We Condone It by Our Silence

Confronting Classics’ Complicity in White Supremacy

Rebecca Futo Kennedy
EIDOLON

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Art by Mali Skotheim

In a recent interview on CNN, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) called himself a “champion for western civilization” in response to questions about his tweet calling culture our “destiny” and stating that America can’t restore its “civilization” through immigration. This isn’t a new code language used by a new type of racist. The same language has justified white supremacy in the United States since the nineteenth century, and it remains the standard argument for anyone who wants to counter the “nation of immigrants” narrative.

In narratives of American greatness, Classics holds a special place because the ancient Greeks and Romans have served as an imaginary source of an inherited Euro-American civilization. This use of the ancient world can pose problems for many of us who study it. Why? Dan-el Pedilla Peralta explains in a recent Eidolon article:

“Because a field traditionally Euro-American in composition, avowedly non-presentist in its focus, and propelled even to this day by a conviction of its centrality to “Western civilization” has made it really easy for the casual student — or the trained professional — to subscribe to facile narratives of static timeless white purity under assault from waves of immigrants.”

As long as Classics justifies itself by claiming to be the foundation of Western Civilization (feel free to do a random check of university department web pages), it will continue to find itself uncomfortably at the contested center of the continuing culture wars.

In the university and the public square, Classics is frequently engaged in battles to demonstrate its relevance, battles that are complicated by the long and ugly history of Classics as a tool of oppression and exclusion. Sandwiched between people who think dead languages are dead for a reason and those who view Classics as elitist and white (and therefore irrelevant to them), defenders of Classics have frequently chosen to cut a middle, sanitized path to try to be interesting to everyone. This path, however, has led to a shameful lack of diversity among those who study Classics — and, more troubling, tacit support of a narrative about Greece and Rome that appeals to those who are drawn to the ancient world because of the racism and misogyny.

In this situation, an intense irony develops. White supremacists, hiding behind posters of the (not originally white) Apollo Belvedere and the Discobolus, among others, look to antiquity’s harshness towards women and immigrants as a model for modern democracies, while social justice scholars within the field try to illuminate these same areas in a quest to help the discipline move forward from its colonialist/imperialist past and to become more open to women and nonwhite, non-Euro-American students and scholars. The ancient Greece that both white supremacists and social justice scholars see is far more accurate a picture than what is presented in narratives of the classical world as the “foundation of Western civilization,” though they have different aims in embracing it.

Western civilization as a concept is relatively new and has a clear debt to, not a conflict with, those cultures that many suggest it stands in opposition to (particularly the Near and Middle East). It is a narrative, as David Brooks has reminded us, that connects to and upholds a set of values that are imagined as specifically “Western” (i.e. Euro-American):

This Western civ narrative came with certain values — about the importance of reasoned discourse, the importance of property rights, the need for a public square that was religiously informed but not theocratically dominated. It set a standard for what great statesmanship looked like. It gave diverse people a sense of shared mission and a common vocabulary, set a framework within which political argument could happen and most important provided a set of common goals.

This narrative is rooted in an idea known as the “Greek Miracle,” a phrase used to refer to the supposedly unique flowering of arts, philosophy, and science between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE in Greece and western Anatolia (modern Turkey), a “miracle” that is dated to coincide, not coincidentally, with the rise and fall of Athenian democracy. It is a myth that gets trotted out frequently in the pages of elite magazines by those among us who wish to promote the study of the classical world as valuable to the present and by those who may be (un)consciously trying to continue to hide the field’s racism and misogyny behind a sanitized story of (white, male, Euro-American) greatness. But the diversity Brooks claims such a narrative encourages is not inclusive of the full range of ancient cultures (Egyptian, Persian, Carthaginian, Chinese, Nubian) that it has appropriated as “Western” along the way — ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Persians are fine, but not modern ones.

Remaining silent, therefore, about the ancient world’s darker propensities and focusing only on the so-called “Greek Miracle” is not an option, especially when we know it is used to promote modern prejudice. Silence encourages acceptance and even approval of antiquities’ worst tendencies in the contemporary world. Ancient Athens, though a democracy, does not fit a narrative of openness to immigrants and refugees no matter how we try to dress it up.

What, then, is a woke classicist to do? How can we find a way to celebrate what is good in the ancient world without dangerously cleansing it of its evils?

If we want to reduce the numbers of casual racists and white supremacists who use classics to justify their racist views, we need to stop providing them with “facile narratives of static timeless white purity.” Before we can engage in critical reception, the first step is a critical engagement with the classical past. We must not only engage issues of race/ethnicity, class, and gender in antiquity in our teaching and scholarship, but also we need to stop pretending that the worst thing the Athenians ever did was to execute Socrates and openly engage the true dark side of Classical Athens’ anti-immigration policies and the obsession with ethnic purity that lies at the heart of its literature, history, and philosophy. We need to recognize and discuss critically that at the heart of democracy often sits a whole series of oppressions that need not be there, but that can take over when we forget that democracy is hard — and can fail if we take things like civil liberties and equality for granted, something students often come to realize on their own in my Greek history classes.

Otherwise, by our silences we provide cover for continuing to be sexist, racist, and classist under cover of the greatness of “Western Civilization.”

After Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, one of the first texts I read as an undergraduate was the Athenian general Pericles’ speech (Thuc. 2.35–46) about a shining city on a hill, the first true democracy, “the school of Hellas,” where citizens willingly died to protect its ideals from corruption by outsiders. His funeral oration (frequently trotted out in articles to justify one side or another in contemporary debates about exceptionalism) is one example of a genre dedicated to touting Athens’ cultural, political, and ethnic superiority over not just non-Greeks, but over other Greeks as well.

This superiority, as Pericles tells us, was premised on Athens’ singular character, a character unique because it was derived from the Athenians’ unique relationship to their land. Of the ancestors of the fallen soldiers, Pericles says, “They lived in the land without interruption in succession from one generation to the next, and handed it down to the present free by their excellence (aretē)” (2.36.1). The Greek aretē, in this passage often translated as “brave deeds,” signifies both actions and character, or, in this case, how one’s excellence of nature leads directly to excellence of action. This passage ties the indigenous nature of the Athenians (many other Greeks, including the Spartans, considered themselves originally immigrants) to their inherent ability to perform excellent deeds.

The indigenous in antiquity were called autochthonous, which literally translated means “born from the earth” (Laurialan Reitzammer provides a wonderful retelling of the Athenian mythic origin story). The Athenians, Herodotus states, “never moved anywhere” (1.56.2), while the Spartans were Hellenes (the Greek name for Greeks), descendants of Hellen (the mythical father of all other Greeks) who immigrated to Greece. They were Greek not because they spoke Greek and worshiped Greek gods, but were Greek biologically, because they were descended from their land of Greece itself. This, in their opinion, made them better than all the other Greeks — Spartans included.

Thucydides tells a slightly different tale, but still the exceptionalism of Athenians among their fellow Greeks rings true. Most Greeks were migratory, except Athenians: “Attica, at any rate, was free from internal conflict for the greatest time as a result of its poor soil and was always inhabited by the same people” (1.2.5). As with Herodotus, Thucydides acknowledges that the Athenians were indigenous and the rough soil of Attica was partially the reason — no one wanted to take the land from them.

But Herodotus and many of his contemporaries (including Hippocrates) believed that the quality of the land could shape the character of its inhabitants. Herodotus himself provides perhaps the most famous expression of the idea at the very end of his history when he has the Persian king Cyrus state “Soft men tend to come from soft lands. It’s not common for marvelous fruits and men courageous in war to grow from the same earth” (9.122). Not content with a general idea of indigenousness, the Athenians even promoted a myth that claimed their ancestors were quite literally born from the soil of their hard land. It is doubtful the story was taken as literal truth, but it was a clever myth to represent the boring reality of their indigenousness as purity and to bind them to their land—an inspirational ideology for so-called Blut und Boden groups that both preceded the Nazi party and make up its contemporary offshoots.

The real debates in Athens, however, often centered on who qualified for the label of “Athenian citizen.” The Athenians, obsessed with the idea of their ethnically pure indigenous status, promoted it in public speeches, in sculptures and paintings, in the architecture of the Erechtheum on the Acropolis and in pretty, painted pots. The attitudes that this myth represented, however, found less celebratory manifestation in their strict anti-immigration and citizenship laws, which informers had to enforce among their immigrant populations.

Known as the Periclean Citizenship Law, the law passed around 451 BCE restricted access to political power and other legal rights to only those born of both a citizen mother and father. Prior to this law, one needed only a citizen father. We don’t know for certain why the law was passed, but part of the reason may very well have been a desire to restrict the large number of immigrant craftsmen and merchants whom Athenian citizens felt might compete with them for certain work — contrary to what Laurialan Reitzammer suggests, male citizens did many of the same jobs as male immigrants (and slaves), often working side by side (we even have payment lists showing that they got the same pay!).

The impact of this law, however, was probably not felt immediately, since it wasn’t retroactive — any children already born of such marriages retained their citizenship. It was really just about the Athenians ensuring that only Athenians had access to their hard-earned benefits in the future. Most portrayals of Periclean Athens, like Rebecca Goldstein’s recent article in The Atlantic, however, wash over the ugly prejudices this law represented and perhaps engendered:

“In 451 b.c., the statesman Pericles proposed a law that only those with two Athenian-born parents, rather than just a father, qualified. Still, as Athens asserted dominance throughout the region, presiding as the standard for Hellenic greatness, the emerging imperial power drew in immigrants. The best and the brightest arrived, hoping to engage in the city-state’s achievements, its art and its learning, even if they were excluded from its vaunted participatory democracy.”

Here, Goldstein paints a glowing veneer over the exploitative nature of Athens’ empire and its attempts to restrict access to the wealth and benefits that it brought. For example, Athenian citizens paid no real taxes. It was the “allies” in the empire and the immigrants in the city who paid taxes to fund Athenian citizen benefits like participation in the public assembly, on juries, and in public festivals. Also, about five years after the law was passed, a shipment of grain was brought into the city to be distributed free to citizens. Investigations were done into who was and who wasn’t a citizen and many, some of whom grew up believing they were citizens, were purged from the citizen roles and sold into slavery in order to ensure that only true Athenians received the benefits of their empire.

Despite these limitations, large numbers of immigrants did continue to arrive in the city after the law was passed, but they weren’t necessarily the “best and brightest” that Goldstein imagines (i.e., rich merchants and philosophers). The immigrant population of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE consisted of people of all classes — from aristocrats driven out of their own cities by civil strife to craftsmen hired to work on the Acropolis building program to carpenters, blacksmiths, tavern keepers, weavers, wet nurses, and prostitutes.

The word “immigrant,” though, is a somewhat misleading translation of the Greek term metic, since many of those who were called immigrants in Athenian law had been there for generations — not being Athenian meant being a perennial immigrant regardless of how long you were there. Also, many so-called immigrants were freed slaves — to call them “immigrants” is to gloss over the realities of forced migration through purchase and sale. But there is no single word in English that captures this status, so we call them all immigrants, which embodies the Athenian attitude that they could never “belong.”

In Athens, immigrants had to play by certain rules if they wanted to remain a free resident. Every immigrant, therefore, had to register in the city within a short period after arrival and was liable for an annual personal tax. All paid the tax, regardless of income, to support the political participation of the citizens while rarely accruing the benefits that untaxed citizens received. Failure to follow these rules could result in sale into slavery — even for those who worked along with citizens in the military, on building projects, and around town.

All immigrants lived with this daily risk of being sold into slavery if their registration wasn’t up to date or if they did not have a citizen sponsor or did not have witnesses to prove their status when an unscrupulous informer (who got a portion of the sale price) tried to turn a profit by turning them into authorities as unregistered. An immigrant woman could also be raped or even murdered without legal penalty to the perpetrators if she did not have any male relatives to represent her in the courts. The threats were real, as numerous extant speeches from the Athenian courts attest. And yet, we gloss over this lived reality because it puts at risk our vision of Athens as a shining city of justice where immigrants came “to engage in the city-state’s achievements, its art and its learning.” Or, maybe, we gloss over it because we don’t see anything wrong with punishing immigrants who don’t “play by the rules,” even when they are victims of crimes; enslavement (or deportation) is just “the price you pay” for breaking the law.

Even for the “right” kinds of immigrants, who did play by the rules, or the “best and brightest” who came to Athens to study and had wealth and connections among the citizens, life as an immigrant could be difficult. Aristotle himself was an immigrant in Athens (as were the mythical Oedipus and Eumenides, as noted by Reitzammer). And his status was frequently tenuous, in no small part because of his close ties to the city’s most dangerous foreign adversary at the time, Phillip of Macedon.

The orator Lysias is another example. Lysias was born in Athens sometime after the passing of the Citizenship Law. His father had come to Athens from Sicily at the invitation of Pericles and established a business there making shields for Athens’ army. Lysias’ family was wealthy and had connections to many of Athens’ elites, including Socrates, Plato and many other students of Socrates. Under the democracy, his family had been rewarded for their generous contributions to civic life and the Athenian military with exemption from the immigrant tax and the right to own property, an impressive reward in a city that so prided itself on its indigenous status that typically only those born of the land could own it.

And yet, Lysias lost everything — wealth, property, family — when the democracy was dismantled by a group of elite Athenians, including family members of Plato and followers of Socrates. They murdered Lysias’ brother, even though they had been friends and had regularly dined at his family home. Lysias, who was granted citizenship and then had it rescinded on a technicality, lived out the rest of his days writing speeches for citizens to give in lawsuits, defending rights and privileges that he himself, as a perennial immigrant, could not access. Despite his numerous contributions to the city, its people, and its democracy, he was not considered good enough to be Athenian because he was not born a citizen.

If there is a lesson to be learned from the study of Athenian anti-immigrant policy, however, it is not that their ethnocentrism was good and worked out for them. Rather, it is that there were negative consequences not only for the immigrant population, but also for the city itself. Xenophon, the philosopher-general, wrote in Chapter 2 of his work On Revenues (Poroi) that the best way to prop up the Athenian economy — which was struggling by the mid-4th century — was to invite immigrants back into the city and to relax restrictions on “the right kind,” i.e., those who paid taxes and filled important economic roles in trade and business. Xenophon would not have felt the need to offer this suggested policy change had Athens’ anti-immigrant policies worked out well for the city. But this other side of the debate will also never be addressed if we remain silent on the anti-immigration policies in the first place.

Silences are powerful. I recently felt that power personally. At a lecture on the use of Aristotle’s vision of education as a model for the modern liberal arts, a well-meaning colleague (a philosopher) recognized how Aristotle’s education system excluded the lower classes. He asserted usefully that we should reject the class bias — but that only made his other silences louder. He did not mention that the Politics, which he was discussing, begins early on with a statement that explicitly excludes both women and non-Greeks (called “barbarians”) from his system, which is only for “free men” (i.e., Greek citizen men). Non-Greeks, Aristotle says, are slavish by nature and so, obviously, not free. He also tells his readers that women are naturally subordinate to men. As a woman in the audience (one of only three in the room), I felt the alienation viscerally — this idea that Classics is only for “white men” hit me hard, even though I know better.

How much more must such silences alienate others not in my position when those silences perpetuate the notion that women and foreigners don’t have a right to liberal arts education or to the classics? One doesn’t inherit a cultural tradition that way one inherits blue eyes. Rather, the classics can be studied and made useful by anyone. How it is used, however, impacts its accessibility and appeal. Does Classics want to continue to be tied to narratives of white male Euro-American supremacy? Its professional organizations, at least, say no — but its use in popular articles, video games, movies, and TV shows suggests that the professionals don’t necessarily get to decide. And yet, for many fans of the classics, the first place they encounter them is in the classroom. We have an obligation to try to walk that fine line between the truth and its exploitation by those who would recreate the modern world in the image of the ancients.

Dangerous visions of purity run throughout Athenian literature as in its laws. We should stop feeding ourselves a “noble lie” that Athens was and is “a model for enlightened progress” (as Goldstein calls it). Instead, we should seriously consider our own complicity in perpetuating this belief when we ignore, downplay, or fail to call out that Athens was an imperialist, anti-immigrant society convinced of its own superiority because of its ethnic purity, especially when looking to the classics to find lessons to help us in our tumultuous present. Otherwise, we give sanction by our silence to the classical past’s uglier tendencies and embolden those who would use it as justification for present racism and misogyny.

Rebecca Futo Kennedy is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Denison University. Recent publications include Immigrant Women in Athens (Routledge 2014) and The Routledge Handbook to Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds (co-editor; Routledge 2016). She also strongly recommends people interested in these topics keep their eyes out for the (not-edited-by-her-and-forthcoming) Brill’s Companion to Fascism and Nazi Ideology and Brill’s Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology (both being published later in 2017). She also thanks Lakshmi Ramgopal for comments on an earlier draft. Her blog is “Classics at the Intersections.”

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Classicist, Ancient Historian, Critical Lover of the Classical Past. Blog: https://rfkclassics.blogspot.com/ ; Twitter: @kataplexis