Misrepresenting the classical past

Photo by Viacheslav Lopatin

Across Western culture and quite a lot of Eastern culture, at the moment, there’s a considerable worry about what the authoritative narratives of the past are and how they should determine the present. There’s a perception that a lot of these stories about the past are being used as a sort of strut or a support for an establishment, a dominant culture that is actually oppressing not only its own history but the present day and the people who are unprivileged in today’s society.

Ancient Greece and Rome have come in for attack on that ground because they appear to be one of the supports that some conservative people like to trot out. It’s undoubtedly true that some conservatives, indeed some extremely unpleasant right-wing people, have used or tried to appropriate the classical past to uphold some notion of white supremacy or the perfection of the West over other cultures, but to take that point of view is a fundamental mistake: it misrepresents not only the history but absolutely the potential of the classical past.

Rediscovery in the Renaissance

Let’s just think for a moment about that history. We could think, for example, about the Renaissance. The Renaissance is the rediscovery of the classical past. It completely changed Western culture. It was revolutionary. It broke the back of medieval Christianity and its institutions. It was part of the invention of the modern world in which we live, and it did so partly by discovering Greek texts of the Bible, which were shocking and difficult for theologians to deal with in that time; recognising, for example, that the end of the Gospel of Mark was fake. That was important, discovering that the word of God was not as fixed as people thought it was.

Above all, it created a completely new cultural repertoire for understanding the world and representing the world. Consider simply the difference between the hunched monk over his vellum manuscript in a monastery as one icon of medieval culture and put that against the statue of Michelangelo’s David, the naked white body. If we want to understand where our body image comes from, why we care about that symmetrical form, that beautiful six-pack that we’re all striving to have, it is because of that rediscovery of the Greek body in the Renaissance.

Inspiring radical revolution

If we roll on that picture a bit further, we come to the 19th century. We discover that idea to be absolutely crucial for politics. The idea of revolution was, as Marx said, enacted in Roman dress. People use the classical past as an image of how the world could be a better place. Of course, it involved certain fantasies about the past. It tended to ignore slavery. It tended to ignore the treatment of women. It tended to ignore the lack of certain sorts of technology that we now love and use all the time. But even so, the classical past, and particularly the Greek past, is a place that people look to for an idea of how we could be better than we are.

In the French Revolution, they dressed up as Republican Romans. They gave themselves Republican Roman names. The same for the American Revolution. For the end of the 18th century, the beginning of the 19th century – the great age of revolution – it was the classical past that stimulated the very idea that we could change the world towards a better society. Far from being conservative, it was threatening, and it was radical. When Shelley said, “We are all Greeks”, what he meant was we all have the ability to change the world, to join in revolution against dominant power.

Studying classics and rethinking sexuality

Photo by BlackMac

What then happened throughout the 19th century is that classics became the mainstay of education across Europe, and, as always, education can be seen to be part of a conservative trend. It’s making you into a good citizen. It’s making you into a good person for society, not necessarily changing society. Across the 19th century, one strand that we see of looking at the past is the idea that we might make a good citizen by studying classics. That in itself is not necessarily conservative. It can be idealistic, but it did tend towards that, as the Victorian age moved on.

At the same time, it became a way of completely rethinking sexuality. How can we think about male desire for males, what we might call homosexuality today, without the importance of the imagery of Greece in our minds – a place where the desire of a man for a younger man was absolutely normal, institutionalised and regular throughout Athenian society of the Classical period? For so many people in the 19th century – when homosexuality, as we now call it, was illegal and punishable by death – Greece was a way of rediscovering or discovering for oneself the possibility of a different sexual life.

This continued throughout the 20th century right up till today, where in legal cases around whether homosexuality should be allowed or not in America, it is usually Greece that is rolled out by the lawyers as an example of how it could work in society. So, again, we have an extraordinary idea that classics can change who you are as a person. It can change your very thought of what sort of world you want to live in.

Our Greek inheritance

It’s the same with philosophy. Somebody once famously asked, what has been the inheritance from Greek philosophy for Western philosophy, to which the answer is, the inheritance is Western philosophy. There is no Western philosophy without Greece or “philosophy as footnotes to Plato”, as Alfred North Whitehead put it. Without that sort of education in Greek philosophy, you can’t get off the ground as a philosopher.

So, when we think about classics as being in some way conservative, we should perhaps turn back to a wonderful story of Melina Mercouri, the Greek actress who stood up in front of the United Nations when she was acting as a diplomat and said in a very heavy Greek accent: ‘Before I start my speech, I want to say a few words of Greek.’ Of course, everyone thought, turn off the microphones, I don’t want to hear this. And then she said: ‘Democracy, politics, theatre.’ If we want to know where our institutions come from and why they matter to us, we can’t do it without that Greek inheritance.

So, when we see the extreme right wing taking over, as they often do, the idea of classics as being some model of conservatism, what we should always remind ourselves is that classics was crucial to Marx. Classics was crucial to Freud. Classics was crucial to the thinking of almost every major revolutionary thinker that we have – some good, some bad – but it’s classics as a way of thinking about how society could be better.

Why Greece matters

There is a real general lesson about why Greece matters in that way – and it’s a double lesson. The first thing is that we cannot understand ourselves and how we can be better if we only look at ourselves. We have to have that sense of the other to truly explore the self. It’s only by having this mirror of the self that we can see ourselves from somewhere else.

I hate the idea that the only thing we should be looking at is what is so-called “relevant”, so that if you are a Chinese single mother in London, the only thing you should do is read books by Chinese single mothers in London. This seems to me to be a way of absolutely restricting the imagination. What Greece has provided again and again is that resource for the imagination to change.

The second reason why it’s absolutely crucial is that it has been a resource for imagination, for change, for so many people. That is to say, it’s kind of strange to imagine how you would want to understand Freud without Oedipus; how you would want to understand Marx without his sense of what democracy might be; how you would go about understanding theological thought without the fact that the Bible, the Gospels, are written in Greek. It’s an extraordinary idea that we can get away from our history. It’s a naivety.

We take our culture with us

There’s always a moment in romantic films where the lovers look at each other and say, oh, if only we could go somewhere where nobody knows us, and we could be on an island all by ourselves. It’s a fantasy, but it’s a stupid fantasy because wherever you go, you take your culture with you, and the idea that you could somehow be on your own in modernity without your past is adolescent. It’s foolish.

Understanding the past is absolutely crucial. Cicero said, ‘If you do not understand where you come from, you’re destined to spend your life as a child.’ And it’s that naivety that feeds some of the current attacks on classics as a subject or ancient Greek as a way of understanding the world. It’s a belief that, somehow, we are self-sufficient in our modernity to explore the world. For me, that’s no more than an adolescent fantasy of going to a place where nobody knows us. We take our culture with us, and Greek is part of our culture; understanding it is understanding our own buried lives.

So, that is why the constant pressure on classics to show that it’s trendy or cool is a misunderstanding of classics. It’s a central part of understanding who we are because of its history and because it gives us a privileged place to look at ourselves critically – not conservatively, but critically. That is why I study this field.

Greek self-reflection

Photo by A. Laengauer

People have tried to explain why ancient Greece has had such an impact, the Classical period in particular, in all sorts of ways. It’s extremely hard to find the magic bullet that captures it, but one of the things that I find particularly exciting is to think about what we might call meta-discourse, which I know is a strange term to use, by which I mean: what made Greece extraordinary was not that they did democracy.

We would say Greece is the root of our democracy. It’s not that they did democracy. It’s not that they did theatre. Other cultures have done these things, too. What makes it so extraordinary is it’s the first place that we know which doesn’t only do democracy; it has political theory. It doesn’t just do theatre; it has theatrical theory. It has theories about almost everything. It has people sitting around talking about what we mean when we say X or Y; philosophy as the meta-discourse par excellence, reflecting on what is a life, what is a good life.

One of the things that makes Greece so extraordinary is not that it had that fantastic combination of theatre, democracy, politics, art, all those beautiful things – other cultures have those, too. What makes it so extraordinary is that self-reflexivity. It’s from Greece that we get the idea that the unexamined life is not worth living. That’s something I don’t find a huge amount in other traditions, and that’s what’s been really pressing on modern Western society, that idea of self-reflection through the Greeks as that other that lets us see ourselves. There is something about the way in which Greek society was formulated that has helped us use it as a form of self-reflection.

Not forgetting our roots

We have to use Greek culture and the amazing texts and the amazing art from there to rethink – to use it critically, not naively. Let me give a classic example: when the first Iraq war started, some years ago now, one of the things the British BBC did, quite remarkably, was stop its standard shows one evening and put on a reading of Thucydides, the ancient Greek historian. It was absolutely riveting. The people who saw it – and it was widely viewed – said this was the most intelligent and penetrating commentary on what was going wrong or what was happening in the world.

It was the ability of this Thucydidean history to make us see it from somewhere else. Because it was about a 5th century BCE event, what Thucydides was writing about somehow got past the censor. It wasn’t a way, if you like, of making a political point for this party or that party. It was talking about the Peloponnesian War; but the way it talked about the Peloponnesian War was so instructive and so painful, in the sense that we had come so little distance in terms of our understanding of political motivation and stupidity of warlike activity that Thucydides was the best commentary that could be found on that event.

Learning to think critically

There are many examples of that. I think of Fiona Shaw and Deborah Warner taking Sophocles’s Electra, a play that is about the psychological damage that a desire for vengeance produces, to Derry in Ireland during the Troubles, and the extraordinary discussions that took place after that performance. The audience couldn’t bear to leave. They had to talk about it because the play gave them a critical version of what was going wrong in their own society, in all these different ways.

We could multiply these sorts of stories. We can see that it’s the use of Greek material to provide that critical self-reflection that is going to recapture why classics mattered so much to so many revolutionary thinkers over time. That’s what I would love to see happen: not treating Greece as some sort of aspic-covered plastic control fantasy of the past, but seeing it as something that is inherently and integrally critical for us to think through what’s wrong and what can be done better in today’s society or in our own selves.

Discover more about

Who needs the Greeks and why

Goldhill, S. (2011). Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity. Princeton University Press.

Goldhill, S., & Osborne, R. (Eds.). (2006). Rethinking Revolutions through Ancient Greece. Cambridge University Press.

Goldhill, S. (2002). Who Needs Greek?: Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism. Cambridge University Press.

The legacy of the ancient Greek world