There’s nothing like an enforced lockdown in the middle of a global pandemic to force someone like me – not antisocial, exactly, but inclined to assume that others are happy to get on with their lives without me imposing on their precious time – to start making contact and reinforcing connections. Longer emails for family and close friends, regular social media contact for everyone else – with a powerful sense of how far I’m already a member of a couple of really important online communities, consisting mainly of people I’ve never met in person, that are now even more important.
One of the things this has brought home is how downright weird some of the algorithms have become. I mean, the whole point of belonging to a local community group on Zuckerberg’s Evil Empire is to hear the latest news, not to get an update on Wednesday that someone was looking for a recommendation for veg box deliveries last Wednesday. Various people have disappeared from my feed entirely, unless I search for them, while I still get regular updates from a couple of students I taught in Bristol a decade or more ago (hi Clio! I hope you found your online yoga tuition). The Twitter is slightly better, but it was very odd to get a notification this morning that someone had liked a tweet I was mentioned in, which turned out to be a discussion from over a month ago of which I had no knowledge whatsoever as I’d never received any alert.
I now feel rather bad that people were looking for my input and just got silence, especially as the topic is indeed something on which I have Opinions. Okay, there are relatively few topics on which I don’t… Even weirder, the alert has now disappeared again, and I can’t find any trace of it, so I can’t check that my recollection of the debate is actually correct or weigh in belatedly there. So, just to prove that I can start an online argument in a disregarded blog post…
How should we conceive of ‘Classics’ – or, what should we call it instead? This is now a well-trodden issue, and people like Jo Quinn have written insightfully about the great weight of historical and ideological baggage the term now lugs around with it: the obsession with language and literature, the narrow geographical and chronological focus, the elitism, imperialism and sexism… Of course much of actually-existing Classics is nothing like this, but the question of whether the subject can ever shake off these associations remains open – especially when, as becomes clear whenever there’s a wider Classics-related news story, many people in the wider culture in countries where Classics has traditionally been strong want it to remain what it was (if not to strip away some of its modern accretions). And especially when, let’s be honest, it’s still difficult not to fall back into old-fashioned evocations of ‘the roots of (Western) civilisation!’ when defending it to university administrators or trying to tempt in students.
One of the problems with changing the name is the loss of such ‘brand recognition’ – perhaps an issue especially for the UK, where students have to be persuaded to commit to a subject from the very beginning of their university careers, rather than in a system where they can pick and choose different courses, and may be much less bothered about the name of the department that delivers them.
Another, however, is the worry that changing the name would be somewhat fraudulent; what sort of ‘Department of Ancient Studies’ teaches only Ancient Greece and Rome? It’s already – albeit quite rarely – a question that gets raised by potential students in relation to Ancient History; no, sorry, despite the name on the door, we don’t do pyramids. Privileging Greek and Latin does actually make some sense in a Department of Classics; is the Department of Ancient Studies going to re-educate all its Latinists to deliver Hebrew and Sanskrit?
Okay, so Classics is a classic case of “I wouldn’t start from here if I were you”, and it may be that the depths of crisis, upheaval and uncertainty are not the best place for a radical re-think (the original Twitter thread was, I think, back in February). But one could argue that the aftermath of crisis, upheaval and uncertainty – the likely need for different sorts of rebuilding – is an excellent time for a radical re-think. We can adopt a name that is about the future, not the past, of the subject; not what we are, but what we want to be. Start thinking of ourselves as, say, Ancient Studies, and see where that takes us.
This isn’t a blueprint for wholesale revolution and reorganisation, firing and hiring – not least because no one is ever likely to give me that sort of power, and especially not if I explain what I’d do with it. But we can be the change we want to see in smaller ways. Think about the way we present ourselves to students, and the messages we give them about what’s important. Think about the assessment questions we set, and the topics we include in courses – and next time we need to propose something new, make sure, insofar as we’re able, that it fills a gap in the Ancient Studies curriculum rather than the Classics programme. Keep looking out for opportunities for collaboration and exchange – easier in some universities than others when it comes to teaching.
In the longer term, it’s important to be flexible and imaginative when it comes to replacing posts. Yes, there’s a real double-band here, needing to justify replacement above all in terms of ability to deliver the existing curriculum while wanting to change the curriculum through recruiting people with different expertise – but at the least we can write cunningly-worded job remits, and then hope that the best people who apply are also the most interesting and diverse, in which case it’s just a matter of fighting off the “yes, they’re brilliant, but can they deliver these seven modules that we’ve taught since time immemorial?” argument.
Be the Ancient Studies you want to see…
Sphinx 
Yes, “by ‘ancient’ we of course mean Greece and Rome” makes no sense, and no, nobody setting out to design an Ancient Studies curriculum today would come up with anything like what we think of as Classics. But still…
Maybe I’m just getting more (small-c) conservative as I get older – or maybe I’m turning back into the snotty Latin-reading elitist I was at 17 – but I want to make the case for Chesterton’s Fence. The question isn’t whether to conserve Classics out of a general opposition to change, but whether there might actually be reasons to conserve it (or bits of it), even if those reasons aren’t being articulated by the people opposed to change; whether there’s something of value in ‘Classics’ that would be lost in a wave-of-the-wand switch to an ideal Ancient Studies. (Does (say) Horace’s Latin have qualities – beauty, power, concision – comparable to Shakespeare’s English, and is there any way anyone’s going to encounter those things other than by reading Horace in the original? If they don’t get a blast of Aristotle in your degree, are they going to get it anywhere else?)
But I suspect I’m underrating the deadweight conservatism of Classics as a community of practice – my own c. of p. is more of the ‘build it up, tear it down’ variety. You may need to push pretty hard to get anything done differently.
But this wouldn’t necessarily entail the cessation of study of Horace and Aristotle, including in the original – unlike the proposal that some ancient history colleagues occasionally float (or even present as inevitable) of dissolving ancient history into history more generally. It simply wouldn’t present them as the *only* things you need to read…
Why not just embrace the absurdity and say “Early Western Civilization.”
Western Civ is a construct anyway, but if it means *anything* useful, it takes the Mediterranean classical era and lumps it together as both an ecumenical (if I’m using that right) and mythical unity, and excludes all the other cultures that one might think are implicated by ‘ancien’t or ‘classical’ or anything else that doesn’t mark off the non-Western.
Ha de ha.
That is to say, unwillingness to associate with the sort of people who think ‘Western Civilization’ is a master term..?
One issue is that you have to explain why you are leaving out Judah and Israel (and probably the ancient ‘Germanic’ world), or you have to change the department to include them. Family trees get bigger as you move back in time, not smaller: anyone who tells a tidy story about Greece then Rome then Charlemagne and Northumbria then the Enlightenment then Our Glorious Selves is not telling a story about their own ancestors, they are claiming the glory of a bunch of Places and Times that were Really Cool.
I have noticed an attempt to re-organize around Ancient World Studies, sort of a way of sneaking the broad vision of Altertumswissenschaft back into the parts of the community that have rejected it. And yes, that means that some people have to stop pretending that Scythia, Babylon, Halstatt, etc. were not part of the Greek and Roman world as well as the Greek and Roman imaginarium, even if the philologists have to learn to read site reports and the archaeologists who excavate in Greece need to start talking with the archaeologists who excavate in Russia. If you study the Roman empire this is old hat, for some parts of the community it would be a radical shift.
A common late-twentieth-century solution in Canada was Greek and Roman Studies, which is honest and something which 6-10 tenured faculty can cover, but there is no way to separate evidence for Greeks and evidence for Carians, and Greeks were present in the Black Sea, Syria, and Egypt so without knowing the local texts and the local archaeology we can’t understand Greeks or Romans. In the end, keeping all the different communities which study the ancient world in different places and languages in touch with one another requires constant work.
I am reminded of a paragraph that appeared in one of the obituaries for Fergus Millar last year:
“In a ‘Western’ culture based on a (very partial) fusion of Judaeo-Christian and classical traditions,” he wrote in the epilogue to his collected essays, “it is puzzling to reflect on how few students of Greek will ever have been offered the chance to read a private letter or papyrus, an honorific inscription put up by a Greek city – or the Septuagint, or the New Testament, or Josephus’ Antiquities, or Eusebius.” In his presidential address to the Classical Association in 1993 (printed in the first volume of his collected essays), he put the point even more sharply: “How many classes for the translation of Greek prose, I wonder, have ever found before them the opening words of the first chapter of Genesis?” And after quoting the Greek words of the Septuagint, he went on: “Yet this view of the nature of the world and of the divinity was, as time went on, to be at least as important, for millions of people whose language of culture was Greek – and later, as we will see, Latin – as anything contained in the pagan classics. It is therefore essential for us to see it too as part of ancient culture.” Such a view constitutes an alternative – and, it seems to me, useful and valid – perspective on the issue of ‘diversifying’ the classical curriculum.
I noted that hiring people with the capacity to deliver this sort of material was not high on the agenda of many Classics departments when I myself was applying for academic jobs post-PhD.
One of my Latin instructors in Canada strongly recommended we pick Jerome’s Vulgate and some bit of the bible that we knew in English to practice sight-reading, and assigned St. Perpetua and Fortunata as summer reading. The split between courses in classical Greek in some departments and courses in New Testament Greek in others makes historical sense, but its probably not the best way of learning the language!
The two problems are, firstly, that the Greek of the New Testament – especially the Gospels and Acts – substantially more straightforward than Classical Greek, so learning the latter helps with the former but not so much vice versa, and secondly that the content is often so familiar to anyone with a Christian upbringing that it’s really an exercise in recall rather than translation…
Thanks for this – and many apologies for the very delayed response, but WordPress has not been behaving lately, so it didn’t tell me about it.
Hello – thanks for the reply: a v related response from me, as I didn’t see this myself until now (probably another case of wordpress playing up). Re: straightforwardness of Greek of Gospels and Acts: I guess that’s mostly fair, though of course some classical Greek authors are way easier to deal with than others! So too w NT Greek authors (as I’m sure you know the Greek of St Paul in e.g. Romans is v tough).
But there’s a wider question here that interests me about how the objective of learning ancient Greek (whether classical or koine) might usefully be conceived a little differently: two advantages of koine Greek are precisely a) that it’s a bit easier, b) that its relationship w modern Greek is much closer. Put differently, it’s more accessible and comes closer to satisfying utilitarian type arguments re: ancient language acquisition. That’s without even mentioning its massive significance for Judaism, Christianity and the Hellenistic and Roman worlds.
In other words, I think there are good reasons here to question the justification given for the primacy of Classical Greek in, well, Classics.