Thursday
Some political-cultural fights never go away, it seems, and we may be seeing a return to battles fought in the early 1990s. Apparently Princeton professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta has attacked Greek and Roman classics as “instrumental to the invention of ‘whiteness,” generating a passionate defense of these works from University of Chicago classicist Shadi Bartsch.
I’ll have to return to Peralta’s New York Times piece in a future post since, at present, I don’t have a subscription to the paper and will need to visit the library. But because Bartsch’s article appears in the Washington Post, to which I do have a subscription, it is the subject of today’s essay.
First, however, a note on my own entry into the fray. If I maintain a blog entitled Better Living through Beowulf: How Great Literature Can Change Your Life, it is largely because I agree with Bartsch that the classics should not be surrendered to the right. Conservatives attempted to appropriate them for their own ideological ends when Lyn Cheney and William Bennet ran the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush years. That may have been when the phrase “dead white men” took root, either as an epithet or a flag to rally around. At the time I fought a double battle, both against leftwing purists who wanted to excise older authors from the curriculum (although honestly, there weren’t that many of such people) and conservatives who wanted to turn the classics into a shrine where one blindly worships. I didn’t realize that there are some today who want to revisit those battles.
Bartsch believes a battle cry has sounded, however, and responds with “Why I Won’t Surrender the Classics to the Far Right.” First she complains how the alt-right misinterprets the past for its own purposes:
The alt-right has no compunction about appropriating antiquity for its own ends — as can be seen images from the Jan. 6 Capitol invasion, as some rioters wore Greek helmets and carried flags with the phrase “molon labe” (“come and get our weapons”). This distorted reference to the Spartan stand against the Persians at Thermopylae in 480 B.C. reflects the supremacist belief that the Spartans saved “the white race” from barbarians.
Bartshch acknowledges that, yes, many classical texts “have been used to justify and support ideologies and actions we condemn today, from defending slavery to suggesting women are lesser creatures than men.” She even challenges herself with the question, “Wouldn’t it be better for us to use texts without tainted legacies and not risk seeming to condone the stories’ content or the history of how the texts were used?” Then she trots forth her defense:
That approach ignores a basic fact: Times change, and so does the way we read. In antiquity, Virgil’s “The Aeneid,” an epic poem written in 19 B.C. about the foundation of Rome, was understood as praise of the emperor Augustus. In the Middle Ages, readers took it to be an allegory of the life of the Christian everyman. In the 20th century, Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini put it to use as a foundational text for the third Roman Empire. During the Vietnam War, the poem was interpreted by antiwar readers as a manifesto against imperialism and warmongering.
While some conservatives today might read The Aeneid as “a celebration of the West’s hegemonic history”—after all, Aeneas, “claiming to be on a divine mission, attacks the native peoples of Italy and wins, eventually leading to the growth of the Roman Empire”—Bartsh points out the poem has other dimensions as well:
When I read “The Aeneid,” I don’t see an endorsement of colonization. I find in it what I am primed to find as a politically liberal Westerner in the 21st century. I find problems with its “heroic” protagonist and his search for a homeland: Aeneas causes carnage in his “divine” quest to become king; he even sacrifices people alive. I read the poem as a warning about the power of propaganda to veil the abuse of power.
Bartsch gives one other instance of a classic episode that can be reinterpreted. In The Iliad Thersites, “the ungliest man below Ilion,” is beaten for insulting Agamemnon: Bartsch observes:
Mostly, he echoes what the heroic Achilles has said earlier (Agamemnon keeps all the good stuff for himself). But Odysseus beats Thersites with a scepter until he collapses. The ruling class has asserted its place.
“Or has it?” Bartsch then asks:
A century ago, readers of The Iliad would comment that Odysseus gave the troublemaker just what he deserved. Today, I’d ask: Why does Homer include this voice of blame within the epic at all? What does it mean that the scepter bestowing the right to speak is used as a weapon to silence? What are the social implications of equating ugliness with low social status?
Bartsch then turns to Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) argues that
marginalized peoples should reinterpret the same texts that their oppressors use and transform them in their own service. Disconnecting the classics from elite education is entirely possible today: These texts are available in translation to basically anyone with access to the Internet or a library.
While I heartily endorse Bartsch’s defense of the classics, I am a little troubled that she doesn’t explain why they have leant themselves to such a wide range of interpretations. She makes it sound as though anyone can pick up The Aeneid and see anything that he or she wants to see—as though literature is no more than a Rorschach test.
I would have liked her to add that the classics have withstood the test of time because they offer a breathtaking vision of what it means to be human. Homer and Virgil capture us in our full complexity. That’s why it’s possible to read The Iliad as both a pro-war and as an anti-war work: at the same time that it conveys warrior ideals, it also shows (to quote Wilfred Owen in “Strange Meeting”) “the pity of war, the pity war distilled.” Achilles is both a glorious hero and, when in the grip of vengeful rage, a monster. (Owen’s “when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels” may allude to Achilles.) The same is true of Odysseus when he slaughters the suitors and the handmaids.
Our greatest writers, regardless of their demographic make-up, give us such rich pictures of ourselves that they never march comfortably under anyone’s ideological flag. They can never be reduced to a political slogan. The best we can do is listen to them carefully and let them teach us about life.