Why Study the Classics?
The answer is, there's no reason. Why study Achilles and Patroclus, why study David, and Abraham, and Jesus? Why study Walt Whitman?
Those who take time to study the old ways call it "culture." The Italians, including Ludovico Ariosto, called it "humanism." Now we are in the era of "post-Humanism." That's funny. Good luck with that. I support Humanism, but let's rewind. Marcel Proust would say all culture is in search of lost time.
To understand humanity, it's important to comprehend Nature. One of my new favorite writers, Ferdinand Bruntiere, emphasizes that the French Middle Ages (including Rabelais and Moliere) valorized Nature against the sterilized Christian religion of the Middle Ages.
You can compare David and Achilles as primal heroes, but eventually you have to acknowledge the Greeks. They are warriors, they are athletes. When a champion or hero dies, they hold games. Ajax and Odysseus competed for the armor of Achilles. Who is your rival? Do you seek revenge? If so, you have a Greek spirit, as all of us do.
Maybe it's because the Greeks gave us every possible mode of thinking that we possess. Thinking itself is battle, well before Schopenhauer claimed the Will to Live as the spirit of conflict. As my beloved Kenneth Burke wrote, war is a special condition of peace.
Who cares about the fall of Troy? Did you know that when Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, entertains the players, he goes back to Vergil, who goes back to Homer? Why would a poet possibly spend thousands of lines on battles, on the petulant Achilles? What is the difference between tragedy and epic? Nothing.
Gird your loins and go back to the Greeks. The Iliad is better than history. Go to every island in the Aegean Sea. Fly to Ionia, You will discover the fall of Troy. Maybe it is the spirit of battle. Maybe it is the concept of philosophy, developed by Plato in his contest with Homer. Do you contest for the highest place?
The battlefield is endless. Does it matter that Orestes murdered his mother? Who cares about Oedipus and Jocasta? What matters the burial of a hero? Of a brother? Does your town invent a pre-history, even if it didn't have one to start? Warfare is cheap. But can any of us give up the spirit of battle? Where would we be without it?
In my opinion - For depth and dimension; however, many of today’s learners dismiss the classics as irrelevant/inapplicable to their issues/world - it is only when, on the rare occasion, a learned individual is in the right place at the right time to connect the classic to the current social issue that interest is sparked.