Antiquity is Everywhere--and this Presents Classicists with a Golden Opportunity

The ubiquity of the ancient world in our modern moment gives classicists another opportunity to demonstrate why their expertise matters.

Though I’m not a classicist by training, I’ve long been fascinated by the ancient world. While I was an undergrad, I decided to add classics to my list of majors (bringing the total to three), and it’s a decision that I’ve never regretted. My classics courses were some of the best and most stimulating of my career as an undergraduate, and when I decided to pursue graduate work in film studies, I decided that I was going to write a dissertation on the representation of the ancient world in film. Since I graduated three years ago, I’ve maintained an interest and investment in the discipline, and so I’ve been both heartened and discouraged by recent events and trends.

It’s no secret that the discipline of classics is in something of dire straits. Like many other humanities fields, it struggles to convince the public (and college administrators) of its value in the marketplace, and there are fewer and fewer tenure-track positions for newly-minted PhDs. It’s a rather sad state of affairs for a discipline and field of study that has played such a key role in the American academy (and indeed in American culture as a whole). 

At the same time, the world of antiquity is everywhere around us, appearing in major news stories, Twitter rants, and popular culture. This presents the discipline with an extraordinary opportunity to show why the work they do is valuable and, more to the point, why the public should continue to subsidize those who want to produce knowledge about the cultures and peoples of the ancient world. 

The news that Princeton, home to one of the most prestigious classics programs in the country, would be doing away with its language requirement for its classics majors landed like a bombshell, igniting commentary (and outrage) from The Atlantic and various other (less sophisticated) news outlets. This announcement, coming on the heels of the similarly earth-shattering news that Howard University would be shuttering its department--the last classics department to be found at an HBCU--made many people wonder whether the discipline was headed even more quickly toward extinction, or at least irrelevance, than had previously been thought. 

In the realm of popular culture, we’re seeing a bit of a resurgence of interest in the ancient world. Epix is currently airing a series focused on Livia Drusilla, the wife of the Emperor Augustus, which has been touted as a sort of Game of Thrones of ancient Rome. What’s especially notable about this series, however, is the extent to which it focuses on the experiences of the noblewomen of the ancient world, those who often were the powers behind the throne. Though historical fiction about the ancient world isn’t quite the phenomenon that it was in the early part of the 2010s, there are still quite a few volumes coming out with ancient subjects, including Steven Saylor’s Dominus, the third volume in his multigenerational trilogy on the rise and fall of ancient Rome, the novel Ariadne, about the famous Cretan princess who aided Theseus in his efforts to slay the minotaur, A Thousand Ships, Natalie Haynes retelling of the Trojan War from the perspective of the women, and Pat Barker’s forthcoming The Women of Troy, the follow-up to her bracing, searing novel The Silence of the Girls. 

And, as I sat down to begin work on this edition of Omnivorous, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, went on an extended Twitter rant about the fact that homosexuality has, somehow, made it impossible for men to be “just friends.” The source of his outrage, you ask? Well, it was a short piece in The New Yorker by Daniel Mendelsohn about the Sacred Band of Thebes, an elite group of soldiers composed of male lovers. Whatever Gobry might think, the scholarship is pretty united on this matter, but that didn’t stop him from going on and on about the issue, mischaracterizing what we know about the sexuality of the ancient Greeks to suit his own diatribe about the evils and dangers of homosexuality. One could almost hear the collective intake of outrage as he made the disingenuous (not to mention atrociously incorrect) claim that Roman understandings of sexuality were close enough to Greek for him to cite a scholarly article on the subject.

Clearly, antiquity--and the study of it--is very much part of the zeitgeist, and this presents classicists with yet another chance to convince those outside of their discipline why their work matters and should be accorded value. There are still quite a few challenges standing in the way, of course. It’s tremendously difficult to convince university administrators of the value of any humanities endeavor, let alone that of classics, which has a bit of an image problem. Far too many people view the discipline as either irrelevant or out of touch with the needs of the present (or both). 

If they’re savvy, however, classicists can take this moment of increased visibility and use it to their advantage. They can demonstrate, for example, why it’s so dangerous that someone with Gobry’s social media reach (he currently has over 100 thousand followers on Twitter) peddles a fundamental misunderstanding about the ancients and how they understood same-sex behavior. Likewise, they can take issue with the fetishizing of the ancient languages and the ways that this practice has historically disenfranchised various groups. And, of course, they can show how a classicist, someone trained in the history of ancient Rome and women’s role in it, can allow for a richer, deeper appreciation for the ways that Domina represents them. Some of this work is already being done, of course, both on Twitter and elsewhere, and I definitely salute their efforts. The important thing now, however, is to seize the day and push for more.

I continue to believe in the value of classics as a discipline. Yes, it needs some structural reform, but I think that it has an incredibly valuable, indeed a vital, role to play in our culture and our society. Given that there are far too many on the alt-right who wish to hijack the legacy of the ancient world to suit their own vile, White supremacist purposes, it’s all the more imperative that ethical classicists take the battle to them. They have a vital role to play in the cultural battles to come, and I’m certain they’re more than up to the task.