Bernard Knox: His like will not be here again

by Carol Van Strum

“Wars and a man I sing…”

— Publius Vergilius Maro, aka Virgil (70-19 B.C.), The Aeneid, opening line. Translated by Robert Fagles, 2006.

An American hero died in July. Sadly, few outside the halls of academe know or care. Whether we care matters little or nothing to him now, but matters a great deal to us.

His name was Bernard Knox. An account of his 95 years on Earth would read like a John Le Carré or Alan Furst thriller: an ordinary young scholar, thrust by wartime exigencies into the world of espionage, secret missions, and unsought heroics, devotes his long post-war life to the equally thrilling — if less harrowing — search for wisdom and solace in accounts of ancient wars and passions.

Knox was born November 24, 1914 in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. While studying classics at St. John’s College, Cambridge, he became horrified by England’s complacent indifference to the spread of fascism throughout Europe. Shortly after graduating in 1936, he joined the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. Wounded and left for dead when a bullet pierced his carotid artery, he somehow survived both his wounds and the amateur care of a young volunteer who learned nursing “from American films.” Eventually, he was shipped back to England for more professional medical treatment. There, in 1939, he married an American, Betty Baur, and moved to the U.S. to teach Latin in a Connecticut private school. Their 67-year marriage ended only with Betty’s death in 2006.

After Pearl Harbor, Knox enlisted in the U.S. Army and volunteered for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which trained him as a parachutist and dropped him into occupied France to teach explosives techniques and coordinate French Resistance and Allied efforts after the Normandy invasion. The OSS later sent him to northern Italy to work with Italian partisans. There, taking a break from his machine gun in a bombed-out, abandoned villa, he idly picked up from the rubble a miraculously intact volume of Virgil’s Georgics (from the Greek, “On Working the Earth”), which fell open in his hands to the prophetic, haunting lines:

a world in ruins…
For right and wrong change places; everywhere
So many wars, so many shapes of crime
Confront us; no due honor attends the plow.
The fields, bereft of tillers, are all unkempt…
…throughout the world
Impious War is raging.

“’A world in ruins,’” Knox wrote in his introduction to Robert Fagles’ translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. “It was an exact description of the Italy we were fighting in….The fighting stopped; it was time to move on. I tried to get the Virgil into my pack, but it was too big, and I threw it back to the cluttered floor. But I remember thinking, ‘If I get out of this alive, I’ll go back to the classics, and Virgil especially.’”

Survive and go back to the classics he did, in high style, receiving his M.A. from Harvard and Ph.D. from Yale. He taught at Yale until 1961, when he was appointed director of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., a post he held until retiring in 1985. His many books, lectures, and essays are a treasure trove of revelations about classical literature and its keen relevance to current issues of public policy and humanity’s place on the planet.

Knox’s 1999 lecture on the competitive spirit, for example, is a masterpiece of historical, literary, and psychological analysis. In it, Knox traces modern wars, capitalism, and the arts back to Hesiod’s mythological daughters of Night: the elder Eris, whom Zeus set “in the roots of the earth” to inspire men to work the soil and create beauty, and the younger Eris, whose “hateful strife… gave birth to painful toil… famine and fearful sorrow, fighting, battle, murder, slaughter, quarrels, lies, disputes, lawlessness and ruin.”

The unresolvable tension between the two Eris sisters — embodiments of “good” and “bad” competitive spirits — was both the triumph and the downfall of ancient Greek civilization. The lesson for Western civilization today is abundantly clear.

Knox was a lifelong, tireless champion of classics studies, particularly the ancient Greeks, who documented and celebrated the earliest known experiment in democracy. Greek democracy, he suggests, engendered the vast flourishing of arts and sciences from which Western civilization arose. The works of what he called “the oldest dead white European males” chronicle not only the triumphs of democracy — sports, art, music, technology, theatre, etc. — but also the weaknesses. Increasingly virulent competition among varied factions, and the tendency of democratic government to attain stability only by “steadily reducing the role of competition in political life,” continue to jeopardize democracy today.

Equally relevant to us was Knox’s life as a teacher, inspiring students to pursue knowledge with a passion and joy equal to his own. “Knox’s exploits were legend at Yale,” a former student recalls, “like how he would sometimes have to drink a bottle of ouzo as a remedy against the malaria he had acquired in Italy, and then proceed to play tug-of-war alone against a host of opponents and win. I remember him talking about being trained in martial arts by the head of the Singapore police, a seraphic white-haired Englishman who would say things like, ‘You’d be surprised how easily an eyeball comes out’ or ‘If a man comes at you, you must first dodge to the left or to the right. Then you must crush his testicles.'”

Such a teacher relived the classics in person for his students. No teachers’ college, education courses or theories can ever reproduce the exuberance and sheer delight such exploits brought to his classes. As the old Celtic saying goes, his like will not be here again. But his writings keep alive a wealth of ancient knowledge and wisdom that we ignore at our peril.

References:

The Oldest Dead White European Males: and Other Reflections on the Classics, by Bernard Knox, 1993.

Always to Be Best: The Competitive Spirit in Ancient Greek Culture, Dr. Bernard Knox, Lecture, University of New Hampshire, Durham, October 13, 1999.

The Aeneid, by Virgil, translated by Robert Fagles, introduction by Bernard Knox, 2006.