Christopher Rush

Content Summary

Heroes of the City of Man addresses eight works of classical Greece, four epics and four dramas: Hesiod’s Theogony, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid; Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, Euripides’ Bacchae, and Aristophanes’ Clouds.  Peter Leithart gives about equal time to all works, since his overarching premise is not to praise one literary form above the other.  Leithart gives each a working subtitle, each designed to highlight what Leithart supposes is that work’s major theme: the Theogony is the “Pagan Genesis,” Iliad is “Fighters Killing, Fighters Killed, Odysseus is the “Son of Pain,” and the Aeneid is “Patria and Pietas.”  Of the dramas, the Eumenides is a tale of “Blessings of Terror,” Sophocles’ first play in the Oedipus trilogy is “Riddles of One and Many,” the Bacchae is “The Contest of Fetters and Thyrsus,” and Aristophanes’ Clouds is about the “Sophist in the City.”

As a college professor, Peter Leithart always has higher and continued education in mind, in not only this but his other works I’ve read and own.  He divides each work into sections, usually along thematic lines that fit with his overarching subtitle for the work, and after each section gives “review questions” and “thought questions,” to help the reader remember and analyze what he or she has just read.  At the end of the book, Leithart has an “Additional Reading” section, a bibliography (not annotated) of recommended works to continue the reader’s analysis of the classical Greek epics and plays.

Author’s Perspective and Purpose

The subtitle is a clear indicator of Leithart’s religious and philosophical perspective in approaching the works he analyzes in his book.  For the better read reader, however, his very title is an initial indicator of his approach: the “city of man” epithet is obviously taken from Augustine’s City of God, a classic work of Christian thought that categorizes much of life as either part of the city of God or the city of Man — Leithart clearly associates the works of ancient Greece as distinct from the “city of God.”  This is not surprising since Homer, Hesiod, and the rest do not claim to know or associate their stories with the monotheistic God of Augustine.  Unlike other critics, however, (and by “other” my experience so far means “almost all”) Leithart does not treat the members outside his particular religious and philosophical framework as deficient, unworthy, or haphazard.  Instead, Leithart has great respect for the originality, skill, tragedy, humanity, and beauty found within the works of the classical pagan Greeks.  Most (for lack of a better word) secular critics I’ve read in my years of study who approach the works of Homer or Virgil seem to find ways to bring up the Bible (usually for no justifiable reason) as a “straw man” to knock down and disparage in an attempt to distract readers from flaws or perceived shortcomings in the hoped-to-be superior non-Biblical works.

Leithart, however, has no problems in approaching and analyzing the ancient works for what they are, not what he hopes them to be.  Certainly his perspective is “biased,” in that he is approaching them from a Christian worldview — not one in which they were constructed; but this does not mean that critics who approach Homer or Hesiod or Aristophanes from a “secular” worldview are not biased — on the contrary, they have their own secular biases, not the least of which is not being a contemporary of the authors, bringing nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first century hermeneutical penchants to the ancient texts.  With the freedom to make no apologies for either what the texts say (or appear to say) or his personal interpretational framework, Leithart does not hesitate to discuss what other critics might timorously deem controversial or ambiguous, such as the moral issues involved with Odysseus’s affairs while claiming to be faithful to his wife.

Critical Response and Evaluation

Leithart’s work has been very influential to me, since, as you know, our classes together often (“always” would be overly generous) focus our analyses of ancient literature from a Christian perspective (which has myriad definitions and sub-interpretations, but a precise designation of what that entails at least at our school is peripheral to the main argument here).  Part of what makes Leithart’s work so useful is that he treats his subjects with overt respect, both analytically and aesthetically.  He is a Christian scholar (not an oxymoron) who noticeably enjoys the works from the “city of man” almost as much as he does from the “city of God.”

It is no accident, either, that Leithart and I appreciate the works from the “city of man,” while approaching them from a Christian perspective.  We both teach at classical schools, which is more than just different curriculum compared to government-mandated knowledge.  He finds great value in the works and ideas of those who believe differently than he does, completely unlike the secular critics I have read who trot in the Bible (or, more accurately, their masqueraded versions of what is supposedly the Bible) to deride and ridicule.  Leithart does none of this, even with passages he does not personally enjoy.  He does not scorn Homer for creating a poem centering on a selfish hero, though he does not hesitate to call Achilles a selfish hero: these are not contradictory statements.

In his introduction, Leithart formulates his reasoning behind his analysis of these classic works in the guise of a response to Tertullian’s question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”  As the renaissance of Classical Christian schooling can attest, quite a lot.  Fortunately, though, unlike many lesser-skilled critics regarding recent pop culture fads (such as Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings movie adaptations), Leithart does not blindly embrace everything about these classics as “close enough to Christian” — Odysseus is not a type of Christ (nor are Harry Potter and Gandalf, despite the claims of recent pseudo-intellectuals) to Leithart.  Even with his admiration and appreciation for the classics, Leithart maintains an appropriate distance from them, as he makes clear in the following paragraph:

Heroes of the City of Man is a book about Athens by an author who resides contentedly in Jerusalem.  One of the foundational assumptions of this study is that there is a profound antithesis, a conflict, a chasm, between Christian faith and all other forms of thought and life.  Though I appreciate the sheer aesthetic attraction of classical poetry and drama, I have no interest in helping construct Athrusalem or Jerens; these hybrids are monstrosities whose walls the church should breach rather than build.  Instead, I have attempted to view Athens from a point securely within the walls of Jerusalem (14).

Part of the utility of Leithart’s work is his synthesis of and expounding upon other key critics.  His analysis of Cedric Whitman’s understanding of the Iliad’s chiastic structure has been helpful to me for years, even before I first read Whitman for myself.  Likewise, Leithart’s analysis of Odysseus’s process of revelation at the close of the Odyssey has been a helpful way to maintain the interest of students as we wrap up the great story.

Some critics might conceive of Leithart’s analysis and categorizing of these classical works as too much Christian revisionism, but they would be mistaken.  I have read other authors who try to imprint Christianity too much onto other works (like Tolkien and Harry Potter as mentioned above), but Leithart does not do that.  He unabashedly analyses these classical works from a Christian perspective, but he does not make of them what they are not.  Instead, he provides an excellent companion to these ancient works for anyone, whether he or she resides in either the city of Man or the city of God.