BRANN IS GOOD FOR YOU:

The latest, Then and Now--a linked pair of essays on Herodotus and conservatism--shows no sign that Brann, nearing her 90th year, is losing it, though it does provide abundant evidence that she still doesn't care very much for modish thought. Indeed, as undergrads, I think we missed the fact that she never really had. Brann is comfortable writing seriously about things like national character, national or ethnic "types," and even the relative greatness of nations. Considering that the consensus of today's universities holds the concept of a "nation" to be a false if not a dangerous category, it's safe to say that Brann's politics are not exactly in the academic mainstream.

Brann's habits of thought are also not in that mainstream, which tends to wash scholars downriver into delta swamps of hyper-specialization. In Brann's essay on Herodotus, one encounters asides on how Fitzgerald cribbed the diction of the story of Kleisthenes for use in The Great Gatsby; the relevance of the Histories to Cavafy's "Waiting for the Barbarians" and to the argument of Federalist 63; and explanatory recourse to Euler diagrams. The cleverness of these leaps of association may remind some readers of other postmodern polymaths like Guy Davenport, though Brann is less ostentatiously pedantic, and working on a somewhat deeper level of analysis.

Also out of the ordinary is Brann's prose. Sometimes the English language fails her--not in the sense that she doesn't know how to use it, but in the sense that the diction and syntax available off the shelf in 2015 can't express exactly the meaning she is after. So we get unconventionally cobbled-together or dismantled words, and sentences that can require attention in order to appreciate their elegance. There is a strong sense of personality here, a "unique voice," to use a non-unique formula, that is forceful, witty, and modest. It can also seem to be, at times--gods of the Great Books, forgive me--a bit flirty. Of the dashing rogue Themistocles, hero of the Battle of Salamis, Brann writes:

So this Athenian Odysseus is like his model not only in being a versatile man "of many turns" ... but also, as the Homeric Odysseus never met a woman he couldn't (and wouldn't) charm, yet was, even in his wanderings, true husband only to one, Penelope, so Themistocles, who could make himself useful anywhere (and did), was a true citizen of Athens to the last.

Hollywood romcoms have been produced on flimsier premises.

Brann suggests that Herodotus was engaged in a self-conscious competition with Homer over whether epic poetry, or a newer form of human inquiry into the past--dubbed "history" by Herodotus--was superior. Herodotus' new genre was more-or-less equal parts travel writing, investigation into what today we would call "historical causes," narrative non-fiction, and anthropology. In Brann's telling, it can sound a great deal like journalism.

What Herodotus' book was not, she argues, was haphazardly cobbled together. Resisting another trend of modern scholarship--the tendency to assume inattention or inadequacy on the part of authors, and to seek philological explanations for difficulties in the text--Brann makes a case for the necessity of Herodotus' extended descriptions of Egypt and Scythia as central to his project: the showing-forth of the greatness of Greece, and especially of Athens, through demonstrating what Greece and Athens are not. Brann, who in her youth at St. John's worked under the influence of Jacob Klein, a friend and peer of Leo Strauss, tends towards the syncretic in her interpretations, which tend to leave the reader feeling inspired and edified at their conclusion. A critic might point out that this sort of thing runs the risk of turning interpretation into poetry.

Follow @brothersjudd