The sophists talk to deceive and write for their own gain, and do no good to anyone …
— Xenophon, Cynegeticus 13.8 (Tr. E.C. Marchant)
In other words, if you do what you love, love what you do, and if what you love is wisdom, you won’t accept payment for your writing. Xenophon’s Socrates might have said so most explicitly (in the Memorabilia he equates sophists with prostitutes), but Plato’s Socrates also thought that bought wisdom — whether written or oral — was debased.
Today’s members of the Academy may get paid to teach, but most of them still offer up their written wisdom gratis. It seems the classical stigma against paid writing has also persisted in Classics, where we can read about it in the original. Nobody wants to be labeled a sophist, and as long as we can find a cui for the bono then the academic’s “objectivity” — already a precarious notion — is called into question.
Of course, that’s not the real reason academic journals don’t pay their editors, writers, and reviewers. The production of written material is one of the major job expectations for an academic and—viewed this way—academics are paid for writing in the form of their salary. The fact is, if you don’t publish you won’t get hired on a tenure line. If you then don’t continue to produce you won’t get tenure. And if you then stop writing you won’t be promoted. Even when you’ve finally “made it” and leveled up to full professor, merit raises nevertheless typically depend on—or at least factor in—publishing, editing, and peer-reviewing.
Academia is thus a self-contained ecosystem of sorts: universities foot the bill for subscriptions — which don’t come cheap — and they also pay the salaries of contributors. But that ecosystem has a foundation of sand, one that continues to shift and crumble. It subsists on the fantasy that all of its inhabitants have a tenure-track job or at least the realistic possibility of one, lots of money with little teaching — a “fantasy” because that is certainly not true now and may never have been true in the first place. The rise of contingent labor has threatened the ecosystem’s moral high ground, possibly out of existence.
Nevertheless we still expect writers to accept vague promises of “experience” and “exposure” in lieu of money, despite the fact that the intended effects of both are now much harder to guarantee than a check. Publication houses still get away with charging hundreds of dollars per book and pretending that all universities can pay their exorbitant subscription fees (they can’t).
If the system is broken, why does it keep working? Why do we keep working? The answer is love. This internalized idea that you shouldn’t want to get paid for your writing anyway, because that’s not the point in a labor of love. This love language becomes weaponized in the service of an exploitative system that already makes years of largely unpaid and unacknowledged labor a necessary (but not sufficient) condition of job security.
Classics may not be very profitable nowadays, but it is unclear whether academic journals would pay for writing even if they could — unpaid writing seems to be a gateway to and condition of your membership in the Republic of Letters. There’s a difference between thinking that unpaid writing is a problem that we may or may not have the financial resources to address and thinking that it’s a feature, not a bug.
The workings of academic publishing run on such beliefs. A system might be able to change, but customs are often immovable. This cultural foundation that sees money as a stain, and believes that payment depreciates objectivity—that believes that philosophers love wisdom, while sophists are paid for “wisdom.”—can be traced back to the very birth of the academy.
Eidolon has never aimed to become a traditional academic journal. Nevertheless, most of our writers are within or adjacent to the academy and likely would write for us for free. In fact, a lot of our writers initially express surprise or befuddlement, not satisfaction—and definitely not expectancy—when they find out that they will be writing for their own gain. So why do we pay them?
We pay our writers for a slew of practical reasons. First, we don’t offer the opportunity to publish in a peer-reviewed publication by virtue of not being one — and recognize the importance of doing so, especially for early-career scholars — so money is meant to be compensation for that. Second, and this can’t be overstated, we pay our writers because we can, thanks to some generous donations to the Paideia Institute.
In this way, we hope to act as a small corrective to the most exploitative parts of academic publishing. We don’t offer a living wage — we don’t hire our writers full-time — but we pay enough to compete with popular online literary magazines.
But the real reason we pay our writers is because we value writing, and are deeply concerned about a world that doesn’t. That world is larger than just academia to be sure, although academics too are complicit by considering writing an extension of or vehicle for scholarship rather than labor in and of itself; or by thinking that writing is “indirectly rewarded” because the best writers naturally rise to the top like cream — a questionable line of reasoning at best and either way, indirectly is not directly; or even by writing for free at all, making it difficult to justify, from a business standpoint, paying writers who actually need the money.
Underlying all of this is the following assumption: writing isn’t real work. It’s something that makes real work happen. Any literate person with a laptop and a copy of Microsoft Word, or a pen and paper, or a lipstick and a mirror, can do it, even if some people do it slightly better than others. An honorarium is a cute gesture, not an entirely reasonable compensation for what is—yes—real work.
Writing is real work. It’s real hard work. A lot of time, effort, and skill goes into finding a compelling idea, then crafting prose in such a way that a reader feels or thinks. Bad writers mangle good topics, good writers elevate flat topics, and excellent writers capture things that the rest of us don’t notice or can’t express. And not to toot our own horns even more, but all of those writers need editors — editing is real work too!
At Eidolon, creating a world in which writing is valued is a vital part of our mission, and in this case valued — if you’ll excuse the capitalistic language — means paid for.
In February, Eidolon published eight articles:
Emily Hauser shared her discoveries about the challenges of writing historical fiction in I, Classicist
Michael Fontaine facilitated a conversation between Daniel Gallagher and Eleanor Dickey about Latin pedagogy in What is the Best Way to Learn Latin?
Tori Lee compared the exclusus amator in antiquity and the modern Rom-com in To Me, You Are Creepy
Nikolas Oktaba exposed the toxicity of genital intrusions in Dick Picks, Ancient and Modern
David Rohrbacher titillated with an erotic cento in A Sexual Encounter, Narrated through Entries in the Index of Herbert Weir Smyth, (Ancient) Greek Grammar (1920)
Dan-el Padilla Peralta confronted the complicity of Classics in the creation of nationalistic and racist narratives in Classics, Beyond the Pale
Stephanie McCarter explored ways to read Plato and Sophocles alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the Ancient World and Me
Megan Daniels argued that Bernal’s Black Athena is still relevant for Classics in Black Athena, 30 Years On
Yung In Chae is the Associate Editor of Eidolon. She received an A.B. in Classics from Princeton University in 2015, and after a year of studying History and Civilizations at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales is now pursuing an MPhil in Classics at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar.
Sarah Scullin is the Managing Editor of Eidolon. She received her Ph.D. in Classical Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012.
