Class Clown
On Boris Johnson’s Virtuosic Misquotation of Homer
When I woke this Christmas Eve to “The Iliad” trending on Twitter, I never thought I would end up arguing that misquoting it was, in fact, a bold political and performative choice. Such is life under our latest emperor.
The reason for this occasion? A video of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had resurfaced from 2013, showing the former Mayor of London reciting what could kindly be called some “edited highlights” of the Homeric epic. However this time it was reposted in a now deleted tweet, by user @Holbornlolz, alongside the challenge “Your move, Labour.”
The video’s resurfacing came hot on the heels of the recent General Election, where Johnson joined the ranks of UK Prime Ministers with a fondness for the ancient world. It certainly brings to mind images of a “ruling class trained by cold baths, cricket and the history of Greece and Rome”.
There’s a lot going on in this video. As part of a plea to “give a quote on the importance of Latin and Greek,” Johnson advises that, when stranded in the bush, besieged by crocodiles, there is nothing better to do than to recite poetry — as he then goes on to demonstrate. Strange that the “crocodile defense” of Classics is not brought up more often; perhaps it would be a “snappier” headline than the endless references to “Western Civilization.”
There were many responses to this video going semi-viral amongst the Twitterati of the day, with some responses positive (“both impressive and amusing”) and others decidedly less so. Some congratulated good old Boris on a job well done, and others were picking up their copy of Homer for the first time in years. Even the skeptical hoped that this might lead to more funding for the teaching of Classics in state schools.
Others were less impressed. Many were quick to point out that the recitation of dusty, old poetry was not a particularly impressive achievement. Séamas O’Reilly compared it to “doing the rap from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” and said that Johnson was “truly, the thick person’s idea of a clever person.” “thanks to boris johnson for singlehandedly undermining any efforts to make classics look accessible and cool” tweeted @floramargarine. One of academia’s most Online™ representatives, Professor Mary Beard, weighed in on the subject, calling it “quite an easy party trick” and pointing out that real value is derived from “understanding of the classical world, not rote learning.” And Edith Hall clapped back with a picture of “Schliemann boring his wife to death at Troy reciting the Iliad” and with an allusion to Plato’s Ion. It was not the only reference to Socrates being made, as Xenophon’s Symposium was quoted, which notes that there is no group of men “more stupid than people who recite poetry… for they do not know the inner meaning of the poems.”
Others attacked not only what Johnson was doing, but how he was doing it, pointing out flaws in his Greek accent, his poor meter, and, indeed, the fact that he skips whole lines of the piece, which starts off as a pretty good run at the opening of the Iliad.
This backlash might seem to indicate distaste for a show of an understanding of the ancient world which was “lazy and tired and utterly irrelevant,” as Charlotte Higgins puts it in her article on the PM’s Classical references. However, there has also been a notable backlash to this backlash. And its charge is elitism.
It is always difficult to correct other people’s uses of history. As Donna Zuckerberg grapples with in another Eidolon article, while nobody owns the rights to the ancient world, we will nevertheless encounter times when people we disagree with invoke antiquity in ways that are frankly incorrect. In those cases, for the classicist who corrects, “they will either declare your expertise meaningless or decry you as a pedantic gatekeeper, or both.” Our knee-jerk response to such modern appropriations of the ancient world is often towards correction. To say “No, not like that” and tackle oversimplifications of our areas of study; to tell alt-right YouTubers that Sparta wasn’t all it was cracked up to be; to laugh at Mussolini’s overinflated fascist architecture or wink at how this video shows Johnson losing all grasp of the text by the end.
But we may just as well ask ourselves what is so wrong with people harmlessly enjoying the spectacle of ancient Greek, recited live, in living color? While the outrage machine revs up again, perhaps now is time to take a step back and ask why we are getting so het up about this speech. Is it really such a bad thing for Classics to be gaining relevance with stunts such as this? Are we perhaps viewing Johnson’s recitation in the wrong sort of way?
To begin to answer these questions, we should consider why quoting Classics works in the first place and ask if we can reinterpret these oratorical choices. We may be surprised to find ourselves coming to the same conclusions, along a different line of reasoning.
Johnson’s linguistic stylings are all part of the Boris “brand” which has us calling him “Boris” rather than “Prime Minister Johnson.” As a part of the ascendancy of the “farcical right,” he has proven that it is less important to be correct than it is to be entertaining. Stephen Marche suggests that, with the rise of the conservative buffoon, “the capacity to gather attention is the main source of power now.” Far from being a move away from the “absurd buffoon” image Johnson has so carefully cultivated throughout his career both as a politician and as a journalist, this performance instead presents itself as a sort of apotheosis of his intent.
Johnson doesn’t respectably engage with the ancient world in terms that would garner new understanding from those who may not have previously had access to it; instead, he uses Classics to act the part of the clown by toying and playing with the audience, as he pauses and waits for laughs. His choice not to translate keeps the contents of the speech inaccessible, which focuses all attention onto his performance — how he speaks, rather than what he says. This stands in stark contrast to his performance during the “Greece vs. Rome debate” with Mary Beard, where, in the presence of a presumably interested and probably classically educated crowd, he chooses to translate after reciting the original. It would appear translation is something he is aware of the need to do and is also capable of, yet does not deign to on this particular occasion. The politics of enchantment.
When commenting on Johnson’s use of the Classics to make himself a clown, like when he recites Sappho to people in shops or compares himself to Pericles, analysts often overlook the self-fashioning aspect of Johnson’s appropriations. We are often so focused on picking at where he has dropped a line or querying the view he presents of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire that we underestimate the larger program at play. By engaging in this game of fact-checking and correcting, however, we also may be condoning its use.
Johnson’s quivering form reciting Homeric poetry to an uncomprehending audience in Australia is exactly the sort of image manufacturing that put him where he is today: in the highest political office in the land. The poem that he recites is a sad one, the beginning full of anger and betrayal, and the tragedy of a foolish leader. But the audience laughs. They laugh not because it is funny, but because Johnson plays it for laughs — leaving pauses, feinting that he is about to end, before launching back into more incomprehensible nonsense and half-remembered poetry.
In “The Anti-Semite and the Jew,” a seminal text in understanding the rise of the far-right to this day, Sartre writes of anti-Semites “amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play.” For those of us who believe in words, this play, this lack of seriousness, discredits those who speak against them. It downgrades the discourse and makes a mockery of all good-faith actors, as their good faith looks like naivety in response to the cool pose adopted by the absurd clowns when challenged to defend themselves. “They seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.” In this context, Johnson’s classical posturing is a bold foray into this form.
I understand why people are impressed by Johnson’s Greek. It is spoken with powerful performance skills, and while it is no more impressive to memorize the Argos catalogue than the names of the Argives in the Catalogue of Ships, something is moving about the display. This recitation has always been political. Even in Homer, that long stretch of book 2 where the Muse is invoked at the beginning and the end must have been a crowning moment for any epic poet at the Panathenaia, a crescendo of virtuosic performance, listing of reams and reams of lords and ships and soldiers. But more than that, the Catalogue defined Hellenic identity for centuries to come, prompting Thucydides to remind his readers three hundred years later that “πρὸ γὰρ τῶν Τρωικῶν οὐδὲν φαίνεται πρότερον κοινῇ ἐργασαμένη ἡ Ἑλλάς,” “Before the Trojan war, nobody spoke of common practices in Greece”. In delineating the in-crowd through poetry and song, Homer generated a political benchmark for Greek identity.
The issue of identity is what is at stake here too: who is made “other” by the speeches that we make, and how can we build from this? As a community, we must think about how our own contributions help form the narrative that builds around an issue. With the Classical and modern world at stake, can we afford to send in the clowns?
Leah Wild is a recent graduate of the University of Cambridge, Terminally Online, and is spending most of her time trying to work out how she feels about things.
