What’s so Special About Classics?
E(i)ditorial — January 2018
At the annual Society for Classical Studies meeting in Boston earlier this month, the most popular topic of conversation was the bomb cyclone. But by late Saturday, when the weather had begun to improve, another topic seemed to be on everybody’s lips: Saturday evening’s “Rhetoric: Then and Now” panel. It was a lively event (with an even livelier Q&A) that featured papers by three members of the Eidolon family: editorial board members and regular contributors Johanna Hanink and Dan-el Padilla Peralta and frequent writer (and founder of Pharos) Curtis Dozier, along with Joy Connolly and James Engell.
All of the papers from the panel left me with much to ponder. But the idea that’s remained stuck in my mind is something that Padilla Peralta said at the end of his paper, and then repeated during the Q&A (and no, it’s not the part when he said that he thought Legend of Zelda would be a perfectly appropriate subject for a course of study, although I would love to return to this idea in a future editorial). Padilla Peralta challenged us to contemplate the death of our field:
If humanistic disciplines and their interpreters are actually capable of accommodating a multitude of subject positions, the challenge of that capaciousness comes in the encounter with the social and political demands of the here and now. In the course of this encounter, we will need to face up to the possibility that Classics will fail the test. Surely — and here I parrot the centurion who quoted Vergil to chastize Nero — it’s not such a miserable thing to die (Aen. 12.646: usque adeone mori miserum est?). It’s well past time for this contemporary configuration of Classics to die, so that it might be born into a new life.
In other words, if our discipline wants to survive, we need to abandon the idea that there’s something inherently better and more worth studying about Classics than other disciplines. This idea isn’t exactly new, but it’s one that I don’t think classicists confront nearly often enough, because it gets at the heart of something that many of us would prefer not to think about. The truth is, the idea that there’s something uniquely (or at least especially) rigorous and important about Classics is one that I suspect many of my colleagues subscribe to on some level.
Everyone in every academic discipline thinks that their area of study is fascinating and important, of course. And it should go without saying that every classicist — including me — loves Classics. But loving something doesn’t have to go hand in hand with thinking that it’s inherently, qualitatively better than everything else. I believe that classicists are particularly in thrall to the notion that our discipline is objectively more important — and, relatedly, more difficult — than other humanities disciplines.
The fallacy of classicist exceptionalism seems to be less taboo a topic of discussion than it was in the past. I don’t remember it ever being discussed when I was in graduate school. It didn’t begin to bother me until I was halfway through my dissertation — and even then, what made me think about it wasn’t discussion with other classicists, but instead something that happened in my personal life.
Late in 2012, the startup that my younger sister and my husband worked for was acquired by Google. At the time, I flew so far under the radar that few people were aware of my existence, let alone my marital status. Articles about my family regularly included a photo of only my parents and my three siblings. (I kind of miss those days.) So when my older sister tweeted about the acquisition and said that more Zuckerberg family members now worked for Google than Facebook, a few members of the tech media were a little confused about who she was talking about. One tech writer (now employed at Jezebel), while musing on who the second family member in question could be, wrote, “Donna’s a PhD student (in Classics! props) or so we thought.”
Five years have passed, yet that “(in Classics! props)” still bothers me. I felt, on a deep level, that Faircloth wouldn’t have written “(in psychology! props)” or “(in comparative literature! props).” Many classicists probably have stories similar to this one— a moment when they started to feel uncomfortable with the special prestige our discipline enjoys. I wasn’t yet ready to articulate how that prestige relies on and is implicated in elitist, exclusionary ideas about “Western Civilization” and white supremacy, but I could sense that the slight thrill I’d always gotten when software engineers were impressed by my field of study was actually predicated on something deeply problematic.
Despite the fact that many in our discipline are now speaking openly about this dark side of classics (a discussion that I’m proud to say this journal fosters), and despite the fact that the discipline itself is fighting for its life, it seems that many of our colleagues still don’t want to even think about this problem. Judging by the tone of the Q&A after the rhetoric panel, for many, the mere contemplation of the ordinariness of Classics is too distressing for rational discourse.
In fact, tied up in this discussion, inevitably, will have to be something we want to talk about even less: an interrogation of why we’re so wedded to the name “Classics” for our discipline rather than a more accurate descriptive name such as “Ancient Greek and Roman Studies.” If we’re honest, the reason probably has something to do with the special disciplinary rigor and importance that we’re so invested in. But I’ve never yet heard really convincing responses to to the two most obvious critiques of the name: if what we really study is “classical languages/literature/civilizations,” then why don’t we include the study of biblical Hebrew or Sanskrit? And if what we study is really the ancient Mediterranean, why don’t we work more closely with our colleagues who study the ancient Middle East in nearly the same time period?
Answering these questions thoughtfully is more important now than ever before. Classics faces profound challenges from both the Left and the Right. Progressive students at colleges such as Reed are arguing that our discipline fundamentally upholds and reinscribes white supremacist patriarchy, and the Neo-Nazis of the Alt-Right have provided proof for this thesis through their consistent appropriation of classical material. Confronting both of these challenges will have to include a profound reexamination of why we think our subject is worth studying. This isn’t an easy challenge, but it’s one that I believe is absolutely essential to our survival.
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, a study of the reception of Classics in Red Pill communities, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in Fall 2018.
