Working Classics
First Generation Classics Special
This article is part of our First Generation Classics special, an exploration of ancient and modern first-gen classicists, broadly defined. Generously funded by a grant from the SCS Classics Everywhere Initiative.
To call myself a “first-generation classicist” has a pastness to it, like a trophy one earns after all the hurdles have been cleared. But being first-gen in Classics is, for me, part of a still-unfolding story about class.
It’s no coincidence that “class” and “Classics” sound the same. From the Latin clamare, a classis was a group “summoned” together in the Roman census, which grouped male citizens into six classes according to property, status, and age. The topmost class of citizens was called the classici, from which Aulus Gellius coined a term for first-rate authors: scriptores classici. Even the ancient texts we possess today transversed the annals of history according to class-related judgments. Class, which is to say socioeconomic inequality, is embedded in the identity of our discipline.
When socioeconomic inequality in Classics is discussed, especially by white classicists, this discussion often problematically diverts from race. In a previous article, Mathura Umachandran unpacked the “queasy calculus” of calling race an American problem and class a British one. For one, the faulty supposition that class is a bigger problem than race in the UK ignores the intersectional challenges faced by UK working-class classicists of color, as Umachandran points out. Furthermore, it suggests that British Classics is keenly aware of its own issues with class or has committed to developing an intersectional discourse around class in Classics. In reality, only the most preliminary efforts have been made.
Like Umachandran, I have a transatlantic perspective. After attending Princeton, I’m currently studying at Oxford for a masters’ degree focusing on classical reception. In the department here, it’s impossible to ignore the “notorious divide” between the performance of Course I students (students with proficiency in both ancient languages) and Course II students (who begin learning one or both languages at university, as I did). In the UK, records show that slightly over 1,000 students took A-level Latin in 2019, while fewer than 250 took Greek. Of these students, the overwhelming majority attended independent schools. In the US, where Classics wields less cultural capital, prospects look even worse.
As enrollment falls, working-class students in our discipline are struggling, and it’s not their fault. In February, it was announced that the Oxford Classics faculty might make Homer and Vergil optional on undergrad syllabi (not dropping them, as the media spin cycle suggests). The proposed change has been linked to gender disparity in academic performance. Last year, the Telegraph reported that, in Finals papers, 46.8% of men earned top marks (“Firsts”), versus 12.5% of women. While this discrepancy is not new, the 2018 numbers represent a “dramatic increase” compared to recent years.
Women aren’t allergic to Homer. While the gender gap at the heart of this epic debate is very real, it is not surprising that women are suddenly performing worse as Oxford strives to admit more diverse candidates from “disadvantaged” backgrounds while the structure of Classics degrees stays largely the same. In other words, an existing gender gap has been compounded by issues of class, race and access. Some students have studied Homer and Vergil before university, in A-level Classical Civilisation or AP Latin; Oxford classrooms favor both this kind of student and their brand of engagement with academic material. It should be obvious why some students are thriving while others aren’t. Not only does class remain a taboo topic throughout Classics as a whole, but our implicit mythos for working-class success is white, elite, and male.
Here, I want to unpack this model of working-class success and its origins by surveying the current state of the discourse surrounding first-gen and working-class identities in Classics. As I will discuss, British meta-scholarship may lead the way in developing a historical account of working-class Classics, but it hasn’t yet gotten everything right. Filtered through my own experiences, I want to show what the larger discipline can learn from the first phase of its attempts to center working-class voices.
I had never heard of Classics until my first day of college, when I found myself at an Iliad lecture for Princeton’s “great books” course. Despite the excitement I felt that first semester, at every turn, my experience in Princeton Classics was fraught with questions of access and survival. All my peers knew Latin; some had started Greek. Would I ever catch up? And more importantly, would my ideas — inevitably patterned by my identity — be welcome there?
In all honesty, I didn’t realize I was first-gen until deciding to major in Classics. My father, a construction worker, never went to college; my mother, who used to be a paint store manager (and, from manual labor, is now disabled), did not finish high school. The privileges afforded by studying ancient languages at an Ivy League university came with a paradox. Oscillating between extremes, I spent some summers of undergrad pursuing internships in Rome and studying Ancient Greek in New York City, funded by luxurious stipends. Others were spent living in my car, working by day, self-studying Latin after sundown. I felt I was becoming someone my family could not recognize, yet it seemed that my growing sense of alienation was a prerequisite for success. And, for white classicists, this is a far easier pill to swallow: such is the essence of privilege.
Today, my own work focuses on the reception of Greco-Roman gynaecological thought. Interfacing with millennia of harmful misconceptions about female bodies (while also proving their relevance to the larger discipline) is a daily, sometimes painful reality of my life. Yet my work’s subject matter is less dizzying than the vertigo induced by my class identity. After all, the development of class-conscious approaches to Classics lags behind scholarly interest in other identity categories, like gender and sexuality.
British classicists like Edith Hall are working to fix this. “A Classical education was never just for the elite, but was a precious and inspiring part of working-class British life,” Hall writes in “Why working-class Britons loved reading and debating the Classics.” Another recent article approaches the topic of working-class classical reception from the perspective of revolutionaries who turned to antiquity as inspiration for progressive causes: “The study of Classics has long been associated with expensive schools and elite universities,” but for centuries, “working-class Britons embraced ancient Greece and Rome.” Marx was a classicist, after all.
Both articles advertise A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain 1689–1939, which came out in late March. The book is the product of Hall’s work as the principal investigator for “Classics and Class,” her AHRC-funded research project with Henry Stead. Classics and Class aims “to present and amplify the many lost voices of British working-class men and women who engaged with ancient Greek and Roman culture throughout the period.” An archive containing over two-hundred of these lost voices is available on the project’s website.
Words such as “love,” “inspiring,” and “embrace” punctuate the project’s prose. And for good reason: Hall wants to restore agency to working-class people and critique the “exclusionist model” of existing scholarship. For her, this model predominantly focuses on the elitism which made working-class voices illegible in the first place. The silencers once more overshadow the silenced.
From a working-class perspective, however, doing away with studying exclusion in Classics entirely is concerning. Aren’t the struggles and marginalization of working-class people fundamental to our stories? They are in Hall’s earlier work, such as her article “Putting the Class Back in Classics” (2008), which surveys “class tensions within classical reception.” The operative word here is “tensions,” acknowledging that the historical relationship between Classics and working-class identity is often antagonistic.
In her 2019 article, Hall takes a different angle: “For every Jude Fawley, there has been a working-class autodidact.” Those of us who fail to surmount socioeconomic hardship are flukes, and “working-class autodidacts” leave the working-class behind. Hall’s exempla prove the rule. We are told that “British shoemaker classicists tended to prefer philosophical authors to poets or historians.” Yet the only British shoemaker classicist mentioned, Henry Jones, abandoned shoemaking for a distinguished career in academia.
What, then, can we make of class and Classics? First, studying Classics is still largely presented as a means of transcending one’s station, not honoring it. In celebrating an autodidact’s transformation from working-class to Oxbridge professor, we normalize a rags-to-riches narrative unattainable for most. Missing, still, is an authentic encounter between working-class identity and antiquity. Moreover, of those working-class individuals who do succeed in accessing classical texts and ideas, most are self-educated. (Unsurprisingly, “self-education” is the most popular tag in the Classics and Class’s online archive.) Finally, the stories of female classicists and classicists of color are sorely absent from this narrative. This is no accident: the template for working-class success in our discipline is white, elite, and male.
I can’t see myself in any people’s history of Classics that subscribes to a monolithic conception of what working-class identities and trajectories really look like. It is clear that centering success stories of white male self-education alone will not solve the erasure of working-class representation in our discipline and meta-disciplinary scholarship. Nor is it safe to posit the existence of a transhistorical, universal appeal to Classics uncritically shared by disadvantaged social groups.
Luckily, there are alternatives. Much like I arrived at Classics through the work of public intellectuals such as Mary Beard, working-class individuals have always found a pipeline to Classics by pop culture and other indirect means. One necessary ingredient, then, in a people’s history of Classics, is legitimizing classical reception as a serious methodology by which we can consider how non-elite audiences often indirectly encounter classical texts and ideas. Classics and Class acknowledges this by asking: “How did working- and lower-middle-class people access information about the ancient world? And how did they feel about it?” It is okay, even logical, for our feelings to not always be positive. At times, my working-class love of Classics feels closer to hate than indifference.
Working-class students in Classics want to succeed, but are being forced to take matters into our own hands. Initiatives by the Christian Cole Society for Classicists of Colour — like lectures on “Decolonizing Classics” — make space at Oxford for formulating intersectional solutions to our discipline’s most endemic problems, such as white supremacy and colonialism. Simultaneously, as scandal surrounds the relationship of Oxford papyrology to billionaire American evangelicals, the UK’s biggest ever university strike continues, demanding pension justice and raising awareness about academic casualization. One gets the feeling of being in the proverbial room where it happens. Might this be where Classics is living and dying, was born and is being forced into new life?
After all, a specter is haunting UK Classics. Academics and journalists alike are scrambling to prove that Boris Johnson, with his Eton and Balliol pedigree, isn’t representative of the field. The authors of these personal and political reflections are, for the most part, former Oxford dons and alumni. They criticize not only Johnson’s politics, but also his comprehension of Classics. Representative titles include “Seeing Through Boris Johnson” and “I was Boris Johnson’s tutor — but did I teach him the right lessons?”
The most recent discussions of Johnson’s education explicitly relate it to class tension. In “Forget Boris Johnson — the classics are for the working classes too,” Charlotte Higgins’ mention of the PM is praeteritio. Uninterested in the PM’s attempts at Homeric virtuosity, Higgins’ real goal is to show that “Classics has a long tradition of questioning authority… It has always been as much of an intellectual resource for the left as the right.” Yet the persistent belief that Classics is a “posh” subject is common to both sides of the political spectrum. The only way to defeat this notion, she concludes, is by making Classics available to more children in state schools.
Advocating for broader access is always an admirable goal. But we must nevertheless be critical about how this outreach is conducted. If we really aim to reclaim our field from its history and practices of exclusion, no student can be used as “a foil for the salvific power of Classics.” As we know from the nonprofit world, outsider interventions in under-served communities risk doing more harm than good. Dan-el Padilla Peralta said it best at the annual meeting of the SCS in 2018: “What exactly do we propose to do by expanding access? Are we simply in the business of bringing fresh blood to the ghosts?”
I’m forced to consider these questions each time I step into a classroom to teach Latin or Greek. My students, ages eight through ten, don’t usually ask why they are learning classical languages, though teachers and aides frequently appeal to traditional reasons for doing so: “Latin will make you smart!” In other words, “Latin can help you perform well on standardized tests and attain other conventional markers of success, which means you can get a better job.” In other words, “you can, and should, leave your community behind.”
Teleological reasons for studying Classics not only send the wrong message to kids, they’re also ineffective. I can attest that kids learn best from not rote memorization aimed at future success, but because of a curiosity we ignite in the present moment. Ancient languages are, after all, ubiquitous in the lives of most English- and Spanish-speaking third-graders: Harry Potter spells and characters, Nike ads, school mythology lessons, the back of dollar bills, the names of cars in the parking lot. A love of Classics and of working-class life are not mutually exclusive, even if the discipline is currently configured in exclusionary ways. What would an answer to “Why Classics?” look like, if it were based on embracing not elite culture, but one’s own culture?
My answer to “Why Classics?” depends on the company. At Oxford, I rarely need to explain the plot of the Greek tragedy I’m reading to strangers, let alone my life choices. There are more classicists per capita than anywhere in the world. Full Loeb collections abound, spoken Latin can be overheard in cafes, and classical inscriptions seem to adorn every building. Yet the socioeconomic disparity here means I find myself talking about being first-gen and working-class more than ever.
In my application for the Rhodes Scholarship, I said that Oxford, with its history and its flaws, would be the perfect place for someone interested in Classics and identity to study. In my interview, the first thing they asked was the quietly misogynistic “grandmother question”: explain Classics as if you were talking to your grandmother. I’m sure I gave a snappy response at the time. But, to be honest, the only thing that works is assuring my family that this, this is what I love. They have to trust me.
There is a popular misconception that working-class families pressure their children to study STEM or go to law school. For this reason, I’m frequently asked if my prospective choice of career troubles my parents. In reality, every career involving a lot of schooling is troubling to them; my wanting to be a classicist is as functionally confusing as my sister’s wanting to be a doctor. Both choices require trust and uncertainty, investment and faith.
At the end of the day, working-class classicists know the cost of our aspirations intimately, regardless of whether those aspirations are realized. In an episode of Scott Lepisto’s Itinera Podcast, Rebecco Futo Kennedy celebrates the perspective afforded to her by having a working-class identity in Classics: an impractical occasion to dream and take chances. “I grew up with practical. Don’t give me practical,” Kennedy says. As someone who grow up in a working-class background,
I often hear people talk about this idea of learning for the sake of learning… as something which is a privilege thing, only for the people who don’t have to worry about the practicalities of everyday life… but the thing I learned was to think, to allow myself to exercise my brain… The things that are hard are the things that don’t have answers. And the things that don’t have answers require creativity! Creativity requires the ability to disconnect from the world that you live in. And people who work, especially manual labor… oftentimes that physical labor is what releases your mind… I don’t think you can separate mental labor from physical labor.
Kennedy’s narrative resonates with me, and also echoes a fundamental aim of the Classics and Class Project: that it is important to spread personal stories from working-class people in the hopes that they “may inspire a more inclusive atmosphere for participation in classical culture across society today.” When I started studying Classics, I remember how desperate I was for working-class representation. (I was sad, like many others, to realize that Virginia Woolf’s “On Not Knowing Greek” does not, in fact, refer to her lack of proficiency with the language.)
If the point of representation is to inspire inclusivity, it can’t imply that working-class students are meant to embrace rugged individualism. I am not self-made or self-taught. I was, however, blessed with many (female) mentors who understood that any success I might have in Classics would require a nuanced understanding of my identity and background. Not a celebration, nor a tokenization: just an awareness of the role class has played in the formation of my identity.
Of course, this is easier said than done. On a practical level, what does it look like to maintain that Classics is not just for the elite, while also acknowledging the historical elitism which makes this clarification necessary in the first place? There is an obvious tension between these two well-meaning strands of inquiry — a determination to recover lost voices on the one hand, and the need to explain why we lost them on the other.
But perhaps it is not a tension we can or should resolve at the current moment. There must be room for both joy and sacrifice, transformation and conservation in any conception of a working-class love of classics. Rather than prioritizing social mobility, working-class Classics might operate according to an Aristotelian conception of change: transformation, in response to the most beautiful and most terrible aspects of the ancient world, coupled with a basic essence permitted to remain the same.
Nicolette D’Angelo is currently pursuing the MPhil in Classics at Oxford, where she is a Rhodes Scholar. She researches ancient medicine in order to procrastinate writing poetry, and vice versa.
Other articles in this series:
The First African to Have Attended a European University
First Generation Classics Special
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