The message of this book is stark: abolish ‘Classics’ as a university subject and replace our ‘exceptionalist’ fetish for all things Greek and Roman with a more global inclusive history of our species over the last 10,000 years. ‘Classics’, according to Scheidel, ‘resolutely refuses to challenge its white supremacist foundations…if the subject itself has been built up over centuries in such a way that it is impossible to separate it from an oppressive, colonial mindset, maybe it needs to die’ (p. 233, author’s emphasis). Scheidel has a particular animus towards the centrality of ancient languages in Classics, and complains several times (pp. 186, 210, 213) about the ‘unnecessary and discriminatory’ requirement that lecturers in Ancient History have to teach Latin and Greek at all levels: he regards language teaching as a soft option and Classics programmes generally as ‘unearned inherited privilege for the few’ (p. 213).
The first and third chapters propose a positive rebranding of ancient history as the foundation of the modern world, with no exceptional status accorded to Greeks or Romans in the global process. To do this we need cross-cultural scholarship and collaboration, negotiating the trade-off between ‘technical expertise and greater breadth’ (p. 158) to ‘map the human past’ as a counterweight to populist national narratives. These new scholars would only need basic language skills: if they are working on (say) Greece and China they can talk to the Sinologist (and the Hellenist) down the hall.
The second and fourth chapters take a wrecking-ball to Classics, which he describes as blinkered at best, toxic at worst (p. 9). Scheidel looks back at the founding fathers of Altertumswissenschaft in 18th- and 19th-century Germany and argues that ‘professionalisation, nationalism and racism interacted to create an academic landscape carved up into ever smaller parcels’ (p. 65). Romanticism harked back to a pre-Christian paradise of art and culture, with Winckelmann espousing the edle Einfalt und stille Größe of Greek art: the Prussian bureaucracy turned this into the rigorous and exacting seminar system of philology which devoted 40% of teaching time to Latin and Greek. We are, Scheidel tells us, still dealing with the hangover from this over-indulgence on linguistic rigour and Mediterranean centrality. This history lesson fuels his Jeremiad against Classics in chapter four: ‘Eurocentrism and colonialism irremovably weigh down a field originally designed to glorify the putative cultural ancestors and role models of modern Europeans and wedded to language requirements that come with a long history of serving as a potent means of exclusion’ (p. 199). He rounds up and shoots the five grounds often proposed to justify Classics: exceptionalism would only work if Latin and Greek were exceptional (p. 204) while the ‘organicist’ argument that Classics is a holistic subject is exceptionalism in disguise. The pragmatic argument (that if you kill off the brand you risk killing the subject matter) is project fear. The progressivist says that Classics is now making amends for its colonialist past and is redefining itself as radical (p. 215), but Scheidel sees this as selfish survivalism with (e.g.) outreach programmes being run to save faculties’ skins rather than for altruistic motives – so they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t: they are just damned. Scheidel has little time for classicists who ‘leapfrog’ into the modern age with reception studies, although he may be right to urge that reception studies, when done well, demand broader cultural knowledge than most traditional Classics provides. One day Greece and Rome could be relegated to ‘mere episodes’ in ‘multimillennial and multicontinental ancient histories’, seeing the Mediterranean as the western end of Eurasia rather than the centre of the world. ‘A different future does not condemn past practices or abandon their harvests’, Scheidel concedes (p. 232): he also admits that experts in the Greek and Latin worlds will always be needed to unpick the ‘religious, political and cultural phenomena’ (p. 237) of our world – just not in departments called ‘Classics’.
The limitations of this book for Classics teachers are clear: Scheidel only looks at higher education in the United States and his words have no bearing on school-teaching or on most of the European university landscape. He is honest about the practical difficulties of implementing his vision of ancient world history and his book is only of ‘academic’ interest to practitioners in the field – and readers are more likely to be provoked than to be inspired by his tract. His hostility to the study of ancient languages, for instance, causes him to sneer (p. 212) at Simon Goldhill’s adolescent joy in Greek and Latin verse as exemplifying ‘privilege’, and he would replace the exuberant life-affirming experience of studying Aristophanes, Homer, Virgil, and Plato (to name but four) for the bleak textless study of eras predating them. ‘Brave men lived before Agamemnon’ admits Horace (Odes 4.9.25) but we cannot access their lives as we can that of the poet who sang those words. He sees David Butterfield’s eloquent defence of the discipline (pp. 234–236) as ‘intellectually bankrupt’ without really saying why; and his outraged disbelief that Classics ‘is both incomparably valuable and incomparably fragile’ is an own goal: the things we most care about are incomparably fragile. As for the ‘toxic’ quality of Classics – this subject has been (ab)used as much for revolutionary as for conservative ends, and in any case, many branches of study have murky pasts. Modern Classics departments are working wonders to widen access to the ancient world for everyone, regardless of ‘privilege’, and students from all backgrounds continue to apply in droves. Scheidel really is the Grinch who stole Christmas. Classics opens the mind to the possibilities of doing things differently, and being able to get so touchingly close to ancient Greeks and Romans affords us a mirror on ourselves as well as a window into their past. In times of global crisis and populist rhetoric we need Classics more than ever to interrogate our leaders as well as ourselves.
Open access
