Since the crisis in Greece began, symbols of classical antiquity have framed the dialogue about it. The overplayed concept of the crisis as a long-running “Greek tragedy” was even the topic of a recent “Bad Metaphor Watch” column at foreignpolicy.com. While I understand the appeal of these references to the classical Greek past, they are often deployed in a way that is misinformed, paternalistic, and condescending — even by professional classicists, who ought to know better.

I’m not saying that antiquity has no place at all in the conversation: my heart has certainly leapt at seeing graffiti and banners in Athens calling for debt cancellation under the Solonic slogan of seisachtheia. But given the current circumstances, it is surely classicists who must better inform themselves and the public about the history of their field, the legacy of Romantic Philhellenism, and the consequences that the construct of the ‘Hellenic Ideal’ had for the branding of modern Greece (on these issues see e.g. the accounts of Calotychos and Leontis). For centuries, outsiders looking into Greece have lamented the observable decline of the culture and people with respect to glorious antiquity. The cheeky cartoons and turns of phrase that today package the disaster in cheery shades of ignorance are thus really heirs to a long tradition — a tradition at the foundations of both the academic discipline of Classics and the Greek nation state.

But you don’t have something insightful to say about the Greek crisis just because you can conjugate the ancient verb κρίνω.

In a recent segment of the BBC 4 Sunday morning program, presenter Paddy O’Connell interviewed classicists about the light that Ancient Greek texts might potentially shine on the current Greek crisis. At the end of the discussion, O’Connell asked his guests: “do you, having studied these classics, feel the pain of the modern Greeks in a different way to other observers?”

Ever since the program aired, I’ve found myself wondering how I would have responded to this question, but also whether it was the right one to ask. One of the guests pointed out that classicists are more likely to have spent more time in Greece, but this is also true of the many other historians, anthropologists, et al. who study the region. And it seems to me that the level of empathy any one person feels with “the pain of the modern Greeks” depends mostly on the character and experiences of that one person. The opportunity that O’Connell missed was to ask his guests directly about the professional stake that classicists might have in the Greek crisis — in other words, whether and why classicists (should) especially care.

I spend a lot of time with my eye on the situation in Greece, thinking in particular about how Anglophone media choose to represent it. On the whole I’m surprised by the lack of classicists making more (reasoned and compelling) attempts to answer the question that I think O’Connell would have done better to pose. Yes, ancient Greek authors wrote insightfully about historical moments of crises and debt, but it would be absurd to argue that classicists are a priori in a better position to understand the current situation because they’re familiar with the Melian Dialogue or Solon’s reforms. In recent months it has also occurred to me that I should be better able to articulate what, if anything, a classicist’s perspective might add to the public conversation here, given that I regularly use material about the crisis in my own courses on antiquity.

Back in November of 2011, as controversy and protest flared in Greece around a new package of austerity measures (sound familiar?), Saturday Night Live aired a sketch that imagined the gods meeting on Mount Olympus to discuss the Greek economic crisis.

With requisite beard, garland and regal staff, Zeus (Jason Sudeikis) calls the summit to order:

I, Zeus, King of the Gods, have summoned you all to Mount Olympus because, somehow, the Greek economy has collapsed!

The assembled gods react to the news with shock and uproar. Zeus continues:

I know! No, I know! I was as surprised as you are! I mean, after all, the Greeks are widely known as a hard-working, industrious people — you know, a people willing to labor week in and week out, three days a week, one hour a day until the age of 45. But today, we Gods must come to their aid. So, quick — let us hear from the Greek God of Finance! [the gods look around] Wait… there is a Greek God of Finance, right? There has to be! Surely, someone has been looking after the economy all these years!

Zeus’ opening sets the premise and tone for the rest of the sketch. There is no Greek god of finance, and the crisis, Zeus learns, is to blame on the ‘party god’ Dionysus. At the end of the bit salvation arrives in the guise of Klaus, the “German god of prudence and austerity” (Fred Armisen). He offers a bailout to the gods on the condition that they make economic cutbacks, which Zeus snortingly refuses:

No way! Sorry, Klaus. Now, either you give us the money, or we take ALL of Europe down with us. I mean, we started democracy, we can end it.

The sketch closes on an animation of a spinning newspaper with the headline: “Greece Gets Bailout: Vows to Spend it Unwisely.”

The situation in Greece has evolved, and worsened, a great deal since the autumn of 2011; the last month alone has seen daily and almost hourly radical developments. Yet I still use this sketch in the first lecture of my Greek mythology course. There’s no getting around that it’s pretty funny, and for students it works to make Greek myth seem entertaining and even a little bit ‘relevant’. More importantly, it’s smart about identifying and satirizing a number of pervasive and perplexing hallmarks of classical mythology. Why are there multiple gods of war? Why do the gods have so many affairs — often with their own relatives, disguised more often than not as animals? Showing the skit has proven an effective device for drawing students in and orienting them to some of Greek myth’s characteristic themes and narrative structures.

But the last time I started a new round of the course I encountered some surprising reactions. Students observed that the sketch calls attention to the fiscal recklessness and feeble decision-making inherent to Greek culture; others were amused by how the “poor work ethic” of today’s Greeks was retrojected onto the gods, while still others criticized the skit’s ethnic stereotyping. A handful had been unaware that anything was amiss in Greece, and for them the sketch was their introduction to a more than five year-old major news story.

This February, with Alexis Tsipras’ SYRIZA party newly in power, even The New York Times succumbed to the allure of bad metaphors when it ran this Op/Ed cartoon, after Germany refused to grant Greece a loan extension:

Back in May 2012, an Economist cover had taken still easier bait when it cast Greece as Europe’s “Achilles heel”.

Loose references to Greek proposals as “Trojan Horses” abound as well, though this metaphor rarely stands up to the slightest attempt at unpacking.

Iconic Greek monuments are also regularly pressed into similar service. This unflattering image of Angela Merkel doing duty as a caryatid propping up the Erechtheion (and, by extension, Greece and its economy) has been making exuberant rounds on Twitter these days:

But the most notorious example of this visual discourse appeared soon after the first package of austerity measures was accepted by vote of the Greek parliament in 2010. A few weeks later (On February 22, 2010) the German magazine Focus ran a cover that imagined this unlikely restoration for the world’s most celebrated armless lady (the title reads “Fraudsters in the Euro-family”).

The cover story was even worse than the cover: as George Zarkadakis put it in a Washington Post Op/Ed piece, “In the article, modern Greeks were described as indolent sloths, cheats and liars, masters of corruption, unworthy descendants of their glorious Hellenic past.” Predictably, uproar ensued in Greece. Focus magazine was sued for defamation and a Greek consumer group (INKA) called for a boycott of German products. The same group told Reuters, “The falsification of a statue of Greek history, beauty and civilization, from a time when there (in Germany) they were eating bananas on trees is impermissible and unforgivable.” This reaction is of course more unforgivable even than the provocation, but it offers a sense of just how charged these images of antiquity and their deployment can be.

It is probable that many people — like many of my mythology students — get their first notice of developments in Greece via media representations wrapped in loose parodic references to myths and monuments of the classical past. Zarkadakis’ characterization of the Focus article could also apply to the light-hearted SNL sketch, and it is a valid reading of much of the material in circulation. In many cases, the media are simply going for saleable humor. Sometimes they even do a good job. But one could easily take a darker view of the phenomenon as a whole and argue that there’s an alarming subtext to the cartoons and cheap playful headlines: “look (and laugh) at how the mighty have fallen.” In other words, I see an unspoken premise at the root of these representations: the Greeks who today are reaping the fruits of their failure to adopt a modern, Protestant ethic are laughingly (or dangerously) unworthy heirs to their ancient ancestors who, as SNL’s ‘Zeus’ boasts, “started democracy.”

This last idea is, of course, nothing new. From the late 18th century, foreign travelers and writers painted Greece’s contemporary inhabitants as Turkish ‘vandals’ and Greeks who barely qualified as Greek, in no small part because their blood had been contaminated by waves of Slavic migrations. The contemporary population was seen as underserving of the venerable legacy of Hellas — a legacy better understood by Western Europeans and one that would, like the ancient material objects already kept in England, France and Germany, be more carefully and ably defended by Western European hands. In The Philhellenes C.M. Woodhouse distilled one robust strain of the view: “The Greeks, if Greeks they could be called, were unworthy of their ancestors, whose true descendants were to be found in the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge.”

For the modern Greek state’s responses to these dusty (not to mention racist and colonialist) charges, one need look no farther than the controversy over the Parthenon/Elgin marbles. This centuries-old issue resurfaced again in headlines just over two months ago when the Greek Ministry of Culture decided not to pursue legal action against the British Museum for the marbles’ restitution. For many years, one of the British Museum’s principal arguments against restitution had been the lack of proper facilities in Greece for the works’ preservation and display. Greece’s aggressive and costly answer to this criticism was the grandly controversial new Acropolis Museum that opened to the public in June 2009, not long before crisis hit. The building is a dramatic showcase for the collection it houses, but it also makes an aggressive display of negative space. Its most impressive exhibit is ironically the very absence of the rest of the marbles. (A tendentious ‘legend’ further claims that at night the Acropolis Museum’s five Erechtheion caryatids can be heard weeping for their missing sister, also imprisoned in dreary London at the British Museum.)

The controversy over the Parthenon marbles needs no rehearsing; it is useful precisely for its familiarity. The debate marks the most obvious arena in which Greece and other European countries have used images and symbols of antiquity as ammunition (not an inapt metaphor) in fighting battles over deeper differences. As Yannis Hamilakis observes in The Nation and its Ruins, “The dispute over the marbles stands for the broader negotiations of the Hellenic nation in the present-day world arena, it operates as a metaphor for its attempt to escape marginalization, to remind the west of its ‘debt’ to Hellenic heritage […], to confront key players in the world using their own ‘weapons’…”.

Recent events in Greece have provided a pretense for many such ‘reminders’ to the Western world about its debt to the Hellenes. In advance of last January’s government elections, Alexis Tsipras — head of the leftist party SYRIZA and Greek prime minister (for the moment…) — wrote an open letter in English aimed at a global audience. In the letter Tsipras too used a bad metaphor: he claimed that the fear- and guilt-driven tactics of “the establishment” (read: Antonis Samaras and the Nea Demokratia party, Tsipras and SYRIZA’s opposition) had “led the Greek people to an unprecedented tragedy.” The letter continued: “And to those responsible for all this, if they know anything about ancient Greek tragedy, they have every reason to fear because after hubris comes nemesis and catharsis!”

Tsipras chose to strike the same note again at the end of his letter, where he argued that his own party and its “whatever it takes” strategy — a strategy defined by a willingness to think beyond established laws and structures — should prevail precisely “Because Greece is the country of Sophocles, who with ‘Antigone’ has taught us that there are moments where the supreme law is justice.” The letter marked an attempt to recalibrate the “crisis as tragedy” trope by closing with a nod to Antigone’s celebrated and stubborn fearlessness. The logical conclusion? If you see yourself, dear foreign reader, in the cultural tradition of Sophocles and Aristotle — if you have benefitted at all from the “gifts of the Greeks” — then you owe the Greek people of today your solidarity, in the form of support for Tsipras and SYRIZA.

As always, though, interpretations of the past are contestable. This past February, in a segment on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Oliver lampooned Yanis Varoufakis, the then-finance minister of Greece (“a country of and in ruins”) for displaying a dangerously shaky grasp of Greek mythology.

In the segment Oliver noted that, at a press conference about a recent loan extension, Varoufakis had “tried to reassure people in the Greekest possible way.” Oliver then rolled footage of Varoufakis explaining to journalists that “Sometimes, like Ulysses, you need to tie yourself on the mast in order to get where you’re going and to avoid the Sirens. We intend to do this.”

Like Tsipras’ own classically inflected statement, Varoufakis’ appeal to “Ulysses” (a Greek hero in his Latinate guise) angles to remind the world of what it owes to the Greeks. But in this case Oliver makes a smug counter-move. When the clip ends, he roars with mock-exasperation that Varoufakis’ remarks aren’t “reassuring, for two reasons: First, everybody in Ulysses’ crew dies in that story, and Ithaca falls to absolute shit in his absence.” (The second reason rests on a less learned observation: Varoufakis gave his press conference sporting a popped collar.) As satirical as the show may be, here Oliver’s sarcasm — particularly when paired with the fashion critique — amounts to version umpteen of the old “Greeks don’t deserve Greece” argument. The Greek might attempt to invoke the classical past, but it’s the Englishman who really knows best. Oliver’s showbiz ‘persona’ in this instance was perhaps more historically loaded and entrenched than he realized.

Behind all the blithe mythical references (Trojan horses, flights of Icarus, Achilles’ heels, etc.) lies a long and complex story, winding from the fraught process of modern Greek nation-building to the current crisis and through violently contested claims to proprietorship over some notion of a Greek classical past. Especially given the history of this discourse of Modern Greek “unworthiness,” academics should be particularly mindful about how (and whether they ought) to throw in their two cents.

On July 3, BBC News ran an article called “Putting the Greek back into Stoicism.” The article, by a U.S. philosophy professor, argues that the suffering people of Greece would do well to read up on the tenets of ancient Stoicism and to adopt some of these as coping strategies. In an incredibly naïve analysis, this author goes so far as to argue that “The current Greek crisis can be attributed to a lack of self-control: the Greek government borrowed more money than it could comfortably pay back.” The piece then ends on this word of advice: “As they suffer privations in the coming months and years, Greeks should keep Musonius [sc. Rufus, a Stoic philosopher banished by Nero] in mind. They may have it bad, but it beats banishment to Gyaros — beats it by a long shot.”

Last week Newsweek ran an article highlighting the 35% increase in the Greek suicide rate since the country adopted the first austerity program. A humanitarian crisis in Greece (see here, for example) should not be for anyone — especially not those whose livelihood is tied to the ancient world! — an opportunity to get cute and condescending about the lessons we can learn from antiquity. On the BBC 4 radio program that I mentioned earlier, a prominent classicist remarked that, while the Greeks are indeed in a “difficult bind,” “even the fantasy-stirring mind of the comic poet Aristophanes could hardly have imagined a hero who borrowed vast amounts of money and refused to repay it, and then came back to the same lenders asking for more”. (It really is impressive the degree to which many classicists who insist that antiquity offers insight into the crisis seem to lack even a basic understanding of the crisis itself.)

But if classicists are really particularly stirred by Greek suffering, they would best spend their time explaining and critiquing how politicians and media draw on highly charged tropes in representing the crisis — not gleefully pointing out the origin of the word.

Johanna Hanink is Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor of Humanities at Brown University and author of Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy. Her go-to source for news on Greece is ThePressProject, to which she also occasionally contributes (for the International edition).

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.