in fact—before he explained himself.) No: it wasn’t that I was gay. I simply felt that everything about me was hopelessly mushy and imprecise, doomed to fail the x is x test. I didn’t even know what x was—didn’t know what I was or what I wanted, couldn’t account for the turbulent feelings, the heated enthusiasms and clotted fears to which I was prone. And so I hid—from many things, but above all from him, who knew so clearly what was what.
This was the reason, at least on my part, for the long period of quiet between us. What his reasons might be, I never asked.
My resentment of my father’s hardness, of his insistence that difficulty was a hallmark of quality, that pleasure was suspect and toil was worthy, strikes me as ironic now, since I suspect it was those very qualities that attracted me to the study of the Classics in the first place. Even when I was fairly young and first absorbed in books of Greek and Roman myths, I had an idea that beneath the flesh of the lush tales I was reading, with their lascivious couplings and unexpected transformations, there was a hard skeleton that represented some quality fundamental to both the culture that produced the myths and the study of that culture. When I was fourteen, my high-school English teacher instructed us to memorize a passage from a play. Among the austere boxed sets of books on the bookshelves downstairs near the black-upholstered oak rocking chair in which my father liked to read was one called The Complete Greek Tragedies; most of the others were collections of papers about mathematics. I opened one of the volumes in the four-volume set at random and read a speech that turned out to be from Sophocles’ Antigone, a play about a conflict between a headstrong young woman and her uncle, the king, who has issued a harsh new edict that she intends to defy. The speech to which I had randomly turned was one in which Antigone protests that the laws that she obeys are not those made by mortals but the eternal laws of the gods; she declares that she will follow those divine laws even though it means her death. “For me it was not Zeus who made that order, / nor did that Justice who dwells with the gods below / mark out such laws to stand among mankind.” When I read those words, I remember thinking that here at last was the bone beneath the flesh: a play in which x was x, a drama whose action revolves around stark choices between which there was no middle ground. Nothing soft here. When, a few years later, I began to study Greek, I found an equally satisfying flintiness not only in the myths or dramas themselves but in their own bones, the language itself: a syntax that was as stark as Antigone’s choices, that allowed for no messiness or approximation. The paradigms of nouns and adjectives that ran across the pages of the slim black textbook we used in Greek 101 were as crisp and unforgiving as theorems.
Much later I was pleased to learn that my instinct about the “hardness” of Classics itself had been right. The discipline traces its roots back to the late eighteenth century, when a German scholar named Friedrich August Wolf decided that the interpretation of literary texts—an undertaking that many people, among them my father, casually think of as subjective, impressionistic, a matter of opinion—should, in fact, be treated as a rigorous branch of science. For Wolf, many of the theories about education that were circulating at the time were deplorably sentimental and soft—for instance, those being promoted by John Locke in England and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France, which emphasized the practical aims of education, its role in preparing students for “real life.” What, these philosophers were wondering, could studying the ancient classics possibly teach students in the present day? Locke, like many parents today, derisively wondered why a working person would need to know Latin. Wolf’s answer was, Human nature. For him, the object of his new literary “science”—“philology,” from the Greek for “love of language”—was nothing less than a means to a profound understanding of the “intellectual, sensual, and moral powers of man.” But to study the ancient texts and cultures properly, one had to approach them as scientifically as one did when studying the physical universe. As with mathematics or physics, Wolf argued, meaningful study of classical civilization could arise only from mastery of many essential and interlinked disciplines: immersion not only in Ancient Greek and Latin (and, often, in Hebrew and Sanskrit), in their vocabularies and grammars and syntaxes and prosody, but in the history, religion, philosophy, and art of the cultures that spoke and wrote those languages. To this immersion, he went on, there had to be added the mastery of specialized skills, such as those needed to decipher ancient papyri, manuscripts, and inscriptions, such mastery being as necessary, ultimately, to the study of ancient literature as the mastery of plane and solid geometry, of arithmetic and algebra, and, indeed, of calculus is to proper study of the field we call mathematics.
And so classical philology was born. When I learned about this in graduate school, I shared it with my father. He winced and shook his head and said, Only science is science.
The silence between my father and me started to thaw when I began my graduate study in Classics, when I was twenty-six. Yes, only science was science; but as time went by, it was as if the arduousness of the course of study to which I was devoting myself were eroding his resistance. Whatever he might think of the mushy, subjective business of literary interpretation, he had a grim respect for the classical languages themselves, their grammars as impervious to emotion or subjectivity as any mathematical proof; through mastering them, I had become worthier in his eyes. He started to ask me, with real interest, about the progress of my studies, about what I was reading and how the seminars were conducted. It was at this time, in fact, that he reminisced about his own Latin studies so many years before and shared with me the story of how he’d read Ovid in high school but quit before he’d been able to read Virgil.
During my first year of graduate school I took a seminar on the Aeneid. My father asked me to xerox some pages from Book 2 and send them to him; he wanted to have a go at them, he said. Now as it happens Book 2 is the part of the epic in which the Fall of Troy is recounted in harrowing detail: the awful climax to which the Iliad and Odyssey allude but never fully describe, the one peering into the future toward the devastating event, the other gazing backward at it. It is Virgil, the Roman, who gives us the whole story at last: the Greeks hidden within the gigantic Trojan Horse, which the Trojans have taken inside their city’s walls; then the ambush in the dark, the smoke from the burning city, the panic and the flames; the image of the headless trunk of the murdered Trojan king, Priam, a pitiable old man, the quintessential epic father, who is slain before the altar at which he desperately prays for the safety of his city by Neoptolemus, the son of the now-dead Achilles—a youth who, by killing the elderly king, seeks to outdo his own father in cruel bravery. My father wanted to see some pages from Book 2 because, he said, he was curious to know whether he’d be able to follow the Latin. But too much time had passed since those days decades earlier when he had read Oh-vid so fluently.
It’s no good, he told me over the phone one night, with that tight rueful tone he could sometimes have, a tone of voice that was the vocal equivalent of someone frowning and waving a hand dismissively, as if to say, Why bother?
It’s no use. I’m just no good at this anymore, he said after he’d had a go at Priam and Neoptolemus. It’s too late.
Oh, well, I said. It was so long ago. Nobody could remember all that.
To which my father replied, It’s okay. Now you’ll read it for me.
A sweet comment. Although my father was hard, was tough, every now and then he would say things or let slip a remark that was so unexpectedly tender or generous or poetic that you’d be confounded—would find yourself in a state of what Greeks called aporia, “helplessness.” (The word literally means “without a path”; “a feeling of being stranded” would be one way of translating it.) But then, this was the parent who, for all his hardness, despite the severity that had etched itself into his very flesh—the stern horizontal lines running across his forehead like the rulings of the black-and-white-marbled composition books we dutifully took notes in, the sunken vertical planes of his cheeks beneath the ridged cheekbones and the high symmetrical arcs of his eye sockets shadowing the spheres beneath like illustrations in a geometry textbook—had somehow acquired the comically incongruous nickname “Daddy
