So I Wrote a Thing
Today is the official release date for my book, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age. I have a lot of feelings about that — relief, trepidation, joy, pride, fear — but chief among those feelings is one of gratitude. The book has an acknowledgments section at the end to thank (some of) the wonderful people whose support I relied on throughout the writing process, but I also wanted to do a Part 2 of sorts here to acknowledge the crucial role that the Eidolon community played in the formation of Not All Dead White Men. This space is where I got the idea that became the book, where I found the people whose help I needed to write it, and where I worked through some of its thorniest problems. Without Eidolon, Not All Dead White Men would never have existed.
When people find out that I wrote a book about classical reception in the Red Pill community, they usually ask me one of two questions: 1) how did I keep my sanity while working on such a depressing topic, and 2) how did I get into this project in the first place? The answer to the first question is “an amazing support network, boxing, and wine.” The answer to the second is a little longer, and it starts with an Eidolon article published in August 2015: “Why Is Stoicism Having a Cultural Moment?” by Chiara Sulprizio.
The Stoicism article was Eidolon’s first piece of content to cross 10K hits. Naturally, I was curious about where those hits were coming from — but as I was looking through the sources of the article’s traffic, I discovered an anomaly. Usually our traffic came primarily from Facebook, Twitter, and from people emailing and sharing the article amongst themselves. But for this article, an unusually large portion of the traffic was coming from Reddit — specifically, in this case, r/stoicism, a community with over 100K subscribers, because Stoicism is indeed having a cultural moment. Someone had shared the article and the users were discussing it. But as I scrolled down the comment thread, something caught my eye: a comment attributing Stoicism’s resurgent popularity to the Red Pill community.
The idea that the men in the Red Pill community might be interested in Stoicism stayed with me, because it seemed like such an unlikely pairing. The Red Pill community is largely a place where angry men fan the flames of each other’s rage, a practice that is completely antithetical to Stoic principles. So I began to do more research into classical reception in the Red Pill community, and I was shocked by how much I found.
Editing and writing for Eidolon had given me the confidence to pitch articles to broad-interest publications with large readerships, like Jezebel. So I was hoping to turn my Stoicism research into something along that vein. But when my editor at HUP discovered Eidolon and reached out to me, I decided to try to tug on the thread running through the ideas I’d been researching at the time and pull them together into a coherent, book-length project.
I was worried at first that writing a book and running Eidolon would conflict with each other, but they never did. If anything, the two projects bolstered each other. Eidolon became a place where I could test my ideas and share the lessons I’d learned in the process of working on far-right classical reception.
Most crucially, Eidolon was the platform I turned to at a critical moment in my book’s development, when I was trying to figure out how I wanted to respond to the results of the 2016 presidential election. I’d turned in the first draft of my manuscript only a week before the election itself, and in retrospect the whole thing dripped with confidence that Hillary Clinton would win and the Alt-Right would soon be a thing of the past, an interesting moment in classical reception that was well worth studying, but perhaps without any sense of urgency. The election forced me to reconsider the place of my work in our current political discourse, and it was in that spirit that I wrote “How to Be a Good Classicist Under a Bad Emperor.” Eidolon’s writers and readers — and, of course, my wonderful team — helped me articulate what the project was really for.
So thank you all — for reading, for caring, for questioning and responding, for always pushing me to do a better job of asking and explaining what classical reception on the internet in the 21st century can and should look like. This book certainly would never have happened without you.
Donna Zuckerberg is the Editor-in-Chief of Eidolon. She received her PhD in Classics from Princeton, and her writing has appeared in the TLS, Jezebel, The Establishment, and Avidly. Her book Not All Dead White Men (Harvard University Press), a study of the reception of Classics in Red Pill communities, is available now.
