Classics: Dead or Alive?
A new course examines ancient Greece and Rome with a 21st-century lens.

By Peder Schaefer ’22.5 / June–August 2022

June 7th, 2022

Molon labe,” declared one of the flags carried by insurrectionists at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The translation from classical Greek is “come and take them,” referring to weapons, and comes from the 1st-century essays of Plutarch, quoting a defiant Spartan king. White nationalists marching in Charlottesville carried flags with ancient Roman symbols. For 21st-century American proponents of the supremacy of “white culture,” ancient Greece and Rome are revered as where it all started. That’s among the many reasons Princeton classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta, in an incendiary 2019 panel discussion, denounced his own field as engaging in the “production of whiteness” and said he hopes classics, as currently constructed, “dies as swiftly as possible.”

Since then, more and more scholars have been asking, should classics even proceed as a field? Does it need merely to be disrupted or should it be dismantled altogether, dispersed into the departments of history, archaeology, art history, and foreign languages? How can classics—a historically white, male, and elite field of study—be made more accessible?

Last December, for one of the final periods of 21st Century Classics, 13 students filed into an old-fashioned, wood-paneled classroom on the top floor of Sayles Hall, ready for another such debate. This time, students argued over whether or not ancient languages like Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit should be a requirement for Brown classics concentrators.

Phoenix Rising?

“I stand with those who have no more patience for the study of ‘classics’ as a fairytale Western origin story,” Associate Professor of Classics Johanna Hanink wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education in February 2021. “That paradigm has not even been around for very long,” she says, “and people will still be reading The Odyssey, Antigone, and The Aeneid long after it’s gone.” But Hanink also points to “all the intellectual innovation and knowledge advancement that is happening these days in and alongside classics,” much of it happening, she says, thanks to classicists of color. “While there are plenty of reasons for anger,” Hanink concludes, “there is also cause for hope.”

“We wanted to try and encourage discourse and dialogue among students about what classics is and what it might be for students today,” says classics department chair Graham Oliver, who designed the course with the help of Mac Carley ’24 PhD, a 4th-year classics PhD student, and Ayanna Tafe ’23, an undergraduate.

The new course—designed as a way for undergraduates to engage with some of the debates around diversity, accessibility, and racism that are roiling classics departments across the country—covered the work of classicists from marginalized backgrounds, new interpretations of classical culture in the 2020s, and hot topics such as whether statues celebrating the ancients belong on the Brown campus.

“The construction of our field is really bound up with white supremacy and many forms of elitism,” says Amy Russell, associate professor of classics and head of the department’s Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan working group. Russell points to the concentration’s ancient language requirement and reflects on how knowledge of languages like Latin and ancient Greek has traditionally been restricted, so that only people from certain backgrounds—typically private prep schools—come to Brown knowing the basics. She says this leads to the gatekeeping of cultural capital.

To those who say that removing the language requirement (Brown’s classics department also includes students of Sanskrit and ancient Indian languages) will mean a less rigorous course of study, Russell suggests looking at the issue of rigor with a wider lens. “Why not turn it around,” she points out, “and ask how was education rigorous if the students of the 1950s did not think about slavery in the ancient world?”

Whether to make ancient languages a requirement is still a live debate, and professors are also discussing how to make changes to the curriculum to make classics more accessible and, with the inclusion of more courses focusing on diversity and inclusion, perhaps even antiracist as well. Oliver’s 21st Century Classics thus acts as a testing ground to imagine what Brown’s classics department could become.

Oliver says the course was inspired by the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning’s Seminar for Transformation around Anti-Racist Teaching (START), which combines antiracist teaching practices with an opportunity to design new syllabi.

START “made me think more directly about what I was trying to do in a course and how I was going to achieve it,” says Oliver. He adds that it isn’t often that academics are introduced to new pedagogical approaches.

The syllabus eventually designed by Oliver, Carley, and Tafe focuses on visual art and culture, and how receptions of classics have changed over time. For example, the first few weeks examine the culture war over classics, such as the debate over statues and how classic iconography is being politicized today, such as the case of Second Amendment defenders who celebrate Spartan Greek helmets. Militarism was a theme as students explored how for decades classics and the military have been intertwined.

Students spent a week on the work of scholars of color and engaged with how classics have represented the perspective of the lower classes. After a few students asked about the work of women scholars and others from marginalized gender identities, Carley says they made changes to the syllabus to include those voices.

Students taking the course included first years who had never taken ancient languages or classics before, those who had taken some Latin in high school, and a few upperclassmen, like Ryan Millard ’22. A double concentrator in public health and biology from southern Illinois, Millard says he got interested in classics after binge watching YouTube videos on classical literature, mythology, and figures like Alexander the Great during quarantine. Going into his senior year, he realized he had a few non-concentration classes left and thought he would try out his new interest in an academic setting.

Oliver says changes in the field “require the academic to admit that they need to keep learning.” As a first step, he will include more 21st-century material and investigate the connection between phenomena like Percy Jackson and Assassin’s Creed and the classical world he knows so well.

Millard is doubtful that “an institution that has proven itself to last 500 years teaching these racist ideologies… has the internal resolve to create radical change.” He agrees with the ‘burn it down’ philosophy argued for by Padilla Peralta. Carley argues the rhetoric around burning down the field is overblown and is optimistic that changes can happen, if given time. “There’s a growing number of classicists within the academy and outside who have a strong intersectional approach,” says Carley. As for Oliver, he says the course pushed him outside of his comfort zone in new ways but also showed how the department needs to continue listening to students as it engages in the long process of creating a more inclusive learning environment.

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June–August 2022

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I urge Brown classics to consider the subtle prejudice of low expectations.

—Gabriel Wingfield ’12 Oswego, N.Y.

Please retain classics at Brown and even expand the department and course offerings. Classics is needed more than ever as our society deteriorates and falls prey to morons like Donald Trump. The historic perspective of the ages Classics provides is essential.

—Peter Allen ’68 AM, ’74 PhD Providence

It's been more than 50 years since I took John Rowe Workman’s class, but I do recall that his course began with Egyptian culture and how much Greek culture evolved from it, followed by the Romans. So why not punch up the Egyptian component? Personally, Workman’s class served as a fine springboard for me as I dove into Southeast Asian culture and quickly picked up on how much it was influenced by ancient Indian Hindu and Buddhist culture passed down in the Sanskrit and Pali languages.

—Terence A. Harkin ’68 Toms River, N.J.

In 1967, after four years of public high school Latin and one at graduate level with Professor John Rowe Workman (see entry from Martha Mitchell’s Encyclopedia Brunoniana), I can honestly say racism and slavery never crossed my mind. Classical Latin is the basis for so many current languages and should be evaluated in that respect rather than otherwise. I’m sure that if you delve deeply into any field of science, literature, philosophy, music, sports, and so forth that you will find some unwelcome connections that should finally be addressed, but to disparage or eliminate entire fields of study seems counterproductive. I understand professor Padilla Peralta’s reasoning for change, but I believe better education for all economic levels and all races and sexes will have a more profound impact on our civilization than simply abandoning several thousand years of history.

—Dave Wipper ’71 Cincinnati

Sounds like the old parameters no longer work. If the University no longer wants to offer a study of this specific period geographically and historically, it deserves a new name. This is not your grandfather’s Classics and calling it thus could be considered false advertising. Perhaps incorporating one survey course to address changes in the old curriculum would be beneficial.

—Allison Summ Williams ’66 Richmond, Va.

I understood two main concerns have grown up in the Classics Department: whether the language requirement for a Classics degree is elitist, and whether the Classics faculty has worked hard enough at listening to students. Two related observations; First, I would urge Brown Classics to consider the subtle prejudice of low expectations. Not all Classics concentrators arrive on College Hill with the benefit of many years of Greek or Latin. I did not. I worked my tail off only to drop Greek Survey my senior year—what was both a humiliating and life changing experience, for which I will always thank God. I would encourage the Classics faculty to give some thought as to why that might be. Second, without dismissing the need for professors to listen to their students, I submit that the purpose of a Classical education is to teach the students to listen. We should assume that the faculty can and do listen. We do not assume that students have learned how to listen. The Classics is nothing if not a field of study devoted to listening well and reading closely. It turns out that understanding someone from a different time and place is incredibly difficult. You must learn their language. It is an act of love, as well as an act of humility which presumes you have something to learn. “Speak to the past and it shall teach thee.” As we all grapple with political polarization heightened by our social media echo chambers—Classics has much to offer university students today. Especially with the language requirement. Listening is hard. Understanding another person is hard. There are not always easy answers or shortcuts. If nothing else can get that lesson into a student’s head, perhaps Greek Survey will do the trick.

—Gabriel Wingfield ’12 Oswego, N.Y.

Tell me this article is a comic one. The many illogical statements and poor arguments indicates that surely, neither the author nor the quotes used of professionals are to be taken as serious. As a student in the late 1950s with professors in the Classics such as Couch and Robinson, I can find nothing in this article except a display of ignorance. Where are the thoughts such as “realize that the highest reward in ancient society was the right to vote. It is usually given at an older age. Therefore, if America were to give the right to vote to 18 year olds, how can it refuse any other rights due to age?” Or, the final exam question: Discuss the effect Julius Caesar has on the modern world? You need other discussion subjects? How about: if given the right to vote at 18 and the right to privacy at the same age, what right does the University have to ask for payment from parents and refuse a parent the student's grade? What need of financial statement’s from parents for any student? By what right does law impose insurance of parents upon youth to the age of 25? Drinking at 21? As for the basis of the article, the writer appears not to understand ancient society. The definition of “Classics” is very muddled. Does he think the Egyptians worried about color? As for Greece and Rome etc, status was firstly your state, In Greece it was city, then country. Status among different peoples was place in society. Color had no place! A statesman or warrior or wealthy merchant etc. had status over ‘common people.’ The statement on ‘statues’ is similarly ridiculous. Should Japanese not raise statues to famous Japanese? Chinese to famous Chinese? Individual European states to famous citizens of their state and so on? Statues in America to its founding fathers and many of its presidents and other famous persons? What do we do for the statues in the Capitol building? The thoughts postulated by this article are puerile to say the least. I hope the writer understands this last sentence.

—F. William Abbate ’61 St. Simons Island, Ga

After reading “Classics: Dead or Alive?” I must conclude that Brown is indeed one of the “evil bulges” in Dante’s hell. What the devil is going on? All I see are ambitious academics seeking to climb the ladder of professional success on the backs of dumb white kids who, though not racist themselves, feel terribly guilty about the ambiguities of their forebears. Indoctrination tells us what the past means, monolithically; education gives us the wherewithal to decide on our own what was good and what was bad. It would seem that Brown wants to dismantle the idea of a “classical” education, and thus to dismantle Western Civilization, which it deems to be “white supremacist.” In short, do you guys have any fun? Do you read any love poetry beside the sparkling brook? Or do you sit around the dormitory all day, bored out of your heads, engaged in Stalinist “self-criticism,” thinking of ways to dismantle the “Christian West” and in the name of “diversity and inclusion” to establish Mayan fertility rituals of human sacrifice in the affluent Connecticut suburbs? Sadly to say, Brown is yet another island of lost children, intellectual and spiritual orphans sitting naked and unwashed in the midst of bad teaching, starving to death on the latest bad food to come out of the graduate schools—the blind leading the blind. Where is the wisdom of the great professors? At Brown, the lunatics are indeed running the asylum.

—Sam Cuthbert (spouse of an alumna) Hagerstown, Md.

It is dishonest to attribute the motives of neo-Nazis who have appropriated selective aspects of classics to the field of study or to its professionals. It is even more ludicrous to look for exemplars of so-called “white culture” in the many peoples of the ancient Mediterranean world. It is ironic that many of the Tiki-Torch crowd have Hispanic, Slavic, Middle Eastern and Asian names. I suppose that slamming the gate comes with their assimilation. The very heart of the Iliad is sympathy for the conquered, and disgust for the conqueror. The classics studied in the late 20th century refreshed ideas of enslavement, queer culture, powerful women, diverse peoples, oral culture, diplomacy, federation, alliance, and manufacture [sic] throughout the broader ancient world. Critics take note, a world where folks do not hasten to throw the baby out with the bathwater would be that which advocates seek, a better world.

—Christopher Kox ’81 San Francisco