Talking Classics

[...] I am certainly not going to argue that the literature of the Greeks and Romans beats all-comers, or that it is somehow better because it’s so old. But there is something distinctive, even if it is not unique, in its disruptive force.

To put it another way, one of the most deliciously uncomfortable pleasures of classical literature is that it gives you no place to hide, and there’s no avoiding the difficult and possibly painful bits: from rape and incest to child abuse and murder; from Medea killing her children or Antigone killing herself, to Oedipus marrying his mother or – in one of the most disconcerting stories ever told – Philomela raped by her brother-in-law, who then cut out the victim’s tongue to prevent her incriminating him. No careful selection, no bowdlerisation, no trigger warnings can ever offer you an entirely easy and unconfrontational ride. If you want classics, you have to take the troubling topics too, and you will miss a lot if you don’t ask what they mean to you. This can be about looking our demons in the eye.

The Greek Miracle?

The classic ground on which I like to tread is tricky terrain. It may trip us up and prove us wrong, but it helps us see things differently in the process. That is as true for the wider inheritance of the ancient world, as it is for those individual masterpiece works of art and literature. I have learned that you get a lot more out of classics if you allow it to be a disruptive challenge to self-serving modern certainties, rather than turn it into an untouchable ancestor in whose shadow you should count yourself lucky to sit.

It is one thing to say that we are still thinking with the ancients and with their questions (footnotes to Plato or not), or that many of our cultural and political conversations would be meaningless if we tried to eradicate the ‘Greek stuff’. That is certainly true (try a visit to any western art gallery, if you don’t believe me). But that is very different from suggesting that the cultural and political traditions that many of us hold dear were somehow handed down from antiquity and that we should be grateful. I’m thinking, for example, of the idea that we owe the notion of law, the rights of the citizen or the convenience of decent sanitation for that matter, to ancient Rome, or that philosophy, theatre, democracy and much more was invented by the ancient Greeks. That’s what has often been called the ‘Greek Miracle’, because it was close to miraculous that the Greeks achieved so much in such a short time, over just a couple of centuries; or that (to quote a television series of 2016) ‘they rose from nothing and changed everything’.

Of course, they didn’t. The word
‘democracy’ does come from Greek (demokratia, or ‘people power’) that’s for sure. Philosophy’ and ‘theatre were originally Greek words too (‘love of wisdom’ and ‘place to look’), like hundreds of other words we use, from ‘fantasy’ to ‘chrysalis’. But inventing the word is not the same as inventing the thing. The idea that no one before the Greeks thought hard about questions that we would call ‘philosophical’ or put on performances that we would call ‘theatrical’, is borderline ludicrous. And democracy, as a political system, can anyway never have been ‘invented’ in the same way that the steam engine or the smartphone were. It has been part of a continual, and rocky, process of invention and reinvention, in different contexts across time and space. To imagine that there was no other example of such power-sharing anywhere else in the world before the clever old Greeks hit on the idea and gave it a name is, to put it generously, a dreadful case of tunnel vision.

To see democracy, in particular, as something we have ‘inherited’ from the ancient world – and whose origins
thousands of years ago under the Greek sun we should still revere – is, at best, a misleading half-truth; at worst, it’s plain wrong. The history of ancient democracy is eye-opening because it is so different from that comfortable figment of it that we have constructed in our imagination: a precious bastion of equality, free speech, human rights and high-level debate. It was far less staid and hallowed, far more surprising, perilous and interesting.

For a start, most ancient Greeks lived under various kinds of authoritarian regime (monarchies, tyrannies, oligarchies), not under any form of ‘people power’. When we talk about ‘the Greeks’ inventing democracy, what we really mean is ‘the Athenians’ – though there were democracies in other cities too, sometimes forcibly imposed on them by Athens (compulsory democracy’ is indeed a chilling thought). Even there, the democratic system was relatively short-lived, spanning 150 years or so of the fifth and fourth centuries CE, and it was rigidly exclusive, more than half of the adult population – women and the enslaved – playing no part.

[...] After all, most of us vote in elections on the basis of inadequate evidence. And, while some questions do have right and wrong answers, many of the most important and unavoidable questions – about justice, morality, choice, judgement and so on – are among those that do not.

Social media is bedevilled by those who think that there is a simple right answer to everything (theirs.), and that debate is a zero-sum game (either you win, or I do). That’s its big problem. Yet, at the same time, even when there aren’t any right answers, the fact is that some answers and some arguments are better and more cogent than others and you have to learn what those are, and why. In a global environment of fact-dodging, misreporting, conspiracy theories, fake news and outright lies, skills in reading difficult things are among those that the world most needs. Part of the unashamed mission of humanities education is to celebrate and face up to complexity, not trade in false simplicity. That is what we [classicists] do.

No, this is not an argument for everyone to take a humanities degree, still less one in classics. Happily, culture and society are collaborative operations. The important thing is that some people do and that we take the skills of the humanities as seriously as those of nuclear physics or accountancy.