Absolutely. The worst effect of all this would be if people thought that the Iliad and other great classical texts were not for them, but for privileged show offs.
The Iliad (and the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Ovid,Horace, Herodotus, Thucydides, Sophocles ...) are not for an elite. They are for all of us.
Nor are they “conservative” texts: they can be read in a radical way. The Iliad can well be read as a depiction of the horrors of war, and of the follies of the so-called great.
Indeed, in the 18C and 19C many working class people fought hard to read, and were inspired by, these great texts, in translation. See Rose: Intellectual Life of the Working Classes.
And if anyone has the chance to appreciate these powerful texts in their original terse and majestic Latin, or conversational and expressive Greek, they should try it. And that chance should be offered to all.
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