After the humanists, the study of antiquity shrank and crystallized into the discipline now called Classics. Latin and Greek remained the primary media of education and scholarship until the eighteenth century. A modern genius like Isaac Newton felt it most appropriate to write his magnum opus, Principia Mathematica (1687), in Latin. By the later eighteenth century, though, when the mastery of ancient languages retreated from its place at the center of intellectual life, scholars of Greek and Latin had to find a new and distinct role for themselves.
They redefined the field of Classics by making the languages, literatures, and cultures of Greece and Rome the primary object of study just as Angelo Poliziano had done. No longer did the classical languages serve as the prerequisite for entering the world of affairs. An education in Classics came to mean understanding the canonical writers thoroughly, not the use of ancient texts to address issues that matter in the world at large.
Although the territory of classical antiquity is theoretically vast, the literary canon makes the field quite small in practice. Classics scholars focus overwhelmingly on a handful of canonical authors—shelf upon shelf of scholarly books and articles explore all the minutiae of Homer and Vergil while secondary writers such as Nonnos and Persius get little attention. This imbalance characterizes a field more concerned with literary reputation than with pressing out into the world on as broad a front as possible in the thirst for discoveries. In this environment, writers become important, not just because their work is great, but especially because they influenced other great writers. One reads Homer because he influenced Vergil, and one reads Vergil because he influenced Dante, and so on.
Writers who didn’t influence others receive much less attention. Yet their work is just as capable of sparking our imagination as any other. Why do we feed our imaginations on such a narrow diet?
The Future of Reading 