Distance and proximity to the Ancient World

Distance and proximity is something that has always appealed to me about Classics: Roman imperialism is both two thousand years away and right under my feet, Greek tragedy relates a world of exposure and incest now reflected in the day-to-day life of Coronation Street’s cobbles, and the thumbs-up-thumbs-down approach to gladiator shows persists on vote-at-home reality TV. However, my studies this semester have made me realise that uncritically looking for parallels between the past and present is not only unproductive but, at worst, unethical; instead, we should think of ‘Applied Classics’ as an active process that involves taking the material we have and transforming it into something which utilises that distance and proximity to say something about the present.

The act of remembering, and choosing what to remember, is not apolitical. My choice to study ancient Greece and Rome does not exist in a vacuum but responds to centuries of colonial thinking which has privileged the language, philosophy, and experiences of a few rich white men. Through this colonial lens, even Applied Classics can feel unethical. As Mary Beard has asked when discussing modern dramatisations of ancient Greek tragedy, for example: is Sophocles’ play Antigone really a cross-cultural framework for rebellion or is it a narrative of revolt pushed by and digestible to the oppressors who introduced it?[i] Antigone is a girl who for personal reasons rallies against the establishment on her own and does so by martyring herself; there is a distinct absence of an organised movement or large-scale change. However, that has not stopped people from adapting it to tell powerful anti-colonial or even anti-apartheid narratives. In Fugard, Kani and Ntshona’s play The Island, for example, black political prisoners perform Antigone’s story in ways that draw parallels between her fight and fate and theirs. As Beard notes, this use of Sophocles’ play to reflect on apartheid and wider colonial struggles potentially acts as the ‘ultimate victory of colonial power’ by pushing out narratives of lived experience and replacing them with ‘Western’ ‘classics’. In addition, the universalising uses of these stories can reduce our ability to understand the complexity of global events by forcing them into narratives we are familiar with, such as the ‘sex-strike’ in Liberia, a single event in a prolonged movement for change, now defined primarily by this forced connection with a palatable ancient story.[ii] This, together with the recent interview with Dan-El Padilla in the New York Times, discussing the colonial roots of Classics, has prompted me to consider whether it is ethical at all to try to ‘apply’ Classics when it requires privileging a culture that has already been bolstered as a beacon of White Supremacy for the past two thousand years.

That said, the methodologies of online publications Eidolon and Pharos have led me to consider an alternative position. The use of Classics by the far-right has been well documented — from a production of the Oresteia being performed at Hitler’s 1936 Olympics to Capitol rioters in Washington in January 2021 drawing on Classics texts to support their ideologies — and if all others abandon the discipline, these interpretations are left unchecked with no counter-argument to stand beside them. This methodology is explicitly laid out in Pharos’ claim that they are not hoping to change the minds of far-right sympathisers but rather offer an alternative approach to ancient material. Similarly, Eidolon states that they ‘don’t believe that political neutrality is either achievable or desirable’ regarding classical study and openly dedicate their platform to progressive, leftist-feminist viewpoints. In addressing the limitations and pitfalls of this approach themselves — they recognise that they will not reach everyone — they allow themselves greater freedom in approaching the material. This has encouraged me to assess my own positionality in applying Classics, and to be realistic about the potential outreach of my interpretations. Pharos and Eidolon both accept that people looking to the ancient world to defend far-right views may well find the support they are looking for — Juvenal does make racial and xenophobic remarks, for instance — but that does not mean that what is written is objective or correct. Through contextualising these texts, the scholars writing for Eidolon and Pharos give them back their complexity and offer an alternative to accepting them as correct or valuable simply because of their longevity.

As well as reflecting on Classics’ colonial past, it is important to consider how ‘elite’ Classics as a discipline can still seem today. The twitter storm that followed Boris Johnson’s recitation of some lines of the Iliad recently brought this issue to the fore. However, many modern approaches have focused on expanding Classics’ reach. The Classics for All charity is working to bring Classics into more classrooms and Neville Morley’s Melian Dilemma Game similarly tries to reach school children by using Thucydides to teach political literacy. Theatre company NMT Automatics is bringing ancient Greek myths to wider audiences by delivering accessible workshops; and Eidinow and Lorenz’s Myth Game brings business into conversation with ancient myth to rewrite prevalent success narratives.[iii] Yet, I think the most interesting use of this methodology is embodied in Aquila Theatre’s Warrior Chorus and the Trojan Women Project which promote therapeutic theatre by offering both distance and proximity to the subject matter and a vocabulary to articulate feelings of grief and trauma. This use of Greek tragedy as a lingua franca for emotional turbulence is also used in the Silence of Eurydice project through which the grief felt for unburied relatives brings together a country separated by conflict. As Hulton puts it, ‘in order for Cyprus’ missing dead to be buried … both sides need to break their silence’; the ancient past offers this voice.[iv]

Of course, similarities between ancient and modern experiences can be simplified and contorted. Take, for example, Graham Allison’s articulation of the ‘Thucydides Trap’, which turns the Greek historian Thucydides’ complex analysis of ancient interstate relations into a soundbite, reducing the build-up to conflict to a simple formula.[v] The idea of the Thucydides Trap has proved popular with modern politicians, and this has had the real-life consequence of heightening already fragile tensions between China and the US. This highlights the modern dangers of appealing to the authority of the classical past without providing adequate contextualisation. In the same way that the past can here determine how we view the present, the reverse can also happen: anyone who has seen Elizabeth Taylor’s sultry Cleopatra before studying ancient history can easily find themselves trying to prove that she was as sensual and decadent as our public imagination has convinced us, and this risks oversimplifying her complex history.

‘Applied Classics’ balances on the fine line between distance and proximity to the classical world. We can benefit from our interaction with antiquity in finding a voice for our experiences and learning from past mistakes; but understating the distance simply because the proximity excites us can be dangerous. Through contextualising the texts themselves and the myriad responses through the centuries, we can utilise the classical past without sacrificing its complexity. ‘Applied Classics’ must be more than looking for parallels or forced similarity but instead utilising that distance to learn from the gap between then and now.

[i] Beard, M., Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations, Profile Books, London, 2013, pp. 133-134

[ii] Morales, H., Antigone Rising, Bold Type Books, New York, 2020, p. 17

[iii] Eidinow, E., and Lorenz, K., ‘Ancient Myths and Modern SMEs’, Organisational Aesthetics, vol. 9, no. 1, 2020, p. 42

[iv] Hulton, D., ‘The Silence of Eurydice’, in L. Hardwick and S. Harrison (eds.), Classics in the Modern World: A Democratic Turn?, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013, p. 251

[v] Allison, G., ‘Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’ Trap’, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2017

(Originally published on the School of Classics blog, 6 April 2021)