Oh, how I wish good ol’ Bucks was still with us to bear witness to this our Hellenistic summer of 2026. He would’ve cackled his ghoulish yap of a guffaw at the very idea of it. Ancient Greece making a comeback amidst the ruins of the modernity he so despised to the bottomless pit of his patrician soul? Surely you must be pulling the rigor mortised tendrility of my long dead leg, his contrarian spirit would be saying.
Not that I remember Bill being a particularly vociferous Grecophile. His leanings were more Roman, Caesarian Rome specifically, the Golden Age of Empire and civilization sowing. He found the cerebrality of the Greeks to be, in the end, tiresome. “Too much fucking navel-gazing!” he was fond of shouting when the club post-dinner discussions veered overly Aristotelian. Bucks was a man of action, of no-nonsense derring-do. While he could talk your ear off with the best of them, he’d do so while sticking you in the ribs with a shiv just to make a point, point being conversationally dependent. Like the treacherous Brutus had done striving Julius wrong.
Still, WFB Jr. would’ve been knocked sideways (if he wasn’t already laid out supine in his mossy grave) at the notion that Homer was the talk of the cinematic blockbuster season. “Surely, you mean that ghastly yellow cartoonish Homer fellow,” I can just hear him sneeringly sniping. Not the Odyssey Homer or the Homer of the Iliad. Surely, not our Homer.
Of course, Bucks, our Bucks, would have no truck or trade with the apparent travesty of this Tinseltown adaptation. I say ‘apparent’ as I myself wouldn’t deign to hand over so much as one lousy drachma to sit through what is quite obviously a “woke” version of the classic tale, our tale. By Zeus’s thunder! Are we to believe that someone of contemporaneous ilk actually made it through the entirety of the manuscript in order commit its sacred words to the vulgarity of celluloid? No, no. Undoubtedly, this was some shoddy undertaking designed to undermine the ancient, universal truths that should be guiding us still to this day. A veritable hit-and-run upon historical orthodoxy.
“Homer was never intended to be read in the first place,” M’lady informs me, her attempt to becalm my bestirred humours lest it provoke my gout. “Let alone taken in like some penny ante zoetrope spectacle. Just like the Bible itself!” she adds. “We are meant to interpret such august information from afar, from a distance. In order that we not make lowly human claims to it.”
Ahhh, M’lady.
Always precise. To the point. Able to cut through the dross.
Woefully incorrect and misguided, but that’s what makes her efforts so adorable. The absolute sincerity with which she travels down these muddled paths of hers. The feminine mind is quite something to quietly (and furtively) behold.
And as my dear departed friend Buckley Jr. would’ve rejoined with his trademark aristocratic dismissiveness, Of course, Homer needs be read. Just not by everyone. Most certainly not the hoi polloi. For it would give them pretensions. An elevated sense of themselves. “They’d become uppity,” I can almost hear him snarl. Yes, yes. Then they start to believe that they belong in our club.
“It is part of our culture!” Williamson-Piggot proclaimed indignantly when news of Hollyweird’s (Ha!) assault perpetrated upon our runic manuscript cut through the centuries’ old rusty haze of the billiards room. Letter writing campaigns were initiated. Our elected officials to be contacted. This was not something that could pass without trenchant comment from we guardians of the West’s artefacts.
“A culture is inherited,” Williamson-Piggot continued, somewhat in his cups, the post-supper brandy swilled back as if he, like Odysseus himself, had been denied the finer things of life for a decade or three. “It cannot be taught. It cannot be interpreted or translated, decoded through the lens of some wild-eyed, post-modernist, Marxist humanity course. Most certainly not oogled and eye-candily fondled over on the big screen of the pornographic moving picture business, I can most assuredly assure you. Culture is bred into the bone. You’re either born with it in your heart and mind or you’re not. If not, stick to your soap opera stories and fake news on the boob tube.”
“The gall of it!” he concluded.
Williamson-Piggot may have been drunk but he wasn’t wrong on this account.
Cultural expropriation (to expropriate WSJ terminology—HA!) cuts both ways. We cannot proudly fly our flag of colonialisation and put on display the bones of your conquered ancestors, you say? Fine. Then leave our ancients alone, in turn. Untouched, unread, collecting dust on the sagging shelves of our unpeopled libraries and the lonely, echoing halls of our educational institutions. Our classics as they were intended: Nobly neglected and Clannishly protected.
