What Ancient Greek Is Good For

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. Late one night in 1925, a classics professor named Carol Wight came across “one of the most interesting men” he’d ever met. In an Atlantic essay, Wight recalled finding a mechanic reading Thucydides on the grimy floor of his shop, a bare bulb illuminating his page. The worker said that he read the ancient historian “because he makes me think.” As though testing him,…