The classics — the poems, myths, philosophies, and histories from Ancient Greece and Rome — portray a society struggling with war, disease, climate change, social inequality, unrest, and autocracy. Just like us, but also not like us at all. The classics are at once beautiful paeans to humanity and an inspiration for Mussolini, and this is not justification for their relegation or promotion. Nonetheless, as with many books in recent years, the classics have also become politicized.
Under the auspices of editor Roger Kimball, the right-wing, high-brow culture magazine The New Criterion has published a series of essays since September 2021 collectively titled “Western Civilization at the Crossroads.” In these essays, various authors argue that western civilization has begun to falter as American society changes, with fewer Americans attending church and communities becoming more racially diverse. To quote the introductory essay of the series: “If one were inclined to sum up the moral of this introductory essay, one might … say that its message is that civilization depends on tradition, that which is handed down, traditum, from the past.” Note that the central idea, “tradition,” is expressed in Latin a few words later, signaling the importance of the Greek and Roman classics to this vision.
Case in point: The “crossroads” in the title of the essay series come from the Greek tragedian Sophocles’ “Oedipus the King.” The authors chose the crossroads — that wooded place where Oedipus kills his father and begins to journey down a swift road to his doom — because they wish to evoke the image of a choice that will decide the fate of this project, “Western Civilization.” They depict the Greek and Roman classics as quintessential vessels of tradition, venerability, and strength. Here is a perspective that conceives of the classics as a set of texts, ideas, and historical events perfect enough to be used as models upon which to base our future practices. Not only is such a stance reflective of a superficial understanding of the material, but it also propagates a dangerous view — that who we were is who we should become.
After all, with some exceptions, those who wrote the poems and inspired the ideas beloved by The New Criterion essayists often owned slaves, enforced the patriarchy, and grew rich off imperial domination. Seneca, the famous stoic philosopher, supported modesty while being one of the richest men in Rome; Ovid’s “Ars Amatoria” comes close to endorsing misogynistic dating strategies; Demosthenes, who provoked Athens to war against Macedon, helped undermine the city’s democracy after it lost. This sounds eerily similar to the world we live in today, where some of the figures most central to the American story, like Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves while advocating for freedom from tyranny. Given this, how can we believe that the world illustrated by classics should by American society’s cynosure going forward?
The left has an alternative viewpoint, and Princeton Classics Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta is one of the loudest voices behind its critiques. The New Criterion ran a scathing profile of Peralta in March 2021 in response to an oppositely complimentary article in The New York Times just one month earlier. In the article, Kimball viciously objects to Peralta’s assertion that the classics must dramatically grapple with the legacy of oppression and its hand in it. Kimball also lodges cruel insults against Rachel Poser, the author of the piece, and sounds off about preserving the purity of the classics.
In essence, Peralta argues that the historical deemphasis of the dark side of the classics — the slavery, nationalism, xenophobia, classism, sexism, homophobia — has marred the discipline to the point where it has been rendered meaningless. Though he doesn’t exactly clarify how, he claims that that stance has led, in Poser’s paraphrase, to “justifications of slavery, race science, colonialism, [and] Nazism,” among other evils. Thus, the field has to strenuously reevaluate itself, or justly perish for its sins.
Like Kimball’s, Peralta’s outlook is fundamentally an extremist perspective on the classics. It also stands in furtherance of an unsavory viewpoint: that the classics, far from being worth everything, as those at The New Criterion would have it, have nothing left to give us. If it’s all dead white men, there’s little reason to bother with it anymore. His burn-it-all-down rhetoric is aggressive. Kimball and his staff are justified in defending the classics as a “fertile source of wisdom and aesthetic delectation.” Yet, for a publication that’s “on the front lines of the battle for culture” and committed to aesthetics, their March 2021 essay reeks with a most unaesthetic venom: In angrily defending themselves against critiques from the left, they fail to consider that, in their moderate forms, the aggressive aims of the left and the defensive stance of the right have intellectual and societal merit. Besides, using big words, especially those from other languages — like traditum — and gratuitously humiliating one’s fellow scholars does not make one an enlightened person.
The tendency on the right — especially on the erudite right but also, worryingly, on the Proud Boys and extremist side of conservative politics — to idealize the classics elevates them to the pinnacle of morality. It plays out in articles in The New Criterion, yes, but also in banners quoting the Spartans on January 6th, social media influencers touting ancient rape culture as worth emulating by incels (see Donna Zuckerberg’s book “Not All Dead White Men”), and the recent discovery that non-classics-professor men think about the Roman Empire rather often. Such misinterpretation and appropriation of the classics, however it manifests, is reprehensible.
As represented by Peralta and company, though, the fringes of the left are equally foolish for their wholesale demolition effort. The New Criterion’s article cites several educators’ diatribes about canceling, or otherwise destroying, the classics as a discipline. Dissolving the field, eliminating its endowments, firing its professors, and removing its texts and topics from curricula are all excessive, unwarranted steps.
There is no doubt that the present moment demands a challenge of the norms of western civilization. One need look no further than to rising authoritarianism in Hungary, violent assaults on the Capitol, or the battlefields of Ukraine to see that the democratic project is under threat. The classics have little to do with this. The solution is not to search two-thousand-year-old texts for suggestions on how to organize society today. The classics cannot explain something so far beyond its bounds, and ought not to be asked to do so.
Western civilization may be at a crossroads, or it might not be. Either way, the left, right, and their academic and social arms have a choice between honestly and appreciatively working with the classics or distorting them to fit a political agenda. As for our larger civilizational questions, we will have to find our way by some other path — one that does not rely solely on traditum nor necessitate its absence.
