Being "American", Sophocles' Intentions, and the Debates over "Western Civ"

I have this day been having two separate conversations on Twitter that actually revolve upon the same thing. The first was a convo with a colleague on authorial intent and Greek tragedy, inspired by last night's reading of Sophocles' Oedipus by Theatre of War. The second was a query from Shadi Bartsch on mask wearing:

While my first response was flippant (as were all the other commenters), there is, in fact, a very serious answer to this and it intersects with the way we attribute genius to individuals and meaning to plays written by men like Sophocles and also, whether people realize it or not, is at the heart of the "Why we MUST revere/teach/worship Western Civ" industry.

So, what are the connections? Let's start with the answer to Shadi's query.

After my initial flippant remark ("For their purposes, American = a$$hole fascist white person."), she followed up with:

The answer, of course, is yes. One can still be an asshole without being a fascist. But, there is a particular strand of asshole that positions itself as "American". And that has its root in the notions of American exceptionalism, the American Dream™, Manifest Destiny™, bootstrapping mythologies, the myth of the American West and "rugged individualism". There are so many names for it that we have been bombarded with in our school textbooks, in TV commercials (especially for trucks). It is at the heart of Libertarianism and Randianism. At its core is the idea that what makes the US "great" is that we are all out for ourselves. That rampant and unchecked individualism and unfettered competition (CAPITALISM!) is what makes individuals exceptional and so a country full of exceptional people will, of course, be exceptional!

But, as we know, there is no such world as a world where everyone is exceptional. Instead, we end up in a world where some people are "more valuable" than others because they are exceptional while others aren't. This is an idea core to social Darwinism and eugenics (and NOT democracy), but which we used to not say out loud.  Oh, how the times have (un)changed!

So, the exceptional people have more value --they are the JOB CREATORS who just happened to have fired or laid off something like 20 million people in the month of April in order to meet quarterly stock targets. They are the ones pushing to force the 'less valuable' people back to low wage unessential work in order to get their money back even while the US government has literally handed them billions of dollars to cover losses and keep them afloat. This is the reality of American exceptionalism and "I got mine" rugged individualism, but the mythologies that surround it and which MUST BE DEFENDED from the likes of universal healthcare, support for public education, and public health policies that don't involve eugenic-style selection of the type Janet there thinks is normal, has brought those who are most harmed by these myths to become its defenders. And they defend it by rejecting vaccinations and masks in public.

What does Sophocles and authorial intention have to do with any of this?

A colleague (Latin teacher and medievalist by training) had a little back and forth with myself and A. Pistone over whether asking the question "Why did Sophocles write this" functions or matters. Here is the beginning of the convo for context:

There is a difference, of course between pondering what the author of any work might have intended (we obviously intend to convey things when we create) and THE intent of the author as embodying the meaning of the work--Greg is really advocating for the former and this is a totally useful and valid conversation to have, but many people (I will not name names. I will not name names) mean the latter. There is still in classics a strong tendency to treat performance texts as written texts, to ignore the dialogic and oral nature of those texts. Looking for the singular perspective of the author (who may not even be fully responsible for the text as it has come down to us) in the case of performative texts that are, by their genre, defined by their audiences, ignores the nature of the work. But, tragedy, and Sophocles in particular tends to get trapped in "GREAT MAN CLASSICS" in ways that do this. And it was this, not Greg's point, that Amy and I reacted against. He is not the bad guy.

With Sophocles and Oedipus Tyrannos especially there is an idea that the play embodies universal truths. But those truths aren't ones that different peoples at different times and in different contexts are expected to find. No, indeed. These universal truths are really a singular TRUTH that emerges from the intent of a singular genius, Sophocles. And it is for us to both find that truth and to revere the exceptional man who produced them. And if we do not find that Truth, it is because we are incapable of it--we must be a too poor, too not white, too not a man to be able to see the genius' truth. And all those works of scholarship that propose to read Sophocles through feminist or class or other lenses are "revisionist" in a bad way and are denying Truth.

It shouldn't be controversial when someone like me says that texts have meanings that are produced despite authorial intention and at the point of reception and that this means any text can have a variety of interpretations and even 'truths'. It's what actually makes works like tragedy so appealing--because they can be accessed in different spaces and times to produce meaning while still carrying in them all the past meanings that others gained from them. It should not be controversial to say that every text contains truths and not Truth. And, yet, this brings us to our third intersection.

The emphasis on authorial genius and Truth is no different from and a product of the same myths of Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism, and the American Dream. And these are foundational to the Western Civilization narrative and so MUST BE DEFENDED.

John Gast "American Progress" 1872

Classics has been at the heart of the American Exceptionalism story since its beginning, but it was in the 19th century, as the "American West" was conquered, indigenous peoples eradicated or removed, and when the Lost Cause myth started us down the road to Jim Crow that things got super entrenched. I've written about this numerous times on the blog (example), there are articles on the way Latin textbooks have been used to perpetuate the ideas of the Happy Slave, etc. The above painting is a beautiful example of the ways "America" (which became especially in the Plato to Nato era the beacon of the "West") has been dressed up by the Classical. And university education and the Western Civilization curriculum have been integral to forging a shared White, elite identity for those who view revering of the canon and the "Great Men" within it is a cornerstone of the Western Civilization narrative. This thread by Dani Bostick on the most recent entry into the "Why We Must Teach Western Civ" catalogue (shockingly, from the National Review *insert sarcastic expression*) pretty much hits a BINGO on what we can come to expect from such articles. But, some people may be unaware of how this elitist argument is part and parcel of the Libertarianism that been intentionally trickled down into the "Everyman Real American" ethos--the one time trickle down has really seemed to work!

The narrative of American exceptionalism is premised on the Frontier Thesis, which argued that it was the westward expansion that forged American identity and which, unsurprisingly, was originally explicated in a speech in Chicago in 1893 at the American Historical Association meeting--coinciding with the World's Columbian Expo. This thesis is, in many ways, encapsulates the way this myth roots the Libertarian ethos at America's imperialist, capitalist core. In decades of cowboy films, textbooks called "The American Experience", and all of us playing Oregon Trail, this idea that America was about our rugged individualism, about pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, and about how we all could, if we worked really hard, own our own 40 acres and a mule or strike gold (or black gold even) has been burned into us. And it means, essentially, that our freedom, American Freedom™ is about being free to do what we want--even at the expense of others (and ourselves). As Ibram X Kendi put it in a recent Atlantic article "We're Still Living and Dying in a Slaveholder's Republic":

The freedom to do, not the freedom of others to be free from harm--that is supposedly the American way. That is where the singular genius, the competitive individualism, the search the Truth and not truths takes us. And where it comes from. This is at the heart of the Western Civilization narrative. It is the heart of the White definition of American. It is why the same people who will tell us that only Sophocles' intentions matter are the same people who want to rush to open businesses, deny care or relief for those most harmed by their actions, and refuse to wear masks to protect both themselves and others from harm. It's a most undemocratic way to express one's freedom, but somehow those of us who care about others get to be "unAmerican".

E Pluribus Plures: Identities in a Multiethnic Ancient Mediterranean

Over then next few weeks, I will be posting up the text and images from a series of lectured I gave between July 9-13, 2019 at the CANE Summer Institute held at Brown University. The theme of the institute was "E Pluribus Unum". I was invited as the Onassis Lecturer to give a three lecture series on the theme. The lectures focus on ancient Greece and move from a general overview of identity in the Greek world (e pluribus plures), then to a deep dive looking at Athenian rejection of broader ideal of 'Greekness' (ex uno unum), and ends with a look at modern political uses of classics that inhibit the field from realizing its own ideal of e pluribus unum. I will post them in order. This is the first: "E Pluribus Plures: Identities in a Multiethnic Ancient Mediterranean". 

NOTE: there are parts of each lecture where I either did not script the text and refer to slides or simply ad libbed. As a result, in those locations, I will either post the slides or will link to previous posts that explain the point I was making.

E Pluribus Unum: From many, one. This phrase is often invoked in contemporary discourse as the ideal of a unified identity for Americans made from a diverse and continually diversifying population. The idea was once symbolized by the ‘melting pot’ myth--from a 'country of immigrants', diverse peoples would assimilate into a homogeneous nation.

 From many, one. In recent decades, the melting pot metaphor (a false story that erases indigenous peoples) has given way to the ‘salad bowl’ or ‘cultural mosaic’, wherein diverse “ingredients” (peoples/cultures) come together, but each maintain their individual integrity, complementing each other. It is an idea that tries to take into consideration the diversity of our population and to make a space for multiculturalism. The melting pot requires assimilation and a giving up of ones previous identities in order to meld into something different--the melting pot requires homogeneity, while the salad allows an olive to stay an olive but still be part of the salad.

Both of the metaphors and the phrase e pluribus unum are attempts to explain the nation that is the United States (from 13 colonies to a single nation; from sea to shining sea, from immigrants to Americans). But at times, unity is mistaken for homogeneity. And so, left out of the unum frequently are the thousands upon thousands of Africans who were brought here as enslaved persons and their descendants and the original, indigenous inhabitants of the land that became the United States, both those continuing to reside here in restricted territories and those forced south of the current border or the descendants of the millions killed in repeated acts of genocide. Increasingly as well, those who aren’t Christian find that they aren’t welcome in either a melting pot or the salad bowl. White supremacism, the power upon which ours and other settler nations were built, continues to hold sway. Non-white, non-Christian ‘plures’ still don’t get to be part of the ‘unum’.

It is an unfortunate truth that classics as a discipline and the ancient Greeks in particular have served as an exemplum for those who would mistake homogeneity for unity. They hold up 5th century Athens in particular, with its strict immigration policies, misogyny, slavery, and imperialism, as a model for an ideal nation, but do so while ignoring the inequalities (or liking them and wanting to bring them back). They look to Sparta as the perfect military ethnostate. They often ignore the rest of the Greek world chronologically and geographically and pretend that Athens and Sparta are the sum total of its parts.

Over my three lectures, I examine the tension between the terms plures and unum, first, by looking at how unum, under the mistaken rhetoric of homogeneity can sometimes be used to cover over wide ranging plurality in antiquity to the detriment of our understanding of ancient history. Second, I will explore how unum can function as an exclusionary mechanism under the heading of ‘purity’ and exceptionalism using the case study of Athens. And finally, I will look in my final talk at how versions of a homogeneous Greco-Roman antiquity have been leveraged, exploited or misunderstood in contemporary contexts and how more accurate understanding of the dynamics of identities, their plurality, in antiquity can help us see current problems with new eyes.

Importantly for these discussions I want us to re-conceptualize the ancient world away from a singular, static ‘Greekness’ and instead as see it as dynamic--what it meant to be Greek was a moving target. ’Greek’ is an imaginary grouping, an imagined community, that people in antiquity could move in and out of, construct and deconstruct; it was an identity they could put on when it suited them, or could leave off. It was a political, social, or cultural identity that sat alongside many other political, social, and cultural identities. And its meaning changed all the time. Today, I want us to deconstruct the ‘Greeks’, ex uno plures, to help us to stop applying our own identity politics to them and instead understand their own.

 WHO ARE ‘GREEKS’?

Here is a quotation from Bernard Knox’s The Oldest Dead White European Males (1993):

“The critics seem, at first sight, to have a case. The characteristic political unit of classical Greek society--the polis, or city-state--was very much a man’s club; even in its most advanced form, Athenian democracy, it relegated its women to silence and anonymity. Racism in our sense was not a problem of the Greeks; their homogeneous population afforded no soil on which that weed could easily grow.” (12)

We are going to come back to this quotation a few times over the next few days, because there are a lot of assumptions baked into it. This was written in the context of the Black Athena debates and racism here is viewed as a black-white problem that specifically refers to skin color. And so, by ‘homogeneous’ Knox likely means ‘all looked alike’ or, as he says elsewhere in the essay ‘white, or rather a Mediterranean olive’. This for Knox was enough to make the Greeks ‘homogeneous’. But, we will see over the next few days that this is not really accurate—they were not really a ‘homogeneous population’, even if they shared in a ‘unified’ identity as Greeks.

This is how we often talk about the Greeks--this map takes a single color and washes it over the Mediterranean and calls it 'Greeks'.

 But, the map below is actually closer to what the Greeks themselves considered their reality. This is not a map of all Greeks--notice the mainland is entirely unmarked--these are just cities established by people hailing from other cities that spoke the Greek language. Each of those dots, and the hundreds more that aren’t shown represented the primary identity for most of the people we lump under the name ‘Greeks’. And, of course, this is just getting started.

Once Alexander comes along, being Greek becomes even less of a clear cut identity. We refer to the ‘Hellenistic’ world frequently as a ‘Greek world’, and then, of course, we speak of the “Greek East” under the Romans, but we need to be cautious.

The Greeks, as these dots suggest, identified themselves in hundreds of different ways. On tombstones throughout the Mediterranean, we see Greeks marking themselves when they die away from home not as ‘Hellenes’, but with what are known as their ‘ethnics’--their polis, village, or regional identity. ‘Hellene’, the Greek word most frequently used for ‘Greeks’ (a Roman word) was an overarching term that contained a multiplicity of different peoples whose languages were mostly mutually intelligible, who sometimes worshiped the same gods in the same ways, and who shared some, but not all customs. One custom they didn’t share, of course, was their political system--each had their own.

Thus, when we talk about Greeks in the ancient Mediterranean, we need to start by recognizing that most Greeks viewed their fellow Greeks on some level as ‘foreign’. And not like Californians think Ohioans are ‘foreign’. But more like Americans think that Canadians are. Foreignness in Greco-Roman antiquity, doesn’t just mean Greeks and barbarians (one popular approach), but also Athenians, Spartans, Corinthians, Milesians, Epeirotes, Macedonians, Rhodians, Thebans, Epidamnians, Thracians, Halicarnassians, Ephesians, etc. x 100. 

So, what makes a ‘Greek’ a‘Greek’? How do we identify if someone, some place, some group was ‘Greek’ in the historical record? And what do we imagine they looked like?

Most lists that anyone makes on this looks a lot like the one Herodotus had his Athenians give the Spartans at 8.144:

Athenians: “It was quite natural for the Spartans to fear we would come to an agreement with the barbarian. Nevertheless, we think it disgraceful that you became so frightened, since you are well aware of the Athenians’ disposition, namely, that there is no amount of gold anywhere on earth so great, nor any country that surpasses others so much in beauty and fertility, that we would accept it as a reward for medizing and enslaving Hellas. [2] It would not be fitting for the Athenians to prove traitors to the Greeks with whom we are united in sharing the same kinship and language, together with whom we have established shrines and conduct sacrifices to the gods, and with whom we also share the same mode of life.”

Each of these things we have identified as what makes a ‘Greek’ can be broken down. What I want to do for the rest of this talk is to break them down, to help us see how ancient identity politics functioned in its own terms, without the false mark fo ‘homogeneity’.

Let’s start with the elephant in the room: race. Knox inserts it here where and in a way it doesn’t really belong, in part because he mistakes skin color for identity in antiquity and also because of the long tradition of claiming the ‘classical’ Greeks as both the cultural and genetic foundation of a ‘white, western civilization’. The ‘Greeks’, he is asserting in this essay belong to ‘white’ history, not to ‘black history’. This is modern identity politics.

Importantly--and here I will be ungenerous in my reading--it was that very homogeneity--the uniform 'whiteness'--of the Greeks that held racism at bay. Thus, for Knox ‘RACE’ as skin color existed, but without racism, not because they didn’t have anti-blackness; but because, supposedly there was no ‘blackness’ among the Greeks. The view is that a society that is [rightly, fortunately?] racially singular is magically peaceful and prejudice free since they have no one to be prejudiced against!

But skin color was not a meaningful measure of difference according to our ancient sources--skin color was used in art in antiquity from ancient Egypt to Bronze Age Crete to Severan Rome to denote gender and age more than anything, except in the case of Aithiopians, which too many scholars conflate with the modern category ‘black’. ‘Race’ as Knox uses it here, was not a functional type of identity in antiquity--it functioned differently.  To gauge Greekness by it is to miss the mark. Skin color, in fact, also has nothing to do with ‘ethnicity’ either, really, but gender and, at other times, simply aesthetics.

What I want to suggest, then, is that there was no expectation of any physical or even practical homogeneity among the Greeks for them to consider someone ‘Greek’ when needed--this is especially true in the Hellenistic period. It was a ‘flexible’ category that could encompass pluralities of practices, physical appearances, languages/dialects, and even foreign descents. The identities of the Greeks were situational and so it was always explicitly NOT homogeneous. Knox among many others, is simply wrong.

Now that we have that anachronism out of the room, let’s take Herodotus’ four categories starting with kinship.

Kinship: Kinship was closely related to genealogies of the type we see Pindar rattling off in his athletic victory odes--Kimon son of Miltiades son of blah blah blah, back to some mythical hero. Cities and peoples could also have kinship and they often had kinship myths to connect them, something Lee Patterson, Iradi Malkin, Naoise MacSweeney among many others have written about extensively. These myths were operational in all sorts of contexts and we see them become important public institutions at varying times in a wide range of poleis.

One of the most well-known stories forged ties between the city of Thebes and Phoenicia through their founder Cadmus, brother of Europa. We see numerous claims of kinship in Herodotus, Pausanius, Diodorus Siculus, Pindar, Hesiod, etc. between Greeks and non-Greeks. For example, Xerxes’ attempts in Bk 7.150 of Herodotus to persuade the Argives to remain neutral by recounting their shared kinship through Perses and Andromeda:

This is how the Argives tell the story, but there is another story told throughout Greece that Xerxes sent a herald into Argos before he set his army in motion against Greece. When the herald arrived, it is said that he told the Argives, “Argives, King Xerxes says this to you: We believe that Perses, our ancestor, was the child of Perseus son of Danae and Andromeda daughter of Cepheus. Thus we Persians are your descendants. We think it inappropriate to send an army against our progenitors, and that you give aid to others and become our enemy. Rather, it is fitting that you keep to yourselves. If everything goes as intended, I will esteem no one higher than you."

The Macedonian King Perdicaas is granted ‘Greekness’ by showing descent from Argos at 5.22:

That those descendants of Perdiccas are Greek, according to what they say, I happen to know for certain and will show later in my history. Additionally, the Hellenodicai, who govern the Olympic games, judged them so. [2] For, when Alexander elected to compete in the games and entered the lists to do so, the Greeks who ran against him prevented him from competing, saying that the games were not for barbarian contestants, but Greeks only. Alexander then demonstrated his Argive descent, was deemed a Greek by the judges, and, competing in the foot race, finished in first place. The Macedonian King and ancestor of Philip and Alexander.

There are also claims of kinship between Royal Scythians and Herakles at 4.8 (here is just the end of the story--I recommend reading the whole thing):

And from Scythes son of Heracles all the kings of Scythia have descended, and because of his bowl the Scythians still carry bowls hanging from their belts. His mother arranged this result for Scythes alone (4.8.13).

I could go on like this forever from Herodotus.

We see it in Hellenistic and Roman period texts, for example Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities 12.225-227 recounts a letter sent by the Judeans to the Spartans declaring that they were kin through Abraham:

After Simon died and his son Onias succeeded him to the high priesthood, the Spartan King Areus sent an ambassador to him with a letter, a copy of which states, [226] “Areus, King of the Lacedaemonians sends his greetings to Onias. We have happened upon a document that says that Judeans and Lacedaemonians are of the same race and related through Abraham. It is just, then, since you are our brothers, that you let us know if there is anything you are in want of. [227] We will do the same with you and will consider your affairs equal to our own. Demoteles, who bears this letter, will transmit your response. This letter has four sides and bears the seal of a dragon clutching an eagle.”

These kinship ties would not have led the Judeans to say they were also Greeks. Nor would the Persians call themselves Hellenes. Nor the Thebans Phoenician. And no one in our sources would call a Scythian ‘Greek’. But they all share kinship nonetheless.

What about ‘ethnicity’? This is probably a better term to understand the dynamics of Greekness that ‘kinship’. Jonathan Hall is still, 20 years later, the best discussion available on ‘Greek’ ethnicity or self-identities. Hall argues that ethnicity is a discourse that allows groups to form identities based on belief in a shared descent or on political contingency or other interactive processes that lead to shared identification--often rooted in this real or imagined shared descent. But this descent (ethnicity) was never considered by the Greeks generally speaking to be, in Jeremy McInerney’s words “a fixed biological entity based on primordial ties of kinship” (Intro Companion to Ethnicity 3).

So, when the Athenians appeal to kinship in their assuaging of the Spartans, along with their claims of rituals, language, and customs, they aren’t necessarily appealing to a set of things that are inherently binding or fixed and they certainly aren’t claiming a strong ‘biological’ connection--they would not allow Spartans and Thebans or any other Greeks to intermarry with an Athenian for almost five centuries and for almost a century before that, wouldn’t allow children of such marriages to be citizens (with exception, which we will discuss in the next lecture). What makes them binding into an ‘ethnicity’ is that the Athenians and Spartans agree that certain specifics of those things makes then Hellenes and not others. It is an imaginary relationship.

What about Language? We know there are people who spoke and wrote in Greek who were Egyptian or Phrygian or Judean or Syrian or Roman, etc. It doesn’t mean they weren’t also ‘Greek’; it means that language can’t necessary be the only indicator of ‘Greekness’. It was used as a measure of something, and we see mockery of other languages: barbarian, of course, on our Herodotean etymology is derived supposedly from the sound foreign languages make and Persian speech is made fun of in Aristophanes’ Acharnians. But, other dialects of Greek other than Attic are also made fun of by the comic poets of Athens, particularly Doric. Language chauvinism does serve as one mark of Greekness, but it can’t do so alone because it also serves to differentiate Greeks from each other.

Religious shrines and sacrifices? Well, we all know that not only did numerous of our ancient authors assume that non-Greeks worship the same gods, just under different names, but we also know of Egyptians, and Lydians, and Persians, and many other non-Greeks offering sacrifices and offerings at Greek shrines to Greek gods. Greeks also adopted foreign cults and worshipped at them—Isis, Magna Mater, Bendis, a Jew named Jesus. Sacrifices at non-Greek sites, like the temple in Jerusalem were also conducted in similar fashion even though to a different god. Roman and Etruscan sacrifice were also similar to Greek practice.

But even between Greek poleis, there are dozens of different variations on the gods, some poleis had gods no others had (like Aphaia at Aegina), not all festivals translated out of their particular poleis and they often didn’t even allow other Greeks to participate. There were of course, panhellenic cults, like Eleusis, panhellenic religions shrines like Delos and Delphi. But again, we can’t say that religion defines Greeks anymore than it defines any other group on its own. Gods, like languages, are mutable, flexible, adaptable, adoptable. And Greek liked having a lot of options.

Customs or way of life? Herodotus himself provides a running chronicle of how many aspects of life the people called Greeks shared with so many others who were not Greeks (even when we often emphasize where he discusses the differences). The archaeological record adds more--burial practices, diet, construction, technology, artistic styles and motifs, alphabets, laws. Often, where we look for and see differences are the places where either our Greek language sources don’t differentiate or where the differentiation is ideologically driven, as we find in texts like Aristotle's Politics, the speeches of Isocrates.

Once you start looking for similarities, you see them everywhere (including clothing styles--unlike the toga, which was a somewhat distinctive outfit, general Greek clothing styles hardly differed--if at all--from those of most other groups in the Near East and North Africa, they even were at various times all the fashionable rage, the Athenian markets were awash with Persian knock off goods—sort of like being able to get ‘Gucchi’ on the corners of Exarchia in Athens now; Margaret Miller has written an excellent book on this).

What about things like architectural styles and pottery and art? These are things that, of course, archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians have tried for the better part of three centuries to use to define civilizations and peoples. But, of course, it doesn’t quite work that way. While there are definitely specific styles of architecture that develop in particular geographic locations and then spread in those areas, they aren’t necessarily restricted to single ‘peoples’. We identify the column with pediment, etc. with Greek architecture, but similar styles developed in north and central Italy independently; the most famous frieze from Athens was modeled off of Persian architectural sculpture (Margaret Cool Root has analyzed this in detail):

The details, of course, developed distinctively, but these can move and jump and skip to all sorts of places and can be built by people who, of course, aren’t of a place--many of the craftsmen working on the Persian Apadana were Greek. Many of the craftsmen working on the Parthenon were not Greek.

And pottery either looks fairly universal in the ancient Mediterranean in terms of pot shapes or, in the case of painting techniques, confined to specific locations--Attic red-figure pottery was produced only in Athens. Corinthian-ware takes its name from being a style specific to Corinth. Like their ‘ethnic’ identities, what we call Greek pottery can always be diversified and recognized for its great range and variation:

 Of course, one can point to athletics as one of the key places where the Greeks acted ‘as Greeks’ and differently from all those around them. Except that, of the 4 majors (Delphi, Isthmia, Delos, and Olympia) only Olympia required Greek ‘descent’. For the others, you only had to be able to speak Greek to participate and we already know that people who weren’t ‘Greek’ could speak Greek.

The example of Aeschylus’ play Suppliants will help us make our points clear--both that we can’t take modern identity categories for granted in antiquity and that identities were situational and functions--and I want to emphasize that this is not a unique text, but we don’t have 6 hours to go through all the ones that make the point.

The Danaids, the 50 daughters of Danaus who are fleeing to Argos in Greece to escape marriage to their cousins the sons of Aegyptus, explain In the opening chorus, where they come from [[SLIDE]]:

May Zeus the Suppliant look with favor upon our company that has voyaged by ship; it put to sea from the fine-sanded mouths of the Nile. Leaving, we have fled the land of Zeus  bordering upon Syria, not because we were convicted and banished by a vote of the polis for bloodshed, but self-motivated by our aversion for marriage, loathing an impious marriage and to the sons of Aegyptus (1-9).

They then refer to their ‘foreign speech’ twice (καρβᾶνα δ᾿ αὐδὰν; 119, 130) and then point out their being of a sun-darkened, black genos (μελανθὲς ἡλιόκτυπον γένος τὸν γάιον; 154-5).

The king they are supplicating for protection, Pelagos, doesn’t even seem to notice either speech or skin color:

This group that we address is unhellenic, luxuriating in barbarian finery and delicate cloth. What country do they come from? The women of Argos, indeed of all Greek lands, do not wear such clothes. It is astonishing that you dare to travel to this land, fearlessly, without heralds, without sponsors, without guides. And yet here are the branches of suppliants, laid out according to custom next to you in front of the assembled gods. This alone would assert your Greekness, but would cause confusion if your voice was not here to explain it.

What he notices are cultural practices--their clothes are weird, but they understand supplication. They are therefore, recognized as ‘Greek’. Skin color is so unimportant, what when he does compare them to anything other than Greeks, he lists a bunch of peoples we would consider to be of varied skin color:

Strangers, what you say is hard to believe, that you are of Argive descent. It is hard to believe because you look rather more like Libyan women and not at all like women from our lands. The Nile might breed such fruit as you. [Your Cypriot appearance resembles the image made by men marking impresses onto women].  I hear that there are nomadic women of India, dwelling beside the Ethiopians, who ride horse-like camels through the land. If you held bows, I would have compared your appearance rather to the unwed, carnivorous Amazons. But I would better understand this situation if I were instructed how your descent and seed are Argive.

Notice also that the Danaids are pointing to shared descent as part of their appeal--but not ‘Greek’ descent. Greek they already have demonstrated by the act of supplication (and don’t ask how they ‘foreign speech’ seems to disappear as an issue in a time without translators, but it is a play and everyone needs to be able to speak to each other). But now they have to prove ‘Argiveness’ and this one is by descent, but their descent is not ‘pure’ Argive or even ‘Greek’. They are descended from Io and Zeus, and then Epaphus and an Egyptian woman, and then Danaos their father with, also most likely, an Egyptian woman. They are Egyptian when they need to be in Egypt, but as they seek to flee to Argos, they have to also be Greek and then Argive. And it would not have mattered anyway because all that matters is that both the Danaids and the Argives believe they share this identity even if they don’t in practical terms. This is what we mean by ‘imaginary’.


CONCLUSIONS

So, in no sense of the word here is there an assumption of homogeneity--not in languages, not in customs, and not in descent. But there is some connection able to be made at some on each of these points--in this case in the ritual of supplication-- and that is good enough to be ‘Greek’ but not good enough to be Argive or Spartan or Theban or Rhodian or Samian or Athenian, etc. Thus we might say that when Herodotus has his Athenians present this list to the Spartans as to why they would NEVER betray them to the Persians, listing ALL of them is something of an overkill. And this may be the point.

At the time of Herodotus’ writing, the Spartans and the Athenians were in the beginning of a new war that we refer to as the Peloponnesian War and which ended up lasting, with fits and starts, for 27 years. Because the Greeks were NOT an unum but plures, they had this habit of fighting wars against each other. Herodotus may be trying to appeal to these specific elements: language, rituals, customs, and kinship--to try to remind them of the bigger picture, to invoke a sort of e pluribus unum of his own. It didn’t work, of course. It rarely worked. Not in the 5th century, or the 4th, or the 3rd, or the 2nd. It really only ‘worked’ when the Romans came along and took all their armies away. ‘Greekness’ was frequently invoked, but didn’t have force enough or, I would argue, wasn’t politically grounded enough, to create such a unity.

And the question we want to ask is WHY didn’t it work? Is it impossible for many to ever truly become one? Both the melting pot and the salad bowl we started with were attempts to offer models of how it might work, but both had the same problem the Greeks had--prejudice. Far from being free from the weed of racism, as Knox suggests, it was present; we are often just looking for it in the wrong places if we try to map our own prejudices and categories dividing humans up onto a world that divided itself differently.

The ancient Greeks were diverse in as many ways as the modern US is and probably more. They were a truly plural plurality that we make the mistake of lumping under the single term ‘Greeks’ for our own political and cultural purposes. In this way, we attempt to erase the tension between unum and plures by pretending that this multiethnic stew in the Aegean was something that it never was. But that tension is real and not every polis in antiquity dealt with it in a way all of us might like. For the most part, e pluribus unum was never its reality, but rather the Greeks were e pluribus plures and they preferred it that way. 

Claiming 'The Classical:' A Reflection

Neville Morley speaks on the EU and the classical.

Last week, I participated in a workshop in London at the Institute for Classical Studies in London called 'Claiming the Classical' with a wonderful and impressive group of students and scholars working to understand how the idea of the 'classical' manifests in 21st century politics. The organizers were Naoise Mac Sweeney and Helen Roche. The idea behind the workshop was a first step in creating a 'international network of academics, researchers and other interested parties. Together, we work to examine the use of classical antiquity in twenty-first century politics." This first of hopefully many meetings and discussions tried to map many of these 21st century political uses. This blog is a reflection on what I took away from it.

So, what is 'the classical' and how do people claim it? 

Put 'the classical' into google and the top choice for completion is 'the classical world.' Typically the 'classical' encompasses the literature, arts, and history of ancient Greece and Rome, but limited to the years between 8th c BCE and the 4th century CE. Give or take a century or two or four on one end or the other. We identify 'the classical' with specific styles of art and architecture, literary forms, genres, with references to specific authors., with specific clothing and weaponry--things that look like a stereotypical "Greek" or 'Roman" thing, like the columns shown above, or togas, or a pegasus. or the sculpture casts shown here in a photo from the Beijing airport shared by Dr. Michael Scott (University of Warwick) at the 'Claiming the Classical' workshop.

Elif Koparal (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University) on
the classical in Turkey.

'The classical' typically excludes the 'eastern' Asian and North African neighbors of Greece and Italy--its one of the things that makes the China example above so intriguing: who is the intended audience for this image? Why show Chinese art students copying the classical casts? Should we see these artists surpassing or assimilating 'the classical' through their own engagement? It's hard to say. In Turkey, a land with far more direct claims to the classical than the United States or northern Europeans, we saw the classical being claimed only as a commodity--the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine pasts of Anatolia marketed to 'westerners' who seem to think Turkey's rich archaeological sites are of value.

'The classical' also typically excludes the northern European neighbors of ancient Greece and Rome, except when they wrote in Greek or Latin, or, more importantly for this post, when those northern Europeans were 18th-21st century British, German, or French scholars, artists, and governments, whose claims to be the inheritors of 'the classical' formed part of their national identities at one time or another in their history. These claims by the British and the Germans especially have embedded the classical into the psyches of the nation so that the Parthenon marbles are thought by some to belong more to the British people than modern Greeks.

Anne-Sophie Noel (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon) discusses French President Emmanuel Macron's relationship to the classical. 

 Interestingly, claims upon the classical seem to coincide with the rise of the nation state in Europe, functioning as a heritage for may different groups of Europeans--not only Greeks and Italians. Somehow, peoples whom Herodotus and Eratosthenes placed at the far edges of the world, whom they hardly knew anything about, decided that they were the true inheritors of this classical Greek past. More so than their contemporary Greeks, whom they considered unworthy of their own past. Something still active and part of the reason, something Konstantinos Poulis (ThePressProject) discussed at the workshop in connection with the debt crisis and the rise of Golden Dawn.

Damjan Krsmanovic (University of Leicester) discusses Brexit through the lens of Boris Johnson, known for his claiming of the classical.

The use of phrases like 'Mare Nostrum' and 'Mos Maiorum' to name policies towards refugees also has a history of imperialist claims to not only the space of the Mediterranean, but the past and future of it as well, as Sam Agbamu discussed. I also recommend this post by Ida Danewid "White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean" at The Disorder of Things blog (I plan on getting her article on the topic when I'm back in the office with access).

Sam Agbamu (King's College London) on 'Mare Nostrum' and 'Mos Maiorum' as refugee policies.

The German claims have led to such excesses as the perpetuation of the myth of an Aryan/German invasion and to the Nazi ideal in the ancient Greek sculptural body. The claims of the British rested both on the traces of Roman Britain in their own land and on the British Empire's right of conquest; they viewed themselves as the true intellectual heirs of Plato and Cicero and their power in the world reflected this. The Nazis simply recreated the ancient past to make themselves the genetic descendants of the ancient Greeks.

Julia Müller (Technische Universität Dresden) discussing identitarian movements in Germany. Their online shop is particularly interesting and features t-shirts invoking Thermopylae.

Americans of European descent also have at times over the last few centuries laid claim to the classical as well based on their connections to those Europeans who also claimed the classical. The Founding Fathers looked to classical models to help create our Constitution and to justify our most loathsome institution -- slavery. Consistently since the founding of our country, the classical has been claimed in defence of the continued perpetuation of racial hate and institutionalized racism, of white supremacy and white nationalism, of colonialism and imperialism-- whether it is architecture and art, 'blood and soil' heritage, or some sense of a 'western destiny'. Even those who disavow racism often hold up the decidedly racist and misogynist Athenian democracy, idealized as some sort of golden age, ignoring its exclusions and foundation on slavery (discussed by myself, Denise McCoskey, Curtis Dozier, Liz Sawyer, and Chiara Bonacchi).

These aren't the only peoples or groups that lay claim to 'the classical'. We find 'the classical' in Latin America, Africa, other parts of Asia, like India. Those claims on the classical are often yoked also to a colonized, imperialist (recent) past--the rejection of the classical becomes the rejection of something viewed as inherently European, foreign, oppressive. Juliana Bastos discussed the rejection of the classical in Brazil

Grant Parker (Stanford University) discussed performance artist Sethembile Msezane's anti-classical 'Zimbabwe Bird' during the Rhodes Must Fall protests in South Africa in 2015.

Nandipha Mntambo's 'Europa', also from Grant Parker's discussion.

But claims on it can also be seen as respurposing or appropriating the classical despite the colonizer, or, perhaps, to reclaim a part of the classical from the colonizer. The legacy of classics as a tool for empire is continually being debated, hidden, ignored, studied, and praised--depending on whom you discuss it with. And the question of why anyone wants to claim the classical is bound up to that history.

The history of the classical in the modern world is a history of a field created as a tool of racism, of empire, of classism, of misogyny. And yet, we see broad claims made upon the classical that reject, or at least, refuse these connections. From China to South Africa to Ghana and Brazil, the workshop highlighted not only the far right 'appropriations' that seems to have awakened classicists to our perils, but also artistic and literary uses of the classical that offer new ways to think about what the classical is and can be. Because of its history, however, any claims upon the classical will almost always be political--even when they aren't.

One question that kept returning at the workshop that we never had a good answer for was why peoples and groups claim the classical. Some suggested it was prestige--that classics has been granted historically a place of privilege in many places and so an appeal to the classical is one that seeks to participate in that prestige. I wonder, however, if it isn't the problem of universalism--for centuries European powers have sought to center the classical as a universal value. Why read tragedy? Because it reflects universal emotions. Why read Thucydides? Because he gave us a vision of a shining city on a hill that had a democracy and democracy is, of course, the telos of all political systems, right? I think it's something else--because empire conditioned the world to believe that the classical was the only truly universal culture and so everyone should want to claim it.

The study of classics isn't restricted anymore in theory to only the elite of northern Europe and the US. Women and people of color are no longer [explicitly] rejected from its ranks as incapable of learning Greek or understanding Cicero and Vergil, but this isn't necessarily the reality of classics as a field. The classical has a place in public discourses throughout the world--sometimes because of colonialism, sometimes despite it. And yet, I left the workshop thinking about the Classics for All ideas, our [feeble] attempts to make a more inclusive classics--attempts that refuse to make space for the varieties of classics that exist both in the academy and without. We are still a restrictive field that relies on knowledge of two languages--Ancient Greek and Latin--to act as gatekeeper to legitimacy as an arbiter of the classical.

There are many ways to claim the classical. For too long, we academic classicists have kept ourselves away from the public discourse and, too often, assumed that any classical receptions, references, or claims by national governments, political and social institutions, or movements was a clear good, or at least harmless, so long as it meant that the classical still had a place in our public discourse and we could use it to demonstrate the relevance of our field--as when today (Sat Nov 17) the SCS social media accounts shared an op-ed by Bret Stephens seemingly simply because it contained the word "Plato" in its title. He's not viewed as a friend, ally, or even neutral party by many PoC and women. And even when one's Twitter page says "retweet =/= endorsement", when that retweeter is one's professional organization, it sure can feel like an endorsement.

Not all claims are equal and many a political claims to the classical is done in the name of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and a myriad of other types of prejudices. When we share those receptions, those 'fun' or 'insightful' articles that seem innocent enough, but are written by those who peddle in discrimination and prejudice, we link ourselves with their politics whether we mean to our not. By doing so, we send a message about who is and isn't welcome. We limit the scope of who we think can and should lay claim to the classical. Afraid to alienate our traditional base of conservative 'white' men, we continue to alienate most everyone else even as we position ourselves as fighters against white supremacist claims to the classical.

We as professional classicists are (maybe too late) taking up the task of engaging these more nefarious claims on the classical. But this isn't the only reflection we need to do. We must also look at how we have failed in the past to be self-critical in our own claims and practices around the classical. As Denise McCoskey has recently written (and which has been on the minds of many of us who became classicists in the shadow of Black Athena) classics as a field is paying in the 21st century for our failures to come to terms with the origins of the field and its continuing problematics in the 20th century.

We can't only look to the far right, to the fascist and white nationalist claims and try to 'reclaim' those 'appropriations'. We also need to do some soul searching about how we keep our field tied to those structures of racism, classism, and misogyny that were its roots by binding ourselves to notions like 'western civilization' and whiteness and exclusivity. Studying classics shouldn't be about joining an elite club, and yet that is often how we sell it, how we view it, and how we seem to want to keep it--even despite ourselves.

What I took away from this workshop was that we have a lot of work to do.

When is an "Appropriation" Appropriation?

This other day I read a dialogue between Craig Jenkins and Frank Guan on Vulture about accusations of cultural appropriation against Bruno Mars. I won't go into the details as one can read the article themselves, but the focus is on how one talks about appropriation between people of color-- "Can there be cultural exchange between two minority cultures that exists without offense? Does 'appropriation' have any place in this debate?"

I'm not thinking about this because I'm a big Bruno Mars fan (I am actually not all that aware of him because I pretty much just listen to movie scores these days), but because I just spent the weekend at a conference called "Racing the Classics" at which the issue of appropriation came up numerous times, typically, in the context of white supremacism and classics. It also came up as a suggestion that to talk about "race" in antiquity is a type of appropriation--"race" understood as an important and uniquely modern phenomenon premised on blackness and whiteness, driven by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and underscored by science, has no place in the pre-Modern world and to talk of it is to, perhaps, either render "race" a safe or less challenging idea or serves to make Classics (and the predominantly white people who study it) relevant in a way that diminishes the lived experiences of those oppressed by systemic racism. In other words, it appropriates the experience of race and theorizes it away.

It's also something students in my Ancient Identities class struggled with last semester as they looked at Greece and Rome adopting and adapting ideas, cults, art/architecture, etc. from Egypt, the Near East, and each other--cultural appropriation was a term thrown around by them a lot. The idea of hybridity was largely rendered impossible by them.

Anyway, I've been thinking about it a lot and thought I'd write out the thoughts. I want to start with the first kind of appropriation (in support of white supremacy) and then consider the latter. But let's start with the definition of cultural appropriation from the Jenkins/Guan article:

If cultural appropriation is thought of as the theft of a minority culture by an oppressor, usually with malicious intent, how do we loosen the definition when people of color take from each other? 

The language of appropriation when applied to the use of classics since the late 18th century in the service of white supremacism in the US and Europe presupposes that the texts and material remains of the Greeks and Romans were stolen by an oppressor, that the ancients themselves were racialized as "white," and done with intent to cause harm. This notion of appropriation is driving a series of initiatives about "who owns the Classics," has spawned a website that documents appropriations by hate groups in the US, and more general conversations about diversity in the field in the US. What is at state when we talk of ownership and appropriation (and misappropriation) with respect to the Classics?

1. As Emily Greenwood reminded us at the conference, all uses of Classics are technically appropriations--not just the uses made of it by white supremacism (which is arguable any use of it in the US by a white person in any institutional context--so, the field of Classics, for example). Thus the language of mis-appropriation is appealing for those classical scholars discussing the so-called Alt-Right--but doesn't mis-appropriation imply that the ancient texts and images are free from the prejudices their user is putting them to? Or rather, that we are in a position to make value judgments about what is and what isn't a "proper" appropriation? Do we give antiquity a pass by claiming that they didn''t express versions of the ideas that they are being used to support (like Juvenal being used to support misogyny and xenophobia)  The malicious intent of appropriation seems clear in these cases, but the idea that the modern Euro-American is oppressing ancient Greeks and Romans is not as clear. It also pretends that ancient Rome was not a foundation for modern Euro-American education and culture in many ways. When we speak of white nationalist and fascist mis-appropriation, do we mean the appropriation of classics away from its proper "academic" sphere? As if academic classics has never been a party to white supremacy?

2. While classicists (including myself) have been arguing that Classics is not the singular heritage of white, Europeans and Americans (on the grounds that the Classics isn't just about ancient Europeans, they weren't "white", etc.), it is important to acknowledge the continual interactions with certain strands of Classics in Europe throughout late antiquity, the middle ages, and through the modern era  (for example, Roman law, environmental determinism theory, Hippocratic/Galenic medicine, Aristotle's philosophy, Christianity); these strands suggest not "ownership" of classics (which is the language of appropriation), but continuity with. And all of these strands have been used to create race science or argue for slavery.

Craig Jenkins: I feel like the answer to this question sits at the dawn of hip-hop, which was set in motion by a Jamaican immigrant in a community of black and Latin Americans and patronized early on by artsy downtown white folk. It was always a multiracial enterprise by nature of the lay of the land here, and I think that speaking of hip-hop as though it was historically an exclusively black art is not only a misunderstanding of how the culture worked from day one, it’s a disingenuous flattening of several conversations about racial identity and cultural exchange. 

And while this is only one strand of continuity in a very singular way, it suggests that the Greeks and Romans in these particular contexts are not appropriations, but are the undergirding for the entire enterprise of race science and white supremacism--these things are built upon ancient ideas, the ancient ideas weren't stolen from an oppressed people--malicious intent though there was. Further, the classical world itself was a multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial endeavor.

This is where we might see appropriation: the theories of the Dorian invasion and attempts to make Greece and the broader Mediterranean (Egypt, the Near East, North Africa) the product of Germanic invaders. This appropriation was done as part of imperialist and colonialist projects that supported white "Anglo-Saxon" domination of 'others'. We might also call the use of classical architectural forms to promote whiteness and white superiority in the US an appropriation. We see it in the architecture of the World's Fairs and, as Dr. Lyra Monteiro argued at the Racing the Classics conference, in plantation architecture.

Which brings us to the second kind of appropriation: that trying to find "race" in antiquity is to appropriate a modern phenomenon and to do so in a way that renders it safe and white and harmless.

Guan: If such a new vocabulary exists, it wouldn’t exist purely or even primarily within the cultural sphere. Most of the current discourse just assumes that the American situation is the only situation there is, which is to say a white majority with money and connections set against a black minority with artistic brilliance. Whereas most people in the world aren’t black or white, and have musical and other cultural traditions that simply don’t fit into the black-white binary... 

I have suggested (and will argue to support) that race is a transhistorical category that modern US color-based race categories are one manifestation in a long history of attempts to categorize humans in the same way one categorizes plants and animals, that the foundation of modern race science is found in numerous ancient Greeks texts and contexts (particularly in Athens in its citizen/metic system). Anti-semitism is racism. Race and racism can be found in modern Israel, in ancient China, in ancient and modern India. It isn't just about black and white.

Jenkins: ... I do agree that the way the conversation about race unfolds here is 100 percent specific to the terrible history of this country, and that outlook doesn’t always translate well to or speak for people who exist outside of it.

Does it diminish the history of race in the US, does it make it "safe" to acknowledge that there are other ways "race" can be constituted? The term "race" as a scientific, biological category for humans is relatively new (250? years) concept, but it has existed as a term for biological descent in animals since at least the 13th century (it's a French word and was used in terms of dog breeding and then of French nobility--I strongly recommend Charles de Miramon’s "‘Noble Dogs, Noble Blood: The Invention of the Concept of Race in the late Middle Ages" in The Origins of Racism in the West).

Since the 18th century, the idea of race has been almost entirely subsumed into a scientific discourse that attempts to rationalize enslavement, irrational hatred and fear of non-whites by a white majority in the US. Something the popularization of genetics testing has given more life to. In between these two uses of race in the 13th and 18th centuries came the transatlantic slave trade and the identification of slavery with blackness and whiteness with free and superior. The history of race was changed in the US forever. But does that mean that race can and should now only be used in that context?

Jenkins...The closeness of these cultures is present in the rap from that era — stop and think of how many classic rap albums have a dancehall toast in ’em – and to pretend these cultures are not meaningfully intertwined and try to hand out roles to people by circumstance of birth just seems … I don’t know … young? But this is the same social-media sphere that doesn’t understand what an Afro-Latina is and accuses African-Americans of appropriating African culture for wearing dashikis to Black Panther. The conversation about race is flat, when the reality of identity is multidimensional.

Some scholars argue that we should only speak of ethnicity if we are talking about anything that is outside of that experience as a way to not diminish the history and lived experience of people of color in the US. Though then we leave out the rest of the world. And, with it, others peoples who have histories and experiences of colonialism, institutionalized oppression, and enslavement. Can the word "race" be exclusive to the modern US experience or the should scholars seek out the similarities in racist dynamics and institutions in other historical periods? Is it an appropriation by a bunch of mostly white people (classicists) to talk about a bunch of dead white people (presumably the ancient Greeks and Romans)?

What does Classics gain by engaging the language of race? Does it appropriate modern discourses to make itself "relevant"? Does it erase the horrors of the history of race in America and do a disservice to our colleagues of color? It is a mis-appropriation? Or does it force classical scholars to see the ancient ideas at the root of modern racism and our field's history of complicity? I'd like to think it will help us to engage the realities of the ancient world more thoroughly and accurately, and, hopefully, help us understand better how many of our institutions of higher education contribute to white supremacy and why modern race science became what it is and help us be part of the solution to undermining white supremacy in the US today instead of a continuing part of the problem.