediscovering nature, bringing with it a certain pragmatism that permeates reading and thinking: "Small farming as an attractive job depends on the possession of a mind not now common." By the same token, what prevents this labor from devolving into drudgery is often the ability to frame the banal activities of the day into some abstract wisdom of the ages through the reading of the Greeks.
Second, Grene reminds us of what constitutes success in life. It surely wasn't nice homes, large farms, distinguished titles, or top salaries. Indeed, we are told in a fine introduction by Robert Pippin that Grene in his 80s taught for a time without compensation. He surely had the talent (his recall of Greek was phenomenal), common sense, and energy to have been materially successful and well-off had that been his focus.
Rather, as we read here, Grene was more interested in students, and above all in imparting some wisdom gained to others that neither Greek nor farming alone might bequeath, but could in concert.
I confess a prejudice in empathizing with Grene. I have tried to farm and study Greek and Latin for most of my life — albeit in the more brutal world of both California agribusiness and the near open admissions of the California State University system. After rereading this short but memorable autobiography, I realized that it wasn't all as preposterous as it too often seemed. And I thank the late David Grene for explaining why that is so.
Mr. Hanson is a senior fellow in classics at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and the author most recently of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War" (Random House).
