A very long piece in New York Times Magazine, He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive? – Dan-el Padilla Peralta thinks classicists should knock ancient Greece and Rome off their pedestal — even if that means destroying their discipline. There is obviously some self-interestedness from those who would defend Classics when they are Classicists. Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel, both of whom I respect, don’t think much of the field (though both have some association with it).
I feel the piece tried to break it down into a binary when the reality is more complex.
My own comment would be to repeat Terrence:
“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”
“I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me”
Personally, I tend to think that shifting away from the Classics would be to surrender them entirely to those who would use them for propaganda purposes. I doubt it would “work” in the sense folks like Peralta think either – most historians long ago abandoned military historian to popular writers and folks in the military academies, and yet it is still as popular as ever.
Although this bit from the piece does not reflect well on Peralta-
“When evening h”as come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them.”
doesn’t matter if a classics dept exists or not. the quality of the ancients is manifest in who they were, not the instrumental value they provide in the present.
“I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.”
I wonder what the reasoning for that position is supposed to be. It’s one thing to criticize the uses the “classical heritage” has historically been put to by imperialists, Nazis, fascists etc., but at its core “classics” simply means the study of ancient Greek and Latin literature (something which can hardly be replaced by some more general field like “Ancient Mediterranean studies”). Does Scheidel really believe that the entire field is so irredeemably tainted by “white supremacy” (even something like a commentary on Lucretius or some other author which can’t be easily read as a celebration of empire) that it just needs to be completely demolished? Or does he simply object to studying these texts as literature (instead of just mining them as quarries for facts to be used by ancient historians like himself)? In either case I find his “shouldn’t exist as an academic field” baffling and quite nihilistic.
i got the *feeling* that the author really wanted to create a division btwn two sides. this is a long piece over a year in the works. how much stuff was put on the “cutting room floor”?
“i got the *feeling* that the author really wanted to create a division btwn two sides.”
Yeah, those snippets by Morris and Scheidel are really hard to interpret without the full context. Have to say though I find them pretty shocking if their gist is represented accurately. The way it’s represented in the NYT article there doesn’t really seem to be a distinction between some of the dubious uses of classical literature in the past (e.g. celebration of empire, or opposition of “Aryan” Greeks and Romans to “Semites”, a triumphalist narrative of “Western civilization”) and the study of the texts themselves.
fwiw, scheidel RTed that piece positive. so idk
The article brought me to the brink of despair, until I saw the comments.
Normally, the readers’ and editors’ picks in The NY Times comments section are a pathetic reductio ad marginalissimum, as commenters attempt to outflank each other further and further to the left, always prefacing their remarks with an appeal to the most minoritized aspect of their identity.
In this case, even the most obscure “As a ___” writers were universally against Padilla’s sophomoric, self-serving nihilism. Only the author of the article, the aptly named Rachel Poser, failed to get the joke.
The “I think” in the Terrence quote is not in the Latin.
I read the comments and the people there are 100% against what this not smart person is offering. But as a European, I’m more interested in what teachers think about it in general,are they don’t understand that this nonsense about racial theories has gone too far? Don’t they think that it was because of such idiots that Trump came to power? They play with fire. I believe that adequate Americans need to ensure that critical racial theory is banned on the legislative level, or by a Supreme Court decision.
Did these classicists just ignore the Classical appropriation by Hitler and the Nazis as not a big problem then? Yet a few random yokels and altrighters start putting Roman symbols on a flag and suddenly they’re ready to put the entire field of study in the bin. This is what happens when academia is full of the best careerists, rather than people who really love their topic of interest. These people simply see another trending careerist move opportunity, it’s how they operate.
Padilla-Peralta has been at this for years now, and has sympathetic followers at higher ed reporting sites like CHE and IHE along with powerful allies, including the founder of Eidolon and Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, Donna (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Zuckerberg). Whatever comes of this, it does not really matter in the long-term: Homer, Ovid, Virgil, Socrates, and Marcus Aurelius are still there, genuinely gifted and talented people and students will still find them and discover their insights, while the academy continues to descend into parochial concerns aimed at flattering the anxieties and neuroses of tenured professors at Princeton and Harvard and the wealthy people who send their kids there as a rubber-stamp for $200k salary jobs in consulting or finance, hoping that they don’t pick up any whiteness along the way.
The ancient Greek states and the Roman Republic and Empire do not even fulfill the racial expectations of the Nordicists who appropriate their legacy. They were Mediterranean-based states which increasingly became more mixed in blood as they expanded in different territories and incorporated and assimilated different peoples as ancient DNA studies also point to. Italy became significantly more genetically West Asian-admixed during the Roman Imperial period as it received more immigrants from the West Asian and adjacent European territories. Greece itself became more West Asian-admixed than before during the Hellenistic era and later periods with increasing migrations from West Asia, which would only be reversed to some extent with the medieval Slavic invasions. And much more importantly, neither Greece nor Italy were ever territories with early Indo-European- or modern Northern/Central European-like genetics. It is no wonder that Nordicists increasingly distance themselves from the ancient Greek and Roman legacies and focus on their own Northern/Central European legacies as they are informed by the ancient DNA results. The ancient Greek and Roman societies, with their Mediterranean appearance, their lack of skin color or racial-based hierarchy and slavery, and their increasing mixing, certainly do not fulfill the Nordicist dreams, but they do not fulfill the dreams of globalists and Afrocentrists either as they never received any immigration of note from the Sub-Saharan African regions or from the far corners of Asia (Huns never settled in the Roman lands in big numbers, and they were invaders anyway).
Onur’s take is the correct one of course. The ancients had no concept of “whiteness” as we understood it. If you hold race is a social construct, then I think it’s completely uncontroversial to make a statement like “Marcus Aurelius was not white.” Beginning in the renaissance – and particularly in the 19th century – a lot of baggage was attached to classics, but any good modern scholar should be able to give readers and students a more accurate representation within the actual historic context than was done in the past. Or at least, if not accurate, more “correct.”
I think there is something to be said for the idea that classics should be more multicultural – that at least for comparative reasons students studying ancient Greece and Rome should also have to read text from the ancient near east, South Asia, and China. They might not be “our” classics, but they are classics nonetheless, and help elucidate what is timeless and universal in human nature, and what is merely contingent. But there are unfortunately not many examples from what would be called the “global south” due to lack of written records, which would mean the field would still be somewhat “problematic.”
@Karl Zimmerman
Yes, the concept of whiteness was alien to the ancients, so saying Marcus Aurelius was white or not would be out of context. I would not ascribe the beginning of the concept of whiteness to the Renaissance though, it only truly appeared with the European colonization and the racialized slavery it triggered. The world of the Renaissance was still pre-modern in many ways.
The field of classics should indeed be open to contributions from other classical literary fields, this is for the benefit of the field of classics itself. Do not know what exactly you mean by “Global South,” you mean the lands south of the parallels of South Asia and the Horn of Africa? If so, well, there is some pre-colonial written literature from those lands as well.
https://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/120271255985/historical-domain-of-the-perso-arabic-script-via
“The field of classics should indeed be open to contributions from other classical literary fields”
Why? Are Sinologists or Indologists also expected to integrate Greek epics or Norse sagas and Old English poetry into their fields? Ok, a case can be made that it’s fruitful to explore the connections and interactions between Greco-Roman antiquity and other Old World cultures (e.g. it has been suggested that the Gilgamesh epic and other Near Eastern texts had an influence on Homer’s epics, and no doubt the Greeks borrowed a lot from the ancient Near East, maybe India too). But I get the impression such scholarly striving for knowledge isn’t at all what’s behind such calls to “broaden” the discipline. The real background seems to be the multiculturalization of the US through immigration of people who have little connection to the traditional cultural canon, so there are all those calls to make it more “inclusive”, so everybody can bask in some ancestral glory or whatever. Just shows again that in a multiethnic and multicultural polity everything is subject to a demographic head count, even academia.
@German_reader
Yes, I said it for comparative purposes only. I agree with you that an academic field should not be shaped according to the demographic or political trends, or whims of politicians or academics.
@ Onur
I was not claiming that the “baggage” attached to classics in the renaissance was whiteness. The baggage is the formation of the idea of “the West” as a coherent concept which was in some sense the heirs of Greece and Rome (which arguably began with Petrarch). Not to be self-evident, but if you’re talking about Northern Europe in particular, there are neither ties of blood, language, or religion which tie them to Greco-Roman antiquity. One could argue that northern Europe embracing the concept that they were in some sense the heirs of Rome was a form of cultural appropriation – if you believe cultural appropriation is a valid concept (I do not).
Humans are fundamentally storytellers however, and in a certain sense there is nothing more powerful in human history than a narrative which is reinforced over centuries. Though in the Middle Ages the Islamic world had about as much claim to have inherited the legacy of classical antiquity as the west, over time the revival of classics ensured continued cultural relevance, and even recontextualizations now centuries old themselves (like Shakespeare’s many classicist plays). Essentially, we stared at the texts, and the texts stared back.
Concerning the USA and its cultural heritage, my take, as an outsider, is clear: as a state founded on a British colony by British colonists with a British language and culture, it should always preserve its British cultural and historical heritage regardless of the demographic or political currents. Deviation from that practice ought to be deemed an anomaly or barbarism and should never be normalized. Latin American countries should do the same for their Iberian cultural and historical heritage. All these countries are multiethnic and multicultural, but each one should have one common dominant culture, which should be in accordance with their foundations.
The real issue is that Classical Studies are dying.* The humanities in general have been bleeding students, and the classics as much or more than any of them. The cause is the soaring expense of college.
Every turn of the screw makes it harder for students and their parents to contemplate spending time on studies that are merely interesting as opposed to those that will lead to remunerative careers.
Further the quality of secondary school education in the US was never very good. American grads of even the best high schools were always far behind the graduates of lycees, gymnasiums, and public schools on the other side of the Atlantic. The last few decades have been devoted to unionization, political correctness, and psychodrama in American Secondary schools. The schools are staffed by graduates of the colleges of education who have no substantive knowledge of anything. The share their ignorance with their bored and distracted students who dream only of growing up to be internet influencers, and who want to go to college to engage in binge drinking and fornication.
The humanities faculties are frantic to find some way to attract students. Many of them are convinced that political agitation is the way to the student heart. Classics is too hard for modern American students, they won’t put out the effort. Thus the politics. Why memorize conjugations when you can sit around and bull—- about how the man is keeping you down.
Ten years ago my children were studying at a very highly ranked university in a major Midwestern metropolitan area. I saw some discussion of merging the Classics programs with those of a couple neighboring Catholic colleges.
@Karl
Still, the West (or whatever it was then called) as understood during the Renaissance was Catholic and later Catholic and Protestant Europe; the Orthodox world was outside the area of influence of the Renaissance except through some minor influences in Russia. Funnily, before the Renaissance, the Catholic world had much less access to the ancient Greek texts (including their translations to other languages) than both the Islamic and Orthodox worlds; if anything, it was largely the last two which were the heirs of the ancient Greco-Roman civilization as evident through their civilizations and the very significant role they would play in the birth of the Renaissance.
“Not to be self-evident, but if you’re talking about Northern Europe in particular, there are neither ties of blood, language, or religion which tie them to Greco-Roman antiquity.”
Gaul had been part of the Roman empire for centuries (and obviously French is descended from Latin) and there were Roman cities in the Rhineland, so this claim that northern “barbarians” (who had interacted with the Roman world for a long time) had no connection at all to the ancient world really goes too far imo.
“Though in the Middle Ages the Islamic world had about as much claim to have inherited the legacy of classical antiquity as the west”
Maybe in the sense of technical knowledge and philosophy, but the Islamic world didn’t care about preserving Greek and Latin literature in their original versions. I admit I don’t know anything about Arab or Persian literature, but is there any evidence that they engaged at all with Homer, Virgil or ancient historians like Sallust (already important for the ideology of Italian communes in the 12th century) as models to be imitated like happened frequently in Byzantium and Latin Christendom?
Also limiting the question to “classical antiquity” is really misleading, of course nobody in the middle ages thought of themselves as being direct continuators of Pericles’ classical Athens (Roman nobles in the 1130s however claimed to be reviving the Roman republic in opposition to the papacy, so something like that wasn’t completely impossible). What was undoubtedly central throughout the middle ages however was the model of the Christianizing Roman empire of the 4th century, and filtered through that there is some link even to the pagan empire and its civilization.
@German_reader
Homer’s works and those of many other ancient Greek poets were well known in the intellectual circles of the Islamic world and read by them in various languages, including the original Greek, from early on, but somehow no effort was made to translate them into Arabic. The reason might be that Arabs did not consider translations of poetry valuable and preferred reading poetry in the original language if possible, and a prior translation to another language (e.g., Syriac) if the work in question is not available in the original language. Besides his compositions, Homer also turned into a popular figure in the Islamic world and many stories and legends were attached to him, so he was no distant figure. The same can be said for Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras and Apollonius of Tyana for instance.
Let me clarify my criticism of Nordicists. I am addressing those Nordicists who claim that ancient peoples of Mediterranean regions such as Greece and Italy were Northern/Central European in genetics, which is falsified by ancient DNA results, and/or appropriate their legacy. I have no problem with the incorporation of the Greco-Roman legacy in the culture of any people regardless of origins, but that is not the same as appropriation, claiming as one’s own, or appropriation via anachronistic concepts such as the West, white or European, which have no bearing in the pre-modern world, at least in a sense those Nordicists would want.
@Onur
“I am addressing those Nordicists who claim that ancient peoples of Mediterranean regions such as Greece and Italy were Northern/Central European in genetics”
Sure, but who’s doing that today apart from fringe right-wingers like Richard Spencer (“You are Greece, you are Rome!”)? It’s true that there were Nordicists in classics departments in the early 20th century (e.g. Tenney Frank who regarded the history of the later Roman empire as one of racial degeneration and feared the same for the US in his time), but I very much doubt such views are still prominent in today’s academia.
It may be that the ancient world is sometimes still idealized too much (this may be especially so in the US where triumphalist narratives about “the West” still have a certain currency, often without awareness of the breaks and discontinuities in “Western” history…Athenian democracy didn’t spawn any direct successors). But jumping from criticism of such views to a claim that study of Greek and Latin literature is irredeemably tainted and should be abolished as a discipline is pretty perverse imo.
“The reason might be that Arabs did not consider translations of poetry valuable”
The language aspect seems central to me, the Islamic conquerors had their own holy language in Arabic and didn’t have any interest in preserving or imitating Latin and Greek literature (whereas Latin was absolutely central as a medium for the educated in Latin Christendom until the early modern era, and ancient Greek literature retained high status in Byzantium, despite a certain distaste for pagan Hellenism). So I’m skeptical whether Islamic civilization can be seen as a successor to Greco-Roman antiquity to the same extent as Latin Christendom and Byzantium. But I’ll admit it gets murkier in areas like the reception of Greek philosophy (iirc some of that is still operative at least among the Shia, with Ayatollah Khomeini having studied Plato’s thought).
So I’m skeptical whether Islamic civilization can be seen as a successor to Greco-Roman antiquity to the same extent as Latin Christendom and Byzantium.
there’s a “fork” here.
the umayyads before 700 AD seem clearly a post-greco-roman society, with greek being the language of administration, and stuff like umayyad notables sponsoring greek frescos. it was later that a rupture happened. the muslim arabs basically created a new and separate identity in the 8th century and their role as a post-roman successor society kind of faded ideologically.
i align with those who suggest that the fitna of the 680s had a notable role in shifting arab muslim self-conception southward to arabia, and the abassid conquest turned them to the east and iran.
@German_reader
Totally agree with your points. The good thing about Latin (Western) Christendom is that via the Catholic Church it spread education and knowledge in Latin literature even to the remotest peoples such as Finns and Balts. Even though those peoples surely have nothing to do with ancient Romans by origins or ancient history, Latin literature became a part of their literary tradition too through its incorporation. That is a good thing, literary traditions, including those incorporated later, should be preserved and studied with care, not destroyed or devalued. Regardless of what some people think, the USA was founded by British colonists and is based upon their legacy, which includes the Greco-Roman legacy they incorporated as well.
@Razib
i align with those who suggest that the fitna of the 680s had a notable role in shifting arab muslim self-conception southward to arabia, and the abassid conquest turned them to the east and iran.
This is somewhat off topic but do you think the birthplace of Islam should be sought in the Ghassanid lands or environs rather than the central Hijaz, or does it likely have multiple birthplaces and composite beginnings?