Sphinx

My book has been published (on Friday, to be precise, at least for the UK)! Rather to my surprise, it’s already been getting some attention, with blog posts from Matthew Reisz in the Times Higher Education Supplement and from Mary Beard. Yes, a gratuitously stroppy account of the current state of Classics as a discipline and Why It Matters is more accessible than some of my usual obscure ramblings – but I have written would-be accessible things in the past, which have largely sunk without trace. Maybe it’s the moment.

Both Reisz and Beard comment on the way that I frame my discussion with a long chapter on What’s Wrong With Classics – the peculiar history of its development as a discipline, its remarkable legacy of prestige and authority despite all the reasons one might have expected it to fall by the wayside, its long-standing association with very dubious agendas and values. Oddly, Reisz charactises this as an account of ‘misconceptions’ about the discipline, whereas my point is that this is all perfectly true (however painful and embarrassing it is to confess) but not quite the whole story. The comment that it’s strange for me to be so gloomy when so many people are watching Mary Beard documentaries on BBC4 therefore misses the point; if there’s a long history of people being attracted to classics for problematic reasons, the fact that lots of people are currently interested in classical antiquity is not an unqualified good thing.

Beard’s take is much more nuanced, getting the point: yes, classics has a long association with imperialism, racism, sexism, elitism, classism etc. – but (and this was also my response to interesting comments from @natcphd on the Twitter, arguing that classics is and remains a colonialist project so long as it retains that name) there are alternative traditions, radical and liberating. Any number of the great figures of Englightenment and 19th-century thought built on their classical educations to question power and existing authority, not entrench it; there’s an inspiring tradition (revealed especially through the work led by Edith Hall) of ‘popular’, non-elite classics, and another one of non-Western writers drawing on the classical tradition as a means of questioning and overthrowing the oppressive monolith of Western Civilisation and its claims.

Of course the relationship between classics as a discipline and what other people ‘do with’ the classical legacy is always one of tension; of course lots of classics remains free from any radical political agenda, or even complicit with the less savoury appropriations of antiquity. Simply because of its history, classics is never going to be unproblematic; a certain defensiveness and an apologetic manner seem entirely appropriate.

To paraphrase an exchange from one of the greatest sitcoms of all time: “Did we save Classics?” “NO! No, you did not! You moved dirt around on Classics’ grave! Your discipline is still hopelessly outdated and irrelevant, it is still irrevocably associated with elitism and colonialism, and it is still on the permanent chopping block of anyone who has any say in its future!” “Well, around here, we call that Wednesday.”