Sphinx

When it comes to my own writing, at least, I’ve always been a follower of the “that’ll do” principle; not quite the slapdash approach the phrase might imply (though doubtless there are critics out there who think my books exemplify the slapdash approach), but the art of recognising the point of diminishing marginal returns, when – given that perfection will always remain out of reach – the expenditure of addition time and effort ceases to yield proportionate improvements in the quality of the manuscript, especially when it’s probably already months (if not years) overdue and double especially when there are loads of other things I want to write about as well. It’s all about the jazz idea of creating something in the moment, of the moment, and then moving onto what the next moment calls for, rather than endlessly honing the same thing in the hope of transcending intellectual entropy.

This approach has worked well enough – until now. I may have mentioned that I have a short, stroppy book coming out in a couple of months’ time on Classics: why it matters. Because this will be part of an X: why it matters series, the publisher has been much stricter about sticking to deadlines, with the aim of having the first couple of volumes appear simultaneously; I would actually have liked a couple more months to work on polishing the argument, but that wasn’t an option. More than that, however, the fact that the book engages with the current state of classics as a discipline and its place in the wider cultural context means that things keep happening that shed a new light on themes and issues that I discuss there, so I keep thinking about how I might have said things differently (in the same way that the piece I’m working on about comparisons between Trump and Roman Emperors will never be finished because they Won’t Stop With The Crappy Analogies, The Bastards).

Yesterday brought two examples. The first was the piece in Eidolon by Savannah Marquardt, on the Nashville Parthenon, and what it says about the status and meaning of the classical in the American South. This instantly reminded me of the passage in Derek Walcott’s Omeros (XL.1.i) where he talks of “small squares with Athenian principles and pillars” in “a wedding-cake Republic”, with “its pillared façade that looked down on the black/ shadows that they case as an enraging nuisance”. A white-washed classics as the essence of whiteness, loathing and mistrusting the black shadows that are inseparable from its foundation; I don’t think the Nashville Parthenon or Marquardt’s fascinating discussion of it contradicts any of my brief comments in the book, but I’d dearly like to have had the opportunity to mention it in passing.

More troubling and thought-provoking was the piece by Grace Bertelli, a Columbia University student, about the barriers to low-income students getting involved with classical language. This emphasised my relative ignorance of the detail of how US classical programmes work (or maybe it’s just Columbia). I had no idea, for example, that one could lighten the overall course load by taking exams (‘testing out’) if you happen to have had the opportunity of learning classical languages at an earlier stage; the UK system may sometimes make it difficult for students from schools which didn’t offer languages, but it doesn’t at the same time make things easier for those who did enjoy such advantages (not just those with private educations, of course, but certainly including them).

Even more interesting were some of the reactions to the article, instinctively rejecting the accusation that classics could be in any way ‘classist’, and insisting that if such students had a true passion for the subject they’d be able to overcome any such barriers – offering as case studies the janitor who got a Classics BA, or their own experiences. Such an insistence on the necessity of undergoing hardship to prove one’s worthiness of being accepted into the cult of classics doesn’t actually do much to modify its image of elitist exclusivity, and maybe that’s precisely the point. As someone who has never been a Proper Classicist, and who moreover didn’t actually develop a passion for the subject until relatively late in my undergraduate studies, I am utterly opposed to the idea of making entry into the discipline really hard from the very beginning – but am currently more exercised by the fact that this would have been a really good example to discuss in my first chapter, ‘What’s Wrong With Classics’…