Susan in NC’s Reviews > Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old > Status Update

“ 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.”

“ 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.”