Unfairly maligned

I know that classics professors don't have a very hip reputation. Remember the part in "The Sure Thing" when Ione Skye says, "You know what I've always wanted to be?" and John Cusack, responding to her uptight, obsessive-compulsive personality, says, "A classics Professor?"

In two books I've read recently there have been peripheral characters who were classics professors. In Caucasia, the mother's patrician upbringing - upon which she has turned her back - is exemplified by her father. He sounds like he was a fairly nice guy, and it was only after his death that Sandy really rebelled and got involved in the Black Power movement. In A Company of Swans, however, Eva Ibbotson creates a real monster of a father: far more concerned with his position at Cambridge than anything else, he notices his daughter only to worry about how she might disgrace him. He is stuffy, judgmental, bigoted, close-minded; he educates Harriet in Greek and Latin, but will not allow her to go to school (this is at the end of the 19th century).

There are also a number of books in which classics students do bad things - Donna Tartt's The Secret History, Carol Goodman's books, and Pamela Dean's transplantation of the Tam Lin myth into the classics department of a small liberal arts college in Minnesota.

Erich Segal usually has a classicist in his books (he is one, after all), and they are fairly neutral. But I don't think I've come across a piece of literature in which there is a hip, exciting classics professor or student who isn't also a total lunatic.