The field of classics is experiencing a crisis of identity. What used to be hailed as the foundation of Western civilization is now embraced by the far-right as origin stories and is reckoning with criticism of being elitist and overwhelmingly white.
Outside of Smith, Howard University dissolved its Classics Department in 2021. The same year, Princeton University dropped its classics language requirement, while one of its prominent professors, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, is gaining attention for advocating to knock the Greeks and Romans down from their pedestals. Inside Smith, the members of the Classics Department are also reflecting on the future of the field.
The term “classics” refers to art and literary works of established value, commanding a certain level of reverence. But treating the study of Greco-Roman antiquity as classical is a historical lens the modern world inherited from the Italian Renaissance; coming out from the long stretch of the “Dark Ages,” the humanists thought of themselves as experiencing a rebirth and strived towards the excellence of the Ancients.
“There have been some strong opinions, even amongst the students, about the future and relevance of Classics for sure,” said Rebecca Worsham, Assistant Professor of Classical Languages & Literatures. “Even calling it Classics has been a big question because it goes into the way we define what is classic. I think a lot of departments are considering changing the names to Greek and Latin studies or ancient Mediterranean studies.”
“It’s probably a good thing to change the name of the discipline at this point,” said Sofie Koonce ’22, a classics major and one of the student liaisons for the Department. “It does have an implication that Greece and Rome are on this pedestal. I’d rather change it to something that actually encapsulates the field.”
The influences of Greek and Roman cultures run deep in shaping the West. The American founding fathers looked to Athens as the birthplace of liberal democracy. Homeric epic poetry and Greek tragedies shaped the literary canon while Socrates, Plato and Aristotle initiated the philosophical dialogues on moral ethics and political theories. But in a world becoming disillusioned with Western ideals, treating only the texts foundational to the West as the classics seem myopic and antiquated.
Nancy Shumate, Department Chair and Professor of Classical Languages & Literatures, wrote in an email responding to some of The Sophian’s questions surrounding the field, “It is true that classics has been used to ‘promote a Western-centric view of history,’ but that is not the same thing as existing to do so. The same could be said of many disciplines, not only in the humanities but also social sciences — anthropology, for example.”
She pointed out that the readers have agency and freedom interpreting the classics.
Shumate went on, “Classical texts are not fixed repositories of dominant values; they are dynamic and open-ended. If they have been used to undergird imperialism, misogyny and slavery (which have existed in all times and places), they have also been appropriated by liberation movements in the post-colonial world and by marginalized people who have recognized in them an expression of their own experience.”
Only in interpreting old texts through fresh perspectives will the study of Greek and Roman languages and cultures remain relevant. Professor Shumate mentioned that the Classics Department recently hosted an event with a BIPOC theater company that presented Euripides’s “Medea” as the story of a migrant woman of color.
Schumate wrote, “And it isn’t a stretch to read the play that way: it’s right there in the text, just as there is a critique of imperialism in the Aeneid and of warrior culture in the Iliad. Their authors were artists and thinkers, not propagandists.”
Another way to expand the field is to shift its focus to the material world, which is diverse and far more encompassing.
Professor Worsham said, “The idea of sort of tearing down classics and building it up again is not a bad one. I think people may have overreacted to it because of the strong language. At the heart of it, classics is the study of people of a certain region. For instance, I’m more on the archaeological side, there are tons of materials that provide a good way for people whom we don’t normally hear from — the slaves and women — to speak to us. The pots and things tell stories because somebody cared about them before they became garbage.”
She also noted that the classical world was never just the Mediterranean in isolation. Its linkages went as far as China, Africa and England. Thinking about the interconnectedness of the world, with communications and movements back and forth, is a way to push back against the white supremacist model of classical history.
Classics also has a complicated history with elitism. For example, mastery of Latin was a symbol of upper-class status from the Renaissance onwards. At the same time, Professor Worsham noted, for this specific reason, there was a great effort to democratize Latin, making it available in public high schools and to the middle class. But the case is less true for Greek, which is more widely available in private and independent high schools.
In terms of diversifying the field, Professor Shumate wrote: “Academia as a whole needs more racial and socio-economic balance. A few years ago, we submitted a proposal to hire a classicist who was a woman of color, which may have drawn in more students, but our application was rejected by the college. I don’t know that some of our majoring students aren’t ‘lower-income;’ there’s no reason to believe they’re all affluent.”
She continued, “I myself grew up on the edge of Appalachia in one of the most impoverished counties in the US with the sort of public high school that you would expect in that environment. Yet Latin was taught there, and for me, it was a gateway to other worlds. One of the most vocal critics of Howard’s elimination of classics was Cornel West, the great African-American scholar and public intellectual. ‘Dante is for all of us,’ he said, and he meant Homer, Virgil, Sophocles and Cicero too. He was right; it just takes some imagination and some stepping outside ourselves to see that.”
Koonce also stressed the importance of pushing back against the White supremacists’ claim over classics. “Not only are they not welcome here,” she said, “they fundamentally misunderstand the history that they are trying to claim for themselves. I disprove all of the nonsense that they claim. But I do understand how that happened because classics has a very elitist, very white history of scholarship even though it predates the concept of whiteness.”
“I hope that classics will continue to be available to Smith students who want to study it, and who still appear every year in steady, if relatively small, numbers despite rumors of the discipline’s demise that have been circulating for several centuries,” wrote Professor Shumate. “I think that there is utility in any study that requires precision of thought and encourages an understanding of how the past informs the present — both important, ultimately, in the practice of responsible citizenship in a democracy. And in general, I believe that all knowledge is good and that we should do what we can to preserve it, perhaps especially now. An enormous swath of human history is written in Latin and Greek. If instruction in those languages stops, that knowledge will be lost forever. How can that be a good thing?”
In looking to the future, Professor Worsham hoped that the Classics Department would build a collaborative process with the students to think about new directions. It will be a continuous effort to adapt and change the field.
