The Classics are not taught to promote racism

2022 Year of Aesthetics Series №40 Sept. 9 2022

Cum mortuis non nisi larvas luctari ~Pliny The Elder

Only losers* wage wars against the dead. ~ Nassim Taleb Tr.

With the dead there is nothing but ghosts to fight. ~ My Translation

Memories are just dead men making Trouble ~ Michael Timmins

For CA, WN and EA, my greatest teachers.

Recently, it was implied by someone on twitter that the classics and classical education is ripe with racism and that we should search out non-racist classists, I commented that this was not a widespread problem in how the classics are currently taught. I think there are those who read the classics as a strict guide and naively, but I was taught the quite opposite, I was taught discernment, and challenging of classical texts. My education in the classics was by three erudite individuals. These two men and one woman taught me the language and evaluation of the classics. They taught me the following lessons.

The first is that the classical authors were people of their era and often innovators of their era. Some of them held long held opinions about slavery, wars of conquest, valor, prostitution, religion, pan theism, monotheism, etc. that do not meet with modern standard. Classical authors could be wrong headed, expedient and cowardly, dismissive, chattel slavers etc. and I was taught to challenge the thoughts of these author and look to sources of these ideas and know for long periods of time they were both attractive and charismatic. Eg. a slave owner could talk about in a bifurcated manner about Roman freedom and not apply it universally. My teachers never took what was in the classics as a universal good but a place where you could learn from both good and bad examples.

Possibly the most interesting idea is the attractiveness of Rome as a model for the west, we can learn a great deal of the charisma and attractiveness of the bellicose from looking at Caesar’s and Octavian’s legacy. How the Caesar used prowess in the field, corruption and bribes of the public to make themselves popular, feared or powerful . How the roman coffers were filled by conquest. This negative example is not yet fully absorbed but this lesson was first taught to me by classicists. I was not taught to emulate classical authors but to discern the good and bad exemplars in them.

Secondly, were great exemplars of the complexity of evil in the tragedy and ideas of how we fit into a chaotic and unfair world. The Greek heros of Homer were first critiqued by the Greek tragedians, who wrote plays the first antiwar plays and criticized Athens role in war. They depicted the downfall of kings who reached too far, and demigods plagued by madness and discord. They showed ill treatment of servants and woman as central themes not to be emulated but to be ashamed of. There is complexity and richness in the old plays. They were filled with tropes of their age, but to ignore their richness because they don’t fit a modern mold is a folly of naïve.

I was taught that the Plato who celebrated the courage of Socrates, also proposed a militaristic state without poets and thinker kings, who held power by controlling the military. Yet Plato hints that the society that he criticizes in the Republic is the only one free enough to allow him to speak.

The great satirist Aristophanes slaughtered sacred false demigods of Athens intelligencia, theater and politica, annually at the public’s expense in the name of a god.

Thirdly in New Testament study, I found that one could have a wide perspective on Christ and his apostles and that one could read naively or with some complexity, and that even as an atheist, I should not be dismissive of what is there.

My teachers taught me to be discerning of the charismatic and attractive ideas, to know that ideas of their time evolve and become dated but that we are our times are not without fault and that it is good to learn from the patterns of the past but not emulating what we find troubling there and taking a stand of what is there that is of value. As well to stand up to the problems of our times before setting up trials for the dead.