Yale (2026) h/b 268pp £25 (ISBN 9780300272734)
The background: it is historically the case that elite Americans consciously borrowed political ideas, symbols, and architecture from Rome, while their leaders looked to the Roman Republic as a model for government and civic virtue. Even today, AI surveys suggest that about 50% of Americans admire the Romans and use them as a reference point. Further less secure surveys suggest that American white nationalists/racists/supremacists make up between 0.0003% to 0.0006% of the population.
D., who teaches classics at Vassar College in the USA, has for some years been running a website (https://pharos.vassarspaces.net/articles/) which gathers together quotations demonstrating how ‘the familiarity and prestige of Greco-Roman antiquity make it an attractive source of symbols and ideas for white nationalists to promote their racist politics’. D. claims that classicists are responsible: we are so enthusiastic about our subject that we are unaware of the extent to which white racists use our scholarly enthusiasm to justify their racist beliefs. Their argument seems to be: the USA is in a terrible mess, largely thanks to migrants and other people we do not like. Clever people like classicists extol the brilliance of those ancient civilisations. Let us therefore selectively choose features of those civilisations to restore the glory days.
Here are a few of D.’s very many examples. Professor Paul Cartledge is condemned for waxing lyrical over Periclean Athens (‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’: D. appears not to know that Cartledge was quoting Wordsworth on the French Revolution). Professor Edith Hall gets a star from D. for arguing that the Odyssey has been used to justify white slavery but a ticking off for writing a book about how Aristotle solved many of her pressing personal problems, so promoting the idea that ancient authors are ‘wise old friends’. Professor Peter Heather goes to the bottom of the class for The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians because white supremacists feel that this makes their point about barbarians (=migrants) being at the gates, ready to bring civilisation down with them unless the supremacists (‘the Romans’) come to power.
I even find myself dragged into such deplorable company by arguing in a piece in 1998, headlined ‘It was tribalism that finished Rome and it will finish Brussels too’, that Britain should resist being sucked into the European Monetary Union (‘For as Chancellor Kohl never ceases to point out, EMU cannot possibly work unless a single, central policy, imposed on all national interests, drives it’). As D. makes clear, the supremacists love pieces that ‘predict contemporary decline’: Britain will need white supremacists to save it! But what my little piece had to do with decline or race or tribalism (those three words occur nowhere in it) is quite beyond me (I would have appreciated it if D. had briefly summarised what I had actually said).
Supremacists, then, will seize on any ‘evidence’ to support their cause. But there is none. The modern world bears no relation whatsoever to the ancient. Top tips from Roman politicians and generals and thinkers might not be terribly useful in the 21st century. Indeed, the whole of D.’s book gives examples of the supremacists’ blindness in this respect and very tedious it becomes too (he agrees that his book is ‘grim, joyless and exhausting’. I add that the incompetent Index does not help matters).
D.’s conclusion is to call for us to ‘assess our relationship to a culture that nourishes white nationalist thought and violence and commit ourselves to resisting and dismantling that culture. Within the discipline of classics, yes, but more importantly in ourselves and in the wider world’. Further, we all have a moral duty to ‘develop a new way of thinking about and valuing the Greco-Roman past. The cutting edge of classical scholarship must be devoted to defining what this mode will be … in support of moral clarity about the history and present condition of our discipline and about how our work can contribute to the formation of a more just and equitable world’.
All very noble. But this talk in terms of a personal moral crusade, involving ‘the wider world’, strikes me as a little too supremacist for my tastes, as well as being pointless, supremacists being what they are. Beowulf, Chaucer, the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Yeats, Dickens, Orwell, Rowling, Agatha Christie… select any famous writer, past or present and by careful selection and distortion of evidence, they will be found to be racist too.
Let me make a practical suggestion. D. has clearly been wrestling with this problem for many years, and its solution means a very great deal to him. So what does he find of value in the ancient world? What lessons might he have for us to learn from his own experience of teaching undergraduates? It would have been most instructive to hear how he sets about enthusing over the two courses of which he is in charge (elementary Latin and Greek/Roman civilisation) without corrupting the young, but he remains silent on matter. If he is up to it, he might try teaching courses about those ancients who have had a massive influence down the millennia e.g. Aristotle’s Ethics, the Stoics or ancient art history, to see how his students respond to the thought of the first two and the technical brilliance of the third. After all, the ancient world is there to challenge us and for us to respond to. D. should tell us how he encourages his classes in this endeavour. Or does he just tell them what to think and leave it at that?
Incidentally, I find it ironical that one of D.’s ways of dealing with the problem is to have set up his website (see above) illustrating the supremacists’ multitude of ways of perverting classics in their own interests. If I were a supremacist, it is the first place I would turn to on the grounds that the 0.0003% to 0.0006% needs all the encouragement it can get.
Peter Jones