Chapter 1: Burning issues in Classics: Introduction
Rhiannon Evans
This collection reflects recent developments in the way we think about ancient Greek and Roman cultures, both the influence these societies have had upon our own and the way that we, in 21st-century Western cultures, choose to retell stories about the past.
Each of the authors in this collection addresses an aspect of ‘Identity’ or ‘Ownership’, two intersecting factors in how we in the 21st-century interact with ancient Greece and Rome. They investigate how we identify with ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as draw (often troubling) elements of our identity from them. In addition, each author addresses the question: which of us feel that we own that past?
One egregious example are these posters advertising Identity Evropa, a now defunct American white-supremacist organisation, active on US university campuses until 2020. This group claimed an exclusive identification with, as well as ownership of, classical culture.
I use the terms ‘Classics’ and ‘classical’ advisedly. ‘Classics’ is the most widely recognised term for the study of ancient Greek and Roman history and culture and is less longwinded than ‘ancient Greek and Roman history, art and literature’. However, the name Classics suggests exclusivity and elitism – a trait many still associate with the discipline – and one which is bolstered by the fact that Ancient Greek and Latin are no longer taught in most government schools (Perale 2023). And although the traditional objects of study are 2000+ year-old cultures, Classics as we know it was created in the 18th and 19th centuries (Whitmarsh 2021), a time of European empires and North America’s doctrine of manifest destiny. Indeed a Classical education was considered a prerequisite for officials involved in Britain’s colonial enterprise, and Rome in particular provided a strong model for the practice of empire (Hingley 2001). As such, Classics has long appealed to and been bound up in Western colonial narratives.
In the late 20th century, though, Classicists became increasingly interested in the lives of ‘ordinary’ people – women, enslaved people, non-citizens and non-elite men. More recently, Classicists have broadened their field of study to include the way the ancient Greek and Roman past has been ‘received’ by subsequent cultures, ranging from fine art and political regimes to cinema and video games. Classical Reception Studies, as a sub-discipline of Classics, also investigates how ancient Greece and Rome have been weaponised to create modern social and political narratives such as the idea of a consistent lineage with the past. In its most sinister form, this genealogy is exclusive, racist and misogynist – dead white men generating an inheritance for not-so-dead white men (Zuckerberg 2018, c.f. Bond 2021). The underlying assumption of Identity Evropa and their ilk is that they exclusively ‘own’ the history, art and political systems associated with Greece and Rome. Such identifications are based on unnuanced, ahistorical and disingenuous readings of the past, relying on simplified interpretations of complex cultures (e.g. Spartans were tough he-men; Rome’s empire was brought down by homosexuality). They function as inaccurate exemplars for alt-right and incel groups. At the same time, ancient Athens in particular has provided an apparently utopian past for marginalised LGBTIQ+ people as a time and place when love between males was normalised and Sappho’s lesbian poetry extolled. Such readings ignore the precise circumstances in which such relationships were acceptable, as well as the accompanying phenomena of pederasty, patriarchy and slavery.
In this volume, the chapters by Josie Murphy, Maya Harriss and Charlie Durrington grapple with modern identities that borrow from ancient Greece and/or Rome. They range from the malevolent to the misguided, from overtly racist policies to overly simplistic cooptions of the past. Alongside these chapters investigating the metaphorical ownership of the past are those of Lucinda Collins Hallahan, Benjamin Parry and Leah Holden, which directly address the ownership of ancient Greece and Rome and how we represent these cultures. Lucinda’s chapter investigates the literal question of who owns the concrete past, while Ben and Leah assess how modern media have coopted the ancient past as entertainment.
In many ways, these chapters are largely critical of the myriad ways in which ancient Greece and Rome have been repurposed for nefarious ends; but we can see light at the end of the tunnel here. For, by revealing these disturbing trends in the afterlife of Greece and Rome, we disempower such rhetoric and encourage instead a deeper understanding of how diverse, stratified, repressive or progressive the past was. As such we can hope that, increasingly, no one is surprised to find that ancient Greece and Rome, as represented in historical or fictional forms, are not (mis)represented by one narrow vision (Higgins 2017).
