nowadays even its noblest ideals, the ideals of active citizenship that once so moved Thomas Jefferson, have passed out of fashion. Too stern, too humorless, too redolent of cold showers. Nothing, in our aggressively postmodern age, could be more of a turn-off than the classical. Hero-worshiping the Romans is just so nineteenth century. We have been liberated, as John Updike once put it, “from all those oppressive old Roman values.”
