Conversation so far:
What did this lead too?
George Steiner was born in 1929.
Who where his parents?
Paris, to Viennese Jewish parents Dr Frederick George Steiner and Mrs Else Steiner (nee Franzos).
WHy was this so terrible?
He has an elder sister, Ruth Lilian, who was born in Vienna in 1922.
What did this mean?
Frederick Steiner was a senior lawyer in the Austrian Central Bank.
WHta did his mother try?
Else Steiner was a Viennese grande dame.
Why was this so bad?
Five years before George Steiner's birth, his father had moved his family from Austria to France to escape the growing threat of Nazism.
What did tis do to his family?
believed that Jews were "endangered guests wherever they went" and equipped his children with languages.
Why was this so bad?
Steiner grew up with three mother tongues: German, English, and French.
What did this mean for them?
his mother was multilingual and would often "begin a sentence in one language and end it in another.
Why was this so bad?
When he was six years old, his father who believed in the importance of classical education taught him to read the Iliad in the original Greek.

Question: What did this do?
Self-contained rewrite: What did learning to read the Iliad in the original Greek do for George Steiner?