The Nobel Prize in Literature has just been announced for a Canadian poet and philologist, Anne Carson, who for a lifetime has insisted that the world should return, seriously, to reading the classical Greek and Latin authors.

Despite coming in the wake of the summer success of the film about Homer’s hero, this Nobel could not have arrived on more appropriate days than these, to warn us that what is needed are more readings of the Greeks, translations by true philologists, rather than Hollywood spectacles for the masses.

Congratulations to Anne Carson and to all of us who think that it is precisely the abandonment of the ancient classics, the fading of today’s school attention towards the Greeks and the Latins, their myths and their languages, that has made the time in which we live so unserious, and so difficult to live in.