Status Updates From Talking Classics: The Shock...

“ That kind of blinkered admiration of classical antiquity skews the facts, cherry-picks from the past and spoils much of the excitement that classics has to offer. It can also prop up a spuriously hierarchical view of world culture: the classical at the top, everything else below; the West beats the rest.”

“Classics belongs to no side. It can be politicised, rightly or wrongly, but it doesn’t intrinsically have a politics. I was once ridiculed for saying something along those lines at a conference of professional classicists who assumed that I was at best naively letting the misuse of classics off the hook…antiquity isn’t the property of either left or right. That’s one important thing that it has going for it.”

“ No one can spend a lifetime in classics without facing up to how the history and symbols of Greece and Rome have been used to support unattractive causes, from the dubious or mildly unsavoury to the outright awful. Even now, racist groups on the far right of politics plaster their propaganda posters with pictures of pure white classical marble statues…”

“But what continues to take me aback is the way the poems look harder than is comfortable at the very values that seem to underpin them. The Iliad, as the first western poem of war (in fact, the first western poem tout court), is already interrogating the morality of warfare. The Odyssey – in a way that is echoed centuries later in the Aeneid – repeatedly calls into question its hero’s conduct.”

“Debate, disagreement, and questioning are what classics has to offer, not certainty, truth, beauty or relevance in the way that people often like to imagine. It’s fruitless to pretend that the Greeks and Romans offer a useful guide to living now.”

“The question is both how we can try to look at the ancient world with ancient eyes (and, of course, those eyes did not all see in the same way) and how we can begin to understand all the different ways, in the gap between antiquity and now, later generations have seen and judged these very same objects, or works of literature, right up to our own day.”

“The masterpieces of the classical world were not born old and revered; many had once been controversial and awkwardly disruptive. One question was how to look at the past stereoscopically: as both old and disconcertingly new.”

“ Again, it’s about imagining how to see ourselves in their place, and about a feeling of direct contact with the past. The dirty, ordinary, wondrous things of Pompeii, from bars to stepping stones, overturn the sanitised version of history symbolised by those surgical-style blue gloves with which we are now supposed to handle even the humblest remains from antiquity.”

“I have repeatedly returned to a question about the ancient world that was very nearly drummed out of me when I was a student: what on earth was it like to be there? That was, I was told, a sentimental and naïve line of enquiry, unanswerable and incompatible with proper historical rigour. Maybe it is naïve. Yet it is also a question that goes straight to the heart of our relationship with the past…”

“ It occupies a vast territory, from Queen Cleopatra’s Egypt, with its notorious (and no doubt exaggerated) luxury, to the grim army bases on Hadrian’s Wall in northern Britain. Its written traces range from the epic poetry of Homer and the philosophy of Plato to the barely legible, often smutty graffiti, scratched on the walls of Pompeii.”

“The underlying message is that you get much more out of classics if you revere it less. Amazement, surprise, pleasure, puzzlement, even revulsion, yes. Reverence and gratitude, no. The world in my sights in Talking Classics is the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and of their neighbours around the Mediterranean and beyond, between roughly the eighth century bce and the fifth century ce.”