The Debate about Classics Isn’t What You Probably Think It Is

On 2 February 2021, The New York Times published a profile piece written by Rachel Poser titled “He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?” The subject of the article is Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an Afro-Latino associate professor of classics at Princeton University who argues that the field of classics as it is currently constructed is deeply embedded with systemic racism and serves to reinforce white supremacist hegemony. Padilla wants to radically reshape the field by rooting out aspects that reinforce white supremacy and rebuilding the field in a new way.

This profile piece triggered an unceasing deluge of op-eds published on various platforms purporting to “defend” the discipline of classics from Padilla’s supposed attacks. These op-eds almost invariably display complete ignorance of the conversation that has been taking place within the discipline of classics over the past few years and ignorance of what Padilla is actually proposing. They reduce the conversation to a ridiculous caricature according to which evil, radical leftist scholars are trying to bring an end to the study of ancient texts altogether.

Many people who are not directly connected to the field of classics are learning about the controversy solely from these op-eds and coming away with the egregious misimpression that this is really what is happening. In this essay, I want to explain for my general readership what is really going on within the field and what sorts of changes people are really advocating. (I would write an op-ed, but no one would publish it, since I’m just a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate.)

The op-eds are everywhere!

Rachel Poser’s profile piece about Dan-el Padilla Peralta in The New York Times has many good qualities and it goes good work to raise public awareness of a conversation that has been happening for several years now within the discipline of classics. Unfortunately, the piece also has some weaknesses. One major weakness is that it portrays Dan-el Padilla Peralta as a radical iconoclast, but yet it does not clearly lay out in any systematic fashion the actual changes that Padilla is seeking to promote.

Consequently, it seems that the authors of the recent op-eds—who seem to only know about Padilla’s work from the profile piece itself—do not understand what Padilla is actually advocating. The result is a seemingly never-ending deluge of uninformed and half-informed think pieces.

I couldn’t possibly list every opinion piece that has been written in response to Poser’s piece in The New York Times, but here are a few that should give a general impression:

• On 3 February 2021, The American Conservative published an op-ed by Rod Dreher titled “Suicide of the Humanities.”
• On 4 February 2021, The Washington Post published an op-ed by the scholar and translator Shadi Bartsch titled “Why I Won’t Surrender the Classics to the Far Right.” (As it happens, that particular article contains a link to my blog post about the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on 6 January.)
• On 5 February 2021, The Weekly Dish published an op-ed by the blogger and political commenter Andrew Sullivan titled “The Unbearable Whiteness of the Classics.”
• On 9 February 2021, The National Review, a far-right magazine, published an op-ed by the magazine’s own editor Rich Lowry titled “Are the Classics Racist?”
• On 18 February 2021, The National Review published another op-ed by the scholar and translator Sarah Ruden titled “In Defense of the Classics.”

Some of these op-eds are written by people who are actually involved in the field of classics (such as Shadi Bartsch and Sarah Ruden), but most of them are written by people with no involvement in or engagement with the field (such as Rod Dreher, Andrew Sullivan, and Rich Lowry). All of them share an overall reactionary stance and all of them reduce the arguments that Padilla and others have put forward regarding the field of classics to a simplistic straw man.

ABOVE: A few of the op-eds that have been published over the past few weeks in reaction to the profile piece about Dan-el Padilla Peralta in The New York Times

How many people outside the field of classics are receiving this controversy

Unfortunately, many people who are not directly connected to the field of classics are learning about the conversation that is currently taking place solely from The New York Times profile piece and the op-eds written in response to it. They are therefore coming away with a very inaccurate perception of the conversation—one that is informed by the very popular (but false) stereotype of the humanities as a stagnant collection of useless disciplines full of leftist ideologues who only care about ideology and not about facts.

This is evident in some of the reactions to the ongoing conversation from people with STEM backgrounds. For instance, Jerry Coyne is an emeritus professor of evolutionary biology from the University of Chicago and a prominent popular science author. He has a blog titled Why Evolution Is True, which has a very large audience. He frequently complains on this blog about how radical leftists are supposedly trashing the humanities and putting ideology ahead of science.

For instance, here is a post he published on 3 October 2018 decrying what he describes as “the abysmal academic standards in the humanities.” On 29 January 2019, he published another post complaining about how he thinks that the humanities have become hopelessly anti-science and “stagnant” as a result of embracing “Postmodernism.” The opening paragraph of his post reads as follows:

“There’s never an end to science-dissing these days, and it comes largely from humanities scholars who are distressed by comparing the palpable progress in science with the stagnation and marginalization of their discipline—largely through its adoption of the methods of Postmodernism. (Curiously, the decline in humanities, which I believe coincides with university programs that promote a given ideology rather than encourage independent thought, is in opposition to the PoMo doctrine that there are different ‘truths’ that emanate from different viewpoints.)”

Coyne himself is far, far from the only person in STEM who has this impression of the humanities; the things he says on his blog are similar to things I have read and heard more times than I can possibly count—in op-eds on the internet, in comments on my blog, in answers on Quora, and from the mouths of fellow students and relatives with backgrounds in STEM.

The New York Times profile piece on Dan-el Padilla Peralta and the op-eds written in response to it have only reinforced Coyne and his followers’ assumptions and prejudices about the humanities. Coyne published a blog post on the subject on 6 February, in which he comes away with the very inaccurate impression that Padilla is one of many delusional radical leftists in the humanities who want to end the teaching of ancient texts altogether because they think they are racist and there is no value in teaching them. Coyne is definitely not alone here; his post already has dozens of comments from his various followers, nearly all of whom share opinions similar to his own.

ABOVE: Photograph of Jerry Coyne, a very prominent evolutionary biologist and science popularizer

What Padilla (and lots of other people) are actually arguing

All of this is very unfortunate, since it is extremely easy for anyone with an internet connection to look up Padilla’s actual work. Even if you don’t have access to or don’t know how to find any of the articles Padilla has published, there are literally free videos of him explaining his ideas in depth on YouTube that come up if you simply type his name into Google. For instance, here is a YouTube video of a brief talk he gave in October 2020, in which he lays out very succinctly some of the changes that he thinks need to happen in the field of classics. Here is another YouTube video of a longer talk he gave about the future of classics.

Padilla is not saying that everyone needs to stop reading ancient Greek and Roman texts altogether. Instead, he is arguing that the field of classics as it is currently constructed in the twenty-first century, especially in the English-speaking world, needs to change. There is a very important distinction between the ancient subject matters that classicists study and the academic discipline of classics as it exists today.

Everyone in the field of classics that I know of agrees that there is value to studying ancient texts. Even people who absolutely despise, say, Aristotle from the depths of their hearts—and, believe me, there are legitimately good reasons to hate Aristotle—recognize that it is worthwhile for there to be people who study his works, even if only for the sake of understanding how they have influenced modern prejudices. Unfortunately, most of the authors of the op-eds that have been published lately don’t seem to grasp this.

Below, I discuss a few of the changes that people in the field of classics—including Padilla—are actually advocating. Rebecca Futo Kennedy (a professor of the classics at Denison University) and Maximus Planudes (a classics scholar who uses the name of a thirteenth-century Greek anthologist as a pseudonym) have already published a post of their own on this subject, which is very thorough. I highly recommend reading it if you have the time once you finish reading this article.

In this post, I will be covering a few of the same topics that Padilla covers in the videos linked above and that Kennedy and Planudes cover in their post. My article here, however, is written from my own perspective as an undergraduate student and is meant primarily for people who are not personally involved in the discipline of classics who are curious about what is going on. With that out of the way, let’s get started on some of the things that people are advocating.

ABOVE: Photograph of Dan-el Padilla Peralta, from the Princeton website

Changing the name of the field

One thing that many people, including Padilla, are advocating is changing the name of the discipline. The name classics has some seriously problematic implications and it is outright confusing to many people. It is derived from the Latin word classicus, which referred to the highest and most prestigious class of the Roman citizenry. The word classics in English still bears the connotation of superiority and erudition.

The name classics therefore implies that the things classicists study are inherently superior to things that other people in other fields of the humanities study. Since (as I will discuss in a moment) classicists currently almost exclusively study ancient Greece and Rome, the name of the discipline therefore implies that the ancient Greeks and Romans are somehow superior to essentially all other cultures that have ever existed. This is a very inaccurate and unsavory implication.

The name “classics” is also highly confusing to most people who do not have any background in the subject. Most of the time, when I tell people that I am a “classics” major, their first assumption is that I study so-called “classical music”—as in the works of composers like Ludwig van Beethoven and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I therefore find myself constantly having to explain to people that I actually study ancient Greece and Rome. (There’s nothing wrong with studying Beethoven and Mozart, but they have nothing to do with my area of study!)

Many classics departments are therefore quite reasonably ditching the name “classics” and adopting other names that are more accurate and more specific, such as “Ancient Greek and Roman Studies” or “Ancient Mediterranean Studies.”

ABOVE: Photograph from the website AncientRome of the Togatus Barberini, a Roman marble statue dating to around the first century CE or thereabouts, depicting a Roman patrician wearing a toga and holding images of his deceased ancestors

Engaging with cultures other than ancient Greece and Rome

Presently, at most institutions, the field of classics is intensely hyper-focused on the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. There is nothing inherently wrong with studying ancient Greece and Rome, but, unfortunately, classicists often tend to ignore all other cultures in ancient world, including even cultures with which the Greeks and Romans frequently interacted. Although classicists certainly realize on an intellectual level that Greece and Rome did not exist in a vacuum, they often functionally tend to treat them as though they did.

Sarah E. Bond, a professor of history at the University of Iowa, has advocated that we should radically reorganize humanities department structures to combine all the scholars who work on fields related to the ancient world into one big “Global Antiquity” department. On 22 January 2021, she issued the following tweet, which triggered a great deal of online controversy:

She followed this up the next morning with another tweet clarifying what she meant:

These are radical suggestions, but they are ones that I partly agree with. I strongly agree that scholars who study ancient Greece and Rome should pay more attention to other cultures aside from Greece and Rome. This should especially include the cultures of the ancient Middle East and North Africa—which, as I will discuss in greater depth in a moment, are now widely recognized to have had tremendous influence on both Greek and Roman history, culture, literature, and politics.

It should also, however, include other cultures in places like India, East Asia, and parts of Africa south of the Sahara Desert that were somewhat more remote, but were still connected to the ancient Mediterranean in sometimes surprising ways. For instance, as I discuss in this article from May 2020, many of the earliest surviving depictions of the Gautama Buddha display noticeable influences from the Greek artistic tradition. Similarly, as I discuss in this article from June 2020, the Aksumite Empire in Ethiopia minted coins with Greek inscriptions and, as I discuss in this article from December 2019, there were diplomatic relations between the Roman Empire and Han Dynasty China.

These are just a few of the very interesting and significant connections that Greece and Rome had with seemingly far-flung ancient cultures that classicists generally don’t tend to talk about much.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Greco-Buddhist statue of Siddhārtha Gautama from Gandhāra, Pakistan, most likely dating to the first or second century CE

Classics doesn’t just need to break out of its geographic isolationism; it also needs to break out of its temporal isolationism. It is truly unfortunate in my view that many classicists have little knowledge of and little interest in engaging with material from late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The Byzantine Roman Empire in particular has generally been unfairly marginalized and ignored by most classicists for a long time, even though it is in many ways profoundly and immediately relevant to what classicists—especially Hellenists—study.

As I previously summarized in this article I published in January 2020, Anthony Kaldellis provides an extremely compelling argument in his excellent book Byzantium Unbound for why classicists—especially Hellenists—should care about the Byzantine Empire. He points out that nearly the entire canon of ancient Greek literature as we know it has been shaped by which texts the Byzantines chose to read and copy and which ones they chose not to copy. Understanding Byzantine culture and the literary interests of Byzantine elites is therefore extremely important for understanding why the particular works that have survived from ancient Greece have survived.

ABOVE: Byzantine manuscript illustration from the mid-tenth century CE depicting Matthew the Apostle with Byzantine-era scribal equipment

At the same time, though, I am not totally on board with Bond’s idea of combining everyone who studies every part of the ancient world together into one big department. I am only an undergraduate, so I am certainly not an expert on university departments and administration, so anyone reading this should take my opinion with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, as I see it, having people who study different parts of the ancient world in separate departments is useful for ensuring that the departments in question are able to adequately address the specific needs of their area of specialization.

I am currently double-majoring in classics and history and, for my history major, I’ve taken a lot of classes about ancient cultures outside the Mediterranean world. I’ve taken enough of these classes to know that the people who study these cultures are, in many cases, dealing primarily with different concerns from the ones classicists are dealing with and that they generally have very little interest in combining their departments with classics.

Indeed, even the political concerns that these disciplines have to deal with are, in many cases, different. For instance, I’ve taken a couple classes in pre-modern Chinese history and I’ve noticed that, when my Chinese history professors have brought up contemporary politics, they haven’t talked about white supremacy and appropriation of ancient history by the American far right; instead, they talk about how the current government of the People’s Republic of China under the leadership of Xi Jinping is using Chinese history and archaeology to justify authoritarianism and the persecution of minorities such as the Uyghurs.

It seems to me that combining separate areas of study that all have their own problems and concerns together into a single department in an attempt to solve some of the problems that one of those areas of study is facing would be counterproductive to the majority of the areas of study involved. Indeed, many people who study other parts of the ancient world would probably interpret it as an attempt by classics to essentially annex or colonize their areas of study.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Xi Jinping, the current General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, whose regime has been using ancient Chinese history and archaeology for political purposes

Getting rid of the implicit notion that ancient Greece and Rome were homogenous “white civilizations”

Moving on, it is unfortunately still frequently assumed, even among people who study the ancient Mediterranean world, that the people who lived in ancient Greece and Rome were uniformly what most twenty-first-century Americans would call “white.” This is an assumption that has never really been grounded in evidence and that scholars nowadays are increasingly coming to recognize as false.

Sarah E. Bond has done extensive public scholarship to promote recognition of the fact that ancient Greek and Roman statues, which appear white in color today, were originally brightly painted and that the Greek and Roman world was, in fact, what we would consider quite racially diverse. She’s talked extensively about how the misconception that ancient sculptures were originally white has been used to buttress white supremacy. For instance, here is an excellent article she wrote for Hyperallergic in June 2017 titled “Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color.”

For more information on this subject, I highly recommend this article I published in September 2020, in which I attempt to debunk the general notion that ancient Greece and Rome were “white civilizations.” In that article, I do admit that the majority of people who lived in Greece and Italy in ancient times would probably pass as white if they were alive today. Nonetheless, I make several points that I think are important for members of the general public (and classicists, for that matter) to realize.

First I note that, contrary to what the vast majority of people in the United States still believe, race is a social construct based on arbitrary and extremely superficial physical features, not an objective reflection of any deep or inherent biological reality. This is something that has been almost universally accepted among anthropologists and academics for a very long time. Unfortunately, I am constantly getting comments from people trying to argue against this, insisting that race is “objective science” and that people of different races are inherently biologically “different” from each other.

Furthermore, as I discuss in the article, many of the concepts that most Americans have about race today didn’t exist in antiquity. No one in ancient Greece or Rome ever thought of themself as racially a “white person.” They had a concept of white as a color, but they had absolutely no concept of a “white race.” If you asked a random person on the streets of Athens in the fifth century BCE whether they were “white,” it would make about as much sense to them as it would if you asked them whether they were “olive.”

It is also important to recognize that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many white Anglo-Americans in the United States regarded Greek and Italian immigrants as questionably white at best and often referred to them by hateful ethnic slurs. White supremacists even sometimes targeted them with acts of violence. One of the largest mass lynchings in United States history was the murder of eleven Italian men by a mob in New Orleans on 14 March 1891. A few decades later, on 21 February 1909, participants in bloody anti-Greek pogrom known as the “Greek Town riot” in South Omaha, Nebraska, destroyed homes and businesses owned by Greek immigrants and murdered at least one person.

ABOVE: Photograph of a Greek-owned hotel in South Omaha that was destroyed by a white supremacist mob during the Greek Town riot on 21 February 1909

I spend the bulk of the article, however, talking about evidence that many people in ancient Greece and Rome—including famous ancient philosophers, orators, novelists, Church Fathers, and even Roman emperors—were probably not what most Americans in the twenty-first-century would consider “white.” For instance:

• The philosopher Zenon of Kition (lived c. 334 – c. 262 BCE), who is known as the founder of the Hellenistic philosophical school of Stoicism, is described in biographical sources as having been a dark-skinned man of Phoenician ancestry.

• The playwright Publius Terentius Afer (lived c. 185 – c. 159? BCE), one of the earliest authors in the Latin language from whom any complete works have survived, was a member of the Afri, an Amazigh tribe that lived in the region around the city of Carthage in what is now Tunisia.

• The emperor Septimius Severus, the founder of the Severan Dynasty, was born in the city of Leptis Magna in what is now Libya. His mother was Italian, but his father was of Punic and possibly Amazigh ancestry. His wife Julia Domna was Syrian. Every single member of the Severan Dynasty was of non-European ancestry.

• The author Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (lived c. 124 – c. 170 CE), who is the author of The Golden Ass, the only novel written in the Latin language in ancient times that has survived to the present day complete, was an Amazigh from the city of Madauros in what is now Algeria.

• The satirist Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE) was a Syrian who was born into a working-class family in the town of Samosata on the banks of the Euphrates River on the far eastern fringe of the Roman Empire. His native language was probably Syriac, but he learned the Greek language and became a prolific writer of satire in Greek. Over eighty works attributed to him have survived, including his satirical novel A True Story, which contains elements that foreshadow science fiction.

• Many influential early Christian theologians and writers were Africans. Tertullianus of Carthage (lived c. 155 – c. 240 CE) was probably an Amazigh and Origenes of Alexandria (lived c. 184 – c. 253 CE) was an Egyptian.

• The most influential early Christian writer of all, Augustine of Hippo (lived (lived 354 – 430 CE) was born in the city of Thagaste in Algeria and was almost certainly of Amazigh ancestry. His works Confessions and The City of God are some of the most widely studied and read works of early Christian literature.

• People whom most Americans would consider Black were present throughout the Roman Empire, including in Europe. In many cases, they held Roman citizenship and they freely intermarried with other people in the empire. For instance, the wealthy Athenian philosopher Herodes Attikos (lived 101 – 177 CE) had an adoptive son named Memnon who was of “Aithiopian” ancestry and was named after a mythical “Aithiopian” king. The Greek writer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE) mentions a Greek woman whose great-grandfather was an “Aithiopian” in his De Sera Numinis Vindicta 21.

These are just a few of the examples I talk about in the article.

ABOVE: Portrait dating to the first or second century CE depicting a young man from Lower Egypt who evidently served in the Roman military, as evidenced by the sword belt over his left shoulder

Getting rid of the notions of “western civilization” and “western heritage”

For over a century, one of the main arguments that the field of classics has used to justify its existence is the claim that the ancient Greeks and Romans were founders of a wonderful, concrete thing called “western civilization.” I wrote an article in February 2020 in which I attempt to debunk this whole notion.

The first thing I note in the article is that the whole notion of “western civilization” is a spurious one that wasn’t even invented until around the nineteenth century or thereabouts. The ancient Greeks and Romans had no concept of “the west”; they thought of themselves as Greeks and Romans, not “westerners.” Meanwhile, for them, Europe was simply a landmass; they had no sense of “European” identity and they felt no sense of kinship whatsoever with Germanic, Celtic, or Slavic peoples, whom they considered “barbarians.”

Moreover, the Greeks and Romans had very close cultural connections to previous and contemporary cultures of the Middle East and North Africa. The Greeks especially were far more closely connected with the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean than with the peoples in western Europe.

The ancient Phoenicians, a people from the area of what is now Lebanon who spoke a Semitic language, developed the first abjad—a writing system with letters to represent individual consonant sounds, without letters representing vowels. In around the eighth century BCE, the Greeks adopted a version of the Phoenician abjad and modified it to create letters representing individual vowel sounds. This became the Greek alphabet. The Latin alphabet is, in turn, derived from the Greek alphabet. This means that both the Greek and Latin alphabets can ultimately be traced back to the Phoenician abjad.

It is also widely recognized that ancient Greek artwork, especially artwork from the Archaic Period (lasted c. 800 – c. 510 BCE), is heavily influenced by earlier Egyptian art. One of the most common types of Greek sculpture from the Archaic Period is the kouros, a statue of a naked man standing with very stiff posture and one foot placed forward. This type of statue is clearly based on earlier Egyptian statues, which frequently depict men in this exact same posture using very similar styles. The main difference is that, in Egyptian statues, the man is always wearing a loincloth, while, in Greek statues, he is usually completely naked.

ABOVE: Ancient Egyptian colossal statue of Ramesses II dated to the thirteenth century BCE in the Grand Egyptian Museum (left) and the New York Kouros, a Greek statue dated to between c. 590 and c. 580 BCE (right). Notice the identical poses and the similar artistic styles.

Ancient Greek religion, mythology, and literature also manifestly display influences from the Near East. Many scholars, including Walter Burkert, M. L. West, Charles Penglase, and Tim Whitmarsh have all written about this. The Greek goddess Aphrodite is widely recognized as being derived from or at least heavily influenced by the Phoenician goddess Astarte, who was herself closely related to the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar.

The Iliad and the Odyssey display parallels with the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Mesopotamian epic poem, the standard Akkadian version of which was composed during Middle Babylonian Period (lasted c. 1600 – c. 1155 BCE) and is attributed to a scribe named Sîn-lēqi-unninni. Among many other notable parallels that could be pointed out, all three epics contain a scene in which the main hero of the epic, a living person, meets a ghost of one of his fallen comrades, who tells him about the Underworld.

Meanwhile, the Theogonia, a Greek poem in dactylic hexameter about the origins of the deities and the cosmos that was composed in around the early seventh century BCE by the poet Hesiodos of Askre, is certainly related to an earlier poem in the Hittite language adapted from a Hurrian myth titled Kingship in Heaven or The Song of Kumarbi. This poem was composed sometime in around the fourteenth or thirteenth century BCE and is known from fragmentary clay tablets discovered in the archive at the Hittite capital city of Ḫattuša.

If you closely examine pretty much any aspect of ancient Greek civilization, you will find some kind of connection to the Near East.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Mesopotamian epic poem that probably indirectly influenced the Iliad and the Odyssey

This influence did not just go one way; ancient Greece and Rome have, in turn, exerted and continue to exert a profound influence on cultures throughout the Middle East and North Africa. This influence is evident not just in the literally countless monuments built in Greek and Roman-influenced architectural styles all across the Middle East and North Africa, but also in intellectual traditions that have continued to the present day.

Unfortunately, people who promote the narrative of “western civilization” nearly always ignore these influences, because they want to pretend that the Greek and Roman influence has primarily only affected western Europe. Indeed, even the Byzantine Empire—the predominantly culturally Greek political continuation of the Roman Empire—is normally seen as “eastern” and is therefore normally excluded from the story of “western civilization.”

It is very telling that, at my university, the people who study the Byzantine Empire are in the Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (NELC) department, rather than the classics department or medieval studies department. Evidently, Byzantium is too “eastern” for the classics or medieval studies departments to even be affiliated with it.

ABOVE: Mosaic from the Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople depicting the Virgin Mary seated with the infant Jesus on her lap. The emperor Constantine I stands on her left holding the city of Constantinople and the emperor Justinian I on her right holding the Hagia Sophia itself.

The more extreme forms of this “western civilization” narrative go so far as to flat-out deny that modern Greek people have any place in the classical tradition. It is no surprise that one early influential proponent of the narrative of “western civilization” was none other than the German scholar Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (lived 1790 – 1861)—who, as I discuss in this article from February 2020, is primarily known today for his stubborn insistence that modern Greeks are somehow not “real” Greeks, but rather degenerate half-breeds born of Slavic, Turkish, and Albanian miscegenation. He famously declares in volume one of his 1830 book Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters (in my own translation):

“The race of Hellenes has been totally exterminated in Europe. [Their] beauty of the body, brilliance of the spirit, harmony and simplicity of custom, art, competition, city, village, majestic columns and temples, yes even their name is vanished from the face of the Greek continent… Not even a drop of true and unmixed Hellenic blood flows through the veins of the Christian population of present-day Greece.”

The American white supremacist author Madison Grant (lived 1865 – 1937) went even further than Fallmerayer. As I discuss in this article from January 2021 about the so-called “Dorian invasion,” Grant notoriously tries to claim in his book The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History, which was originally published in 1916, that modern Greeks are not “real” Greeks and that the modern people who are racially closest to the ancient Greeks are, in fact, the English. Grant writes:

“It is not possible to-day to find in purity the physical traits of the ancient race in the Greek-speaking lands and islands, and it is chiefly among the pure Nordics of Anglo-Norman type that there occur those smooth and regular classic features, especially the brow and nose lines, that were the delight of the sculptors of Hellas.”

There are also less explicitly racist versions of this narrative. For instance, as I discuss in this article from January 2020, the popular series of mythology-based children’s books Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan, originally published from 2005 to 2009, portrays the Greek gods as living in the United States because the United States is supposedly the place where the flame of “western civilization” burns “brightest.”

Riordan eventually emends this narrative in his sequel series The Heroes of Olympus by having his heroes actually travel to Greece, but the consistent message within the first series is that the “flame of the west” has passed from Greece to the United States and that the Greek deities have therefore abandoned modern Greece.

It should come as no surprise that a Greek person once commented on an answer I wrote on Quora with a phrase that his father once told him: “Westerners have always loved Greeks—but only the dead ones.”

ABOVE: Photograph taken in around 1860 of the German author Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer

Getting rid of the pervasive unwillingness to criticize the ancient Greeks and Romans

Currently, many classicists are still unwilling to seriously criticize the ancient Greeks and Romans. Notably, as I discuss in this article from August 2020, there is a widespread unwillingness to recognize the sheer extent to which ancient slavery was a horrible, dehumanizing, and brutal institution.

It is a disappointing fact that some older classicists especially are still openly acting as apologists for slavery. Most notably, in August 2020, The Great Courses Plus released a lecture on ancient Greek slavery by Robert Garland, a highly respected emeritus professor of the classics from Colgate University, with the following description:

“Slavery was an ideal condition for some people in ancient Greece. Poverty and disease were so prevalent in those days that people preferred to be slaves so that they could survive those hardships. This gave them a level of economic security in that poverty-stricken world.”

As I discuss in the article—and as I think any reasonably informed person will agree—this is all complete nonsense. Slavery has never been an “ideal condition” for anyone. Nonetheless, this is the sort of thing that some older scholars are still pushing.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the description for Robert Garland’s lecture on ancient Greek slavery for The Great Courses Daily

There is also a frequent tendency for classicists (and people who are interested in the ancient world in general) to idealize Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic, portraying them as models for modern states to emulate. As I discuss in this article about Athenian democracy that I published in January 2021, however, this approach is misguided, because it fails to take into account the glaring flaws of these ancient states.

Classicists generally intellectually realize that Athenian democracy was highly exclusive, but there is a common tendency to merely make mention of this and shrug it off without making a real point of what it means. As I discuss in much greater depth in the article I have linked, at the very best, fully enfranchised adult male citizens only made up about one sixth of the population of Athens and anyone who was not an adult male citizen was formally excluded from participating in the democracy. At any given time, there were almost certainly more people in Athens who were enslaved than people who could vote.

Athens was also an aggressively imperialist state that treated its “allies” as subjects. Whenever one of its “allies” tried to leave the “alliance,” Athens used violence to force them to rejoin. The Athenians even committed flat-out genocide on a few occasions—most famously in around January 415 BCE, when the Athenians slaughtered all the men of the island of Melos and sold all the women and children into slavery.

The Roman Republic, which people also tend to glorify, was even less democratic than ancient Athens, since not even adult male citizens had much of a say in government the vast majority of the time. Likewise, the Roman Republic was arguably even more imperialistic than ancient Athens. The number of slaughters and atrocities committed in the name of the Roman Republic are indeed too numerous to even count.

There are, of course, important lessons that we can learn from studying ancient Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic, but the idea that these ancient states are good models on which we should directly base our own government is deeply misguided.

ABOVE: Painting by the German history painter Philipp Foltz (lived 1805 – 1877) showing the famous Athenian statesman Perikles addressing the Athenian Assembly on the Pnyx

Increasing recognition of the racist history of the field of classics

The way the discipline of classics is currently organized enables classicists to be ignorant of the racist history of their own discipline. Let me illustrate this with an anecdote. Last year, I happened to mention to one of my Latin professors here at Indiana University Bloomington that the eminent German classicist Eduard Norden (lived 1868 – 1941) was a racist who dismissed Loukianos of Samosata’s literary output on the basis of his identity as an ethnic Syrian, describing him in his Die antike Kunstsprosa vom VI. Jahrhundert v. Christus bis in die Zeit der Renaissance (which was first published in 1898) as “an Oriental without depth or character… who has no soul and degrades the most soulful language.”

What’s really interesting is that the professor in question responded by telling me that he consults Norden’s commentary on Book VI of the Aeneid all the time and that he had no idea that Norden was racist. He said that, after what I had told him, consulting Norden’s commentary would never feel the same.

I don’t blame that professor personally in the slightest for not knowing that Norden had written some really racist stuff; after all, I only knew about that quote from reading it quoted in Daniel S. Richter’s article about Loukianos in The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic. Nonetheless, the fact that it is possible for a classics professor to regularly consult a work written by a scholar from a hundred years ago without having any idea that the scholar in question was really racist speaks to a serious systemic problem in the discipline of classical studies.

One of the Delphic Maxims that are said to have been inscribed at the Temple of Apollon at Delphoi is “γνῶθι σεαυτόν,” which means “Know yourself.” This is a maxim that every classicist knows quite well. Unfortunately, it seems that classics as a discipline does not, in fact, know itself after all. There needs to be more support for scholars looking into the history of the discipline and much greater recognition of the racism and sexism that have been embedded in the discipline throughout its modern history.

ABOVE: Photograph of the classicist Eduard Norden, taken in 1888 when he was a student in Berlin

De-emphasizing Greek and Latin philology

The field of classics is intensely focused on Greek and Latin philology. This is partly justified; after all, a very large chunk of the surviving texts from the ancient Mediterranean world are written in these languages and knowing these languages is important for most scholars in the field. Unfortunately, the way that almost the entire field is structured around Greek and Latin philology has the effect of making it nearly impossible for people who are not already extremely socially privileged to enter the field.

For those who are not already aware, a student applying to a classics PhD program is generally expected to have had at least four years of formal instruction in Latin or Greek (usually Latin) and at least three years of the other. They are also generally expected to have received an A in every Latin and Greek class they have taken. This is a philological standard that is nearly impossible for most students to achieve and even many students who meet these rigorous expectations are rejected. Meanwhile, students applying to classics MA programs are generally expected to have had at least three years of Latin or Greek and at least one year of the other.

One difficulty many students face in meeting the philological expectations stems from the fact that the vast majority of high schools in the United States do not offer Latin. According to the National K-12 Foreign Language Enrollment Survey from June 2017, in that year, only thirty high schools in my entire home state of Indiana offered Latin. That’s in sharp contrast to the total of 174 high schools in the state that offered Spanish, the eighty-four high schools in the state that offered French, and the sixty-two high schools in the state that offered German.

I know from personal experience that not having taken any Latin in high school can make it significantly more challenging to pursue a degree in classics. I personally went to a very small, rural high school that was located several miles outside the small town of Kokomo, Indiana. Like the house I lived in, the school was surrounded by vast cornfields. My entire graduating class was composed of only 117 students. Naturally, the only foreign language classes my high school offered while I was there were Spanish and German. (It had previously offered French, but stopped offering French to new students the year I entered high school.)

When I first came to Indiana University Bloomington, I knew immediately that I wanted to major in the classics. (I added a second major in history before the end of my first year.) Nonetheless, I had virtually no experience whatsoever with Latin and it didn’t take long for me to realize that I was at a significant disadvantage compared to all the other classics majors at the university. They had all taken Latin in high school, so most of them started out taking 300 and 400-level classes in Latin their freshman year. I, on the other hand, had to start out in CLAS-L100, the very first course in the introductory sequence.

I went through the entire four-semester Latin introductory sequence and I did well in it. In fall 2020, I finally started taking 300 and 400-level Latin courses. I found that fellow undergraduates who had started at IU the same year as me were well ahead of where I was because they simply had more years of experience with Latin. I was still in the phase where I was forgetting vocabulary, while others who had taken Latin in high school were able to sight-read complicated sentences that took me ten minutes to figure out. My Latin has continued to improve since then. I am currently taking two upper-level Latin courses at once in order to keep from being too far behind my peers.

ABOVE: Beginning of a chart from the National K-12 Foreign Language Enrollment Survey from June 2017 showing the number of high school programs in various foreign languages in each state, with my home state of Indiana highlighted

Acquiring formal instruction in Ancient Greek is even more difficult than acquiring formal instruction in Latin. There are only a handful of high schools in the United States that offer any Greek courses whatsoever and, as far as I am aware, there is not a single high school in the United States that offers Ancient Greek at anything more than the most basic introductory level.

Even most colleges and universities in the United States do not offer upper-level classes in Ancient Greek, since only those schools with large, healthy classics departments can afford to teach such classes. These naturally tend to be more elite schools that are more expensive and harder to get into. Moreover, as I have discovered from first-hand experience, those universities that do offer upper-level Greek courses don’t necessarily offer them consistently.

I’ve always been more interested in Greek than Latin. My high school obviously never offered any form of Greek classes. Nonetheless, while I was still in high school, I was able to teach myself a little bit of Greek using a copy of Donald J. Mastronarde’s Introduction to Attic Greek and a website on the internet that had free written lessons and exercises in Koine Greek. Part of the reason why I decided to go to Indiana University Bloomington was because I knew that it was one of the few universities in the state that taught upper-level Ancient Greek.

I went through the entire four-semester Greek introductory sequence. I was expecting to start taking upper-level Greek courses in fall 2020. Midway through the spring 2020 semester, however, it was announced that two of the Hellenists in our classics department were moving to the University of Michigan. As a result of the reduced faculty, the department has not offered any Greek courses that are open to undergraduates this whole year other than the courses in the introductory sequence (which I have already taken), meaning I am missing out on a whole year of Greek classes right now that I would have taken otherwise and there’s not much I can do about it other than try to keep up with Greek on my own.

Next year, the only Greek classes that my university will be offering are the classes in the introductory sequence, an upper-level class on Xenophon in the fall, and an upper-level class on Homer in the spring. I had a conversation over email with the head of the classics department, who is also going to be the one teaching the Xenophon class in the fall. He strongly advised me not to try to sign up for either of the Greek courses that will be offered next year because they are “fast-paced” and, although they are nominally open to undergraduates, they are intended mainly for graduate students who already have extensive study of Greek. He told me that he thinks that the Greek will be way over my head.

Nonetheless, I am going to be graduating at the end of next school year and I really want to get at least a little bit of Greek beyond the introductory sequence in before I graduate. These are the only Greek classes that are going to be open to undergraduates that I haven’t already taken. There are no intermediate classes being offered. Therefore, as I see it, I don’t have any choice but to study Greek as intently as I can over the summer and take the classes on Xenophon and Homer that are being offered next year.

ABOVE: Portrait of Xenophon (left) and portrait of Homer (right)

I am personally extremely lucky, both that Indiana University Bloomington offers more Greek and Latin courses than most colleges and that I discovered my interest in ancient Greece and Rome before I came here, meaning I was able to start taking language classes right away. Many other people either go to universities that offer hardly any upper-level Latin or Greek courses or don’t discover their interest in the classics until after they are already at university.

I think it is fair that getting into a classics PhD program should be difficult. After all, the economic demand for people with classics PhDs is extremely tiny, so it is logical that programs should be extremely selective about who gets in. The problem with using experience in Greek and Latin philology as such an important factor in determining who gets in and who doesn’t isn’t that it restricts who can get in, but rather that it specifically restricts who can get in to the few students who are privileged enough to have had the opportunity to have already acquired extensive experience with the languages.

The high schools that offer Latin tend to be either elite, mostly-white private schools or well-funded public schools serving affluent, mostly-white neighborhoods in cities and suburbs. Most students of color trying to make it in classics would not only have to face the problem that I did of having never had Latin in high school, but also a plurality of other, far greater challenges, including the problem of systemic racism, which I have never had to face.

There are other areas of the study of the ancient Mediterranean world where the advantage that the most privileged students have over everyone else is much smaller. Notably, in the areas of ancient history and material culture, students generally tend to come in with similar levels of formal experience. Universities are also more likely to offer upper-level classes in ancient history and material culture than Greek and Latin.

It is therefore interesting how the one area of classical studies where the most privileged students have the greatest advantage over everyone else also happens to be the one area that graduate programs seem to care the most about.

The rhetoric of “burning it all down”

The ideas I have listed here are a few of the real changes that people are currently suggesting. None of these suggestions involve abandoning the study of the ancient world altogether; they are simply about changing how we study the ancient world.

It is true that some of the people advocating for change in how we study ancient Greece and Rome have used the rhetorical phrase “burning it all down.” For instance, Nadhira Hill, a PhD candidate in Classical Art and Archaeology at the University of Michigan, defended the use of the term “burning it all down” in a blog post titled “Yes, Classics Is Toxic, or In Defense of Burning It All Down” published on 21 December 2020. Sarah E. Bond used the same phrase in her now-infamous tweet on 22 January 2021.

What most people writing op-eds right now do not seem to understand is that, when twenty-first-century classicists use the rhetoric of “burning it all down,” they are not literally suggesting that we should round up every last copy of the Odyssey and Plato’s Republic, toss them all on a gigantic bonfire, and dance around the bonfire of burning books singing the Soviet anthem. The phrase “burning it all down” is a metaphor used to express the idea that the old order needs to be consumed in fire like the phoenix in order for a new order to be born from the ashes.

I personally agree with most of the things that the people who talk about “burning classics down” are actually advocating. Nonetheless, I am not personally going to use this rhetoric, because it is so easy for people to misinterpret—especially for people outside the field who are only paying half attention to what classicists are saying. It is extremely easy to spin this rhetoric into the hackneyed, stereotypical narrative of “Woke leftists want to destroy the humanities.”

Obviously, conservatives will try to tar us with this narrative no matter what we say or do, but I think that the least we can do is not make it easy for them.

ABOVE: Thaïs Leading the Destruction of Persepolis, painted in 1781 by the English painter Joshua Reynolds

The inevitability of change

I furthermore want to emphasize that many of the changes that Padilla and others are pushing for are already starting to happen. Some departments that were formerly called “classics” have already changed their names. Young scholars in the field increasingly roll our eyes at the notion that ancient Greek and Roman texts should be taught in line with the idea of “western heritage” and we are generally more willing to be critical of ancient practices such as slavery.

Greek and Latin philology is still dominant in large classics departments at elite institutions, but, as Rebecca Futo Kennedy and Maximus Planudes discuss in this blog post from 15 February 2021, at many smaller departments and less elite institutions, philology is already being knocked off its pedestal. These departments are increasingly finding that, as a result of systemic changes in society, the economy, and the university, they can’t realistically offer the in-depth philological training that graduate programs in classics expect.

The inevitable fact is that the status quo of the discipline that Padilla is critiquing simply can’t survive; its demise is inevitable. The study of the ancient Mediterranean world will inevitably look very different in thirty years than it does today. That’s just a fact. It is up to classicists right now to decide whether we want the new status quo to be a better one.

The real threat to the study of the ancient Mediterranean world: capitalism

There is, of course, a real threat to the survival of the study of the ancient Mediterranean world. Contrary to what the recent op-eds have led so many people to believe, however, the real threat is not “radical leftist” professors seeking to destroy the discipline from within, but rather the capitalist economic pressures that are currently eviscerating the humanities in general.

Incoming college students are increasingly told that they shouldn’t major in the humanities because they will supposedly never find jobs. This is manifestly untrue; studies have consistently found that the overwhelming majority of all people who majored in the humanities are happily and gainfully employed. It’s true that humanities majors do tend to make less money on average than people who majored in some disciplines of STEM, but the average pay for a humanities major is comparable to the average pay for a psychology or biology major—and yet, for some reason, I’ve never heard anyone warn students not to get a degree in biology.

Nonetheless, as a direct result of so many incoming students being fed the false narrative that majoring in the humanities is a sure path to unemployment, students are increasingly reticent about majoring in the humanities, or even taking humanities classes at all. The result is that there are fewer students in the humanities overall than there were a couple decades ago.

Meanwhile, as a result of the simultaneous process of the corporatization of higher education, universities are increasingly less interested in offering valuable education and more interested in churning a profit. As a result, they are less concerned with which skills are valuable to society and more concerned with which departments are attracting the most students. As a result, many universities are downsizing, defunding, or flat-out dissolving many of their humanities departments.

For instance, just recently, in December 2020, word got out that the University of Vermont (UVM) would be abolishing all Greek, Latin, and classical civilization majors for undergraduates, along with its classics MA program, and dissolving its classics department entirely, citing supposed low enrollment in these programs as an excuse. In addition to dissolving its classics department, UVM is planning to dissolve a large number of other programs, amounting a total of twelve majors and eleven minors in the College of Arts and Sciences that are all slated for dissolution.

ABOVE: Seal of the University of Vermont, which recently announced that it will be dissolving its classics department entirely due to supposed low enrollment

If any of the conservative op-ed writers really gave the slightest care in the world about the study of ancient Greece and Rome, they would be rallying to classics’ defense, criticizing the capitalist economic pressures that are destroying the humanities, and doing everything in their power to stop these departments from being dissolved and defunded.

But they aren’t doing that. They aren’t doing it because they don’t really care about the study of ancient Greece and Rome in the slightest. All they care about is effete pearl-clutching about how Black people and young scholars are trying to make the field less racist.