Classical Studies

CLASSICAL STUDIES. Critics on the Left have never been entirely comfortable with the idealized image of ancient Greek and Roman civilization captured in the famous verse “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.” According to this story, Greece is the fountainhead of democratic values and institutions, as well as of literature, philosophy, art, and history, while Rome is the model of a stable and powerful empire, bestowing the benefits of peace and Hellenic culture upon the known world. As the twin sources of “Western civilization,” the virtues of Greece and Rome have been appealed to as evidence of the superiority of European over other cultures.

There is, however, an alternative picture: Greek and Roman civilization was built
upon a brutal system of slavery; women were excluded from civic roles; both
Athens and Rome developed empires that were perceived as tyrannical by their
subject populations; the Roman aristocracy was as greedy, arrogant, and
powerful a ruling clique as any; so great a thinker as Aristotle believed that
“barbarians” were biologically inferior and thus naturally fit to be slaves of
the Greeks. Oddly enough, much of what was truly democratic about classical
culture, like its theater and sculpture, has been perceived in modern times as
elite art, known through difficult languages or stored up in museums. Recent
decades have seen the emergence of critical perspectives on classical
civilization that have focused attention on oppressed and marginalized
populations in the ancient world. Scholars on the Left, especially feminist
critics and people of color, have to a large extent inspired this new approach,
and it has significantly influenced the teaching of the classics in colleges
and schools.

Classics had a special status for socialists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To many theorists and popular readers, capitalism and class society seemed a passing phenomenon, embraced by ancient collectivity (cf. August Bebel’s Frau und der Sozialismus) and the socialism
to come. C. Osborne Ward, one of the outstanding intellectuals of the First International’s U.S. affiliate, in The Ancient Lowly (2 vols., 1887), presented the Christian Revolution as an attempt to recuperate
a recollected ideal of ancient equality, though it was ultimately defeated by the bond between church and state. After the First World War, with the failure of socialist reform, the authority of the Russian Revolution as the model of scientific socialism, and the rise of modernism, the importance of the ancient world as a source of socialist perspectives tended to diminish in the United States, and few scholars on the Left looked beyond the linear model of social development adumbrated in Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State and canonized in Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938).

In the 1960s, the Women’s Classical Caucus was formed within the professional society of classicists (the American Philological Association, now rebaptized as the Society for Classical Studies) in order to address the status of women in antiquity in a critical way. These women and men did not take it for granted that, in classical Athens, a respectable woman did not appear alone in public, and rarely appeared in public at all; that she was deprived of juridical as well as civic rights (in the law courts, it was considered indecent even to mention the name of a citizen woman); that in all legal transactions she was represented by a guardian (called the kyrios), who, in marriage, transferred her to the authority of a husband, who in turn became her kyrios (women in Rome suffered comparable
disabilities, although they were not so rigorously segregated from male social life as they were in Athens). Feminist scholars were not content to describe such oppression; they were also concerned to understand how it was legitimized. As a result, a new word entered the vocabulary of classicists: ideology. The great texts of antiquity, from Aeschylus to Virgil, are now seen, by some, as complicit in sustaining or reproducing systems of domination, and not just as timeless repositories of high values; the sexist and racial aspects of ancient medicine, or of Aristotelian biology, are increasingly being subjected to critical scrutiny. To address the problem of ideology, classicists borrowed from other disciplines, such as anthropology and semiotics (the analysis of language and meaning); new journals came into being to accommodate the new methods (in this country, first Arethusa, Helios, but now several others), and the whole field became the scene of political, as well as antiquarian, controversy.

After World War II, leftist scholars such as Moses Finley brought a new
sophistication to the analysis of the ancient economy and elucidated the class
structure of classical societies. In 1972 a panel (still unique) on “Marxism
and the Classics” was presented at the American Philological Association, which
led to a special issue of Arethusa (1975). In the process, another term entered the lexicon of classical scholarship: class struggle. Wealth in ancient Greece and Rome took primarily the form of land, although there was some manufacture and export of commodities like oil, wine, and pottery. Poor citizens, struggling to maintain a small plot, constantly ran the risk of falling into debt and thus being
expropriated by the rich, who exploited dependent labor on their estates. Materialist historians have interpreted ancient democracy as the collective effort of the lower and middle strata to protect their interests, and its failure coincided with the victory of the large landowners. During the Roman
Empire, there was a progressive lowering of the status of the average citizen, under competition from mass slavery and intensive exploitation, until the condition of tenant farmers and serfs was socially and legally little better than that of slaves.

It remains controversial to what extent slavery may be understood as a specific “mode of production” in antiquity. Slavery was, as one ancient testimony by a slave informs us, the worst catastrophe that could befall a human being. Slaves had little chance to have their own voice recorded in the annals of history, but scholars are collecting what evidence they can, often in the form of inscriptions, to understand how slaves responded to a condition in which marriages were regarded as mere cohabitation, and slave children were said to be fatherless. At Rome, manumitted slaves received citizen rights, and funerary inscriptions offer some insight into the careers of those who, in the first two centuries A.D., achieved a measure of economic success. It is a sign of the relevance of the Left to classical studies that the third edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary had for the first time an entry titled “Marxism.”

The plight of slaves, the poor, women, foreigners, and other oppressed groups is at last receiving something of the attention it deserves, and has in turn called into question the notion of a privileged and superior “Western” tradition. Areas such as the relationship between classical Greece and Rome and other cultures, and the modern reception of classical texts, have become staples in classics curriculums, expanding the geographical and temporal boundaries of the field. Most recently, questions concerning the elite nature of the classics and the responsibility of classicists to promote inclusiveness and expand the reach of classics to marginalized groups have been urgently addressed within the profession. The “Classics and Social Justice” group in the Society for Classical Studies, and activities such as the “Our Voices” Conference to promote engagement with schools (see https://ourvoicesinclassics.com), have strong activist agendas. Public forums like Eidolon (https://eidolon.pub), The Sportula (https://thesportula.wordpress.com), and Pharos (http://pages.vassar.edu/pharos) publish an array of critical perspectives on the profession. Discussion and self-criticism are intense and ongoing, and it is fair to say that a serious Left perspective is now institutionalized within the Classics.

Arthur, M., and D. Konstan. “Marxism and Classical Antiquity.” In The Left Academy, edited by B.
Ollman and E. Vernoff, vol. 2. New York: Praeger, 1984, pp. 55-77.

Finley, M. I. The Ancient Economy. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1985.

Lekas, Padelis. Marx on Classical Antiquity. New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1988.

McCarthy, George E. “Karl Marx and Classical Antiquity: A Bibliographic Introduction.” Helios 26 (1999): 165-173.

Peradotto, J., and J. P. Sullivan, eds. Women in the Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984.

Rose, Peter. Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth: Ideology and Literary Form
in Ancient Greece. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992.

Ste. Croix, G. E. M. de. The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. Rev. ed.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Wood, Ellen Meiksins. Peasant-Citizen and Slave. New York: Verso, 1988.