Romans Go…Where?

Every summer, this Roman goes home — just for a few days. Even the car drive from Fiumicino is as imbued with the classical past as it is with very personal memories. Circo Massimo is thick of afternoons of cheap beers with the occasional joint, and a more deafening nostalgia for my high school days bites deeper as we leave the Colosseum on my left and spot the rainbow of the Coming Out pub at the entrance of via San Giovanni in Laterano. The auditorium of Maecenas evokes the pastries I would get with my high school best friend from the overpriced bakery on Via Merulana, while now, from his oven-shaped tomb, Eurysaces guards me silently as I get on the train to visit her new house in Tor Pignattara.

And yet, the Romans are not us. Not in the anglophone academic world where I work and live, at least. It first struck me when I heard their North American accents while watching Asterix in English, and it became even more evident upon reading a number of pieces recently published in this journal.

In Nandini Pandey’s new column, the Romans are not even all the British, but only the most entitled Oxbridge fellows scrutinizing your ways at High Table. Although her experience and mine are no doubt very different, these are the same fellows who often lectured me on Virgil’s Aeneid upon learning that it was my topic of research, who told me that an Italian studying Latin was “cheating,” and with whom, I was told, it was simply better not to discuss Brexit.

But I was privileged, since some did recognize me as something of an exponent of that long-decayed civilization that had found a much better expression in the imperialism of their own country. After I opened a Cambridge lecture series with a brief speech on post-colonial perspectives in classical literature, I was later cornered in the pub by one professor, who told me that, as a Brit, he did “not understand the problem with colonization,” because he considered himself as having been colonized by the Romans, “an enlightened civilization,” and he “was perfectly fine with that.”

That tongue-in-cheek bow to my Roman origin came back to mind as I read about Nandini’s painful experiences at the Oxford High Table. Although the professor did not dare voice his thoughts for discussion in the seminar room, I was still dumbstruck by the fact that he chose to spell them out at all. I suspect he did because he knew that on my own (as a junior, female, adjunct, Italian postdoc) I would be too astonished and weak-minded to reply. Anyway, the tone camouflaged the provocation as a joke. Another façade of sophisticated British humor that slapstick-loving Italians would not be able to get.

Since then, I have been mulling over what I could and should have said on that occasion instead of my mumbled expressions of incredulity. So I resolved to write this piece to address at least some of the problems at work in that weird interaction. Not a reply to the most disquieting aspects of the professor’s viewpoint (for these have been effectively answered by Nandini’s article already, and in different ways by Yung In Chae), but a reflection on my personal experience of being a young female Italian scholar from Rome in the world of these new Romans. A brief note on where many of us Italian classicists are, as well as on where we have escaped from.

Who was I, a Roman student, and then scholar, of Classics, to the eyes of these people? I was certainly not the rightful heir of that enlightened Roman Empire that had been so kind in colonizing them — not that I ever wanted to be. While the situation is nowhere near as critical as that painted by Johanna Hanink for Greece (both on Eidolon and later in The Classical Debt), Italian students too may feel to be dispossessed of their heritage when moving from Italian into anglophone academia.

To be fair, when I moved to Britain, the prestige surrounding Italian scholarship was still very much alive, although often undermined by the ridicule surrounding Italian society as a whole. But it was not uncommon for me to receive mixed messages about it. As many international students will have experienced, one aspect in particular in which British academia has no open-mindedness to international practices is essay structure. When I tried to explain to one reader that my Italian training was at the root of my writing, he scornfully replied that Italian Latin scholarship only became fashionable in the ’90s — before then, no one in Britain really seemed to care about it.

Not only did I find it difficult, coming from six years of studies in Italy, to get used to the fact that what had so far been the center of a discipline was now displaced to its borders, but I also struggled with how prestigious institutions seemed unable to even conceive of Rome as a central location for Roman studies. In one of my interviews for a Classics graduate program in the States, a professor boasted about his department’s collection of Roman coins. I stupidly betrayed how unimpressed I was when I replied I was from Rome — we had quite a few coins there. But I guess this just made him defensive, since next he was eager to let me know that it was a gamble for them to accept us Italians, because although our ancient languages are very good, it’s of no use if we can’t write in good English.

In British academia, perhaps more than in the States, it is true that English as a second language is a problem for many Italian students not only for our work, but also in our interactions with superiors and peers. I came to think that our lack of proficiency in English was used by both students and teachers as a tool to undermine our threatening familiarity with the classical world and its languages that we were so privileged to receive almost for free at state schools and public universities. A strong accent can easily turn you into a living stereotype, while wrong prepositions cause hilarity beyond belief. When I first presented a paper at my department’s research seminar at the beginning of my doctorate, a professor called me in his office to let me know on behalf of most colleagues that, despite forty-five minutes of “discussion” following the paper, they hadn’t understood a word. The same professor’s recommendation for improving my English was to open a book of Denis Feeney and copy his style.

Sure, many were supportive of my Italianness, which, to be honest, I did not play down. Some, however, took more liberty with it, like that one professor who always shouted “ciao bella” and started to gesticulate and produce Italian-sounding phrases every time he bumped into me. Graduate students also happened to show a lack of patience. At one point, many backed a proposal to ban foreign languages in the common room. They didn’t put it in writing, but they had no problem letting me know that Italians were the issue, since they had proved unable to integrate during the coffee breaks.

No wonder our knowledge of the classics is threatening. If we are born in the right place and have access to a liceo classico, we receive more training in classical languages and literature in high school than British students do during their undergraduate degrees. We have all been through a large number of undergraduate modules (I personally did around forty for my BA and twenty for my MA) in various aspects of Classics and other disciplines, from philosophy and textual criticism to archaeology and epigraphy. Many of us are also trained in papyrology and paleography.

Those who attended the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (some may say the Italian Oxbridge, except it subsidizes students’ accommodation and maintenance costs, so it has quite a different composition in terms of students’ backgrounds) did double the work, as they were constantly engaged in research seminars and presentations throughout their undergraduate degree. So it is not unusual to hear Italians complain about the low expectations in UK departments regarding textual criticism and linguistics.

These are the same “arrogant Italian scholars” that some of my PhD peers complained about when they heard them deliver research papers in the department. The single-minded textual critics, incapable of structuring an argument despite their insurmountable, useless amount of information and inability to pronounce “through” and “though” differently.

Not infrequently, I would buy into it too. In the first year of my PhD, and possibly even later, I would myself strive to become the living Italian stereotype, available for mockery: in my unreliable punctuality, in the constant coffee and cigarette breaks, in my thick Roman accent and invention of weird idioms, and in my “friendly rudeness,” which is the untranslatable mark of the Romans. But too often, despite my attempt to “put my hands in front,” as we Italians say — namely, to warn my peers that my occasional rudeness and political incorrectness was more often than not the result of a transition into a wholly different language, and a wholly different system of values — my Italian parrhesia would backfire under the hypocritical taciturnity of the well-behaved British. And so, between one mistranslation and the next, a sense of isolation would creep in: the consciousness of not belonging, and of being kept suspended once unrooted, somewhere in between the old and the new.

It is no doubt very different for each and every one of us, but for me at least, the struggle to belong in my new home was coupled with the despair of ever going back to the old one, for I had left Italy out of the certainty that I would never be allowed to become an academic in my country. Much of this conviction, I now realize, had a gendered root. The remaining dissatisfaction with Italian academia unfortunately depended on those same issues that make Italian society as a whole a cause for ridicule in anglophone circles.

Sexism deserves its own space in my relationship with Italian academia because I was so blind, for so long, to how it contributed to shaping Italian academia’s inequalities, and my belief that I would never be accepted there. It is only now that I see, in retrospect, how things may have been different if I had been a male student in the classroom.

One professor only allowed male students to address him by name, while female students had to address him as Professor; another was perhaps more cordial, as he took the liberty to call me “bambina mia” (“my baby”). When I came back to Italy years later for an international seminar, an unfortunate episode of harassment on behalf of one of the professors triggered surprising comments by one Italian colleague. First, he was surprised that I, as an Italian, would react as stupidly as my female colleagues from the United States, because in his experience Italian women, unlike North American ones, were able to recognize the difference between sexual harassment and the “ridiculous flirtations” of a drunken male professor. He lectured me about what constituted sexual harassment and what didn’t, feeling the need to add that I probably didn’t know because no one would ever try to harass me. When I and others complained about the fact that more senior women should be invited to the seminar, he also kindly recommended me to “stay at home” if I didn’t dare confront a majority of men, who inevitably constituted academia. And the professor who was in charge of the seminar indirectly backed him up when he confessed that although he did “care about the issue,” he simply couldn’t think of many women classicists, from all over the world, who would be right for his program.

Sexism isn’t at all a peculiar feature of Italian academia, of course. It’s just that in Italy you can get away with it relatively easily, especially since female students and scholars are, just as I was, generally uncomfortable with bringing it up in their departments. But even more pressing in Italy are issues of university recruitment, with its academic nepotism and fake competitions. There’s the impossibility of finding an appointment without an academic patron; the bitterness of discovering too late research positions advertised during Christmas, in recondite and barely accessible corners of the Internet; the surprising specifications for the ideal candidate’s research — so specific that they could only match the profile of one person.

Moreover, obstructionism is frequent when there are wars between two patrons, and the threat of appeals is constant, even if you manage to get appointed to what will most surely be a fixed term and extremely precarious job. Add to this the understaffed and under-budgeted conditions of so many of our libraries (stolen books, malfunctioning WiFi, inaccessible e-resources, insufficient space to host a research community), and you get somewhat close to picturing research in Italian academia.

To this you may also add the inability of Italian Classics academia to renew itself and confront more directly the role that Classics has to play, for better or worse, in our society as a whole. As I am writing, another ship carrying 150 people (the majority of whom are from nationalities that would assure them automatic international protection in most countries) is being taken hostage off the coast of Catania in full violation of human rights conventions (the Diciotti vessel). This is the order of what I would not hesitate to call a neo-fascist and racist government that the Italians have voted in protest against the Democratic Party’s ever more blatant inability to speak to the economic struggles of the working and middle classes.

Classics plays at least two roles in this political crisis. Undoubtedly, there’s a renewal of fascist ideology on the extreme right. It was a Roman fascist salute that the shooter of Macerata showed off before opening fire on six African migrants at the eve of this year’s national elections. And it is Julius Caesar’s name that apparently shines in the entryway of the headquarters of CasaPound, the neo-fascist, racist, and anti-Semitic Roman organization and party, named after another major figure steeped in the classical tradition. On the other hand, Classics has always been and continues to be the domain of the elite culture of the left. This is the culture of politicians who have always been as ready to pick up on Berlusconi’s probably intentional mistakes in Latin quotations and Roman history as they have been to help, behind the scenes, his economic and political projects.

The last years in particular have seen the pinnacle of the debates regarding the utility of Classics, especially the liceo classico (most recently defended by Federico Condello). Arguments have moved from the traditional idea, continuously imposed on us at school, that Latin and Greek are “good for the mind” (although still present in Andrea Marcolongo’s La lingua geniale), and many have raised their voice against the old-fashioned and decontextualized grammatical approach of the liceo (most famously Maurizio Bettini).

But this is not enough. While academics are too often found lamenting the scarcity of Wilamowitzes and Fraenkels in contemporary philology and simultaneously vilifying any type of literary or theoretical engagement with the classical texts (mostly railing against gender and reception studies), public discourse does not come anywhere near addressing the pressing issues of Classics: the obvious links between a “classical” and “classist” education, the underpinning beliefs about the superiority of ancient Greek and Latin culture and their connections to models of Western superiority, the implied male and white readership of the ancient texts in all of the secondary literature.

No, it is simply not enough to remind readers that Aeneas was a migrant himself in this loaded climate of the migrant crisis (a recurrent reminder in the Italian press of late — counteracted, I now see, by the young alt-right journal Giovani a destra, whose claim to philological accuracy cares to stress, with Virgil, the Western origin of Dardanus). We need to open our eyes seriously to the different and intersectional identities of the contemporary readers of these texts, especially women, LGBTQ+, and Italians of color.

For the problem lies not only with the frequent appropriation of Latin at the hands of the far right, or of extremist Catholic groups (though that is a big problem, as attested by the latest words of don Vilmar Pavesi, spiritual father of current Minister Lorenzo Fontana, who claimed that women can’t make the mental effort to learn Latin). We seriously need to start embracing change in our own academic circles too. Because when I open Nicola Gardini’s 2016 Viva il Latino (an ode to the “beautiful uselessness” of Latin), I read that the thrill of reading Catullus as a sexually restless teenager consists in tuning in with Catullus’ powerful use of swearing, which marks his identity as a “free man” in active sexual activities with “subalterns” such as slaves and young men. At the very least, these pages make me doubt that the author ever wondered whether some of his readers may privilege different identifications when readings the same collection of poems.

These worrying shortcomings in Classics pedagogy have been playing a crucial yet too often underestimated role to the so-called “brain drain” of Italian academia. They must be addressed both in their own right and in conjunction with Italy’s social and political instability, its academic nepotism and the general precariousness of the job market if we want to start discussing the possibility of change, and the possibility of homecoming for many Italian academics working abroad.

But while academics working in Italy should start opening the Greek and Roman classics to a polyphony of different voices and start to scrutinize their feeling of entitlement to the Western classical past, it is also time for Italian academics working in the anglophone world to reclaim for themselves a part of that classical heritage. The academia we have left may be defective in its recruitment processes and oppressive in its power structures, but the transition to more liberal and progressive systems, in many ways enlightening and liberating as it has been for me, is anything but painless when you are invited to take part in the sardonic humor of those who believe themselves to be blameless of the very defects that they attribute to the Italians.

The experience is no doubt made more bitter by the assertiveness with which these self-appointed Romans castigate your command of their language and emphasize the faults in your argumentative structure. These are no doubt the inevitable insecurities of academia everywhere. But I thought it worthwhile to reach out to those fellow Italian students and colleagues who have felt a similar discomfort in their old and in their new countries — and if so, tell them to hang on in there, wherever the Romans’ home may be.

Elena Giusti is Assistant Professor of Latin Literature and Language at the University of Warwick. Originally from around Piazza Bologna in Rome, she left Sapienza in 2011 to pursue a PhD at King’s College Cambridge, a Teaching Fellowship in Glasgow and then a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College Cambridge. She is currently working on making Birmingham her new home.