Sphinx

Everybody so often, a student will come up with something that is simply perfect – they may not do it perfectly, but the idea is just so right. This week, it was the student in my Greek Political Thought class who organised their short presentation for a seminar on citizenship around the UK citizenship test; yes, they could have put more emphasis on the analytical side, comparing and contrasting the assumptions inherent in the questions with the assumptions we see in ancient sources rather than just working through the whole of a practice quiz, but it still raised so many important issues in interesting and accessible ways – as well as, for me, offering an insight into how young people think about such things. The complete incredulity among the students that anyone should need to know about Boudicca to qualify for citizen rights – let alone their reaction when I sketched out the old Tebbit Cricket Test – suggests a radically different conception of Britishness from that which continues to dominate public debates.

Of course, this is likely to be at least partly connected to the fact that all but two of the class can take their British citizenship for granted, and had clearly not thought much before about how others might acquire such status – so one of the problems in the seminar was having to explain UK law, then explain how far it reflects a quite different tradition of thought (partly the ‘subjects not citizens’ thing, partly the influence of Roman law and ideas), so that we could then reflect on Greek conceptions and debates, which was what the class was supposed to be about. Yes, this could lead into the “most Greeks took this stuff completely for granted too” point (since we’re considering Greek political thinking, not just the narrower theme of Greek political theory), but we still ended up spending much less time on detailed discussion of ancient sources than planned.

If I do this course again, I’d be strongly inclined to ask the students to devise their own Athenian citizenship test, on the basis of their assumptions about how one should qualify for political rights, and then compare and contrast with both the historical Greek and the actual British realities (whatever the latter is by then). I’ll also make sure we do actually spend sufficient time talking about Lysias, as I’d planned, and the question of whether we get a better sense of the meaning and importance of citizenship if we pay more attention to those who are looking at it from the outside. A few days later I was strongly reminded of the speeches he wrote for non-Athenians, pointing to everything they’d done for the communities while those who enjoyed citizenship by right flouted its norms and damaged their own people through self-interest, when reading a powerful and heart-breaking blog by the ever-thought-provoking Maria Farrell on her feelings, as an Irish citizen living in London, on being told that At Least You Can Leave.

There’s an obvious risk of competitive complaint – is it worse to be terrified of losing one’s job, home, access to medical care etc and being targeted for not being One Of Us, while retaining the right to escape elsewhere in Europe, or to have all the privileges of a native but to lose one’s rights as a European citizen and so feel trapped in an increasingly narrow-minded, xenophobic and angry community?* – when we** really need to be pulling together. The “duty of hope” that Maria’s written about in the past might suggest that we should entertain the possibility that her blog will turn out to be a museum piece, a bit of a bad dream that disappeared in the morning light when unexpected events made the whole Brexit thing go away. But I’m always more inclined to Thucydides’ sarcastic “hope? a great comfort in danger…” position; in which case it’s probably time to start thinking of ways of “prepping” for Brexit in ways that go beyond stock-piling tinned goods and water purification tablets and identifying suitable locations for the fortified stockade in anticipation of needing to fight off bandits, right-wing mobs, zombies etc.***

Things which come immediately to mind… Well, listening to what EU citizens themselves want and need is an obvious one, via organisations like the3million and simply by talking to friends and colleagues; everything we know about the track record of the Home Office points to massive problems with applications for settled status, and any number of miscarriages of justice and acts of malice and stupidity, so moral, financial and any other sort of support will be needed. Assume continuing xenophobia, attacks on people speaking foreign languages (regardless of whether they’re EU or not); we need to be ready to step in and stand by anyone in that position. And more positively, assuming that insular attitudes will just get worse, an ongoing commitment to European cultures and languages, even or especially out in the Brexity wastelands beyond the big cities; film clubs, literature clubs, language classes – clandestine if need be…

We may getting to the point where Classicists for the EU needs to be revived, as Classicists for EU Colleagues and Students, to ensure that they can still feel they belong – and don’t abandon us. As both Lysias and Xenophon observed, from different perspectives, Athens would have been in deep trouble without its metics.

*The former, obviously, but that doesn’t mean the latter is trivial.

**Yes, I’m using “we” in a sense that certainly doesn’t apply to a significant proportion of the British population. And your point is?

***Not necessarily distinct categories.