A recent bill sponsored in the Utah State legislature (SB 334: Center for Civic Excellence at Utah State University) proposes to create a new center for the institution’s general education that will hire only non-tenured faculty on short-term contracts. The center is aimed at “engaging students in a civil and rigorous intellectual inquiry, across ideological differences with a commitment to intellectual freedom in the pursuit of the truth” – to be achieved through “engagement with foundational primary texts representing “the best of what has been thought and said”.”
Legislating Homer
It sounds fine on the surface, but the devil is in the detail. On an institutional level, this bill will undermine faculty shared governance, and make it near impossible for lecturers in these classes to enjoy the protections of academic freedom traditionally afforded to university educators. -Casualised and short-term contracts for educators will also impact on the quality of learning for students.
This legislation comes with cultural impositions. The bill specifies “primary texts predominantly from Western civilization” and then lists “from figures with lasting literary, philosophical, and historical influence, such as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Lao Tzu, Cicero, Maimonides, Boethius, Shakespeare, Mill, Woolf, and Achebe.” Bare bones of Hellenic, Roman, Judaic, Confucian, and English philosophical traditions. This list is strange: it includes the expected and comically adds a Chinese philosopher, a single woman, and the Nigerian poet and novelist Chinua Achebe. Anyone who has been in a faculty meeting can imagine the tokenising process that generated this list.
This proposal is part of a developing strategy evident in the treatment of Florida’s New College or the founding of Ralston College in Georgia where the Classics and the Western Tradition are offered up as cures for modern ills. The claim of such initiatives is that the close study of the foundational texts of the western tradition give unique access to the truth and provide a special framework for achieving “critical thinking” (a phrase oft used and rarely defined). Such claims speak quietly both to aspirational values and modern prejudices. However, anyone who has been listening to cultural debates around education for the past generation can see them for what they are: a way to exclude the disciplines (and the people) that challenge our assumptions of cultural superiority and force us to contend with the colonial inequities and continuing violence of western imperialism.
Homer and the law, an ancient tradition
Homer’s prominence in this list deserves some attention. Advocates for classical learning like Jeremy Wayne Tate or public figures like Elon Musk have touted the importance of reading Homer for the “west” in recent years. Their public statements, however, often demonstrate that they have not actually read the epics themselves. What makes people want to legislate Homer into the classroom?
There’s something of a traditional relationship between Homeric poetry and quasi-legal power. Many have seen the Homeric epics as laying out institutional frameworks for modern law, as my friend Elton Barker argues in “Entering the Agon: Dissent and Authority in Homer” (2009) or Shulamit Almog explores her The Origins of Law in Homer” (2022). There’s more to this, however: mythical stories about the creation and adoption of the Homeric epics are directly connected to the foundation of states and regimes.
According to Plutarch in his “Life of Lykourgos,” the founder of Spartan institutions, introduced his people to Homer (along with a heavily militarized society dependent on enslaving its neighbors). There is another tradition that the Homeric poems were introduced to Athens by the tyrant Peisistratos (or his son Hipparchus). As Gregory Nagy puts it in “Homeric Questions” (1996), “myths about lawgivers…tend to reconstruct these figures as the originators of the sum total of customary law.” In each case, the poetic authority of Homer is connected to a kind of political power. Lykourgos and Peisistratos are not credited with shaping the poems, necessarily, but instead with preserving them from performers and ensuring they became a part of civic life. Athenian leaders (either Peisistratos or Solon) are also credited with instituting the “Panathenaic rule”, whereby the Iliad and the Odyssey had to be performed in order by rhapsodes (singers of Homeric poetry) taking turns.
Anxiety and Homer in education
Whether or not these foundational narratives are historical, they illustrate a basic connection between epic poetry and political power. Anxiety about controlling this authority appears throughout antiquity, to the medieval and modern world. Byzantines validated new creed of Christianity for a new Rome, by melding Aristotle in their theocracy. Later Frankish/Germanic empires, like that of Charlamagne’s proclaimed to be inheritors of Rome. The radical elites that emerged from the Enlightenment –the French and very bloody Jacobins, saw themselves as the custodians of new Roman Republic. The ancient worlds they all sought, were of their imagination.
Plutarch’s “Life of Solon” records an anecdote of Solon manipulating the text of the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships to argue that the island Salamis belonged to Athens not to their rival Megara. Plato’s Socrates worries in the “Republic” about the danger of letting people hear the story of Achilles’ rage, because then they might think it is ok to be insubordinate to a leader. (Socrates openly complains that most people are too stupid to understand allegory.)
Later authors were less concerned about this danger. As the late Malcolm Heath explores in “Homer in the Theory and Teaching of Rhetoric”, the Homeric poems were favoured by teachers of public speaking (what the Romans called declamation) “as a familiar point of reference, and as a source of illustrative examples drawn from texts whose exemplary status was beyond question.” One could imagine these uses as a kind of Homeric window-dressing, rather than a full-scale engagement with both epics, against the claims of a teacher like the roman Quintilian who claims Homer provides “the model and origin for every type of eloquence”. I think this positioning largely explains Homer’s embrace in the Italian renaissance where Leonardo Bruni describes his poems as a “complete education for life” in his “de Studiis et Litteris”
When modern advocates claim Homer for the classroom, I wonder whose Homer they have in mind. No less a luminary than Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini–later, Pope Pius II–traced beginning education with epic back to ancient authors in his de Liberorum Educatione but warned that “it requires a strong sense of judgment to understand their virtues” (quamvis and intelligendum eorum virtutes opus esset firmiori iudicio).
It wasn’t only the Renaissance scholars who loved Homer, of course. The enlightenment’s Giambattista Vico positioned the Homeric poems at the beginning of the development of sophisticated human knowledge, the source of human society. Friedrich Nietzsche saw this kind of thinking as a kind of projection but started his career as a philologist nonetheless focusing on Homer as a cultural phenomenon. And there’s no shortage of those enamored of Homer for aesthetic reasons. Consider Henry David Thoreau’s comment in his essay “Walking” (1862): “The poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.”
A Trojan Horse?
How does this intellectual history help us understand how Homer ends up on the legislative docket in Utah in 2025? Homer has been positioned as foundational to European identity and education in different forms for two millennia. Part of the allure resides in the connection between Homer and the past and between epic and political power, independent of the content of the poems.
It is the content of the poems, however, that potentially makes Homer dangerous. Anyone who has read Homer knows how easy it is to misread epic, to see the violence as glorified or mistake a heroic Achilles or Odysseus for someone to be emulated rather than a figure to be contemplated and questioned.
A great proportion of Homeric success relies on poetic ambiguity. Epic poetry relies on creating tension in the audience by inviting them (and us) to consider hard questions and problems without answers (like the amnesty at the end of the Odyssey). Like all literature that may indeed produce critical judgments, it creates a dialogue between opposed ideas and provides no simple answers.
Yes, Homeric poetry transmits some of the less positive values of its tradition: from what some have seen as misogyny proto colonialism, to a casualisation of slavery and a destructive engagement with the environment, as outlined by Edith Hall in her recent “Epic of the Earth: Reading Homer’s Iliad in the Fight for a Dying World” (2025). But it also emphasizes the crucially hard work of empathy, the cost of doing violence, and basic rights for all human beings. And, we should never forget, Homeric epic shows how bad leaders bring ruin on their people and how ‘great men’ sow the seeds of their own destruction.
We can cling to the naive hope that Homer’s return to syllabi will function like the horse famously attached to epic: it can be a vessel for smuggling dangerous ideas into a besieged state. But this takes work too. We need the teachers and students to have the freedom to ask hard questions of each other and to use Homer as a mirror for the modern world in its fullness. This means including more than a token of diverse voices on the syllabus. It means ensuring that the people teaching and learning in the classroom reflect the world, not cleansed of complexity, and dangerously simple as some fantasise
*Joel Christensen is a professor of Classical and Early Mediterranean Studies at Brandeis University where he serves as Senior Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs. He has recently published Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things with Yale University Press.
