Attacking (and adoring) the classics

»There has been a good deal of debate in recent years about the Greek and Roman classics and their claim to universality […] even when scholarship has long made it clear that the civilizations that produced them were founded on values and institutions a number of which we find repellent — patriarchy, misogyny, economies based on the labor of enslaved people. […] The fact is that such crises have always been good for the field.«

Taken from Daniel Mendelsohn’s review of Stephanie McCarter’s new translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. More of that here.