The Return?

I mean, turning Odysseus’ return to Ithaca into a Liam Neeson style revenge flick COULD work…

My reading of the classics is concentrated mostly in my teens, twenties, and late forties. I’ve begun to wonder quite a bit about how certain texts fall into and out of circulation over time. In the nineteenth century the Aeneid and the Anabasis seem to have been read nearly as much as Homer, but the latter survives the “de-Classification” of higher education and the former do not. Thucydides was rescued by the political scientists, while it feels that Herodotus is making a slow but unmistakable comeback. It’s obviously no puzzle why we read fewer of the classics than we did in the nineteenth century, but I don’t know why certain texts dropped out rather than others.