These were isolated incidents, however. It was only in 1991, when Lefkowitz was asked to review a volume of Black Athena and some related books in New Republic magazine, that she took the full measure of the “stolen legacy” myth. She also discovered that the myth was being taught as though it were solid fact in the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley .

No one who reads History Lesson could doubt that she abhors racial prejudice. She is also highly sensitive — as her own work on women in ancient Greece demonstrates — to the ways in which traditional scholarship has slighted or neglected disadvantaged groups. (She had incidentally helped to found Wellesley’s Black Studies department, the Africana Studies Department’s predecessor.) In opposing the Afrocentrist version of antiquity, her only concern was that students shouldn’t be taught false history, or at any rate that false history shouldn’t be allowed to go unchallenged. Her review in the New Republic was measured in tone, and she took care to avoid mentioning the ethnicity or racial identity of any of the writers she was discussing.