In Week 3, our Tuesday Talk featured classicist Michael Scott (Professor of Classics & Ancient History and Pro-Vice-Chancellor International, University of Warwick) speaking on how we engage with - and maybe obsess over - antiquity.
The references are everywhere
Prof Scott showed how we see references to antiquity all around us. Just look at Amazon’s Alexa, named after the library of Alexandria.
We can see other examples: Mark Zuckerberg has spoken on his admiration of ancient Roman emperors, and some rioters attacking the US Capitol in 2021 even presented themselves as Spartan warriors, complete with Greek helmets.
I found the talk thought-provoking. There were great resources mentioned, including Pharos, a website run by classicists. It critiques uses of the Greek and Roman ancient world to push alt-right agendas and other exclusionary ideologies.
An ethical perspective
As a bioethicist, I also have an interest in flawed arguments that are used to back these political positions. I think it’s fantastic that there are resources out there that are working to counter claims like ‘Marble statues in ancient Greece and Rome were white, and this shows the supremacy of White bodies’.
For me, though, the focus of our efforts should not be on correcting facts—e.g. that these statues were painted in a whole range of colours and never seen as white. Instead, I am interested in how the argument itself doesn’t make sense. Regardless of what colour marble statues were in ancient Rome, I find the argument above entirely baseless and uncompelling.
The existence of a thing (in ancient times or today) does not indicate its moral desirability.
Where we could go from here
I wonder if this work could go further. Classicists could work with philosophers to further pick apart the strength of the arguments made in these references to antiquity, rather than only their factual basis. In parallel, I also wonder if the effort to rehabilitate the classics could go further. Why does so much of classics teaching today focus so firmly on ancient Greece and Rome?
As Prof Scott mentioned, some reference to the contact that these peoples had with others around the world is sometimes included in the curriculum. But where are the talks on the ancient Africa, like Aksum in the North, and Bantu in sub-Saharan Africa? Where is education on the art, trade, and oral histories of Aboriginal Australians? And where are the women in these discussions?
Perhaps one way to address the problem of the weaponisation of classics in politics is to open up classics beyond ‘the’ ancient world of Rome and Greece.
Without such a wide curriculum of Western-centric, Eurocentric history for today’s political powers to draw on, perhaps we have a better chance of calling out current othering, discrimination, and manipulations of history for political purposes.
