Capturing the Elusive Universality of Classics

Erica Choi, Princeton University

I remember the first time I read Catullus 101 (multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus…), when I knew that all the index cards filled with principal parts had not been for naught. Catullus’s despair at the loss of his brother hit close to home — haven’t I also spoken to the ashes of my mother in vain? — and connected me to a larger, timeless human experience.

But when fellow Princetonian Solveig Gold argued in her article “The Colorblind Bard” and its follow-up article “The Colorblind Bard: an Exchange” that classical texts were written not to oppress but to set free, I was thoroughly perplexed. Attributing the “communal striving towards truth and beauty and goodness” to Western civilization rather than humanity even though people everywhere at every point in time have striven for these values, she enthusiastically concludes that if the texts were just left to speak for themselves, we would fall in love with them.

Does that mean that if someone doesn’t find Classics appealing, they are just reading it erroneously?

The debate that Solveig’s article sparked has focused mostly on the problems of classical reception and left unchallenged her assumption that texts would appeal to everyone if they were just left to speak for themselves. But classical texts are not universally appealing.

By no means am I suggesting that classical works do not encompass timeless experiences. I’m merely pointing out that since classical works also embrace and endorse many forms of reprehensible practices, such as slavery, classism, and the subjugation of women, it’s hard to focus on “not the injustices, but the text.” So ubiquitous are such injustices that they are almost invisible in the works that we read, creating the illusion that classical texts were written to “free” people. But a slave transcribed Cicero’s praise of liberty.

No wonder that reading Classics can be an emotionally jarring experience for many rather than emotionally appealing. Consider Ellie, a student at Mills College whose thought-provoking comments prompted Madeleine Kahn to write her pedagogical essay “Why Are We Reading a Handbook on Rape,” describes the emotional distress that reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses caused her:

Ovid hasn’t written a book that’s hostile to women. He’s written a handbook on rape. And I don’t know about the rest of you, but it is personally painful for me to have to read all of these stories about women being raped and abused […]

That Philomela story is one of the stories I had the most trouble reading. It’s like being raped all over again. When it happened to me I was just fifteen, but I felt like my life was over. I felt like being raped changed the meaning of everything I’d ever done, and of who I was. And I thought that nothing else in my life would ever have meaning again. I would always just be Ellie whose life stopped when she was raped at fifteen. And that’s just what happens to Philomela. It was terrifying for me to read.

We can argue about whether Ovid is a pornographer who takes delight in violence against women, as Amy Richlin would say, or a friend of women who, in the words of Leo C. Curran, engages with “the intellectual and emotional experience of the woman and her suffering” with “sympathetic imagination.” The very question consumed me as I struggled through my independent work last year. At the time, I wanted to defend our beloved poet and argue that some people were just interpreting the Metamorphoses incorrectly, that underneath its horrors was a message we could all get behind.

I was wrong. The Metamorphoses wasn’t and can’t be made appealing to Ellie. Classical texts, written by men and women who were flawed like everyone else, often turn a blind eye to or explicitly uphold injustices. These texts have victims. And though the victims have disappeared into the depths of history, the same notions of victimhood survive and haunt us even today. So much for universal appeal.

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Classics comes with additional baggage: its reception history. Sure, we don’t know if Homer was white. But we belong to the same discipline that has portrayed St. Augustine as white even though he was native to North Africa and probably black. Making so much out of our ignorance of Homer’s race while turning a blind eye to his painfully white appearance in our conception ironically echo the pitfalls of the literary critics whom Solveig disapproves of, who insisted on focusing on “lived experiences” rather than created meaning.

Classical rhetoric has been seized by imperialists and the Nazis alike. Today, the alt-right movement continues to appropriate classical aesthetic. Exploring the feelings of alienation that generations of minorities have experienced from the discipline of Classics is central to both Ayelet Wenger’s and Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s recent articles, both worthy reads.

If I could teach prospective students classical texts first and the injustices surrounding Classics second, I would. But I can’t. We all come to Classics with a preconceived notion of the discipline and its people that is inevitably colored by its history and usage in popular rhetoric. We come to Classics expecting a white Homer and a white St. Augustine.

Classical texts marginalize certain people. Classical history has discriminated against certain people. So rather than being universally appealing, Classics appeals mostly to people who it hasn’t disenfranchised somewhere along the road: namely, people who have not been imperialized; who have not struggled with class-based discrimination; who have not been victimized by sexism; whose group identity is not shaped by slavery and being considered as second-class citizens. In other words, Classics still appeals mostly to the elites in society.

Underprivileged kids have fallen in love with Classics, but they did so in spite of the problems in our discipline. Solveig writes that the Classics department at Princeton is racially diverse. But the students in the department come from disproportionately wealthy backgrounds, with a much higher concentration hailing from pedigreed private schools than the rest of the student body at Princeton, let alone the nation.

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I agree with Solveig in one respect: Classics should not belong to white men. It may often feel like it does, as Wenger and Padilla point out, but it doesn’t have to be so.

I believe reception studies will help us push the boundaries of Classics as a discipline. We, as the readers of classical texts, can challenge their values and alter them in our retellings.

Those who are alienated by the values represented in classical texts themselves, like Ellie, probably won’t grow to love the original texts. But if Ellie were to, let’s say, use Ovid’s imagery to write a story about men and women who are raped and display fortitude, strength, and grace that enable their recovery (a transformation sorely missing from the Metamorphoses), it would send a powerful message in the discipline of Classics. Analyzing such a retelling would force academics to confront the issues in Ovid more.

Those who are alienated by Classics’ history can create room for themselves in it. Derek Walcott borrows Iliadic language and marries it to his nativism in his post-colonial epic Omeros, forging his place in the classical narrative. People living in the relics of colonial history following Walcott can more easily picture how they would also find some place in Classics.

I want to close with the remarks of our Department Chair, Andrew Feldherr, whose introduction of Alice Oswlad moved me even before hearing the eulogy for the forgotten and glossed over men and women of the Iliad: “If the historical accidents of the past have deprived us of so much and restricted the experience of what survives to a relatively small group, the future of our discipline has no such limits and is as wide and diverse as its readers can make it.”