A Question of Purpose: What Do the Classics Mean in Today's

Political Climate?

Jason Colavito
11/23/2016

I guess there is a theme to my blog posts this week. Over on Live Science there is
an interesting article on the cultural debate that arose after the BBC aired a
documentary alleging that the terra cotta warriors unearthed near the tomb of China’s
first emperor were the work of a Greek artisan, or produced under the influence of
Greek sculpture. One of the archaeologists involved, Li Xiuzhen immediately
backtracked in the face of criticism, distancing herself from art historian Luckas Nickel,
who made the claim that the sculptures were directly created by Greek artisans or by
Chinese workers under a Greek supervisor. Li alleged that the BBC had misrepresented
her and made her out to be a believer in the Greek origin of Chinese sculpture. “The
terracotta warriors may be inspired by Western culture, but were uniquely made by the
Chinese,” she said. Other Chinese scholars were even more dismissive, with the official
in charge of the emperor’s tomb, Zhang Weixing, bluntly stating that there was no
evidence for contact with Greece at all.
There is, so far as I know, no archaeological evidence to connect the terra cotta
warriors with Greek sculptors, and the argument is, so far, entirely stylistic, and, to my
mind, not terribly convincing. However, because the sculptures show similarity to the
Greco-Buddhist art of the Hellenistic Greek kingdoms of India, it is a possibility, though
how direct the influence was, if there was any, is eminently debatable in the absence of
evidence. What is interesting, though, is that the debate over the claim has focused far
more on cultural tensions between East and West than about facts and evidence.

The authors of the Live Science article (which first ran in The Conversation), Johanna
Hanink and Felipe Rojas Silva, provided an overview of the Western tendency to
attribute all non-Western culture to white people from Europe or the lands of the Bible.
They cited examples like Great Zimbabwe, which was wrongly declared to be the work
of the Queen of Sheba, or Phoenicians, or a lost white race, right down to the fall of the
white minority government of Rhodesia in 1981. And then they say this:
Art historian Michael Falser has recently shown how the concept of Greco-Buddhist art,
or Buddhist art with a Greek "essence," is really a colonial notion that originated during
British rule in India. In the West, examples of this art (represented largely by sculptures
of Buddha), have since been largely interpreted as the result of Greek influence – and
thus, implicitly, as an early example of successful European attempts to civilize the
East.
Falser’s paper from last December is interesting, but it represents one of the problems
with the extreme ends of historical scholarship, namely that the urge to use history for
political and social ends tends to prioritize the feelings of modern populations. In this
case, Falser has minimized the impact of Greek art on the subcontinent (and thus the
areas influenced by it) by prioritizing scholarly engagement with early Buddhist art over
the art itself. For him, Greco-Buddhist art is simply too rich a phenomenon to tease out
its distinctively Greek component. He calls it “a discursive hybrid with local, regional,
national, international, and global components alike.” In this reading, our understanding
of art is really only engagement with the politics of the art historians: if early scholars
were Eurocentric racists, then their conclusions must be the product of imperialist and
colonialist attitudes and can be rejected. Similarly, he says modern critics are “politically
correct” in using art to craft a narrative of cooperation and peace. To what degree, then,
does our frame of reference govern our very ability to perceive historical facts?

This logic is a little too postmodern for my taste, though, because Graeco-Buddhist art
is not solely a fantasy imagined by colonial Europeans in India, no matter their reason
for promoting its relative importance. The fact of the matter is that there was a Greek
kingdom in India, and it produced art, and others took influence from that style. It’s
difficult to argue that a Buddhist monument containing a Greek-style sculpture of Atlas
holding up the heavens was made through sheer coincidence, or that the Corinthian
capitals on the columns at Gandhara emerged in a vacuum. Surely, the early exponents
of Greco-Buddhist art were racists who overemphasized its power and prevalence, but
that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It would be like trying to deny (as Eurocentric
historians tried in the past—and even in recent times) to deny the influence of
Mesopotamian, Levantine, and Egyptian art and literature on that of early Greece. As
recently as twenty years ago, it was still controversial to suggest that
Homer’s Odyssey contained Mesopotamian motifs and influence.

As with all things, when the pendulum swings, it tends to overcorrect. Where past
generations wanted to subsume the world beneath Western civilization, today many
scholars are too quick to dismiss Western civilization altogether in their race to
empower historically disadvantaged groups. This is one reason that I found
an argument made this week about white nationalism and the Classics to be
simultaneously enlightening and frustrating.

Donna Zuckerberg, the editor of Eidolon and a Classicist, decried the use of the
Classics among white nationalists, the so-called alt-right, to give a gloss of intellectual
respectability to their prejudices. She rightly noted that those who use the Classics
uncritically fail to understand that the literature we inherited from Greece and Rome is
not a fair representation of the entirety of Classical culture, but rather a representation
of the viewpoints and disagreements of elite men. She also worries that the enthusiasm
of white nationalists will lead to a renaissance of Classical studies for the wrong
reasons, much as fascist support of Classicism perverted Classical Studies in Hitler’s
Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. There is, after all, a reason that both Mussolini and Hitler
built oversized Neoclassical buildings as a way to resurrect their countries’ past glories
in the face of “decadent” modernism.

Zuckerberg notes that alt-right proponents of the Classics make extreme forms of two
key arguments for the study of the Classics: First, that the Classics are the foundation of
Western civilization, and second, that understanding Classical Antiquity can help to
prevent repetition of ancient political and military mistakes. She then makes an excellent
point that it is the duty of those who actually know things about Classical Antiquity to
point out when racists, misogynists, xenophobes, and general-issue hate-mongers
misuse history for political ends:
It is time for Classics as a discipline to say to these men: we will not give you more
fodder for your ludicrous theory that white men are morally and intellectually superior to
all other races and genders. We do not support your myopic vision of “Western
Civilization.” Your version of antiquity is shallow, poorly contextualized, and unnuanced.
When you use the classics to support your hateful ideas, we will push back by exposing
just how weak your understanding is, how much you have invested in something about
which you know so little.
But then Zuckerberg tries to stake out a different claim for the Classics, mainly that they
should be decoupled from Western civilization and that the foundations on which the
West was formed should be undone in service of modern political concerns about race,
class, and gender. She proposes an action plan for Classicists that would see them
actively reject those who wish to understand Western civilization through the story of
Greece and Rome:
When you hear someone —be they a student, a colleague, or an amateur — say that
they are interested in Classics because of “the Greek miracle” or because Classics is
“the foundation of Western civilization and culture,” challenge that viewpoint respectfully
but forcefully. Engage them on their assumed definitions of “foundation,” “Western,”
“civilization,” and “culture.” Point out that such ideas are a slippery slope to white
supremacy. Seek better reasons for studying Classics.
She added that Classicists should avoid research into “elite white men” and privilege
research into race, class, and gender issues over those of politics, international
relations, or military history. To that end, she is starting a project to document alt-right
use of the Classics and is publishing a book next year called Not All Dead White Men to
explore diversity in the Classics.

Here is where her argument rubs me the wrong way. I think that in her right and
righteous zeal to ensure that the Classics do not become the handmaiden of hate, as
the Nazis happily used Tacitus’ Germania, Zuckerberg has let the pendulum swing too
far in the direction of denying what the Classics actually are. Greece and Rome are the
foundation of Western civilization, whether one likes that fact or not, and whether one
supports that legacy or wishes to change it. Our political institutions, religious
institutions, language, science, history, and culture are an outgrowth of the structures
that built, sustained, and destroyed Rome. It is not much of a stretch to see the
formational period of modern Western civilization in the Middle Ages as an argument
between those who looked back to Rome and those who wanted to transform that
inherited legacy into something new. Every European monarch for a thousand years
aped the style of the Roman emperors, and less than 100 years ago there were still two
monarchs in Europe—the Czar of Russia and the Austrian Kaiser—who traced not just
their Caesarian titles but their imperial authority back to Rome, the Czar in what was
allegedly a transmission of Eastern Roman authority to the Third Rome in Moscow, and
the Kaiser through inheriting the power and glory of the defunct Holy Roman Empire in
a transmission of the last vestiges of Roman glory. The Founders of the United States
explicitly cited Roman precedent in establishing the Constitution, and when Napoleon
promulgated his famous legal code, the basis for modern European jurisprudence, it
took its form and inspiration from Justinian’s codification of Roman law.

It does not diminish the struggles of race, class, or gender to recognize the debt that the
West owes to the elites who reigned in Greece and Rome, nor to acknowledge that not
everyone wants to devote his or her life to social justice issues. Some people are
genuinely interested in issues of power and privilege, of military campaigns and political
disputes. These should not be delegitimized in a rush to man the barricades against
rightwing extremists. Indeed, it plays right into their hands.

It is not possible to understand the political and even social history of Europe and
therefore America without understanding the long shadow of Rome. (A recent history of
the Dark Ages was even entitled The inheritance of Rome!) But understanding is not
endorsement, and as Zuckerberg correctly notes, no one who loves the Classics should
hesitate from acknowledging their biases, omissions, and failures. Yet to pretend they
should speak primarily to the social justice issues of modern America is to make these
texts into the same kind of political football that alt-right propagandists wish to do from
the opposite direction.