VICTOR DAVIS HANSON & JOHN HEATH
WHO KILLED HOMER?: THE PREQUEL
A few weeks before the book Who Killed Homer? appeared, the journal Arion published the following excerpt. This condensation and the subsequent appearance of the book set off a firestorm in the tiny world of classics that endured for more than two years. Most classicists were as outraged over our thesis—that the profession had abandoned advocacy for the study of classical antiquity at precisely the time advocacy was most needed—as the public was receptive.
We have, of course, been delighted by the response that WKH? received in the popular media from nonclassicists. Our intention in writing the book was that the Greeks—and how we classicists write and teach (and do not teach) about them—might become the subject of some discussion outside the soundproofed walls of the academy. The reviews the book received, almost all of them so far positive, in important review publications (e.g., Kirkus, Publishers Weekly), major newspapers (e.g., Washington Post and Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Cleveland Plain Dealer), and mainstream journals of various political persuasions (e.g., American Spectator, Dissent, Weekly Standard) were also a pleasant surprise. Even more unanticipated was the interest a cranky book on the Greeks aroused among the producers of national and regional television and radio—the irony of our representing classics and classicists on Talk of the Nation and NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, as well as in numerous other radio and newspaper interviews, was not lost on us (or on the rest of our profession). Apparently, what we had to say has resonated with a number of people outside the classics frog pond who are genuinely interested in the Greeks and Romans.
That being said, it is not surprising that classicists have for the most part tried to avoid at all costs a public wrestling match with our tar baby. Yet the hundreds of personal e-mails, letters, and invitations to speak (!) from classicists and humanities programs throughout the country suggest that there are many teachers of the Greeks and Romans who have found something to like in the book, but do not have the time, energy, or stomach to get dragged into and smeared by the controversy.
Who can blame them? We too are glad that the immediate disputation died down, since we have spent a great deal of time writing personal letters of response, being adopted as philhellenes by a number of Greeks, and politely accepting and declining offers of all sorts of trips and interviews from (sometimes bizarre) groups and individuals. The “official” published response of the profession itself reveals the “highly idiosyncratic agenda” (as one angry reviewer put it, adding “perverse” in another paragraph) of the book: praised by Bernard Knox; trashed (on four occasions!) by a furious and seething Peter Green; praised and trashed simultaneously by Charles Beye; lauded by such diverse figures as Camille Paglia, David Kovacs, James Morris, Richard Rodriguez, Roger Kimball, John Silber, and Steven Willetts; dismissed as very unfunny by Mary Lefkowitz; and even deemed life-threatening to Charles Martindale.
WKH? is built upon three arguments which any critic, classicist, or pubic intellectual must address: (1) The demise of classical learning is both real and quantifiable; (2) The self-appointed leaders of our present generation of classicists have helped to erode classical education through an increasingly careerist approach to their vocation that runs directly counter to the spirit of Greek wisdom itself; (3) Greek wisdom is not Mediterranean but anti-Mediterranean; Hellenic culture is not just different from, but entirely antithetical to, any civilization of its own time or space. Connected to this proposition is our contention that the central institutions that derive from an underlying Hellenic core of values have shaped the modern West. We must therefore examine them if we are to understand, manage, and correct our own lives.
Most find this blanket assertion astonishing for at least two reasons. First, nursed on the mother’s milk of academic specialization, most campus critics immediately object to our equation of Hellenism and Western culture: no, it was the Jews, the Christians, the Romans, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Germans, the et alia….that created Western civilization. These critics forget that the core of Western culture, enlarged and enhanced by all of the above, first coalesced in Greece and nowhere but Greece.
Second, nearly everything that academics in the humanities value—appointments, fellowships, peer-reviewed publications, release time—is predicated upon a fashionable disdain for almost everything Western. Proclaiming that there was very little equality and quite a lot of racism, chauvinism, and elitism in ancient Greece is now the career creed of academic classicists; and when the other cultures of the ancient Mediterranean are invoked—Egypt, Persia, the Near East—it is nearly always to suggest that the Greeks borrowed or stole from them what was good and invented on their own what was bad. Very few classics professors seem to realize, much less argue, that Persepolis was not a polis, that the independent voices of Homer, Hesiod, and the lyric poets are not of the religious tradition of the Old Testament prophets, and that the monumental tombs of the elite in Egypt have affinity to Mycenaean and Hellenistic, but rarely to classical, Greece.
Because we see great value in studying and coming to grips with Greek wisdom—and because fewer and fewer Americans are aware of this wisdom—we also called for drastic changes in the way classics is structured. We hoped, at best, to raise the issue for debate, and that we may have accomplished to some small degree. The oddest reaction to our sample curriculum outline, in fact, was that many classicists objected to our proposal that classics be at the center of the way undergraduates are taught.
Our call for more and better undergraduate teaching, broad publication with less conference hopping, and so on, is not going to sit well with careerists in any department in the modern university: it “really chills the blood” of one phlegmatic reviewer. Still, it is fun to cull the comments on our proposal even from the most glowing reviews: “Their rigorous pedagogic program for returning classics to a pride of place in the humanities, however, involves too many Draconian measures—scrapping the doctoral dissertation, ending post-doc fellowships, junking peer conference junkets—to be practical”; “…too many forces in the universities that would prevent any such change”; “unlikely”; “likely too much to expect”; “Was ever a wish list so nobly at odds with its context?”; “utopian… or possibly harmful” (this quite favorable reviewer did not like our proposal to jettison the dissertation and replace it with a series of papers presented to the entire graduate faculty, despite the fact that of the over 1,400 theses started in the past ten years, less than half were finished by the end of 1997!); “their solution is a kind of academic boot camp”; “It is like a good B-movie plot; we know that it is too late.” Yes, we do.
So, if our proposals for genuine change will be dismissed, what do the official candidates for American Philological Association (APA) offices suggest should be done instead? After all, their recent 1999 statements are filled with ideas for addressing contemporary “opportunities” and “challenges”: they insist “we must increase our efforts to reach out to a literate audience beyond our classrooms” and call for “responsible” popularization and attention to undergraduate teaching. There is even a new ad-hoc Committee on Outreach—staffed for the most part, we cannot help but observe, by the same APA figures who have advocated the recent deleterious developments in the field. Others promise a new magazine for the general public that highlights the exciting research APA members are doing—the more they formally deny there is a serious problem, the more they look for ways to find salvation.
But the methods for achieving these noble goals which we outlined in the book—all part of the central argument of WKH?—are decidedly different from our own suggestions and are uncannily familiar: more links with other professional organizations, more cross-fertilization with other disciplines and alliances with other departments, more prizes, panels, websites (the Internet will save us all!), organizations, journals, conferences, sessions, colloquia on topics like the APA-sponsored three-year panel on “Ethnicities: Ancient and Modern,” and papers on “The Relationship Between Gender and Ethnicity in Ancient Mediterranean Societies” and “Women’s Culture, its Formulation and Transmission.” In other words, more of the same kind of inbred behavior that got us in this mess to begin with, or at least has done nothing to get us out of it.
The vitae submitted by the candidates for professional offices in the APA give away the game: fellowships, grants, leaves, monographs, and administrative appointments pepper the landscape of their personal statements without a single mention anywhere of the variety or number of courses taught, articles or books penned for the popular press, or even the expressed intention of committing themselves to such endeavors in the future. How sad that we are to vote for those who give us the least amount of evidence that they have taught the ordinary student in any personal fashion or written anything anyone has read.
As for the suggestion that the Greeks can be saved with more colloquia on the state of classics, we can think of no greater waste of time or money. We already know what must be done, how it should be done, when it should be done—but the medicine is worse than the disease. For example, in June 1998, three months after the publication of WKH?, there was a conference at Stanford University (our alma mater), sponsored by the Department of Classics and Stanford Humanities Center. The working title of that conference—eventually retitled “Institutionalizing Classics”—was “We Killed Homer” (the website address ended in wkh.html), an unusual bit of candor peering through what was probably intended to be a joke. The colloquium featured seventeen speakers, including four scholars named in our “roll call of dishonor,” on “current issues and controversies in the teaching, reading, scholarship, and public invocations of the classics.” But, of course, there was no real interest in a diversity of opinions—no one critical of current trends in scholarship, curriculum, or graduate indoctrination was invited to participate. Indeed, it appears that no audience outside of the Stanford campus was invited to attend—to this day we have not heard of a single classics department in the Bay Area (where we live and work), much less the country, that received notice of the conference. The speakers, several on year-long leaves, reaffirmed that all was well with the field, and most of the speakers did in fact seem to be flourishing in the California sun. Much of the conference, we have learned from second-hand reports, was apparently devoted to suggesting that we were rightists (a euphemism) on questions of race, gender, and class. A similarly skewed and monolithic conference on the future of Ancient Studies was held in February 2000 at New York University. The reviewers of the conference for the Chronicle of Higher Education and The New York Times wondered aloud why genuine diversity of opinion had to be tracked down on the other side of the country. And the American Philological Association did devote a panel at their 1998 convention to discussions of Who Killed Homer?, but the range of topics proffered did not suggest that any classicist actually wished to discuss the arguments presented in the book: the dearth of jobs for classics professors, the ideological fads that promise expansion of popular interest in Greece and Rome but have actually eroded both readership and enrollment, and the value system of a profession that rewards undergraduate teaching hardly at all.
The simple fact is that classicists in charge of classics are not open to criticism of their field, and they are understandably but sadly so defensive about their failures that they are unable to deal directly with our blunt critique. We are still waiting for one of them—any one of them—to tell the world why our children should study, and why our neighbors should care enough to read about, those long-dead Greeks. And so here is a final great irony. The aforementioned candidates for APA office, who have demonstrably not been interested in real discussion, now, in typical academic passive-aggressive fashion, indirectly accuse us of trying to “silence” certain voices: “We fail the commitment to intellectual endeavor that is our primary legacy from the classical past, if we eliminate certain roads of inquiry in favor of others”; “What is most to be feared is the successful appropriation of the classics by a single, and single-minded, body intent upon imposing its will, forestalling dissent and thereby forestalling progress in scholarship and education.” If there has been any attempt to silence anyone, it has come entirely from our critics, whose efforts have ranged from calling the FBI, to lobbying the University of California Press to forgo their paperback edition of Who Killed Homer?, to efforts by the editorial staff of UC Press to censor our updated edition.1
The claim of classicists to want to keep open dialogue and discussion is simply another posture, and so, sadly, Who Killed Homer? continues to remain about the only alternative voice in classics’ eleventh hour.
IN a recent article about the state of classical studies, Garry Wills makes a series of remarkable assertions, but perhaps none is more surprising than the title of the article itself: “There’s Nothing Conservative about the Classics Revival.”2 A political agenda is clear—more on that later—but what could Mr. Wills possibly mean by a classics revival? The only evidence he provides for “people beating their way… to clamber on board” the sinking ship of classical studies (38) is the connection of some recent scholarship to a few other disciplines and special interest groups in the academy—black studies, gay studies, women’s studies, and comparative anthropology. To Wills, that a handful of academics can now find their own ideologies reflected in the scholarship of their colleagues down the hall in the classics department means that ancient Greece and Rome are alive and well in America at the millennium: “The ancient texts have become eerily modern in what they have to say about power relationships between men and women, gay men and war, superiors and subordinates” (42).
Wills himself, however, is aware of the tenuousness of his thesis. “Multiculturalism, far from being a challenge to the classics, is precisely what is reviving them. if [our emphasis] there is a resurgence of interest in the classics, it is because we are making them our classics…” (42). The conditional mood gives away the game: unfortunately there is no “resurgence of interest in the classics,” and so Wills cannot adduce proof of growing university enrollments in classics, more B.A.’s awarded in classics, an upsurge in hiring of recent classics Ph.D.’s, new undergraduate programs, expanding readership for university press books on the ancient world, steady growth of Latin in the high schools, a renaissance in interest in the Greeks by the public at large—or any other hard data. In fact, Mr. Wills has nothing at all to support his assertions other than his ideological affinity for the fashionable causes of contemporary classical scholarship: if we mean well, then we are crafting a classical renaissance.
In fact, classics is dying, if not already dead, mostly because of the very approaches Wills cites as evidence for his imaginary revival. Multiculturalism has not “supplied blood for the ghosts,” but drained the last drops from a fading patient. Like the narrow philology it replaced, the latest multicultural fad is hardly populist and inclusive, but usually in language and scope predictably elitist, narrow, and self-serving. Classicists now share an uncomfortable fate with Aesop’s dying eagle. The Greek fabulist tells of an eagle, shot down by an arrow, which only at the moment of his death recognizes his own feathers on the shaft. What classicists have said and written over the past few decades—how we said it and especially why—has done its own part to kill off any lingering interest in the ancient worlds for all but a tiny cadre of professional scholars. For the first time in the centuries-long struggle to preserve Greek wisdom, the Greeks’ traditional defenders have turned traitor to the cause and, consciously or not, abandoned the wisdom of the Greeks in favor of a hypocritical careerism.
If Wills means by a “classics revival” that professional scholars are publishing more than ever before on the ancient worlds, he has a point. In the single year 1992, for example, classicists published and reviewed 16, 168 articles, monographs, and books about the Greeks and Romans.3 The work of over 10,000 individual scholars appeared in nearly 1,000 different journals. We are a busy profession in our eleventh hour. Researchers on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey alone produced more than 200 publications in nine modern languages, not including the scores of studies of the historical, archaeological, and linguistic background to the Homeric texts. These articles and books represent officially published material; perhaps as much was written in relatively obscure journals or local academic newsletters and bulletins.
A comparison of the professional output of 1992 with that of 1962 reveals the remarkable growth in the industry of classical scholarship in just the past three decades: twice as many scholars now publish 50 percent more material in twice as many journals. A reference aid listing abbreviations of journals, series, and standard works “that classicists most frequently find in the scholarship of their discipline” lists more than 4,400 separate titles.4 No classicist alive knows even the serial numbers of his trade anymore, so enormous has the machinery of academic production become. No one has calculated how much capital and how many ditched classes and ignored students were invested in this new experiment in mass publication.
Scholars cannot even keep up with the publications themselves in their own subspecialty within classics. The author of a recent 470-page book on the Iliad, for example, comments at the beginning of his bibliography (itself comprising twenty-five pages containing over 700 items): “A few sources mentioned in passing in the notes I have omitted, in the interest of economy [!], as peripheral; even in work central to the Homeric Question, there can be no question of completeness.”5 Even academics, who write for a few dozen or so, now confess that after reading 700 secondary works in their field, they cannot master their own bibliographies. Is this abundance of classical scholarship a sign of a healthy, flourishing, important, “reviving” discipline? Or is it, in fact, symptomatic—and explicatory—of its very demise?
Different statistics might tell a very different story. At the same time scholarly publication was soaring, the number of nonprofessionals in America actually reading about or studying the classical world took a nose-dive. There were 700,000 high school students enrolled in Latin in 1962; by 1976 enrollments had plunged 80 percent to 150,000. In but fifteen years over a half-million fewer Americans enrolled in this fundamental building block of classical studies. In this Golden Age of classics publication, the number of college Latin students plummeted from 40,000 in 1965 to 25,000 just nine years later, and enrollments have not recovered. The full data on the nineties are not yet in, but statistics for the first half of the decade reveal that the decline continues, if not at an accelerated rate.6 In short, there are both more students in the university and fewer in classics than ever before.
Between 1971 and 1991 the number of classics majors dropped by 30 percent, as did Greek enrollments in one decade between 1977 and 1986. Of the over one million B.A.’s awarded in 1994, only six hundred were granted in classics, meaning that there are now five or six classics professors in the country for every senior classics major and over thirty articles and books each year for every graduating student.
One of the authors of a recent survey of the study of Greek in North America observed that enrollments in a new sequence of Greek courses at her university declined over four semesters, from twenty-five to ten to five to two. The sequence was canceled, she concludes, despite—and who says politicians have a monopoly on “spin”?—“the unquestionable success of the experiment.”7 Two students completing a Greek sequence at a major university is now labeled “success.”
Falling student numbers are, of course, not the only symptom of our moribundity. The death of classics can be measured not just in the number of students, but also in the kind of students and the quality of their education. Classics majors in the 1970s had the highest GRE scores in the humanities, fifty points higher than majors in English. By the mid-1990s the gap had nearly disappeared, but the movement was in all one direction: the scores of English majors remained virtually unchanged, while the average for classics majors dropped forty-four points. By any objective criterion classics faculty faired just as poorly: there are now fewer doctoral programs in classics than in any other discipline surveyed; even with cut-backs at graduate programs, classics still has one of the poorest rates of employment in the humanities for recent Ph.D.’s and the second lowest salary on average in the humanities.8
We cite the above statistics simply to document the obvious: the Greeks, unfamiliar to the general public at large, are also now dying in the university itself. The claim of a “revival” is but yet another hoax from a school of thought that denies the existence of facts, that believes the Greeks exist “only when we rethink them as a way of rethinking ourselves” (Wills, 42). Today classics embraces a body of knowledge and a way of looking at the world virtually unrecognized, an almost extinct species even in its own protected habitat, the academic department. We classicists are the dodo birds of academia; when we retire or die, our positions are often either eliminated outright or replaced with temporary and part-time help.
So the real question becomes, why are the Greeks unknown now? America is at its wealthiest, its universities are larger than ever, the number of senior classics professors, endowed chairs, think tanks, humanities centers, graduate programs, journals, publications, and professional conferences is at an all-time high. Why such dismal interest now, despite the availability of Greek wisdom through an unprecedented number of high-quality and affordable translations? At the very moment in our history when Homer might be helping to remind us of who we are, why we got here, and where we should go, only a handful of Americans knows the Greeks—or cares that classics is dying. If we are writing so much, why are others reading so little of it? In our identity-obsessed age, why haven’t we Westerners been led by our very busy professors and scholars back to the beauty and the wisdom—and the power—of our own culture?
II. THE PRESENT CRISIS
As the statistics reveal, the beginning of the end of the formal study of the Greeks arrived in the 1960s. Classics—lonely amo, amas, amat in the carrel, Demosthenes’ hokey sermons on courage and sacrifice, Livy’s advice to fight the good war—became worse than irrelevant. The entire package was viewed as part of the reactionary “establishment.” It had to be jettisoned. Curricular “reform,” introduced by a new crop of professional “educators,” meant the abandonment of core courses. The post-Sputnik panic also created an increased educational emphasis on math, science, and modern language. And the number of students—and faculty—grew at unprecedented rates in the late sixties and early seventies, greatly increasing the challenge of teaching difficult subjects to the more poorly prepared undergraduates (a task which was increasingly handed over to the burgeoning ranks of graduate students). For these and other reasons, students of this new age, no longer either compelled to memorize irregular comparative adjectives or eager to soak up the bothersome wisdom of Sophoclean tragedy, now needed to be enticed back into the traditional classroom. Scholars were forced to win back their students and to convert the now preoccupied public to their own particular enclaves.
Yet many old-school philologists, faced with these challenges, sadly became even more reactionary. If classics was to be extinguished by the uncouth, better to commit suicide with a tiny, loyal band in the bunker. They would not stoop to fight the barbarians hand-to-hand, to dilute the purity of their discipline with courses accessible to the “illiterate” (i.e., those with little Latin and less Greek). Teaching, of course, was rarely on the High Classicists’ agenda (they had tenure; others to come did not). At the height of the crisis, Professor George Goold of Harvard University said as much at the national meeting of the APA in 1971:
I think we are liars or fools or both, if we claim that the usefulness or relevance of classical studies constitutes the real reason why we cultivate them…. [W]e did not take up classics in order to teach it, and once we are honest enough to face that fact, we shall—when we actually do teach classics—be superior teachers for that very fact…. The real reason we study classics is its value: and that value is quite simply the pleasure it gives us. It is a pure, non-material pleasure, akin to the pleasure we derive from looking at pictures and listening to music; it is, for the most part, a passive, intellectual pleasure….9
The American public, then, was supposed to pay materially for a few professors to privately enjoy a “non-material” pleasure. These self-styled elite classicists—most not as candid or as intellectually honest as Professor Goold—shunned the task of winning new recruits to their “passive, intellectual pleasure.” University and government money would always subsidize a tiny cohort of true classicists, who could read Greek in tiny enclaves.
After all, what was the alternative? Only “classroom showmanship,” “middle-class dutifulness,” “being excited in class,” and “pushing academic uppers,” as one Ivy League classicist scoffed recently-adding that the profession does not need “the pose of middle-class populism” or “good citizenship and chumminess, to the point of opening our homes to calls at all hours from students.”10 An ethos like that should win Professor Konstan the presidency of the APA. Yet our problem in classics has never been “calls at all hours from students” but, in fact, no calls from anyone outside academia at any hour. Most of our unemployed young Ph.D.’s in classics milling around the hiring board at the annual job convention would prefer the risk of middle-class populism to the certain doom of aristocratic elitism; many, we think, would prefer “calls at all hours from students” to no jobs at all.
In a sense, the self-proclaimed Old Guard of classics fiddled while Rome and Greece burned in their classrooms. Enrollments steadily declined even further, until a wise few saw the peril. Finally, in the 1970s, courses in Greek and Roman religion, mythology, and literature in translation—many introduced and taught by new, more energetic faculty—came to play a more important part in the classics curriculum. Rousing new editions of Homer, the lyric poets, the tragedians, the historians, Aristophanes, and the Augustans by gifted translators such as Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fitzgerald, Peter Green, Michael Grant, William Arrowsmith, and David Grene became fixtures in the syllabus. The field would have died completely had it not been for the popular efforts of such scholars and teachers. Their skill and imagination ensured that the themes of drama and epic, hard and tough lessons, now struck harmonious chords with students unversed in the niceties of iambic trimeter and epirrhematic syzygy.
Anemic and bandaged, but still breathing, Homer limped into the 1980s, leaning heavily on the goodwill of dedicated teachers, translators, and “popularizers” who were struggling to save their programs (High Classicists at a critical time provided little leadership to capture new students, other than staffing the offices of the APA). But much damage had been done—the vital organs had been reached, and worse still, too many classicists themselves were now confused and divided over whether saving classics meant killing it. Homer, then, required more new blood, more work to build on the successful undergraduate translation classes of the 1970s.
Instead, the 1980s and 1990s have seen another curricular shift in the academy and a much different challenge to Homer in the form of “theory” and “multiculturalism,” the very movements Wills cites as responsible for our “revival.” Multiculturalists generally belong to one of two camps. Some believe that all cultures are equal—the West no better or worse than any other. But others more dour are convinced that all cultures are equal except the West, which is uniquely imperialistic, hegemonic, nationalistic, sexist, and patriarchal and therefore to be studied only as an exemplar of what is wrong with the present world. Either way, the Greeks lose: if they are the same as the Thracians or Carthaginians, why study Greek instead of Greek/Phoenician/Hittite/Egyptian? If they are worse, why study them at all?
Astonishingly, too many complacent classicists seemed to have learned nothing from the catastrophe of the 1960s and therefore have done little to fight back against this new, more virulent variant on the tired modernist accusation against Greek and Latin of “inappropriateness” and “decadence.” Instead—and here are the eagle’s feathers—they have enlisted in this crusade against the West. Like Ephialtes, classicists used their inside knowledge to lead the enemy around the pass at Thermopylae, and so to destroy the embattled and outnumbered Greeks and their entire tiny phalanx from the rear.
A new crop of “social constructionists” either trashed the classical world for not being multicultural (which is dishonest: no civilization has been or ever will be truly multicultural) or tried to reinvent the Greeks and Romans as multicultural (which is a lie). Greek wisdom is not only forgotten—it is now to be actively rejected. The last generation of classicists wishes to survive and be loved—by fellow academics—by guaranteeing to their anti-Hellenic colleagues that there will be few other classicists to follow.
Eager to fan the last ember of the dimming classics campfire by co-opting this latest fad, some programs in classics for a few years now have been adopting such misguided schemes of reinvention as the following:
Our field is ripe not only for theoretical but also practical restructuring. Why Greek and Latin, to the exclusion of others? A department of Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac could be one very exciting place….11
So would a polyglot “Department of Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Phoenician, Assyrian, Babylonian, Hittite, Egyptian,” and so on—but to what end other than attempting to appease others at the university by killing the field? “Why Greek and Latin to the exclusion of others?” Why? Perhaps because there is a literature of Greek and Latin that alone in the Mediterranean is quite separate from religion, one that alone inaugurates the Western experience of self-criticism and abstraction. Perhaps because in these languages there are words for “citizen,” “constitution,” and “freedom” and a vocabulary of social dissent. Many now find that it earns dividends to deny that the Greeks were unique in the ancient Mediterranean, or that Western culture, ancient or modern, has any peculiar dynamism or imagination. Such a traditional view, we are told, is now hopelessly naive and outdated:
I argue that the current sense of “crisis” has been misrepresented as a conflict between theoretical and traditional archaeology, or even between young and old. In fact it is just one part of the general collapse of intellectuals’ attempts to define what ‘the West’ is and should be. Archaeologists of Greece had neutralized their material to protect the set of beliefs which gave prestige to classical studies; now that these beliefs are crumbling, they are left defending nothing.12
Are we to believe that this archaeologist and his many peers in their own lives really find the definition of the West—free speech, an independent judiciary, material bounty, private property, a market economy, separation between church and state, and constitutional government—to be mere “crumbling beliefs” amounting to “nothing”? Still, there is nothing particularly objectionable to “universal inclusivity” as a general warm and fuzzy principle—provided that faculty and students understand the real differences between these cultures. Like the Greeks themselves, classicists must never pretend that all cultures are equal. They know better than to speak the untruth that there is a Phaedo in Egypt, an Oresteia in Persia, or an Iliad in Assyria, much less democracy among the contemporary Germans or universities in fourth-century B.C. Gaul. The Pharaohs really did not have designs for airplanes, and Socrates, as Professor Mary Lefkowitz has demonstrated time and time again, was neither black nor a product of a stolen African philosophical system. The Romans learned much from Mago the Carthaginian’s treatise on agriculture; but there existed nothing in Punic culture like the Theophrastean tradition of Western agronomy.
It is neither ethnocentric nor chauvinistic to admit that the court of Tiglath-pileser III was not a Socratic circle, that the citizens of Sidon did not craft law by majority vote, that everywhere outside of Greece there mostly were two, not three, classes, that hydraulic dynasties did not foster yeomen, that planned palatial economies did not create an empowered citizenry, that literature or philosophy apart from religion is rare beyond the Aegean. Yet the current multiculturalism on campus makes such truths unmentionable if not dangerous.
As one classicist recently insisted, “The patriarchal denial of the possibility of early matriculture found in traditional classics is elitist, (hetero)sexist, and insidiously racist and anti-Semitic, since it dismisses academic discussion—i.e., the production and dissemination of knowledge—of a matricentric and egalitarian early culture and discounts African influence on the cultural development of the West.”13 To argue—as the evidence overwhelmingly suggests—that Greek wisdom of the polis ultimately owes little of its core to other Mediterranean cultures now earns scholars the nastiest of labels. Who in fact now has “dismissed academic discussion”?
Even more strangely, some scholars have built careers in the past decade by insisting—again, by citing authors and arguments that have been thoroughly refuted—that the polis Greeks derived many aspects of their core culture from Africa and the Levant. Professor Wills merely repeats these discredited notions when he insists that “Eurocentrism, when it was embedded in the study of the classics, created a false picture of the classics themselves. Multiculturalism is now breaking open that deception. We learn that ‘the West’ is an admittedly brilliant derivative of the East” (42). Can Mr. Wills please demonstrate from what part of the East did the West brilliantly derive democracy, free inquiry, the idea of a middle class, political freedom, literature apart from religion, citizen militias, words like “parody,” “cynicism,” and “skepticism,” and a language of abstraction and rationalism? And can Professor Passman explain where there was an “egalitarian early culture” outside of the classical world—Egypt? Carthage? Persia?
Martin Bernal is a historian of China who compares himself to Schliemann and Ventris—philhellenes both—because of his contributions to the study of classical culture despite his “amateur” standing in classics. He has urged us “not only to rethink the fundamental bases of ‘Western Civilization’ but also to recognize the penetration of racism and ‘continental chauvinism’ into all our historiography.”14 Not only are all cultures alike in this postmodernist world, but Greek wisdom turns out not to be Greek at all! Racism in “all” of our historiography has created Greeks who were not really Greeks. The paradox is unmistakable: Western culture is racist, sexist, patriarchal, but we nevertheless now are to claim that it all started in black Africa and Asia. These new critics cannot have it both ways: either Greece and the West are terrible and properly the baggage of an oppressive European culture that plagues us still, or they are not. The Greeks cannot both be deplorable and yet proof positive of a glorious lost African or Semitic legacy.
It is time to put aside the personal quibbling and concede that this latest attempt at “rethinking” the Greeks has failed—except at offering a false picture of the origins of the West and serving the professional aspirations of a handful of academics who publish too much and teach too little, who advocate one life and live another, who ridicule everyone’s affluence but their own. Wills takes a particularly odd tack when he dismisses the comprehensive refutation of Bernal’s thesis by “Mary Lefkowitz and a group of scholars…for what they take to be errors and overlooked information” (40). Bernal’s thesis has been demolished by professional scholars from a wide variety of disciplines. They do not merely “take” his arguments “to be errors,” but demonstrate them to be errors and half-truths and unsubstantiated inferences. What exactly does “what they take to be errors” mean? Errors or no errors in Bernal’s “history”?
Diverse and impressive cultures populated the ancient Mediterranean, constantly interacting, borrowing, sharing, adopting, and rejecting from one another as they saw fit, all worthy of professional exploration. The Egyptians and Persians influenced the early Greek world, and the Greeks themselves were variously impressed with the Scythians, Celts, and Carthaginians. But all cultures have never been, and are not, the same. If names now must be changed to fit the times, it would be far more honest to call the true classics program of the next millennium the “Anti-Mediterranean Studies” Department. If truth were still a goal in American universities, then we should explore why and how such a tiny, poor country in the southern Balkans differed so radically from the general culture shared by its wealthier neighbors across the sea, its tenets still so radically more influential even as we speak.
When the Pharaohs were coercing labor on a mass scale to erect their own elaborate tombs, when the Great King of Persia was building palaces for himself and temples for the gods into which no commoner could step, the Greeks were constructing gymnasia, theaters, law courts, public dockyards, markets, and assembly places for their own lowly citizens. That is a different reality and can be evaluated on absolute criteria. In the classical age of Greece, there was no Pyramid of Pericles, no Great Palace of Epameinondas, no mummified Aristides. Giza and Persepolis are still beautiful and they are monuments to the ingenious marshaling of human and material capital, but they are also testaments of how and why that labor and treasure were used—and for whom. Again, whose values are “crumbling”?
While Cleisthenes and his successors were reorganizing Athens into a consensual democracy built upon assemblies, councils, and officials elected by citizens and lot, hereditary princes and priests were running the show for the Celts, Persians (whose “Great” king could “do as he willed”), Scythians, Jews, and Egyptians. There was no God-On-This-Earth Themistocles, no Lord Solon. As Greek farmers perfected a system of mass fighting in hoplite ranks to save their lands and their consensual polis, the Carthaginians still preferred mercenaries, and a professional military class had long since dominated in Persia and Egypt. Miltiades, elected by the Athenian people to command them at Marathon because of his proven record of leadership, defeated a forcibly conscripted Persian army led by the sons, sons-in-law, and nephews of Darius—mostly incompetent and frightened insiders appointed by the Great King to positions of command, the ancestors of Saddam’s yes men and Iran’s theocratic guard alike. Leonidas died with his men in the front ranks at Thermopylae watched over by King Xerxes enthroned on the mountains above. At Salamis, as Themistocles took to the water, Xerxes once again took to the hills—and then again to the safety of his harem. Yes, they “are just different customs,” but all soldiers across time and space appreciate a general who looks, battles, and thinks like they do—who fights in front, rather than sits enthroned to the rear of, his men. Persians prostrated themselves at the feet of the King; Aristophanes made Athenian political leaders such as Cleon look like self-serving dolts, religious seers like mere oracle-mongers hawking phony wares. Whereas Aeschylus could celebrate the emergence of a democratic form of trial by jury of one’s peers in Athens, justice in Egypt was defined as “what Pharaoh loves.”
Yes, the Greeks relearned to write by adapting an eastern alphabet to their needs. Yet the polis Greeks quickly turned their new, and now vastly improved, tool of writing into powerful lyric, drama, and history in the hands of the individual—not the state, not God, not the military—who asked and explained and challenged. The Achaemenids and Pharaohs, with their tiny cadre of scribes and priests, used their millennia of literacy to produce ex-cathedra pronouncements and royal records of what the big men did. Herodotus and Thucydides wrote history as free inquiry, something Near Eastern and Old Testament literates never really did. Government chronology, religious chronicles, campaign facts, priesthoods, religious adages, and dynasties are still not history. Eastern powers put their artists to work on small prestige objects and relief sculpture of their ruler’s conquests or palatial tombs; the Greeks produced cheap utilitarian vases of unsurpassed beauty and public murals glorifying community bravery.
The polis may have entertained Asiatic-inspired cults or borrowed architectural orders from Egypt, but no Greek believed that there was a better political state outside of Greece. They all knew there was no polis out there. Thus when we in America speak of that paradox “multiculturalism,” we classicists must be honest, even if brutally so, and say that we are enriched by different foods, music, fashion, art, literature, and language—as satellite experiences around our dynamic Western center. Even the most rigid defenders of the West have always acknowledged that other cultures offer aesthetically impressive, moving expressions of the human condition. A Chinese poem, an African play, a novel from the Punjab, or American Indian chants can evoke human emotion and reveal the tragedy of man on earth every bit as passionately and accurately as Sophocles or Virgil.
But not one of the multiculturalist classicists (despite the fashionable rhetoric) really wishes to adulterate our core values from the Greeks, to live under indigenous pre-Columbian ideas of government, Arabic protocols for female behavior, Chinese canons of medical ethics, Islamic traditions of church and state, African approaches to science, Japanese ideals of race, Indian social castes, or Native American notions of private property. What we say now as classicists and how we live have become two very different things—and for students of Socrates that has become a dangerous thing indeed.
Again, many classicists now seem to be unaware of or unimpressed with the uniqueness of the Greeks. They argue that the West is merely a construct of a privileged few whose beliefs are now “crumbling” and that its shortcomings are unique among other cultures, ancient and modern. Yet they suffer the wages of hypocrisy: all make their arguments in the comfort of Western institutions that guarantee their rights—rights that descend directly from the Greek vision of the world, rights that now incidentally include guaranteed employment for life and unquestioned academic freedom of speech, rights that are never acknowledged as unique or appreciated as life-sustaining. Intellectually naive at best, this form of academic multiculturalism is hypocritical to the core and, worse, entirely alien to Greek wisdom.
Most “theoretical” classicists who empathize with the oppressed from the safe distance of the university lounge identify themselves and their research as adamantly anti-Western and try to exhibit as many credentials, claim as many affinities, and list as many identities as possible to ensure they are not associated in any shape or form with traditional admiration for the Greeks and their legacy:
I find it difficult rhetorically to lay out the ways in which Foucault’s work has mattered to me without acknowledging the fragmented, disparate, split nature of my sense of self, a self produced in late capitalism, with gender, class, all those markers that locate one tenuously and ambiguously in the world. All of these affect the encounter with the great man. I am a psychoanalytic female subject, an academic, a Marxist historicist feminist classicist, split, gender-troubled, in the midst of a book about Sappho. And I realize as I write that I could not have written this book without Michel Foucault. So how can that be? I have to take these various elements of whom [sic] I think myself to be, and look at them in relation to the work of Foucault.15
Note the repetition of “self,” “me,” “my,” “myself,” and “I”—twelve times in but six sentences. Perhaps we need a little less of Professor Page Dubois and a little more of why we should learn about the Greeks in the first place. Professor Dubois may be fragmented, disparate, feminist, split, psychoanalytic, gender-troubled, and adrift without Michel Foucault, but we wonder whether this “self produced in late capitalism” really does teach six to eight classes a year to the underclass, creates positions for the unemployed and exploited in her own field (and there are many), writes prose for those students unacquainted with the Greeks and the West, or as a self-proclaimed Marxist tutors the poor and uneducated. If she were to do all the latter, and spare us the therapeutic self-obsession, then we might witness a revival of classics, though one far distant from the pages of the New York Times Magazine.
In short, not until the late fourth century B.C. did the polis produce anything like what we would now reasonably and without calumny define as a present-day American academic: a well-fed, elite, institutionalized thinker of the late twentieth century, who crafts ideas for his peers with the assurance that the consequences of those ideas should not and will not necessarily apply to himself.
Thus, the crime of these “soft” multiculturalists is one of ignorance and omission, a serious enough charge against those stationed to protect a weakened discipline from enemies at every side. Other classicists, however, the “hard” multiculturalists, have made a direct attack on the Greeks. They do talk and write about the Greeks and the West, but concentrate only on the ugliness of that tradition, the oppression and brutality. “Why study the culture of classical antiquity,” they ask, “if it was only the mechanism to extend slavery, sexism, racism, imperialism, patriarchy, and colonialism, the assault on the Other, the non-citizen, which continues unabated today?” These latter classicists are popular and in demand in the university—what better way to refute the West than have its own defenders lead the attack? What better way to destroy a discipline than offering rewards to the last generation who promises that love for the Greeks will end with them?
These classicists indict the classical world and the West on two grounds. First, they deplore the West’s successful and brutal history of cultural imperialism (the fact of which is often quite true). Second, they often contend that the values embedded in the West are not merely dynamic, they are toxic. That is, academic multiculturalism of the “hard” sort often means that all cultures are equal except that of the West. Multiculturalist diversity turns out not to be a diversity of ideas at all, but rather a uniform chorus of head-nodders, who attack what started with the Greeks, who see history not as tragedy but as melodrama, where the task of the present-day smug academic is to round up all the usual nasty suspects—heterosexually inclined, free, European male citizens. But under examination, all of these charges of the hard multiculturalists turn out to be simplistic or hypocritical, or both. Let us examine some of the most common.
III. THE HORRIFIC BEAST
The Beast—the sexism, chauvinism, slavery, and exploitation inherent in Western culture—was born, as we all know, in ancient Greece. And today’s academic ideologues are content merely to flop him over and poke at his purportedly foul and scaly underbelly. Each critical thrust is accompanied by a sanctimonious cry of disgust and blame: “Down, Beastie, bad Beastie,” as if censuring the Greeks for lacking modern sensibilities offered a meaningful vision of the classical world and its significance to our own, as if we can assuage our own middle-class guilt by blaming the dead. And so at a recent conference on “Feminism and the Classics” at Princeton University, feminist scholars—who could agree on little else—universally conceded that the Antigone is a hurtful and patriarchal text that primarily reinforces the subordination of women.
Yet this Beast is a much more complex and subtle creature than these would-be dragon slayers care to acknowledge. But before we examine this apparently loathsome brute in detail, remember three things about the Greeks. First, by and large, the sins of the Greeks-slavery, sexism, economic exploitation, ethnic chauvinism—are largely the sins of man common to all cultures at all times. The “others” in the Greek world—foreigners, slaves, women—were also “others” in all other societies of the time (and continue to be “marginalized” in most non-Western cultures today). If classicists can find a present-day matriarchal nonracist, classless utopia, and can trace that legacy back to an ancient culture where women and the Other were far better off than in Greece and Rome, let them step forward with “proof” rather than discourse. Millions in America no doubt would love to emigrate there.
A bloodthirsty Cortes did not have to teach the Aztecs about colonization, sexism, racism, religious intolerance, or slavery—much less the intricacies of human sacrifice. For the real brutality of killing children, civilian massacre, and gruesome disfigurement, examine primitive, prestate cultures outside the Western experience. Africa knew enough of human bondage and female subjection—and a bit more about human sacrifice, cannibalism, and torture—before Europeans taught them Western pathologies. The discussion of—and often redress of—those innately human failings, however, is most likely found in the West, and so often the tortuous path toward solution started with the Greeks. It is natural for the Western critic to lasso his own Beast, but there are really much greater ogres in the world’s herd mysteriously left untouched.
Secondly, the march of centuries does give us latecomers advantages over our predecessors through the grasp of the mistakes of the past. Two-and-a-half millennia of review should result in some moral progress. The social contract does not suddenly spring mature from the head of Zeus, but is hammered out through centuries of hit and miss, through the laboratory of millions of personal tragedies. The better question, then, is not “why did not the Greeks move, as we have, to eliminate sexism and slavery?” but rather “why after 2,500 years has our own moral sense in comparison progressed so little?”
Thirdly, and most important, classical literature is its own most astute critic. Classical writers are far harsher on their own culture than is any contemporary multiculturalist, providing others the ammunition for their own execution. The Greeks present a picture of their culture and say: this is the way it is—this is what we value, this is what makes us who we are, this is who is included, who excluded—and then blast the entire conglomeration to pieces. What is most often misunderstood about classical literature is that almost all of it was composed as a critique of society and the very values that allowed it to flourish. The most important legacy of the Greeks and Romans is this uniquely Western urge to pick apart everything—every institution, tradition, and individual. Only in this manner do ideas change at all—and only in this way does the author find any credibility with the reading or listening audience.
The macho world created by Homer, the smug polis of Aeschylus, Herodotus’s wild Aegean, even Virgil’s holy Rome—all are held up for review and none emerges unscarred; the foundations begin to dissolve even as the superstructure is crowned. Even Xenophon, Spartaphile par excellence, cannot write a paean to Spartan culture without attacking the institutions he is supposed to be praising.
We are not saying that every Hellenic community was a republic or a truly autonomous polis, or that institutions like slavery and the political subservience of women were anything but reprehensible. What we mean by Greek wisdom is that at the very beginning of Western culture the Greeks inspired and sustained the ambition for an ordered and humane society, one whose spirit and core values could evolve, sustain, and drive political reform and social change ages hence: a Beast that could with time, after painful self-criticism and experimentation, know when and how to shed his more odious skins.
The Greeks become the cultural template that two millennia of critics of society know to be best. It is this manual we use when we stab Caesar, organize the legions, start a revolution, write a treatise, build a cannon, question male supremacy, or probe a cadaver. We are not claiming in the West an uninterrupted utopian polis of some 2,500 years—who could, given the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the World Wars, apartheid, and the brutality of colonialism?—but only a foundation for, at its best, an ordered and humane society. At its worst, the Western tradition is merely a dynamic and frightening scientific enterprise, one that gave Hitler the power to build Tiger tanks, invent V-2 rockets, and organize the panzers. But that same legacy also ensured that a coalition of liberal states would—and could—sacrifice their citizenry and national treasure to obliterate a vile enterprise, an aberration that we nevertheless knew had arisen at least in part from our own shared culture.
Classicists need not worry about offering sophistic alternatives to the West to today’s undergraduates, since most students in state universities—poorly prepared, in debt, and at work at low-paying jobs—scarcely know anything about the origins of their own culture to begin with. And if classicists are really troubled over what Greece spawned, they should concentrate on the frightening dynamism—not weakness—of the West, whose marriage of market capitalism and democratic freedom seems to be sweeping the planet precisely by offering the worst of our material culture.
Classical literature, and most European literature that followed, is in some sense a comment upon and evaluation of contemporary custom. Cynicism, skepticism, parody, invective, and satire are all Greek and Latin words—a rich vocabulary of public and private dissent unequaled in non-Western languages. Apart from a few hackneyed court panegyrists, no important classical author, not even the subsidized Horace, ever becomes a mindless spokesman for the regime. Sophocles, Athenian patriot and veteran par excellence, wonders in the Ajax how courageous individuals keep falling through the cracks. Euripides, breathing hatred and venom at arch-rival Sparta, nevertheless dramatizes the brutalities of war and creates characters who question the way women and slaves are treated. Aristotle, no fan of the tyrant, has no belly either for turning the whole thing over to the mob. Both radical democracies and autocracies become his models of “deviant” constitutions. Socrates was not the last to tell us that the unexamined life was not worth living.
Beneath the veneer of Petronius’s hilarious banquets and drunken orgies in his Satyricon is a devastating condemnation of Roman imperial culture, from the emperor to the lowliest slave. Later Rome became a more closed society, but the stuff of its imperial literature from Virgil and Horace to Seneca, Tacitus, Juvenal, and Suetonius was parody, satire, and invective against society at large and often the emperor in particular. Conflict, dissent, self-criticism, revolutionary critique—these are the burdens of our inheritance from the Greeks and Romans. The current scholarly criticism of the Greeks and the West, then, is as much a part of our Western tradition as slavery and the subjugation of women—a legacy far different from anything that emerged from the theocratic states, palatial economies, or nomadic tribes outside Greece. The irony is usually missed by the critics. But we must keep that self-critical tradition in mind when considering the following standard attacks on the Greeks by those classicists eager to repudiate the very literature they study.
Greek society subjected women to second-class social and political status and demeaned them in a variety of overt and subtle ways.
Sadly, yes. Greek women could not vote or hold office and lacked equal protection under the law, so the active political leadership of the polis voluntarily sacrificed half its brain power and any claim to true egalitarianism. Recent scholarship often seems content merely to demarcate the exact nature of the sexism of the Greeks and the West: “In the case of a society dominated by men who sequester their wives and daughters, denigrate the female role in reproduction, erect monuments to male genitalia, have sex with the sons of their peers, sponsor public whorehouses, create a mythology of rape, and engage in rampant saber-rattling, it is not inappropriate to refer to a reign of the phallus. Classical Athens was such a society. The story of phallic rule at the root of Western civilization has been suppressed….”16
Yet these same Greek men insisted on incorporating strong female characters into every aspect of their art and literature. The sensuous, proud Venus de Milo is no Penthouse titillatrix. Still too much a Barbie doll, you maintain? Try the armored Athena Promachos with her grim visage of martial probity. Greek tragedy is dominated by heroines, from Iphigeneia to Alcestis to Clytemnestra to Antigone, women who all direct lesser men in their midsts. We may wonder now if God is a woman, but Spartans, Argives, Eleusinians, and Athenians were convinced that Artemis, Hera, Demeter, and Athena were their patron deities.
Antigone sacrifices her life for the sake of a male relative, the Princeton conference feminists remind us. She condemns herself to death by burying her brother—but she is the most noble and forceful character in the entire play. Creon’s arguably justifiable defense of his city becomes tyrannical and monomaniacal, earning the wrath of the gods. He is finally reduced to a wretched caricature of arrogance and incompetence when he brags that he will not fall victim to a weak woman. Sophocles surely had seen such men and knew that the male gospel of unquestioned intellectual and spiritual superiority was not supportable, an untruth that indicted any—man, ruler, the state itself—who would mindlessly embrace it. Women and the treatment of women were very much on Greek minds, and a few of the best saw the sexual contradiction at the very heart of the polis.
Whom do we remember, Clytemnestra or Agamemnon? The latter kills his defenseless daughter, who offers her throat to the blade heroically and bravely. His wife Clytemnestra finishes off the king, who perishes ignominiously in a bathtub. Both husband and wife are wrong, perhaps, and in Aeschylus’s version it is clear that the male is to be preferred to the female (Athena, the female goddess with no mother, says as much). Yet the issue is raised before the assembled citizenry, the battle joined.
Penelope, a perfect match for Odysseus, surpasses in wit and wisdom her whiny adolescent son Telemachus. She is the sole person of action among a sorry group of gullible and indolent wannabe suitors. But that is not what we learn from the critics:
Almost imperceptibly, the seeds of later misogyny are sown. Penelope yields to Odysseus her loyalty and her creativity. The traces of sexual subjugation and political exclusion, the violence that lies behind this act, are scarcely visible and might seem merely figments of our imagination, had we not already experienced them fully in the first half of the poem.17
The strange argument here is that Penelope may appear to be an equal match with Odysseus—but that is before the astute reader projects the fates of other females in the first half of the epic onto Penelope’s marriage. Odysseus’s “sexual dominance” of Circe, for example—we are not reminded by the scholar that Circe was just as eager for sex as Odysseus and would have transformed him into a pig had he not acted first—reveals the inherent (but “scarcely visible”) violence in the “true nature” of male/female struggle for power. Penelope is a rape victim whether she—or the reader—knows it or not. This kind of misreading is typical of most postmodernist research, in which the themes of texts and the tensions in cultures can be dumbed down to an issue of power. Some feminists cannot decide whether Penelope was a clever, powerful subverter of male assumptions or a dupe who stayed home while her no-good husband philandered. Mostly, though, they just rail that she gets less air time than Odysseus.
The narrative of the Odyssey incorporates as a significant element of its ideological strategy a commentary on the construction and differentiation of gender. The text self-consciously employs control over narrative production itself and the ability of a subject to guide this narrative as a means of differentiation. The story works towards the fulfillment of the goals of the masculine hero, which are represented as socio-culturally constructive. Females within the narrative are almost unanimously represented as constructing plots or narratives hostile or threatening to the hero’s goal. The consistent denial of the completion of female plots, which is also a denial of female desire, subordinates female subjectivity.18
In fact, with Penelope—at the very beginning of Greek literature—the entire Homeric world of male adventure and dominance is undercut by the most unlikely of people, a woman behind the loom with more nerve and brains than all the men of the entire poem. Throw in Nausicaa, Calypso, Circe, Arete, and Athena, and it’s no match. Men should feel slandered—“gender outrage”—that Polyphemus, Antinoös, and Melanthios are so petty, childish, and brutal precisely because of their exaggerated maleness. No wonder a few Victorians thought the author of the Odyssey must have been a woman. The roles in myth for women are limited, of course—wife, mother, daughter, inhuman witch or warrior, denizen of some shattered household, or beached nymph on a mysterious island. But the traditional tales are consistently manipulated to bring scrutiny on just these traditional expectations. The Greeks, it seemed, wanted to know why it had to be so.
Don’t forget the hyacinths, moon, and stars of Sappho, the cucumbers of “silly” Praxilla—an entire alternative female universe to the shields and breastplates of Greek poetry. The Greeks often mused that the best lyric poetry was at times written by women. Corinna, poetess of backward Tanagra, they said, beat the old master Pindar himself five times in poetry competitions. So angry was he, the myth went, that he was reduced in rage to calling her a “sow.” The point of that frivolous yarn was not to make Pindar venerated and majestic.
It would be difficult to argue that any of these authors was trying to revolutionize the political structure. Yet they raised the important issues, played on the tension created by this obvious and sometimes embarrassing gender gap again and again. The playwrights expected their dramatic enactments of competing ideas to be of great interest to the Athenian civic body at large—and to win them a prize. The examination of gender issues in tragedy was not, then, as some contemporary feminists argue, a mere sham. The discussion was not a phony sounding board designed to release safely male tension and assuage masculine anxiety about men’s self-serving suppression of the opposite sex. At the very beginning of the long road to full egalitarianism, people in the West became aware of the contradiction between their ideals and their traditions, of the facts that talent and character knew no sex and that a free society which was half unfree was not free.
There was not a true Greek emancipation of women, perhaps because of the Greeks’ quite different approach to politics and the law. They would not necessarily define equality of power solely by twentieth-century notions of statute and legalistic prerogative. No more than 30,000 to 40,000 free adult male citizens exercised full political rights at Athens out of a total resident population of perhaps 350,000-500,000. In that sense even the most radical of Greek democracies was illiberal by modern standards. At the same time it is absurd to equate the absence of the vote with modern notions of exploitation and inferiority. The oikos, or household—man, wife, children—was the building block of the polis.
Religion, ritual, and cult—where women just as often were in control—could be as important as citizenship to the life and health of all in the polis. Priestess (hiereia) is a common Greek word, but one still rare in our own vocabulary. Greek religion does not insist—at least not to the degree found in much of modern Christianity, Judaism, or Islam—that women are secondary in formal ritual and religious expression, or prescribe that the gods may be reached only through the benevolence of male intermediaries. Antigone—long before the male priest Tiresias appears on the scene—alone understands the unwritten laws of the gods, serving as a remedial tutor to all of Thebes in the lost arts of piety and the true nature of treason. To the Pythagoreans, women were central to religion. Their active role in cult was essential to belief and honored as such by husbands who were to profess formally both their admiration and their fidelity. The Stoics assumed that women were equal to men, while Plato and Aristotle at times argued for equal opportunity of education.
The Greeks did not solve, but most certainly began, the discussion of the place of women in society, a dialogue that finally turned into equality in the West—and only in the West. Women—especially those who lose crucial steps on the cutthroat cursus honorum due to the demands of child-raising—may still bump up against glass ceilings in corporate America. But how many would trade their business suit for a veil, their contraceptives for infibulation, their inheritance for suttee, their Bruno Magli pumps for foot-binding, their 1.8 children for fourteen, their Lady Remingtons for clitoridectomies? If full equality is not yet here, it is not because the classical cultures did not allow women to vote. It is more likely because for centuries we ignored what the brilliant Sappho, Aspasia, Lysistrata, and Antigone had been saying all along, ignored that women held property and personal rights in Sparta and Rome far more liberally than in most societies for the next two millennia.
The study of women in antiquity, then, can tell us much about the values of the West, but not in the sense offered by much of today’s feminist criticism:
Feminist theory—Native American, African American, lesbian, psychoanalytic, French feminist, gynocentric, historical, anthropological, archaeological, literary—can open up the traditionally hermetic discipline of classics to the outside world. Once it is so transformed, it will be apparent to scholars in other disciplines that there is more to the discipline than the collections of “great myths” and cliches about the traditional values of “Western culture” currently portrayed in the popular press. In the end, then, theory can turn classics from a rarefied study for the leisure class (by means of which others are kept at bay) to a vital arena for multicultural dialogue in the next century.19
The “outside world” that will suddenly discover the importance of the Greeks as a “vital arena for multicultural dialogue” turns out to be “scholars in other disciplines,” not really those outside the university gates who are relegated to the condescending “popular press.” This smug rejection of Western culture—the primary aspect of the ancient world that could actually be of interest to anyone outside of academia—in favor of lancing another boil on the Beast, has kept the Greeks safely out of the “popular press” for several decades. And we suspect that the “leisure class” includes most new theorists who are better paid, have more time off, and travel far more widely and frequently than America’s indebted students and their strapped working-class parents who are paying an increasingly stiff tab for the rather affluent and increasingly rarefied practices of American university faculties.
The Greeks and Romans developed an economy based almost entirely on chattel slavery.
No charge is more frequently cited by current multiculturalists than the charge that the Greeks, like racist southerners of old, were slaveholders. True, few Greeks had any universal notion of the inherent dignity of mankind that might prevent a fellow human from becoming the mere property of another. And the Athenian renaissance would have been absolutely impossible without the arms, backs, and brains of thousands who are now completely forgotten in the story of Western civilization, poor nobodies with names like Sosias, Thratta, Xanthias, Karion, and Manes, all vanished without a trace left in the historical record, but who we can be sure died in the silver mines, on triremes, and in dank shops. Aristotle and Plato at times—to their lasting discredit—argue that there is such a thing as a natural slave (their concern is not to discredit the institution per se, but to ensure that the properly dull and limited, not the gifted, are the ones enslaved). Aristotle calls the unfree a “tool,” little more than a breathing wrench, a saw or hoe with a working brain. Nicias, the rich Athenian whom Thucydides praises as sensible and pious, made much of his fortune on the backs of hundreds of anonymous slaves, human shovels chained and forced to dig Attic silver, men who crawled into black tunnels with death their only escape—all to give Athens her silver owls and to keep Nicias in good repute.
But on closer examination the distinctions between slave and free, even in the most hideous and ubiquitous manifestations of the classical mind, are not so clear-cut as we are now led to believe. Even Aristotle assumed that slaves might be better treated than the poor, that their relegation to political nothingness did not, as in later times and other cultures, preclude all cultural, political, and social prerogative. His Politics seems to assume a large body of contemporary hostile critics (“others affirm that the rule of masters over slaves is contrary to nature”), who force him to defend his own (perhaps often unpopular?) views of natural human inferiority. Plato in his Laws writes that the proper way to treat slaves is to be more just to them than to those who are our equals. Bankers, accountants—professors too—were Greek slaves. Slaves could be chained and die in the mines, but the material conditions of the free poor, at least in modern terms, often could be little better. The true evil of slavery in the ancient world was more often the reality of a virtual nonexistence in the political life of the community, a forfeiture more bitter to any Greek or Roman adult male than is conceivable to us.
Rightists like the Old Oligarch (an anonymous fifth-century B.C. pamphleteer) and Plato worried about the absence of clear visual distinctions between free and slave under democracy. The Old Oligarch went so far as to claim one could scarcely tell master from slave at Athens and that slaves were on occasion as wealthy as free men and said whatever they wanted without fear of reproach. Even if an exaggeration, such a claim would have been inconceivable in any other slaveholding society. Poor stammering Claudius was accused of turning his empire of millions over to Narcissus and Pallas, intriguing ex-slaves who knew a little more about how to run Rome than did the inbred and dissolute Caesars. Ex-slaves in Petronius’s Satyricon assume that slavery is often but a temporary state, a bad and unlucky start that can be circumvented by the more cunning who are able to outwit their witless masters and end up with cash, status—and slaves of their own. His potbellied freedman Trimalchio is an ancient Horatio Alger, a caricature of the wily slave who ends up quite free and more a Roman success than the tired and bankrupt class of old aristocrats. Horace claimed his father’s kin were of slavish origins. No wonder that under such a mobile and changing social cosmology, Roman law in theory recognized some marriages between free and slave.
Examples abound in Greek history of the mass liberation of slaves. We hear frequently of slaves given freedom for fighting alongside their masters, made citizens in times of population decline, armed by cagey insurrectionists, manumitted upon the death of the master. One wonders if Isocrates was altogether exaggerating when he claimed, “No Athenian inflicts such cruelty on his slaves as the Persians do to their own free men.” Slavery in the classical world was clearly a mutable and debated enterprise, with the distinctions between servile and free often blurred in a way unknown, for example, in the American South. Few if any ex-slaves tutored the children of Jefferson Davis, improved the accounting system of the Confederacy, or built their own plantations.
Modern multiculturalists often ignore these significant differences between slavery in antiquity and nineteenth-century America, forcing errant interpretations onto the past in their efforts to reveal the racism inherent in the West. So Shelley Haley, a self-labeled “Black feminist classicist”—such glitzy, bumper-sticker self-identification is now the trademark of the new academic who has such concern for others—argues from no evidence at all that the Macedonian Cleopatra was black, at least symbolically:
Gradually, by reading my history and Black feminist thought, I perceived that Cleopatra was a signifier on two levels. She gives voice to our “anxiety about cultural disinheritance” (Sadoff 1990: 205), and she represents the contemporary Black woman’s double history of oppression and survival. In the Black oral tradition, Cleopatra becomes a symbolic construction voicing our Black African heritage so long suppressed by racism and the ideology of miscegenation.20
Cleopatra may have been a “voice,” “signifier,” and “symbolic construction,” but there is no evidence that she was an African black. The sheer familiarity of Greek masters and some slaves—Aristophanes, Demosthenes, and the Old Oligarch suggest that they often looked, talked, and acted alike—helps to explain the very persistence of the institution, which might have fallen into greater ill-repute had all chattels without exception been chained and sent into mine shafts below the earth. Spartacus, whom classical elite historians often describe as a better man than the Roman plutocrats and blue-bloods who conquered him, could not mass millions to overthrow Rome because, under the insidious system of slavery in Italy, not all slaves were starved and beaten by cruel overlords with whips and fetters. Nor were all masters bloated grandees who customarily drew blood from their servants.
A few authors like Epictetus and Plutarch, even at times Euripides and Aristophanes, chafe at the contradictions of slavery. In the ancient world slavery was not systematically predicated on color or purported racial inferiority, but quite often on the accident of fate—a siege, a pirate attack, an unlucky birth. Heraclitus says simply that war “makes some slaves, others free.” A horrible institution, yes, but at least not always parcel of some larger nightmare of race, color, or pseudo-genetics. When Diogenes was purportedly taken captive and enslaved, he pointed to a Corinthian buyer and said, “Sell me to him, he needs a master.” Despite what Aristotle claimed, natural inferiority was not felt by all Greeks to be the ideological underpinning of slavery, which explains why—contrary to the American experience—the existence of educated, brilliant slaves was apparently not fatal to the idea of the vile institution itself. An ingenious, brave black slave called into question the entire servile architecture of the South; an ingenious, brave Greek slave could be dismissed with, “Sorry, you or your parents were in the wrong place at the wrong time.” A Greek was not terribly bothered that his slave was a better man than he—such are the vagaries of fate; a plantation owner presented with the same saw his entire pseudo-scientific creed crumble before his eyes. What bothered Aristotle and Plato was that all Greeks—women and children especially—were in theory only a captured city or losing battle away from enslavement.
The Roman philosopher Seneca advised: “Remember this, that the man you call your slave comes from the same species, enjoys the same sky, and breathes, lives and dies exactly as you do. You can imagine him to be a free man, he can imagine you a slave.” Five centuries earlier the obscure rhetorician Alcidamas scoffed, “God made no man a slave.” It may not have struck him that one should therefore dismantle the institution, any more than it did Thomas Jefferson or John C. Calhoun, but the topic of slaves—if not slavery itself—was at least open for discussion. How else could we ever have eliminated slavery at all?
The Greeks are slaves of reason, without the natural spontaneity and levity of other cultures. They are responsible for burdening their Western successors with the heavy cargo of rationalism, which has led only to the bottom line and taken the mystic joy of the inexplicable out of life. We who study the Greeks wrongly believe that truth and values are absolute and unchanging, and not mere constructions of those who hold power.
Multiculturalists argue—often in a patronizing vein—that we in the West do not appreciate other indigenous systems of discourse and reason, so burdened are we by Hellenic notions of “linear” thinking, positivism, and empiricism, so constrained are we by the silly notion that a text means what it says, that writing honestly can more or less describe a reality.
Nor may the meaning be referred to referents external to the text, for the analysis also argues that the claimed referentiality of a text is irreducibly metaphorical, based on a distinction between inside and outside that is also shown to be a logical fiction. All texts, both the figurative and the ostensibly descriptive, are reduced to the level of rhetorical acts that strive to deny their rhetorical status in the pursuit of an elusive referentiality or “truth.” In the philosophical context, this technique of reading, in its emphasis on the text’s irreducible rhetoricity or “textuality,” destabilizes the central enabling assumptions of conventional Western metaphysics such as “being,” “presence,” and “identity.”21
If Professor Goff’s book is also a mere “rhetorical act,” and thus has nothing to do with any truth about ancient tragedy, why read it? Since its language provides no entertainment and “destabilizes” nothing, and itself uses the entire structure of “Western metaphysics” in its argumentation, the collection of essays is at best a bad joke, at worse hypocritical to the core.
Yes, the Greeks first taught us how to analyze the world systematically with logic in pursuit of the truth, but they also told us that we must acknowledge and then, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes joyfully, give in to the power of the irrational, of wonderful things we cannot always see, hear, or prove. Creating at once an enlightenment and romantic reaction is no easy task. Apollo, the god of rationality and measure, turns his temple over to Dionysus three months each winter. Dionysus, the god of irrationality, ecstasy, and liberation, must be given his due as the unfathomable power that somehow makes the juice flow in the veins of plants and animals alike. Pentheus, the legendary king of Thebes, tries to deny the divinity, the power, even the very existence of this “new” god. He is overwhelmed and succumbs to his own repressed irrational desires, and is finally torn to shreds by his delirious mother.
The irrational is always dangerous, but it is thoroughly embedded in our natures; even Plato makes it a part of our souls. Phaedra’s illicit passion for her stepson Hippolytus must result in the destruction of the entire family, but we should not forget that it is Hippolytus’s calculated and complete rejection of Aphrodite, passion herself, that begins the disastrous chain of events. Aphrodite only wants a little recognition, or so she claims—but how is Hippolytus (with his “big thick books”) to dedicate himself both to the sexual purity of Artemis (an odd desire for a male in the classical world) and acknowledge the importance of sex at the same time? Is smug prudery as evil as indulgence in the call of nature? Egos, ids, and superegos are scattered throughout the pages of classical literature, demanding that we examine the contradictory and conflicting aspects of human nature. It is no coincidence that Freud and Marx—both critics of much of Western society—were armchair classicists who used that very training to press their attacks.
Our tradition of self-criticism, of analyzing who we are, how we live, what we believe, and what we value, is the source of Western progress. To the Greeks and Romans we owe our constant questioning: Why do we do this? Why do we do it this way? Is there a better way to do it? Is our society really moral? We inherit these queries from Prometheus, our prying intelligence which saved us from our bestial existence by bringing us “fire”: science, manual skills, communities, technology. And often when we reach the limits of our reason, we turn to faith, religion, and mysticism.
Those who decry this “Western paradigm” of progress, restlessness, dynamism (the fruit of rationalism), of needless tearing down and building anew, who argue that our ceaseless itch to move ahead has not brought happiness, has not always improved our lives, should be warned: the Greeks were there long before them. For every Aeschylean myth of Prometheus and the advance of civilization, there is a Hesiodic Myth of Ages, an ironic Sophoclean ode about progress, a primitivistic vision of human life which sees degeneration, not amelioration, over time. The Golden Age has passed, as have the Silver and Bronze—the era of heroes and demigods has slipped by. We live now in the Iron Age, a time of moral decline: “Would that I were not among the fifth generation of men,” Hesiod sings, “but either dead earlier or born later! For now it is a race of iron; and they will never cease from toil and misery by day or night, in constant distress, and the gods will give them harsh troubles.”
Perhaps, the Greeks mused, the world will end soon. Perhaps life is cyclical and a new Golden Age awaits. For Homer’s audience perhaps Cyclops’s lush and pristine island, Calypso’s sensual hideaway, or the humane fairyland of King Alcinoos is preferable to the halls of drunkenness and pigsties of civilized Ithaca. Such apocalyptic visions are central to the Judeo-Christian vision of life as well, are they not? The Greeks gave us progress, and then warned us that it might degenerate and become no progress at all. Science and learning exact a price as they lead us further from the womb of nature. It is one of the great slanders against classical antiquity that the ancient Greeks (far better than we) did not realize the price to be paid for the march of progress, for the ordering of the world according to the dictates of reason rather than by emotion or faith. Remember, there was a reason why Sophocles called civilization’s wonders deina, the ambiguous “terrible.”
The Greeks and Romans were not all moral or intellectual supermen who always followed what they preached. They may have bequeathed to us a desire to be self-analytical and supplied us with the tools to accomplish this examination, but they did not always like the critique and often despised the critic. The price Western society has paid for its open invitation to criticism is steep: instability, wars, revolution, martyrs, cycles of pseudo-learning, refutation, and still more intellectual trends, false knowledge, and fads. Every time a Westerner goes to war, seeks to discover a new continent, or worries about atoms, the world should beware. Constant discussion, controversy, creating and demolishing in search of a better way are central to our free markets, constitutional governments, and individual rights, but they are also expensive and bothersome—and sometimes deadly. The ancients who started this marketplace of ideas were as burdened by it as we are. Herodotus, like us, sometimes tired of the Western hubbub and often saw things in the East he rather liked.
Even the Athenians, who tolerated so much, had their limits. Anaxagoras, the first philosopher to live in Athens, and Protagoras, the sly Sophist, were driven out of town. Socrates, the greatest searcher of them all, preferred the imposed death sentence to exile. Thucydides’ forced expulsion may account for his magnificent history. There were political reasons why Archilochus, Xenophon, and Herodotus did not always live or die where they were born. The Roman Ovid offended Augustus with his politically incorrect verse and was banished to the Black Sea for the last decade of his life. Petronius, Seneca, and Lucan were all snuffed out for being a little too talented and outspoken to suit Nero. Euripides’ drama was the most challenging to traditional conceptions of the gods, myths, rulers, policies, and drama itself. Year after year his plays were chosen for competition—an honor in itself—yet year after year his plays came in second or third. He won only four times in his lifetime, earned a reputation for misogyny, was perhaps charged with impiety, and, frustrated by his reception in Athens, finally spent the last two years of his life in barbarous and regal Macedonia (where, rumor had it, he was torn to shreds by the royal hounds). Like Socrates, Euripides’ genius was ridiculed by Aristophanes to the apparent applause of most of his peers. Aristotle and Plato each put his life in danger by advising Greeks who had no belly for their message or reputation, and both had heard quite enough of the sophistic denial of an “elusive referentiality” or “truth.” And both free thinkers in their own writings reflect displeasure with critics: both would have been unwanted renegades in their own utopias, had the regimes of the Republic or Politics ever become flesh.
Over time, after painful scrutiny (sometimes over millennia), some ideas are junked as peripheral or wrong: slavery, for example, the second-class political status of women, or decisive warfare itself, as it now seems. New ideas, even new people from outside can also be incorporated, although again this may take a very long time and be done for the wrong reasons. The evil emperor Caracalla, for instance, hungry for increased tax revenues, first proclaimed the rights of universal citizenship for all free men in the Roman Empire—regardless of race, ethnicity, language, or place of birth. The Greeks and Romans learned much about astronomy, art, architecture, and social custom from other nations. They absorbed foreign religious ideas as well, intolerant primarily of the intolerant (such as the Christians). But most alien to the classical spirit is the suppression of argument, the rejection of self-criticism, or the idea that incorporating the ideas of others diminishes oneself.
The Beast is always there among the Greeks, but there were usually enough Greeks who recognized it as such—the worse for tyrants, autocrats, and reactionaries. These critics and skeptics, not the numerous toadies and sycophants, defined the ethical and moral landscape of literary expression, and so they condemned any and all for the next 2,500 years who would accept society as it was, rather than for what it might be. The greatest of Roman poets—Virgil, Horace, and Ovid—often make us uneasy. Few now read a Valerius Maximus, who dedicated his pretentious collection of hackneyed adages to the emperor Tiberius—and for good reason.
A final irony? The very tools which today’s critics in the university use to dismantle Western culture and to deny the Greeks their progeny are themselves inevitably Western. No postmodernist goes on the attack against the “elitist construction of science” without resorting to a rational argument based on evidence, data, illustration, and logic—the entire Greek manner of formal invective and philosophical refutation. To craft his clever sabbatical request or grant proposal, the deconstructionist anti-Western classicist does not (as we should expect) quote God, footnote the president, insert the chairman’s sayings, claim a drug-inspired supernatural revelation, break into religious chants, hand out cassettes, begin dancing, or warn openly of mayhem to come for disbelievers. No multiculturalist thinks his academic freedom is an oppressive idea, the concept of a university separate from the church and government a burdensome notion, or their presentation of research and opinion in journals peer-reviewed and free from state censorship “hegemonic,” “patriarchal,” “sexist,” or “racist.”
Radical feminists may decry the linear and positivist approach of Western rationalism, but when they fly to speak about such oppressions, they assume that the same tyrannical manner of mathematical and technological inquiry ensures the jet’s engines are running and its navigational instrumentation functional. Indeed, the entire architecture on which the university censor sits is Western to the core, from the library to the curriculum, from the elaborate process of acquisition, retention, tenure, and promotion of faculty to the conference room lights that go on with a flick.
The truth is that there is no workable alternative to the Greek method of wrestling with the Beast, to the relentless modes of dissent, induction, empiricism, and formal argumentation. The free critic (yet another Greek word) exists only in the West. Even today he is not easily found as an indigenous species in the Orient, the Arab world, or in Africa or South America. Native censors of Islamic justice, Chinese totalitarianism, African tyranny, and Latin American dictatorship are usually safely ensconced in Europe, Australia, or North America—the adherents of the Greek legacy. They are most often found in academia or journalism, always protected and subsidized by the very culture they have in the past despised.
Salman Rushdie and Edward Said have attacked the West from England and America, not so frequently from the tolerant enclaves of their beloved motherlands, drawing on a Western tradition of polemic, invective, satire, and allegory in their work. The temple and mosque of the non-West are not quite as hospitable to the big mouth as the parlor and campus of the West. Professor Wills’s assertion that “We learn that ‘the West’ is an admittedly brilliant derivative of the East” seems lost on the contemporary intellectual—if only we examine where and how he lives and not what he says. One may write favorably about the sense of indigenous community under Khomeini, national fervor spawned by Saddam Hussein, Palestinian rights, religious awakening in Algeria, free health care from Castro, but one usually does so now from a tasteful and computerized study in Palo Alto, Cambridge, or New Haven, rarely for long in Teheran, Baghdad, or Havana.
It is no surprise that in the last half century there have been hundreds of symposia, conferences, and public discussions of Hiroshima in America—almost all critical of U.S. policy—and few Japanese-sponsored counterparts devoted to a careful anatomy of Pearl Harbor or such atrocities in Asia as the Rape of Nanking. No public or private review of the Gulf War was published in Iraq after the deaths of tens of thousands, and we omitted the postmortem rallies and “victory” parades. Yet hundreds of books and articles criticizing our conduct of the war reached the American public when we lost but a few dozen soldiers. Anyone who knew of the Greek tradition would understand why that is so. To deny this tradition, to expose the Beast without examining the Greeks’ incessant battle with the creature, is to dismiss the real value of studying our past.
V. TREND, JARGON, AND THE STRANGE CYCLE OF SELF-PROMOTION
So the topics chosen by classicists for research and emphasis over the past twenty years often resulted in a one-sided and negative offensive against the very Greeks they were studying. Far too few classicists stood up to fight back, to talk about both sides of the Beast, to refute this simplistic dismissal that was palatable to contemporaries in the university but intellectually dishonest. Multiculturalism, then, rarely in any fair fashion presents the aggregate of Greek wisdom—and history will not be kind to the present multiculturalist classicists who knew better.
But classics suffered from more than just having its defenders join the enemies of the Hellenic tradition. At the same time that generation of academics was fashioning careers by feeding the Beast, a new way of talking and writing about texts and culture swept through the academy. Perhaps more deadly for the Greeks than the new revisionism was the very way these topics were approached—the creation of an angry and ultimately elitist vocabulary, tone, and attitude. In short, classicists, who publish so much, could no longer write; classicists worried about the Other had no intention of writing for the Other.
A “new” theory-oriented cohort arose in classics, adding a vacuous jargon and sophistic superstructure on top of the multiculturalist perspective. Everything became a text; truth was a construct and the Greeks could become anything you wanted. Not only were topics of research to be rigidly anti-Hellenic, now even the language and tone went against the tenets of Greek clarity and candor. Forget what the Greeks actually said and did; new rules were enlisted to prove what they did not say.
In classics, champions of radical egalitarianism not only openly acknowledge but actually boast that there is something superior about subspecialized and encoded research. The very distance of the forms of expression from ordinary human language makes it valuable. We promote and venerate—whether cynically, indifferently, or ignorantly—those who do the Greeks the most harm. Books in classics are praised in professional journals for their small-mindedness and pedantry; this is referred to as “densely argued” or “close readings.” They are hailed for their bad prose; this is called “challenging.” They are lauded for their jargon-filled phrases; this is termed “methodologically sophisticated.” The contemporary prejudice against big ideas (“assumptions” and “assertions”) and jargon-free writing (“middle-tone approach”) ensures that no one outside a tiny cadre of subspecialists will read Homer. Of course, this new language and tone are not merely embarrassingly elitist; they are also absolutely fatal to the creation of any new interest in the Greeks themselves.
For example, a very positive review of a recent book on Homer’s Odyssey22 informs us that, owing to its “complexity” and the author’s “exposition and organization” being “less clear than they might be,” even specialists will have to read the book “at least twice for full comprehension.” “Non-Classicists are unlikely to finish the book.”23 Should the fuzzy exposition and cloudy organization have been fixed before publication? No, because it does not seem to matter: the book receives high marks in an influential journal. The review seems to praise it while confessing that few can finish reading it.
We could document the cant-laden nature of much recent scholarship. Our criticism here, however, is not directed so much at the sterility of these trends but at the motives of those scholars who adopt them: self-promotion, whose apparent long-term goal is the avoidance of classroom teaching and the corny—and rather difficult—goal of convincing others of the value and beauty of the Greeks. The most serious crisis in classics—and the university as a whole—is not what academics say but what they do and do not do.
In the June 1995 issue of the American Philological Association Newsletter (the official voice of “classics”), classicists are told to mobilize against the proposed dismantling of the National Endowment for Humanities, the lifeblood of their grants, years off, conferences, and travel. They are advised how to reach congressmen “who believe agencies serve [a] rich elite” by disguising their true creed. In “Tips on Letter Writing,” classicists are told, “Use simple language. Critics have often charged that NEH money supports elitist scholars. Thus it is important not to use technical words or high theory…. Observers believe that the 104th Congress is populist-minded. In demonstrating to your representatives the impact of NEH in your district, highlight traditionally populist concerns such as equal access and participation by the many, not the few” (emphasis theirs). Professor Konstan’s “pose of middle-class populism” may not be so bad after all.
No classics professor, then, is to write like a classics professor (“technical words” or “high theory”) to his hayseed (“populist-minded”) congressman. Instead, apparently, connect affirmative action to populism and beat them at their own game. Instead of worrying over the charge of “elitist scholars” (largely true), why not advise Congress that the NEH is not a bad idea if it is the only chance for hundreds of draft horses to have one year of their lives free to gather their lifelong thoughts and write something that somebody might read, a crap shoot where there is sometimes a chance that something of value might emerge? Why not admit that Congress is not “believed” to be populist by “observers,” but is populist inasmuch as a vast majority of the electorate swept them into office through a popular vote-something the student of democracy surely can grasp? And why the need to instruct the stewards of Homer to “use simple language”?
What is behind this new research and writing that has been so fatal to classics? Corruption mostly—would-be revolutionaries in theory who indeed were for the most part quite traditional, careerist, and elitist. The 1980s and early 1990s were years of profit-making in America for student and professor alike. In the 1980s the more ambitious students boasted without conscious shame that immediately upon graduation they intended to become insurance salesmen, bond brokers, investment bankers, and other facilitating middle-men—Hesiod’s old bribe-swallowers of the city. Classes, departments, and entire divisions within universities evolved to satisfy new customers. Had not Socrates and Jesus long ago railed against the money-changers? But now student and teacher in the university joined wholeheartedly, with the zeal of converts, in the worship of the Golden Calf.
Yet the Greeks always questioned the relationship between virtue and currency, commerce and citizenship, and sought to impart an unashamedly impractical moral economy wherever they might. But in the eighties, classics (and, indeed, all of the academy) was reinvented as a place of reduced teaching loads, extended leaves, think-tank hopping, conferences, endowed chairs, grants, and petty power politics—often decorated with a patina of trendy leftist ideology or neoconservative scorn as the volatile financial situation and funding source prompted.
Few argued, as their forebears had, that a classical education could be “useful” in some larger, Greek sense—skills such as reading, writing, thinking logically; qualities such as perseverance, pride in accomplishment, self-restraint; values such as egalitarianism, rational debate, demand for truth. Classics was now strangely led by individuals who saw their field as but another stepladder by which to enter the realm of a professional elite. Classicists—ironically and hypocritically-joined their cohorts throughout the university in transforming the professoriate into the “profscam” now so familiar to us all. These are tough charges, but a sampling of the behavior of our leading classicists supports them.
Classicist David Halperin, writing in a recent book, informs us that his career did not suffer from a lawsuit brought by one of his colleagues claiming that Halperin had demanded that MIT interview a job candidate because he was in love with him, and that Halperin had harassed undergraduates. Although the lawsuit was settled out of court, Halperin lists the signs of his success in the case: “I continued to get grants. My lecture invitations did not diminish; in fact, my lecture fee increased…. And MIT offered me two years of leave at a generous level of financial support, along with a research budget whose magnitude I shall probably not see the likes of again.”24 Time off from teaching in the form of grants, employment at think tanks, visiting professorships, and attendance at conferences to write works like Saint Foucault (“As far as I’m concerned, the guy was a f***ing saint” [6]) is the sign of the greatest success in classics; little is said about his students or the status of classical languages, literature, and culture at MIT.
The motives behind such un-Greek behavior are clear. One apparently does not reach our top universities by a lifetime of exploring Greek wisdom with undergraduates, explaining the Greeks to the general public, or tutoring the untraditional: talk always to a tiny elite few about the underprivileged but under no circumstances live, teach, marry, or go to school among them. And somehow reaching an elite university, not teaching America about the Greeks, has become the goal of most of our philhellenes. Teaching well or writing accessibly about classical antiquity counts little toward tenure, promotion, and career advancement in classics. They are, in fact, privately considered to be black marks on one’s career; the stale odor of “popularizer” can never be fully expunged from the writer’s curriculum vitae. Schliemann, Evans, and Ventris—none of them a classicist—suggest that this was not always true in our profession. It has often fallen to the “amateurs,” then, the David Denbys of the world—who, upon returning to college in his forties to read the Iliad, wrote passionately of its beauty and its stark, existential challenge in The New Yorker—to pass on the flame.
In the academy, however, the university career, the pro forma title of academic “classicist” now defines a person as a student of the Greeks. Consider the recent sworn court testimony of the well-known classicist Martha Nussbaum. In an effort to belittle the authority of another Greek scholar, David Cohen, Professor Nussbaum argued that “Cohen…is not a classicist. He has never been employed by a department of classics, and is not a member of the American Philological Association…. He is a professor in a department of rhetoric, with a degree in law.”25 Whether one is knowledgeable about the Greeks is now defined by membership in a professional organization—whose candor we have just examined. Whether one knows or does not know the language of the Greeks depends on teaching in a department of classics. But again, are such protestations true—and are they always sincere? Shortly after testifying that one’s classical credentials are to be equated with the locus of appointment, classicist Nussbaum herself took a more lucrative job at the University of Chicago—teaching in the schools of law and divinity.
Rarely in these budget-cutting days do we find a public confession of the true priorities of our field as forthright, for example, as the recent protestations of one Ivy League professor, David Konstan, at one time the president of the American Philological Association. Professor Konstan sincerely insists that the real “problem” in classics is “that small-minded deans and college presidents and legislators (with the collaboration of a certain number of faculty members) at more and more colleges and universities are trying to increase teaching loads and take away time from the research….”26 He insists classicists should “fight for more research time” in order to publish on “women’s roles or slavery or sexuality in antiquity” and that we must “demand respect for such work and the time it requires” (33). Many classicists at major universities actually believe this: professors of Greek and Latin are suffering from too little academic publication like Sappho Is Burning and too much teaching, too few journal articles like “Standing by the Stathmos” and too many students. Fifty more paid leaves to produce ten more books like Penelope’s Renown might yet revive our discipline. More university presses to handle the dividends that accrue from less teaching might yet bring us “respect for such work and the time it requires.”
Most academics, unlike Professor Konstan, usually have enough savvy to avoid complaining publicly that their lecturing to one or two large classes a year and conducting a graduate seminar or two on their esoteric research entitle them to such generous booty from either public coffers or the pockets of indebted parents and students—especially when so many of their junior colleagues are eager for, but out of, work. There is no doubt that they have demanded (and obtained) “time” for such research, but the quest for “respect” adds insult to injury.
The odd cycle of self-promotion—release time from teaching yields another obscure article which ensures a grant which earns more release time from teaching so that the article can be republished as a book chapter that few will be taught and fewer will read—requires the sacrifice of broad scholarship and teaching. The ambitious classicist must find something strikingly novel to write, something startling upon which to build a resume of things published, not classes taught. But the aspiring researcher in classics can rarely find much of anything spectacular to do anymore. We can take only tiny, nearly invisible steps, not ostentatious leaps. These are important steps—progress in any field comes in increments—but there is nothing here to offer the self-promoter a splashy entrance on the road to success, though this is now required in the new corporate ideology of the university. There is little here, really, on which to build a grand career that will liberate one from the classroom—no new gene, nonpolluting gas, or cold fission.
Under our current values, all that is now left to the careerist classicist is to play the theoretical game, to reinvent the Greeks and Romans each year, to “gender” Homer in the fall, to unmask his ideology in the spring. To do something else, something actually important, to put stone and text together, to combine papyrus and coin, to make sense of some noble, big idea for the carpenter, teacher, and dentist, would require an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century scholar like Gibbon, Mommsen, or Grote. They would be people of action, of wide reading, of passion and prejudice—“assumers” and “generalizers,” in other words, who, like Homer, rarely nod, have a life outside the campus, and certainly have not been ground out by modern American doctoral programs. Indeed, most classicists now suspect that those who argue for big ideas are advocating “nothing but pop phraseology for moral platitudes,” as Professor Konstan once again intones.28
So irrelevancy, incoherence, and professional self-promotion have become blood brothers in a perverse kind of suicide pact: the more esoteric the research, the more cryptically it is expressed, the less meaning it has for anyone outside a clique—the better for one’s career. Again, what a strange cycle! Tenure, promotions, leaves, salary, visiting lectureships, positions on editorial boards, prestige—these are the petty recompense for their wholesale destruction of Greek wisdom. We have lost sight of any real intellectual or educational goal—to explore, to understand, to explain, to disseminate, and, yes, to proselytize, to convert. Peewee gladiators in our own tiny and self-determined research arenas, we have now finally lost the interest of even the most bloodthirsty spectators.
VI. OPPORTUNITIES LOST
The damage to the Greeks is not, as we have seen, just a question of commission, of offering Greeks who have been leveled, deliberately dumbed down and miscast, no different and surely no better than the Pharaohs, palaces, and serfs. Nor is the crime merely one of doing research that is not needed, unreadable, and antithetical to the ethos of the classical world. There is also a (in some sense) worse sin of omission. The industry of publication comes at a price: for every silly or needless article and book written, hundreds of students are not taught at all, and little is written to remind the reader of the role the Greeks could play in our own lives. Meanwhile we, the silent of classics, followed a very small cadre into an oblivion where no one can read what we write, understand what we say, or feel at home with our presence—and all for a few pieces of silver.
Instead of teaching the corporation the egalitarian ethos of the Greeks, we in the university were taught by corporate America, with disastrous consequences. Our administrators (“officers,” no longer scholars) now justify their enormous raises on the rationale of running a “business” (no longer a university) with a “payroll” (salaried professors) in the millions, of supervising a “physical plant” and real estate (no longer the gym, library, or open field) worth millions, and offering a “product” in high demand by its “consumers” (so much for degrees and students). Much could have been learned in the 1980s from the Greeks, and much misery of our winner-take-all craze avoided. Much of the structure of the classical city-state was egalitarian. Even the Greeks’ earlier and more hierarchical oligarchy and timocracy were essentially communitarian. The focus of ancient philosophers was not whether there should be equality of some kind but how far it should extend. Kings, tyrants, aristocrats, and dictators are the enemies of Greek political science. “Not for me are the things of rich Gyges,” Archilochus sings, “no love I have of great tyranny.”
There was decentralization in the polis as well, assignment by committee from the Board of Generals, from temple construction to the organization of tragic festivals. Those misfits who were power-grabbers and headline-stealers were ridiculed and attacked. Miltiades was criticized for taking credit for Marathon. The noble general Epameinondas’s fellow commanders even set up a stele demanding equal credit for their own role in the victory at Leuctra. The Greeks conceded that brinkmanship and megalomania might bring some results in the short term, but knew they inevitably become self-destructive. The ambition of the Athenian showboat Alcibiades remains the textbook example. The careers of two of the most familiar figures from classical antiquity, Alexander and Caesar, are notably unclassical; both were in part responsible for the decline of the ancient egalitarian state. Alexander, a half-civilized Macedonian, had a brilliant but brief career. When he died at thirty-three, alcoholic, diseased, and poisoned, his “empire” was quickly divided and weakened. Caesar was butchered for setting himself above the ruling class, a lesson well learned by Augustus. The successful establishment of the Principate depended a good deal upon at least the illusion of a governing class of equals.
Even business, where we might think the Greeks have the least value and relevance, could have learned from a glance at the past. The bitter experiences of buy-outs, golden parachutes, takeovers, layoffs, down-sizings, closures, individual short-term success at the expense of the company and the community—the entire miasma of the present—could have been predicted by investing some energy in Western culture, if leading classicists had stepped forth in public and in print and in the classroom with the necessary lessons. The Greeks made the first and ultimate critique of the present philistinism, the most persuasive cry for moderation and the reign of to meson (the middle). The Greeks already mapped the paths to individual success and the creation of a stable society: joint decision-making, no astronomical payoffs for an undeserving elite, constant audit and accountability, duties to the community, noblesse oblige toward the less fortunate (what the Greeks called charis).
How odd that so many of this last generation of academics adopted instead the ethics of the corporate state and created a careerism fatal to undergraduate teaching and broad scholarship. As we have seen, they were proud to label themselves almost everything but undergraduate teachers of Greek and Latin. In the process we lost both the student and the general reader, Homer’s only links to the world outside classics. The crucial issue turned out to be a matter of character—of actions matching thoughts, of behavior rather than words, in believing in absolute, rather than relative, standards of conduct—as the Greeks, had the academy remembered them, would immediately have pointed out. If you want to learn why our lawyers, doctors, politicians, journalists, and corporate magnates equate the accumulation of data with character, inherited power with justice, titles and suits with dignity, and capital with talent, why they all know nothing of Greek wisdom, of deed matching word; if you want to know why college tuition has increased at over twice the rate of inflation—then one must look to what they have and have not been taught at America’s universities. Is it any wonder, then, that our children no longer know what democracy, free speech, ethics, and Western culture are, much less where they came from and how they are to be preserved? Is it any wonder that Homer is dead?
Greek wisdom—which requires word to match deed—puts a burden on classics professors in a way unknown, say, to the instructor of postwar French literature or most academics in general. After all, we should expect something of the field to rub off on the experts, expect that they would enact in their lives what they admired in their books. Let comparative literature professors living in upscale communities drive imported cars and cry for “diversity.” Let anthropologists put their kids in private schools and blather on about “the cultural mosaic” in our public schools. Let Marxist sociologists who spot “exploitation” have Latin American nannies and rely on poorly paid TAs. Let biologists with down parkas and four-wheel-drive Jeep Grand Cherokees decry global warming from old-growth redwood decks. Let English professors talk of egalitarianism and “community” as they negotiate reduced teaching loads and private perks. Let deconstructionists say there are no facts as they circulate their own detailed resumes and write blurbs for each other’s books. But let not the classicist do so without remorse.
Thucydides writes of the mob because he was exiled by the mob. Socrates talks of courage and duty because he tried to save the rear guard of a defeated army. Plato writes of reckless democrat deckhands on the sinking ship of state because they killed Socrates and nearly himself. Do not believe historians who now say that their craft is faceless abstraction, dealing only with races, genders, classes, statuses, or ideas, the inevitable laws of the animal kingdom, or the endless processes of acquisition and consumption, of anonymous death and renewal. (Did not more than one Greek say, “Not finely roofed houses, nor the well-built walls, nor even canals or dockyards make the polis, but rather men of the type able to meet the job at hand”?) People, then, matter.
It is not primarily what classicists say, but what they do, that has destroyed formal Greek learning. Like Louis XIV, philologists and theorists alike have bragged these past two decades that les classics c’est moi. But old Mme. de Pompadour had their true behavior better pegged: Après nous le deluge. The real damage of the university clerks was in an attitude sown by the old and now reaped by a new—most likely the last—generation of classicists. Their classics by intent was to have little to do with Greek, nothing to do with the formation of character or the time-honored rebuke of current fad, was not to be an eccentric but nonetheless noble calling of the old breed, a lifelong vocation kept distant from lucre and status—in the past decade was not even to be taught by the successful classicist. At the moment when heroic and innovative efforts were needed in the university, this last generation of custodians of Greece and Rome adopted the ethics of the winner-take-all mogul it claimed to despise. Those who did not, kept silent.
Instead, like finance and law, the study of Greek in the past twenty years became a profession, a tiny world—but a world of sorts nonetheless—of jets, conferences, publicity, jargon, and perks. Knowledge of Homer was to be little more than a way of talking like an on-the-move professor, a manner of living like an in-the-know professor, an embrace of the attitude of a cutting-edge professor—but was no longer a cherished idea of the Greeks that one believed in and lived by, much less a burden to be shouldered and passed on. A few classicists now talk the talk of “teaching undergraduates” and of the need “to promote high-school Latin,” but more often their own behavior indicts them. Their real genes show up in each new generation of graduate students who arrive at their new teaching posts with not a care other than to be somewhere other than where they are. No wonder the panicked elite university now is dreaming up all sorts of incentives to match the grandee with a few undergraduates.
If classics is ever to have a real revival, we must end what the therapists call “denial.” Almost automatically academics now cry in unison, “But I teach!” “Classics has never been better!” “The parameters of research are exploding!” “Why are you saying these hurtful and damaging things about us?” “Why are you writing this screed, this polemic, this diatribe, this jeremiad, this harangue, this bombast, this broadside?” This from a generation that knows retiring faculty are more often now not replaced; that sections of introductory Latin are not increasing; that Greek programs are not being newly instituted; that classics departments themselves are dying, not springing up; that more is being published while less is being read; that as teaching loads diminish per individual classicist, new jobs for others are not being commensurably created.
The death of the Greeks and Romans means an erasure of an entire way of looking at the world, a way diametrically opposite to the new gods that now drive America: therapeutics, moral relativism, blind allegiance to progress, and the glorification of material culture. The loss of classical learning and the classical spirit as an antidote to the toxin of popular culture has been grievous to America, and it can be sensed in the rise of almost everything antithetical to Greek ideas and values: the erosion of the written and spoken word; the rise of commitments, both oral and written, that are not binding; the search for material and sensual gratification in place of spiritual growth and sacrifice; the growing conformity of urban life at the expense of the individual and the ethos of individualism; ahistoricism and a complete surrender to the present; the demise of the middle class. When Garry Wills claims that the “concept of a serene core of cultural values at the center of Western civilization is entirely false” (40), he simplifies and misrepresents the debate (has any contemporary scholar claimed the core was “serene”?). Certainly the classical worlds have been variously interpreted by different cultures at different times through the last two millennia, but to conclude from this comforting bromide that there was no real “core” to Greek culture itself, no set of values accessible even now to readers of Greek or of importance to all of us today, is simply a lazy nod to postmodernist hypocrisy.