A New Path for Classics

I lead a local library group that is reading Herodotus’s Histories, an ancient Greek account of the Greco-Persian Wars. Last week, one of the members emailed me after he saw the New York Times Magazine profile of the Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta. “So painful to read,” he commented. “There is so much anger about this field of study.”

That message got me thinking about why so many people care so much about what is happening in the field of classics. Among humanities disciplines, classics is probably second only to American history for the size of its nonacademic fanbase. Trade books on Greek and Roman history consistently pepper the lists of major publishing houses. Media outlets cycle through think-pieces comparing this or that modern phenomenon to some aspect of classical antiquity. Was Trump a new Nero? Is the coronavirus pandemic like the plague that killed Pericles?

In the United States, ancient Greece and Rome occupy outsized positions in the national imagination precisely because they have been woven into the fabric of American history. Some, though certainly not all, of the founders were keen readers of classical authors — Thucydides, Xenophon, Cicero, Vergil. Even in his lifetime, George Washington earned comparisons to the Roman farmer-hero Cincinnatus. Early American orators cast the new nation as destined to inherit the mantles of Greece and Rome. Greek Revival architecture was once so popular here that it was known as the “national style.”

From the start, there was also a sinister side to all this adulation of antiquity. Slavery’s defenders cited the pro-slavery thought of the ancient philosophers Aristotle and Seneca. Monuments such as the 1897 Nashville Parthenon were constructed to evoke the Old South as much as ancient Greece. In the 20th century, the classical tradition became oddly bound up in American nationalism and foreign policy. A notional link between modern American and ancient Athenian democracy was used to justify U.S. intervention in the Greek Civil War of 1946-49.

Nevertheless, that tradition can still be invoked to conjure and conflate rosy visions of Greco-Roman antiquity and the early United States. One of Donald Trump’s last executive orders, “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” underscored that Washington and Jefferson “sought to use classical architecture to visually connect our contemporary Republic with the antecedents of democracy in classical antiquity.” The order, which still stands, officially encourages “classical and traditional architecture” for all new federal buildings.

And yet, lately some classicists have been working hard to set the study of classical antiquity on a new path. They have been laboring to apply a more critical lens to the ancient material, and to critique and rethink the institutional structures that shape how that material is studied. Their work has shown, incontrovertibly, how ideas about ancient Greece and Rome have been used to authorize racist and other exclusionary practices and narratives. They are exposing how the academic discipline of classics is both a product of and longtime accomplice in violent societal structures, including white supremacy, colonialism, classism, and misogyny.

There are, of course, some who feel threatened by this kind of work. They see critiques of Greco-Roman antiquity and even of classics’ own disciplinary history as an attack not only on Western civilization but on the United States’ putative leading role in it. (This is no coincidence, given that the notion of Western civilization was itself developed largely by the “New Historians” working at American universities in the aftermath of World War I.) Classical antiquity’s exalted status in nationalist narratives helps to explain why conservative publications love to lament the field’s supposed decline in the hands of liberals.

College “Great Books” courses once told a story that began with Homer and ended with Dante (the case of the sequence I took as an undergraduate), but now many people seem worried that soon the texts of the traditional Western canon will no longer be read at all. On the other hand, at a time when the humanities seem ever more under threat, classicists are struggling to justify the existence of their departments without the aid of the claim that ancient Greece and Rome were the “foundation of Western civilization.” Until very recently, the truth and virtue of that claim, which still lingers in the “about” section of departments and organizations, had gone broadly unchallenged.

So yes, today it can feel like there is “so much anger about this field of study.” There is anger from those who fear that a de-privileging of Greco-Roman antiquity will lead to the decentering of certain identity categories: American, Western, white, male. There is anger from those for whom that decentering is not happening quickly enough. And there is anger from those who are drawn to the study of antiquity but have been hindered by the exclusivist structures of the discipline. In these last two cases, the anger is justified.

But I am also exasperated by the media coverage of this latest chapter in the so-called culture wars. So often that coverage omits to mention all the intellectual innovation and knowledge advancement that is happening these days in and alongside classics. This is especially frustrating because much of it is happening thanks to classicists of color — not because of current disciplinary structures, but despite them. While there are plenty of reasons for anger, there is also cause for hope.

Within the ivory tower, Eos: Africana Receptions of Ancient Greece & Rome and the Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus are two new and thriving scholarly societies. Both have earned official affiliate-group status with the Society for Classical Studies, whose current president, Shelley Haley, is the first Black woman to lead the organization. Outside the tower walls, Luis Alfaro’s Greek Trilogy of plays have been triumphs on the stage. Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey has been a bestseller.

What is more, in turning away from the triumphalist “Western civ” model, a new generation of classicists is becoming better in tune with the world’s shifting realities. For example, the nation of Greece has recently been looking to allies beyond Europe. It is forging new economic and cultural links with China in a partnership based, at least rhetorically, on the idea that nations with ancient pedigrees understand each other. The same general premise also underpins the Ancient Civilizations Forum, a cultural initiative with nine member countries in regions that were “cradles of ancient civilizations.” The forum casts the antiquity as a potential source of soft power for modern nations. This rise of “archaeodiplomacy” in interstate relations is one reason that the study of global antiquities is relevant, even urgent.

The field of classics should evolve to keep up with the world outside the library doors, just as it has done before. In the early 19th century, American intellectuals started preferring Greek to Roman models because they saw the Roman Empire as too closely associated with British colonial rule — a reorientation that set off the American “Greek Revival.” Today, as the United States comes to grips with its own painful history and diminished status in a globalized world, our approach to antiquity should radically shift once again.

This is why I feel invigorated, and not threatened, at the prospect of change for my discipline. It is also why I stand with those who have no more patience for the study of “classics” as a fairytale Western origin story. That paradigm has not even been around for very long, and people will still be reading the Odyssey, Antigone, and the Aeneid long after it’s gone. And so I stand with Dan-el Padilla Peralta and others who would rather see the current incarnation of classics burn than fossilize, and who are eager for a fire that will make way for healthy new growth.

Classicists, after all, are the last ones who should fear ruins.