The Politics of Classics
By Eden Riebling
“Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture’s got to go!” In the four decades since Stanford students took up that chant, the campaign to cancel Classics has only partly succeeded. We can still read Homer and Sophocles in English class, and still major in Classics in college. But curricular reforms have decentered the study of ancient European culture, and the popularity of Classics as a major has declined sharply. A new cohort of emerging Classicists must renew the discipline or watch it become as obsolete as the broken statues it venerates.
Renewing Classics is work worth doing, because Classics done well creates humane understanding. Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass risked mockery, beating and even death to study Socrates, Cato and Cicero. Reading the Classics so galvanized the Reverend Martin Luther King that he mentioned Socrates three times in his Letter From Birmingham Jail. Protestant Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hanged for plotting to overthrow Hitler, revealed in his prison letters how Classical examples imbued the German Resistance with hilaritas — Plato’s term for the serenity with which Socrates raised the cup of hemlock to his lips.
Socially conscious Classics endures today in sometimes surprising places. It lives on, for instance, in the work of Cornel West, a Black Christian-socialist who draws on Greek and Roman authors to critique race, gender, and class in American life. “Engaging with the Classics and with our civilizational heritage is the means to finding our true voice,” West recently wrote. “It is how we become our full selves, spiritually free and morally great.” This multiracial humanism has been a casualty of our cultural politics. The celebration of difference has eclipsed a reverence for what we share. This change has alleviated a sometimes stifling homogeneity in American life. But the downside has been a dehumanization of those with whom we disagree. Trying to remain nonpartisan today on any contested issue can make you feel like you’re in a no-man’s land, like the one Priam crossed to supplicate his rival.
Yet we will not save Classics by loving it blindly. All good things can be used for bad ends, and an admiring interest in antiquity is no exception. Reviving Classics must begin by turning a classical, critical lens on Classics itself.
Too few voices in the discipline objected when dictators and racists leveraged a love for the past to sow hate in the present. The Confederate South, European imperialists, and twentieth-century totalitarians all found Classics congenial to their ideals. Those historical realities, which implicate Classics in legacies of injustice, compel its latter-day defenders to say how and why they are different — and to remake Classics into a bulwark against the intolerance it once abetted.
Whether Classics is a force for liberation or for oppression depends on one simple thing: How we use its ideas to see those who differ from us. Ideas abet oppression when they valorize or demonize races, genders, classes or cultures. By contrast, ideas encourage liberation when they emphasize our common humanity, so that we see others’ perspectives and make them our own. Classical ideals, like perhaps all ideals, have been used both to oppress and to liberate.
Greece and Rome were slave societies, yet they invented our ideals of human freedom and dignity. They mapped a way to liberation in lines of poetry written three thousand years ago.
It is in Book 24 Homer’s Iliad that we may find the key to global justice, peace, and love. This great poem of war falsifies the evils of force in a climactic scene often called the most moving in all of literature. The wrath of Achilles becomes empathy for his foe. When the supplicant Trojan king kneels before him, saying, “I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son,” Achilles cathartically weeps with and for his rival. As he emerges from the depths of brutality by identifying with his deadliest opponent, their shared grief transmutes enmity into fellowship. Achilles becomes a new and different epic hero, moved not just by compassion for the enemy but for all humankind. He pities others, seeing deep into their hearts and into his own, and becomes human in the full sense of the word. Harvard classicist Gregory Nagy, who deems this ethos the defining Classical ideal, calls it “epic empathy.”
Yet complicity with oppression shows that empathy has too often been a forgotten part of the Classical soul. Why did Hitler fill the courtyard of his Reich Chancellery with knockoff Roman statues, and spend his last days hovering over a scale model of Berlin rebuilt in the style of Classical Athens? We must identify what oppressors found useful in Greece and Rome to cauterize our culture from it. The Greek pedagogical ideal of paideia – which conceived itself as the only valid template for temperament, and tempts us today to believe that everyone else in the world really wants to be an American – is among the ideas perhaps overdue for disavowal. What does remain valuable in the classical tradition we should affirm and modulate, not in triumphant power chords, but in Socratic suggestion and tragic lament.
That’s the mood of Iliad 24, and of the humanist tradition it inspired. This tradition cautions against hubris and counsels radical respect. We all have inside us something precious, demanding dignity, making us all naturally equal: “We all share the divine power of thinking,” the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote. This Classical commonplace evolved into the idea, famously expressed by the Roman statesman Cicero, of a common human nature. On this view, which inspired Dr. King’s multiracial civil rights movement, a just government discriminates neither by gender, race, religion, sexuality, citizenship, nor any other group criterion. To Classical humanists, the only group that matters is the one to which we all belong.
This multiracial humanism declined, alas, with the rise of identity politics. Ethnocentric activists called the whole idea of human nature a threat to diversity. Demands for Black Power or White Power replaced Classical ideals like “the content of our character.” Performative protest replaced Socratic dialogue and Aristotelian norms of weighing what all sides say before forming your own opinion. The result has been half a century of dehumanizing those with whom we disagree. If you’re neither woke nor a white nationalist you’re in a kind of no-man’s land, like the one Priam crossed to supplicate his rival.
Yet Classical ideals survive whenever we recognize our shared humanity, seeing others as more than mere things. When we do this we reenact Iliad 24. If going back to the Classics will not, ipso facto, make us good, perhaps it will restore empathy as an ideal to which we aspire. Perhaps then we will approach our disputes more constructively, remembering what Homer never forgot: There is no “wrong” side to history, and in a tragedy both sides are right.
Until then, those who know their Homer can only stand in lonely awe of those who live their Homer. How Classical and how epic, for instance, is the empathy of the Israelis and Palestinians in the Parents Circle, a continuing dialogue between those on both sides who lost family in Gaza. Like Achilles and Priam they tell their enemies their grief, and their enemies share their pain, and they hold each other and weep, not far from the original Troy.
Eden Riebling attends the Horace Mann School in Bronx, New York. In addition to being a NextGen Politics Civic Fellow, she is the President of Classics Unplugged at the Society for Classical Studies, and the creator of Sing O Muse, an AI generating Homeric poetry.