Can Classics Be Saved?
Maybe, but doing so is going to require a significant shift in its intellectual focus and priorities.
The discipline of classics is in crisis. Of course, this isn’t much of a surprise, given the dismal state of the humanities in general—which some have referred to as an extinction event—but for those who study ancient Greece and Rome (as well the broader Mediterranean world) the situation is especially dire, as they face either apathy or open hostility from a skeptical public and penny-pinching administrators.
Nor is all of the skepticism coming from outside. As Rachel Poser documents in a recent piece for The New York Times, many within the field--most notably Dan-el Padilla Peralta, the subject of the article--question (rightly), whether classics as a discipline can survive the sort of rigorous self-questioning that it urgently needs. In particular, classics absolutely must contend with the reality that it has often been wielded as a weapon in all sorts of colonial and racist violence, even if that means hastening its demise.
Since reading the article a week ago, I’ve wrestled with its ideas, trying to determine whether my reluctance to accept the end of classics stemmed from a reflexive desire to defend something that I love or whether it emerged from a genuine belief in the value of studying antiquity. Though I’ve come to recognize that there are elements of both, I do think that the classics are worth defending, though doing so requires not only recognizing the discipline’s long-standing complicity in systemic racism and colonialism but also reorienting itself so that it can more convincingly make the case for its continued existence, and sponsorship.
Which is where reception comes in.
For those who aren’t familiar with the parlance of the academy, reception refers to the ways in which the ancient world has been used and referred to in arts, media, and culture. While reception has established itself as a legitimate and well-regarded part of the discipline, some aspects of it--particularly the study of contemporary media such as film, television, popular fiction, and comics--has struggled. I hear from my friends in classics all the time that they have trouble getting their work placed in classics journals and, while there has been some movement in the right direction, as a whole the powers-that-be that control the direction of classics seem quite reluctant to change course, to acknowledge that reception is anything more than a sideshow. To me, this seems like disciplinary suicide
Of course, I’m not the first or the only person to make the claim that classics should focus more on reception. Leah Mitchell and Elie Rubies wrote last year of the need to embrace a modern perspective as a way of combating the ever-present threat of irrelevance that hangs over the head of the discipline like the Sword of Damocles. In a somewhat different vein, the classicist Shadi Bartsch argued recently in The Washington Post in favor of reclaiming the classics from those, like the alt-right, that would seek to use them for their own horrifying political ends. In doing so, she obliquely makes a case for why the study of classical reception is both an academic and a political necessity.
Indeed, antiquity is everywhere you look these days. On the day of the Capitol insurrection, not only were many of the rioters seen sporting various emblems referring to the ancient world (as Bartsch outlines), but Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, in his speech to the gathered Senators that night, referred to the downfall of the Roman Republic and the political violence that brought it to pass. More recently, during former President Trump’s impeachment defense his lawyers offered up a garbled mishmash of references to the governing systems of antiquity. In the realm of popular culture, Netflix released the popular anime Blood of Zeus in 2020, and it has already been renewed for a second season, and films like Gladiator and 300 continue to have cultural cache. And, of course, there are the Wonder Woman films and the recently announced biopic of Cleopatra (both the former and the latter star Gal Gadot).
Clearly, the ancient world is all around us, and classicists are uniquely positioned to provide the context for us to make sense of when, for example, politicians and their acolytes are misrepresenting the ancient past for their own, cynical political ends or the effects that popular media have on our understanding of the ancients and ourselves.
However, it won’t be enough for classics as a discipline to fully embrace the study of contemporary reception. It must do so in a way that is fully accessible to the general public. Again, this might seem like something that should go without saying, but you would be surprised at the reluctance, and sometimes outright resistance, you face when you broach the subject with those still ensconced in the discipline.
Recently, for example, I was part of a discussion among a group of classicists who are, like me, very invested in reception. In part, we talked about the possibility of founding a new journal focused explicitly on the reception of antiquity in contemporary media. While I strongly advocated for the necessity of having such a journal be both open access and geared toward a popular audience, there was significant concern in the group about whether doing so would reduce the journal’s standing in the eyes of the discipline and the academy. In particular, many people were concerned about whether making the journal more accessible to laypeople would mean that it wouldn’t be as convincing to promotion and tenure committees.
Though I was very familiar with this line of argument--I’d heard it before during similar discussions--I still couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Were we seriously considering founding yet another journal that, even if it were open access, would still be so clotted with jargon that the average reader wouldn’t bother reading it? What, I wondered, was the point of all of this if we weren’t doing more to interface with very publics that, in an age in which antiquity is being used to bolster white nationalism and other reactionary political projects, has proven so susceptible to gross misrepresentations of antiquity?
And, of course, there was also the false choice between rigor and accessibility. I’ve seen a similar misstating of the case in my own field of film and media studies (and in other fields as well, such as English and History), where it’s understood that if you’re writing for the public you’re somehow abandoning scholarly rigor in order to achieve some form of cheapened relevance. For some academics, the steps needed to save the discipline from utter irrelevance are not worth taking because they would, in their view, damage the intellectual integrity of the project. Needless to say, I think such arguments are both philosophically wrong and pragmatically foolish; if disciplines like English and Classics want to save themselves from oblivion, then they need to change, and fast.
The advantage of something like reception is that it can help address the very real issues that Classics has with racism and colonialism. What better way to talk about the malicious ways in which antiquity has been used than through reception?
I firmly believe that there is a future for the discipline, but only if those who have the power to change its intellectual investments do so before it’s too late.