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This is a thoughtful piece that deserves close reading and consideration from all Classicists. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/magazine/classics-greece-rome-whiteness.html
The subtitle is unfortunately sensationalist; this is the more important quote: 'My only rejoinder is that I’m not interested in demolition for demolition’s sake. I want to build something.'
One thing that really stands out to me is how very American this article, and much of the online debate, is. The European roots of Classics are acknowledged, but not the fact the discipline remains profoundly international.
Classics is older than America, and its current American manifestation is not the only form it can or should take.
As an old discipline often given great authority, Classics will be and has been appealed to by all who seek to validate their perspective, however hateful it may be.
This really only becomes clear when we take a broader view. Classics and race are entangled in America because race is deeply embedded in American culture.
In England, Classics is implicated in debates about class and elitism because class is deeply embedded in English culture.
Feeney in the article is really good here: 'I’m not sure that there is a discipline that is exempt from the fact that it is part of the history of this country.'
So this is where I fundamentally disagree with Ian Morris: 'Classics is a Euro-American foundation myth... Do we really want that sort of thing?'
Classics qua Greek and Latin gives us the tools to confront and understand Greek and Roman texts on their own terms.
Classics qua history and archaeology allow us to understand how people lived and interacted in the Mediterranean from 3000 BC or so down to the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
Greene and Cruz do not wear molon labe masks because they received a thorough education in the Classics. They do it because they're reactionary demagogues clinging to any form of cultural authority they can find.
Honestly, I doubt anything we do inside the academy will ever change things like that. But the fact the Q Shaman had pagan Germanic tattoos doesn't make the University of Leicester axing Old English any more tolerable.
The extent to which Classics is embedded in society speaks to the importance of making it accessible. Maybe some racists will come to the field by way of Thermopylae and remain racist even after they learn to contextualise it.
But others will come by way of Thermopylae and learn the tools to interrogate that myth and understand it on its own terms (Hi!). Classics is only a foundation myth if we teach it as one, or -- worse -- stop teaching it, and leave it to vulgar misappropriation.
If Classics has failed America, America has no less failed Classics by turning the oldest humanistic discipline (if we believe it) into a vehicle for hate. I'm not here to defend the discipline as it is, just say that we do not need to imagine it in such a blinkered way.
Classical learning will survive in some form longer than America does. The decisions we make now, however, will decide whether it does so as the reserve of a few elites, or a democratised and vital discipline.
