Just what is this classical patrimony received by the inhabitants of North America and consciously cherished well into the twentieth century? To Europeans living west of the Elbe or south of the Danube, the remains of classical civilization are visible still: intelligent observes are aware of a continuity extending over many generations. For that matter, Roman ruins survive from the Atlantic shore of the Iberian peninsula all the way to the Euphrates, or from Scotland to Morocco. People who speak Romance languages cannot be altogether unaware of the Roman past, nor can Greeks forget their distant cultural ancestors.  But in North America, neither monuments of antiquity nor the roots of language can evoke memories of civilizations broken, yet somehow working through us in a ghostly fashion. Nevertheless, we pay public homage to long-dead Greeks and Romans. Why is the public architecture of our national capital still dominated by classical columns and domes? Why do we still pay some lip-service to the disciplines of the humanities, the sources of which may be traced back to Greece six centuries before Christ? [Read more...]