Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, some elementary Latin textbooks—it could be a bookshelf in my study, if I were a little more interested in Proclus and Neoplatonism than I am. But this shelf belongs to a man named Eric Orwoll, a classically trained musician, self-taught student of Greek philosophy, and founder of a new housing development in far northern Arkansas. Mr. Orwoll and his co-developer, the New York Times reports, think that they have found a legal way to make their new development available to white people only. Because I made my living as a teacher of Greek and Latin and like to think that what I taught helped my students to become better human beings, this is distressing. Even though I know that you can’t blame the tools for what the workman does with them, it upsets me to see texts that I love connected with actions that I find repugnant.
The Times article and the picture of Orwoll’s bookshelf that accompanied are troubling for another reason. They may give ammunition to people who want to insist not merely that classics are outdated, but that they are in fact pernicious relics of a racist past and gateway drugs to a racist future. But should it? The most prominent advocates of this position, like Donna Zuckerberg and Dan-El Padilla Peralta, operate within the circle of professional classicists, people with PhDs who teach in universities. When they teach, lecture, and publish, are they even talking about the same thing that Mr. Orwoll and his Nazified Neoplatonists mean by "classics"?
Classics, by whatever name you want to call it, has a long, complex history. The habit of thinking about Greece and Rome and using them as touchstones for high culture or exemplars of an imagined ideal past--racist or egalitarian, democratic or imperial, Athenian, Spartan, or Roman--has been part of Western culture since at least the Renaissance, or perhaps before. (The Romans, after all, may have begun classics when they began to use ancient Greece as a model for literature, architecture, and art.) The academic subject represented by departments of classics in places like Princeton or Bryn Mawr, in contrast, hasn't existed for very long--perhaps for a couple of centuries.
So imagining that some racists’ use of Greece and Rome somehow implicates the subject overseen by the Society for Classical Studies and taught by the classics department at Harvard is a confusion based on superficial resemblance. People who read the same things don’t always read them in the same way. Novels can change your life, but there’s a big difference between reading Middlemarch because Dorothea Brooke speaks to your condition and reading Middlemarch because you’re an English professor working on forms of epistemological hegemony in the Victorian novel. It’s hard, also, to see how changes in one of these forms of using Greece and Rome would have any effect on the other. Decolonizing the classics at Yale is unlikely to have any effect on Mr. Orwoll and his kind. They will continue to read or misread the old books, confuse classical ornament with classical form in architecture, and imagine a Rome and Greece that never existed.
But Mr. Orwoll and his ilk do have a warning for the other classicists, those of us who work in schools and universities. The texts we handle so casually remain powerful. Plato or Aristotle or Vergil have something beautiful and important to say, and deep study of them can change your life. At this beginning of an academic year, we need to remember their power, and their danger, when we put them so casually and freely into the hands of our students.
