The Classics Reclassified

Description

To the delight of everyone who has ever drowsed in school (including not a few teachers), Richard Armour has written this fiendish satire on the classics (otherwise known as old chestnuts), which make up that perennial academic sword of Damocles—the Required Reading List. Describing the infamous list as “better even than artificial respiration for keeping dead authors alive,” Armour retells seven great works, identified (though scarcely recognizable) as The Iliad, Julius Caesar, Ivanhoe, The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Silas Marner, and David Copperfield. He also includes brief - mercifully brief - biographies of the authors, nails down his sources (occasionally hitting his thumb), and tests the reader with some highly useless questions. Here is a fresh, if slightly precarious, slant on such learned matters as the Oral Tradition in Greek poetry, “which finally died out in 329 B.C. during an epidemic of laryngitis,” and the Homeric Cycle, on which the author of The Iliad pedaled around Athens. Armour is equally astute (and irreverent) throughout his entire reclassification of the classics. In tracing the effects of Shakespeare’s boyhood as a butcher’s apprentice, he explains that “all that skewering and hacking was later faithfully reproduced in the fifth act of each of the tragedies.”