Ancient history
This week I want to recommend two articles about something you’d think I’d care a lot about but, in fact, usually don’t: classics. Like many nerdy kids in the U.S., I liked Greek myths and found it thrilling that something so old could not only survive but still feel exciting and fun to read. But for reasons known only to my heart’s most secret chambers, I left that interest by the side of the road sometime during adolescence and refused to pick it back up despite many chances and signs that maybe I should. I went to a hoity-toity college but somehow never read The Republic. My favorite professor (and sometimes advisor!) at that hoity-toity college was a classicist. At one point I somehow translated a poem from Greek for an assignment despite speaking no Greek (in comparative literature this is not as crazy as it sounds and anyway it was modern Greek). And yet to this day my main engagement with The Odyssey is a TV miniseries that aired in the late 90s, starring Vanessa Williams as Calypso and that’s all I remember about it.
The supposed primacy of Greek and Roman history and culture to “Western civilization” has definitely kept me uninterested, because hello, Western civilization is a bullshit concept, and diving into it any further that I had to didn’t seem like it was going to lead me anywhere interesting. It’s much more interesting to look at the cultures and societies and histories that Western civilization leaves out, or in many cases actively tried to destroy and erase. All that erasing can mean there’s less to look at, or at least it can seem that way, but you can’t live on top of Tenochtitlan for ten years and not grasp just how much of history, art, philosophy, literature, religion, and experience Western civilization tries to convince you didn’t matter, or never existed in the first place.
So I was honestly surprised to find myself really enjoying two classics-adjacent articles this week. The first is a profile of Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who, as the headline tells us, “wants to save classics from whiteness.”
Padilla argues that exposing untruths about antiquity, while important, is not enough: Explaining that an almighty, lily-white Roman Empire never existed will not stop white nationalists from pining for its return. The job of classicists is not to “point out the howlers,” he said on a 2017 panel. “To simply take the position of the teacher, the qualified classicist who knows things and can point to these mistakes, is not sufficient.” Dismantling structures of power that have been shored up by the classical tradition will require more than fact-checking; it will require writing an entirely new story about antiquity, and about who we are today.
Yes! I’m here for that! I’ve been unsatisfied with the “point[ing] out the howlers” approach, which is everywhere in archaeology and also in my own work; I’d put this article in that category. It’s not good enough.
The second article I enjoyed is from September, which is either a few months ago or several centuries ago, I can’t tell, and ironically given everything I’ve said up until this point, it’s about the continued searing relevance of classical tragedies.
You’ve never really seen “Oedipus,” I found myself thinking, till you’ve seen it during a plague. The plague hadn’t really stood out to me on previous readings, yet it was the key to everything: the way the denial of the contagion reflected right back on the contagion of denial, its tendency to morph into “denialism.” I felt a new appreciation, too, for all the work the plague was doing to power the plot. It reprised the riddle of the Sphinx: Oedipus had to save the city again. It was a ticking time bomb: every moment that he didn’t solve the plague, the bodies were piling up, death-rich Hades was making off with more shades. And the ultimatum from Delphi—solve the murder, or the plague goes on—turned the myth of Oedipus into a whodunnit, with Oedipus himself as both detective and murderer.
I just happened to read these pieces more or less back-to-back, and the friction they created between them added to both. Maybe this is the week I’ll finally start listening to the audiobook of The Odyssey, in Emily Wilson’s new translation. With apologies to Vanessa Williams, my mental image of it could probably do with an update.