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Arts and Humanities in Higher
DOI: 10.1177/1474022205051966
2005; 4; 185
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education
Paul Cartledge
Why/How Does Classics Matter?
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Citations
Why/How Does Classics Matter?
pau l ca r t l e d g e
University of Cambridge, UK
a b s t rac t
Classics is in the news – or on the screen: Gladiator a few years ago, Troy very
recently, Alexander as I write. How significant is this current Hollywood fasci-
nation with the ancient Greeks and Romans? Or should we take far more
seriously the decline of the teaching of the Classical languages in schools, a decline
so grave as to prompt a recent debate in the House of Commons? My answer is
that both are in their different ways equally significant. Our culture cannot do
without proper appreciation of its classical roots, and Hollywood is as objective a
barometer as any of our culture’s contemporary pressure points. This article
explores six aspects of antiquity – its representation in cinema, athletics, theatre,
architecture, literature, and politics – that are still palpably salient for modernity.
k e y w o r d s
architecture, athletics, cinema, classics, literature, politics, theatre
p r o p a e d e u t i c
I n 1 9 9 7 i addressed a plenary session of the Cambridge International
Summer School on Cambridge’s contribution to Classical learning, and I
looked forward to ways in which I thought Classics as a discipline might
continue to grow and reach out in the third millennium, not only in
Cambridge but, as it were, globally. I simply took it for granted that Classics
‘mattered’ – it was just a question of how, and how much, and to whom
(Cartledge, 1998a; see also Cartledge, 1998b). Now we actually are in the third
millennium, I am invited to reflect on the question of whether my discipline
does (still) matter.
1
My first reaction, I confess, is to reply that of course Classics matters. Is not
merely to ask that question to give a hostage to fortune, playing into the hands
of those who say that Latin and Greek, the foundation of the discipline of
Classics, are dead languages and so Classics, above all in a post-industrial,
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e-commerce age, is but a dead letter? On further reflection, though, that initial
reaction now seems to me a little too defensive. This is not the place, nor the
time, only to be defending the subject of Classics, but rather also to be
promoting it, in all its richness and diversity, linguistic and otherwise. That is
consciously to borrow the title of a recent excellent lecture by Chris Stray, in
2003, prompted by the centenary of the Classical Association.
I begin therefore with a quotation from that lecture, or, to be more exact,
a quotation within a quotation:
At a time when we appear to be on the eve of extensive reconstructions in the higher
educational system of the country, the first duty of those who believe that due recog-
nition of the claims of Greek and Latin is vital to our intellectual welfare is to know
what they want. It is clear that Classics will not be allowed the lion’s share which has
been theirs in the past, and the question is, how much must we struggle to retain.
(Quoted in Stray, 2004)
Those remarks were not first published, as might be thought, in 2002, but in
1902 (Postgate, 1902: 80). Plus ça change in 2004, on the one hand, so one might
suppose: for is not Classics yet again being required to justify itself, to fight
for what few scraps may be left over from the rich man’s table of public and
private benefactions to the tertiary, higher education sector? Yet, on the other
hand, a very great deal has changed since 1902, and by no means for the better.
Postgate could look back to the golden age of Classics in British education,
to a very recent high Victorian past. We in 2004, however, have to look back
rather to half a century of more or less constant trench warfare and rearguard
action: from the abolition of the requirement of some knowledge of Latin
for entry to Oxford and Cambridge in the 1960s to the dropping of any
Classical language from the National Curriculum in 1990, to name only two
of the more spectacular reverses.
In 1964 the late (Sir) Moses Finley, an American who learned his Latin and
Greek late and yet became one of the most distinguished professors of ancient
history in the western world, addressed the topic of ‘Classics’, that being his
contribution to a volume entitled Crisis in the Humanities (Finley, 1964).
‘Crisis’ is of course a word of Greek origin, meaning judgment, decision,
moment of decision. We are again, I think, enduring another such crisis of
decision – or, to borrow a suitably classical metaphor (think of Oedipus), we
are ‘at the crossroads’ (Toner, 2002). What place are the Humanities in general,
and Classics in particular, to be allotted within the educational curriculum,
especially perhaps the tertiary or university curriculum? And what place is
Classics to be allowed within intellectual and cultural life in general? I cannot
of course answer those questions now – I am no Delphic prophetess. Instead,
I shall try to show you how Classics does still matter, and suggest to you reasons
why it is undesirable, to put it gently, that Classics should cease to be thought
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to matter, and matter greatly – to all society, not just to the privileged few
who are granted direct linguistic or other access to some or all of its multi-
farious and manifold riches.
I begin with English etymology. A very great deal (about a third, it has been
estimated) of our English vocabulary has Classical roots, Greek or Latin,
sometimes both Greek and Latin. The Xenophobe’s Guide to the Greeks, a very
modest but engagingly humorous publication, begins by listing all the things
we could not talk about, or talk about in the same way, without using
loanwords of Greek origin – including, of course, xenophobe itself. I mean
words like (in alphabetical order) academy, cinema, philosophy, politics, theatre,
photography, not to mention borborygmus (a key word, if ever there was one
– it means a rumbling in the bowels) and kakorrhaphiophobia (a morbid fear
of failure, allegedly). Pretty much the same could be done with Latin-derived
words too: client, infinity, order, patron, republic, et cetera, et cetera. Not to
mention ‘Classics’ itself. What do the following have in common? A classic
car/movie/clothes? Classic FM (radio station)/Classical music? A classic
performance/game/match? Classics, as in classic horse races? And Classics the
discipline? The answer is, very little – except their common etymological deri-
vation from Latin ‘classis’, a ‘class’, and so high-class, or first-class, or classy.
And as for hybrid Graeco-Latin English words, we need look no further
than ‘homosexual’ and ‘homosexuality’. The referents of those words arguably
existed, or perhaps even abounded, in Greek and Roman antiquity; but the
words themselves could not have done, since they combine Greek homos
(‘same’) with Latin sexualis/itas. Actually, those are both surprisingly modern
words, coined only in the late 19th century (see also Foxhall and Salmon,
1998). And that is a salutary reminder that words do not exist in a vacuum;
they are historically contextualized or even conditioned. ‘Homosexual’ and
‘homosexuality’ lead us on, that is to say, from straight linguistic borrowing to
the issue of cultural borrowing, to the complex area(s) of heritage or legacy.
That in turn raises a major issue, the one that underlies the whole of this
essay. If – as I shall argue – Classics does still ‘matter’, if the study of the
Greeks and Romans does have some useful or pleasing things to tell us or
teach us now and in the foreseeable future, is that because the Greeks and
Romans were essentially like us, or because they were essentially unlike us, or
both of those, both like and unlike? My answer will be ‘Yes’ to all three. They
were indeed relevantly like us, and unlike us, and both like and unlike us. And
I stress the ‘relevantly’: significance depends on what one is interested in
personally, or what one thinks society as a whole should be interested in
collectively. My watchwords will be two quotations from famous ancient
sources, one a Roman writing in Latin, the second a Greek writing in Attic
(Athenian) Greek.
Cartledge:Why/How does Classics Matter?
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First, like my Cambridge colleague Simon Goldhill in his recent book Love,
Sex, and Tragedy. How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives (2004), I quote from
(Marcus Tullius) Cicero:
Not knowing what happened before you were born means being a child for ever. For
what is human life, unless it is interwoven with the life of our ancestors, by the memory
of ancient history? Moreover, recollecting antiquity, and providing examples from it,
provides authority and credibility to one’s discourse, as well as enormous pleasure.
That passage comes from Cicero’s discussion of the ideal orator (a good Latin
word – whereas ‘rhêtor’, whence our ‘rhetoric’, is the Greek synonym). With
its talk of ancestors and antiquity, it has perhaps a very special Roman
resonance and relevance. But my second quotation is, I believe, as universally
valid and applicable as it could possibly be: ‘The unexamined life is not worth
living for a human being.’ That is Socrates speaking, or rather ‘Socrates’, since
this is from Plato’s published version of the Apology or Defence Speech that
the real Socrates did not in fact deliver at his trial for his life at Athens in
399. Socrates was adjudged guilty of irreligion and immorality. Sentenced to
death, he chose to die rather than flee. Plato, Socrates’ most famous pupil,
considered the death of his master to be a martyrdom, on behalf of
conscience and free thought. But whatever and however we think of the
particular rights and wrongs of Socrates’ trial and death, the ringing phrase I
have quoted from Plato is one that has not lost its savour or salience over the
intervening 2400 years.
For the sake of clarity and comprehensibility, I have selected just half a
dozen aspects of my vast topic for special consideration. In all these cases, I
shall try to show, it is not merely accidental that the origins of those words
are either Greek or Latin: either there is some direct legacy or heritage from
the Greeks and Romans to us, or there is some sense in which principled
comparison and confrontation between the way they did things and the way
we do – or could or should do – them really do still ‘matter’, that is, make a
difference to how we could or should live our lives individually and collec-
tively.
1 . c i n e m a ( m o v i e s )
I begin with the largest of mass cultural phenomena today, the cinema (from
Greek for ‘movement’), audiences for which number in the millions. Some
700 feature films/movies have been made on ancient Greek or Roman,
including mythological, themes (Solomon, 2002). Mostly they were made in
the late 1950s and early 1960s and catered to a post-Second World War
audience thirsting for action heroes. Former body-builder Steve Reeves in
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Hercules Unchained can stand for the bulk of them. But Reeves also (perhaps
unwittingly, perhaps not) stood for rather more than that. In an age when
nudity on the screen for women was taboo, it was permissible to show nearly
naked men – men who were also of course ‘fit’ in both the current senses of
that word. Such masculine near-nudity appealed, one assumes, to the hetero-
sexual girls and women who flocked to movie ‘theaters’ and cinemas. But it
also appealed hugely, and deliberately, to what were not yet commonly and
publicly called ‘gay’ men.
In other words, these ‘beefcake’ movies not only looked directly back to
the ancient Greek and Roman ideal of the fit masculine body, an image that
is perpetuated today in, say, the Kouros (Yves St Laurent) advertisements, or
by Brad Pitt’s hunky Achilles in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy movie (2004). They
also looked back, much more coyly, to ‘Greek love’, male–male homosexuality
(a ‘bastard’ Greek-Latin hybrid, as we have noted) or (worse) pederasty (which
has an ancient Greek pedigree both as a practice and as a word), to forms of
love that still dared not speak their name openly in mid-20th-century
Hollywood.
2
Some of these movies also had what we might more broadly call a political
agenda: 300 Spartans of 1962, for instance, pitted the Spartans (read: the
American-led ‘free’ West) against the Persians (read: the Communist and
servile East). Or, far more subtly and subversively, the 1960 Spartacus of Stanley
Kubrick called into question issues of race (a black gladiator), gender (the
relationship between Spartacus and his ‘wife’ Varinia, played by Jean
Simmons), and sexuality (just how masculine was Spartacus? and what about
the definitely camp Crassus, as played by Laurence Olivier?), not to mention
class – i.e. issues of slavery and oppression (Spartacus had been taken as the
eponymous hero of the German communist Spartakist League of the early
20th century). Such issues were being tested to destruction during the Civil
Rights protest era, and it was no coincidence that the movie’s screenwriter
was Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, who had been blacklisted
under the McCarthyite witchhunt for their ‘Communist’ affiliations.
After the 1960s, the ancient-world vogue receded in Hollywood. But since
2000 the ‘Gladiator effect’ has struck hard. Hot on the heels of Troy comes
Oliver Stone’s Alexander the Great, and we are promised – or threatened with
– a Boudicca/Boadicea, and a Hannibal. There is no doubt a strong element
of fashion in all this, but also an element of style. All five that I have
mentioned can deliver a strong narrative story line with a beginning, a middle
and an end, as Aristotle recommended in the Poetics. Above all, perhaps, there
is more than a tinge of nostalgia. When Men Were Men is the title of a recent
collection of essays on ancient Greek and Roman gender and sexuality
(Foxhall and Salmon, 1998). In an age of gender-bending we (or Hollywood’s
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financiers) hanker, perhaps, for an era when things were seemingly more clear-
cut, and clean-cut. Yet actually in this area the ancients not only did things
differently, but they did them with no less subtlety, complexity and downright
perversity than we do. It just will not do, historically, for gays and lesbians
(another Greek-derived term) to appeal to the ancient Greeks and (to a
smaller degree) Romans as authorizing ancestors, legitimizing ‘homosexuality’
as a contemporary lifestyle option, as no less ‘natural’ than heterosexuality. Nor
are homophobes (a modern coinage) any more entitled to cite Plato in
support of the claim that homosexuality is ‘unnatural’ and therefore morally
wrong.
2 . a t h l e t i c s – o l y m p i c s
My next two sub-topics introduce a no less complex variation on the dialectic
between Modernity and Graeco-Roman Antiquity. For most of us today,
participating or spectating in either athletics or theatre is essentially and funda-
mentally secular rather than religious. For some athletes, it is true, sport is
literally as well as metaphorically a religion, but the modern Olympic Games
– to take the most obviously relevant instance – is not itself a religious
phenomenon, however much symbols like the Olympic flame designedly give
it a quasi-religious flavour. Going to the theatre is in the West an unambigu-
ously non-religious activity, even when what is being enacted is a revival of
a mediaeval Mystery play. But for the ancient Greeks all sporting activities
and all theatrical performances took place within the framework of religious
festivals, communal actions devoted to one or other member of the Greek
(and later Roman) pantheon. Though athletics, especially, increasingly took
on a secular air, neither the Olympics nor any ancient drama festival entirely
cut loose from its foundational religious origins (Cartledge, 2004; Phillips and
Pritchard, 2003).
When Baron de Coubertin founded the modern Olympic ‘movement’, or
at least provided the key impetus for the revival of the Olympic Games in
1896 and following years, he thought – or claimed – that he was imitating
the ancient Greeks in two key respects: amateurism, and participation for its
own sake. In both he was quite wrong. Greek athletes at the Olympics may
indeed have won only token, symbolic prizes, but the Olympics was just one
out of some 50 or so athletics festivals at which competitors might compete
each year, and at all but a very small handful of them the prizes were seriously
valuable in material terms. Even Olympic victors were regularly rewarded
after their victories by their home cities with such substantial material benefits
as free meals for life, or a state pension, or at any rate an immediate cash sum.
Second, victory at the ancient Games was all, and the winner took all. There
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were not even second and third prizes, no silver and bronze medals but only
gold, as it were. Victory, moreover, was won in an almost military, or para-
military, style, and it was gloried in thereafter in a most unsportsmanlike way.
De Coubertin may have been misled here partly by the sacred Olympic Truce,
which he thought signified the Greeks’ essentially pacifistic outlook toward
the Games. Actually, the Truce was mainly a pragmatic device to enable the
Games to take place. It was designed, that is, to prevent wars between Greeks
from stopping athletes and spectators from getting to Olympia every four
years: as it indeed did – for almost 1200 years without a break.
I could choose many illustrations to show just how different an ancient
Olympic victory was from a modern one. I select just one: the case of
Kleomedes from the small Aegean island of Astypalaea. In 492 BC Kleomedes
won the boxing crown, by a knockout; but unfortunately for him his
opponent remained out cold, for ever. He died. On account of that
manslaughter Kleomedes was deprived (robbed, as he saw it) by the judges of
his prize. He promptly went out of his mind. Returning home to Astypalaea,
he entered a boys’ school and started destroying both it and the pupils within.
Their distraught parents not unnaturally came after him, seeking vengeance;
but Kleomedes simply disappeared into a wooden chest in a religious shrine,
vanished into thin air. So, since the Olympics were a religious festival, and
since murder and pollution were matters of religion for the ancient Greeks,
the authorities of Astypalaea sent an official delegation to Delphi on behalf
of the bereaved parents and relatives, to consult the prophetess of Apollo. Her
reply will probably come as a shock today, much more of a shock, anyhow,
than it was to the original consultants: Kleomedes, she said, was no longer a
mere mortal; he had ascended to the higher status of a semi-divine hero,
between gods and men, and should be worshipped as such in perpetuity (this
was so that his unnatural force could be harnessed for the good of the
community of Astypalaea). Compare and contrast the fate of the American
footballer turned actor O.J. Simpson: no perpetual hero he.
3 . t h e a t r e – d i o n y s u s s i n c e 6 9
It was probably within the context of ancient Greek – or more specifically
ancient Athenian – theatre that the idea of a ‘classic’, as we would now call
it, was first born. In 386 BC, 100 years or so after Aeschylus first had his tragic
plays performed, and 70 years after his death, the Athenians decreed that his
plays might be ‘revived’. Otherwise, as had always been the case from the
beginning, all plays staged at the annual Great Dionysia festival were new-
minted for that one occasion, usually never to be repeated in live perform-
ance. Fifty years after that historic exemption, the leading Athenian statesman
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of the day, in the 330s, had a law passed to collect and preserve official archival
manuscript copies of not just Aeschylus but also Sophocles and Euripides
(both of whom had died in 406 BC). The Big Three tragic poets and drama-
tists thus became instant ‘classics’. Which is why, ultimately, we have at least a
little of their original output still available to us to read or, in various ways,
re-perform, in the original or in translation.
But what a difference there is between, say, the original performance of
Euripides’s Iphigeneia at Aulis at Athens’s national theatre and Katie Mitchell’s
recent production, in English translation of course, at the Royal National
Theatre. Euripides’ original was one of a trilogy of plays staged towards the
end of the Peloponnesian War against Sparta, a war that Athens would shortly
lose. It was deeply controversial in its own day mainly because it challenged
dominant male Greek notions of what it was to be a hero, by presenting a
young girl as a heroic self-sacrifice. But the impact of that challenge was
magnified many times over because the play was part of a truly national
religious festival, staged before an audience of some 15,000 including perhaps
half of the total Athenian male citizen body. However ‘radical’ Katie Mitchell’s
production might aim or claim to be, it could not possibly hope to be
anything like as rooted and radical as the Euripidean original. Yet even so
Greek tragedy continues to pack a considerable punch on a whole variety of
stages on both sides of the Atlantic (Hall et al., 2004; Rehm, 2004).
I could go on multiplying the differences between then and now, but I
select just one aspect for a more detailed look: judging. Our word ‘critic’ (like
‘crisis’) comes from the Greek for ‘judging’, as in a court of law. But the
ancient Athenians did not merely judge the quality of the Iphigeneia at Aulis
metaphorically, on aesthetic or other grounds. They literally judged it, and the
other two tragedies Euripides had performed with it, against two other rival
trilogies of tragedies: they decided which one was to be awarded the prize
for best playwright and for best sponsor or impresario (the citizen who funded
the productions). They also decided which of the three lead actors
(protagonists) was best and awarded him a prize too. Ancient Greek theatre
in other words was competitive, in just the same way as the Olympic Games
and within a comparable, religious context. For Dionysus and Zeus were both
thought to enjoy and applaud competition among mortals, competition that
was designed ultimately to honour them, the gods, the most (see further
Cartledge, 1997).
4 . a r c h i t e c t u r e
The ancient idea of classicism was by no means confined to the theatre. In
fact, an even stronger sense of continuity of the idea can be found in the
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sphere of architecture. We are all familiar with the Classical ‘orders’ – defined
as such by the architect and architectural writer Vitruvius who lived and
worked in the Rome of Augustus. Augustus was famous for saying that he
found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble. Not of course entirely
true as a matter of fact, but ideologically and symbolically entirely apt – and
the inspiration for his marmoreal remodelling was ultimately Classical (as we
say) Athens. No single Greek building inspired him or contemporary archi-
tects and sculptors more than what has come to be known as the Parthenon.
Originally,‘Parthenon’ was the name of just one room, admittedly the most
important, of the temple dedicated to Athena Parthenos or ‘Virgin Athena’
on the Athenian Acropolis. That room housed the cult-statue, composed of
gold and ivory fixed on a wooden core to the design of Pheidias. But the
Parthenon’s significance far transcended its original function as the house of
a goddess. Augustan classicism, followed by the classicism of the age of
Emperor Hadrian a century later, ensured that the Parthenon became a
‘canon’, a standard or measure, of perfection in architecture and architectural
ornament. Later, for reasons other than the purely aesthetic, the Parthenon
became a Christian church and then, under the Ottoman Turks, an Islamic
mosque. That is what it still was, officially, when the 7th Lord Elgin, ambas-
sador to the Sublime Porte (as the Ottoman empire was grandiosely known),
made his historic – and still monumentally controversial – decision to strip
the Parthenon of as much sculpture as Elgin thought preservably portable:
that is, shippable back to England or, more exactly, to his ancestral seat in
Scotland. In so doing, he sowed the seeds of a dispute that reaches from the
narrowly diplomatic politics of just two modern nation-states – neither in
existence in the same form then as they are today – to the cultural politics of
the entire globe, in the form of the issue of national versus international
cultural ‘heritage’ or ‘property’.
Where do the Elgin Marbles (by which I mean just those marbles that Elgin
took and have survived, not the entire extant architectural decoration of the
original temple) properly ‘belong’? Is it in the British Museum, under
the Trusteeship of the Museum Trustees on behalf of the Government of the
United Kingdom, which claims their legal ownership? Or is it back in Athens
somewhere adjacent to their original site, if not – for atmospheric reasons –
literally back on what remains of the original structure?
3
It is not so much
the rights and wrongs, the ins and outs, of this particular case that concern
me in my present context: rather, my point is that the very classicism of the
Parthenon and its marbles (including the Elgin collection) is world-
historically important (see also Beard, 2003). Moses Finley once edited a
monograph series entitled ‘Ancient Culture and Society’. Prospective readers
were informed that his contributors would not be trying to answer such
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questions as ‘What is the Parthenon?’ but ‘What is the Parthenon for?’ One
answer to that is that it reminds us how central and vital the Classical heritage
still is, and how much it still matters.
5 . l i t e r a t u r e – o m e r o s a n d a f t e r o v i d
Enough of the Greeks, for the moment. The Romans invented literature, not
merely the word but the thing. They did not just use letters to write words,
which were then combined to form texts (a term borrowed metaphorically
from weaving). They invented the writing (and performing) of texts as a genre
of human social interaction. They invented the idea of a ‘chair’ (from Greek
and Latin cathedra, ‘seat’) of literature, a subject to be ‘professed’. No less
important, they borrowed from the Greeks and further developed the idea of
rhetoric, the notion that how you say or write something might be as
important as, if not more important than, what was being said. From Teisias
and Korax, Greeks from Syracuse in Sicily who lived in the 5th century BC,
to Jacques Derrida and George Bush or Tony Blair in the 21st century AD
there is a pretty direct line – via the Hellenistic scholars of Alexandria, the
literary critics of Republican and Imperial Rome, the scribes and scholars of
Byzantium, the humanists and litterateurs of the Renaissance and the 18th-
century Enlightenment, and the professional Classicists of the 19th and 20th
centuries.
Much as I should love to ‘count the ways’ in which this literary heritage
and inheritance are currently expressed, time forbids me to select more than
two living or recently living examples. Both are poets (from Greek poietes and
Latin poeta, meaning a ‘maker’), I make no apology for that. Both are men –
I do apologize for that. One is a Nobel Prize winner, the other a former Poet
Laureate. One is black, West Indian, the other a white Yorkshire Englishman.
I refer to Derek Walcott and Ted Hughes. Walcott’s published poetic oeuvre
is large; he is also a watercolour painter of great accomplishment. But I shall
concentrate for obvious reasons on his Omeros of 1990, a verse epic the very
title of which advertises his debt to ancient Classicism, but also his struggle
somehow to remake or even escape from that debt.
Omeros is the modern Greek way of pronouncing ‘Homer’. But whereas
Homer’s heroes were leaders of men, kings, princes, mighty warriors, not to
mention gods and goddesses, Walcott’s anti-heroes are lowly, or if you like
ordinary, Caribbean fisherfolk and their fellows. Walcott is as it were demoti-
cizing the Homeric inheritance, but he is also crucially Caribbeanizing and
so colouring it – black instead of white. Like his invented characters, Walcott
is a black West Indian – and so the descendant of slaves. And Homer was the
preferred literature of the very white men who were responsible ultimately
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for enslaving his African ancestors and transporting them across the Atlantic
into the Caribbean in the first place. Walcott seeks therefore a kind of revenge
– and there are very striking juxtapositions of slavery and classical or classi-
cizing ‘culture’, including neoclassical architecture, in the poem. But at the
same time, the very choice of subject to reappropriate, Homeric epic, is a clear
sign of that white classical culture’s deep and unavoidable hold over him (as
over the audiences of Troy!). He can’t live with it, yet it seems he can’t live
without it, either (Hardwick, 2003). Of such cultural conflicts and wrestlings
of the soul are Nobel Prizes for Literature made.
Ted Hughes too wrote and published a very great deal, prose as well as
verse. He never won a Nobel Prize, but in toto his poetic and other literary
achievement is very great and will, I predict, stand the test of time. In what
in retrospect looks very like the Indian summer of his prematurely ended
career one work, for me, stands out: not Birthday Letters, but his Tales from
Ovid. No single ancient Greek or Latin text has had more influence, that is
inspired more imitations or reflections, in visual as well as verbal form, than
Ovid’s Metamorphoses (the very title of which of course betrays the Latin
poet’s own debt to the Greeks). Hughes, in a typically postmodern way, both
imitated and (mis)appropriated Ovid’s original. He retold a selection of the
original stories of shape-change, for instance those of Arachne and Marsyas,
stories or myths with obvious significance for cultural creativity. But he gave
them his own characteristic contemporary spin, if you’ll pardon the pun, both
of language and of imagery (see also Brown, 1999). If classicism is, according
to one definition, the following of orderly rules laid down in some distant
and supposedly more ideal past, then creative classicism is precisely the
deviation from – or bending of – those rules, to enable a perpetual process
of innovation and freedom within those ideal constraints.
6 . p o l i t i c s – d e m o c r a c y
So I turn finally to politics, and more particularly to democracy (see also
Cartledge, 1999). We are all democrats now, are we not? Democracy is either
the only good form of politics, or – to take the disabused Churchillian line
– it is the least worst of the political systems on offer. And there is a sense –
in terms of our heritage or legacy – in which we are all democrats today
because the Greeks and Romans were, or rather because key practical poli-
ticians and political thinkers thought the ancients were worth imitating or
paying homage to. I refer here to the two foundational events or processes
which ground the entire western political project today, namely the American
and French Revolutions (good Latin word) of the late 18th century. The
Americans preferred the Roman model – which is why they have a Senate
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and a Capitol in Washington rather than a Boule and Acropolis. There were
two reasons for that preference mainly: first, scale – they did not see how
ancient face-to-face, direct, primary and participatory democracy could be
practical in a country the size of the United States, even when ‘the United
States’ was confined mainly to the eastern seaboard of that great continent;
second, they identified democracy with faction, with what the Greeks called
stasis – a ‘standing-apart’, literally, that all too regularly led not just to civil
strife but to open civil war and bloodletting.
Instead, the Americans went for the Roman idea, as articulated by Cicero,
that the safety of the People was the supreme law. The People was the key
concept. By claiming that the politically empowered were acting in the name
of the People the American revolutionaries latched on to the ancient Roman
tradition of the res publica, literally ‘the People’s thing’. The Americans thus
inaugurated the model of representative – as opposed to direct – democracy
that is the fons et origo (fount and origin) of all modern democratic systems,
including our own funny British hybrid with our so-called ‘constitutional’
monarch (something that American Republicanism was of course diametri-
cally opposed to, both in practice and in theory).
The French Revolutionaries, however, were far less hostile to the Greeks.
Indeed, the word ‘democracy’ entered the English language via the French
‘démocratie’, and leading thinkers in late 18th-century France were divided
between those who favoured the more direct, spontaneous, immediately self-
determining model of the Greek polis to the more cumbersome, indirect and
managed politics of the Roman Republic. Rousseau, for example, one of the
principal intellectual forefathers or godfathers of the French Revolution, had
a lot of time for something he called the General Will. Whatever exactly he
meant by that, and however exactly it was meant to operate, it was directly
opposed to any smaller sectarian, let alone individual Will. In that sense it led
directly to the concept of the will of the People.
On the other hand, Rousseau – oddly, to our eyes today – actually preferred
the way they did politics in Sparta to genuine original Athenian democracy.
Reading the ancient sources, which were almost to a man hostile to Athenian
democracy, and especially his all-time favourite Plato, Rousseau was too easily
convinced that ancient democracy was nothing but mob-rule: the rule of the
poor, ignorant, fickle, uneducated masses over their betters, for their own
selfish, sectarian reasons and ends rather than for the good of the common-
wealth as a whole. It was not in fact until the early 19th century, and in
England, that Athenian democracy started to acquire a good name – but when
something that the English called ‘democracy’ was at last implemented, it
would not of course have passed muster with any genuine ancient Greek
democrats. For them, all modern systems of so-called ‘democracy’ would be
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merely one or other kind of disguised oligarchy – the rule of a few. Sic transit
gloria mundi . . .
e n v o i
Let me conclude on a suitably ambivalent note. On the one hand, thank God
– or perhaps, rather, thank the gods – we are not ancient Greeks and Romans.
We do not (any longer) exploit slaves, or most of us in the West don’t anyhow.
We do not treat women as second-class humans, at least, not legally, and we
do not stage brutal and brutalizing gladiatorial games. On the other hand,
what a shame – to put it mildly – that we are not ancient Greeks and Romans.
We no longer produce geniuses of the theatre such as Aeschylus, or poets of
the inventiveness and polish of an Ovid. We have yet to recover the combi-
nation of self-sacrifice and devotion to the common good that was more or
less a routine normality for – in their very different ways – the Athenians,
the Spartans, and the Republican Romans. The great modern spiritual
monotheisms that dominate the religious landscape unfortunately and appar-
ently inescapably come with a huge and core component of deep-seatedly
irrational and unassuageable prejudice and hatred, the very reverse of the
relative toleration that characterized the ‘pagan’ religious world – where
Christians could be dismissed, ironically, as ‘atheists’, because they refused to
recognize the existence, let alone the power, of the Greeks’ and Romans’
polytheistic plenitude.
And we have yet to come up with anything as spiritually binding as the
Olympic Truce or as life-enhancing as the relatively ‘civilized’ and ‘civilizing’
Pax Romana, the Roman imperial peace that from the time of Augustus to
Marcus Aurelius, say, spread Roman law and culture (including not least
hydraulics and communications) from Spain to Iraq, from Egypt to Germany.
But for that Roman Empire, for example, there would have been no Chris-
tianity – and so, in a sense, no ‘western’ civilization at all worth speaking about
still today. Of course, these are huge issues. Of course, there is no pat ‘yes or
no’ answer to whether Graeco-Roman based western culture or civilization
is a Good Thing. Unquestionably, though, without the Greeks and Romans
we would not even be able to begin to think about what sorts of issues are
involved in answering it. Does Classics matter? ‘The unexamined life is not
worth living for a human being.’ I rest my case.
ac k n o w l e d g e m e n t
It was an enormous privilege and pleasure for me to be invited to address a plenary
session of the International Summer School again (see already Cartledge, 1998a),
and equally a pleasure, once again, to thank for inviting me Sarah Ormrod, who
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was also generously agreeable to my slight variation of the standard lecture series
title. The original oral version was delivered on Bastille Day, 2004.
n o t e s
1. Shortly before my talk was delivered, the future of Classics language teaching
in schools was being discussed in the House of Commons – a good indication of
just how grave the situation really is.
2. Rock (note name) Hudson is, sadly, a case of suppression of homosexuality
par excellence.
3. My own view – which claims and is certainly intended to be scholarly rather
than (merely) political – is that they should go back, to a purpose-built museum,
to be reunited with the extant Parthenon marbles still in Athens and with all those
other bits and pieces to be found in various other parts of the world, in museums
such as those in Palermo, Copenhagen, Berlin and Paris.
r e f e r e n c e s
Beard, M. (2003) The Parthenon. London: Profile.
Brown, S.A. (1999) The Metamorphosis of Ovid: From Chaucer to Ted Hughes.
London: St Martin’s.
Cartledge, P.A. (1997) ‘Deep plays: Theatre as process in Athenian civic life’, in
P.E. Easterling (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, pp. 3–35.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cartledge, P.A. (1998a) ‘Cambridge Classics for the third millennium’, in S.
Ormrod (ed.) Cambridge Contributions, pp. 103–21. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Cartledge, P.A. (1998b) ‘Classics: From discipline in crisis to (multi)cultural
capital?’, in Y.L. Too and N. Livingstone (eds) Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of
Classical Learning, pp. 16–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cartledge, P.A. (1999) ‘Democratic politics ancient and modern: from Cleisthenes
to Mary Robinson’. Hermathena 166: 5–29.
Cartledge, P.A. (2004) ‘Olympic self-sacrifice’, in M. Kaila, G. Thill, H. Theodor-
opolou and Y. Xanthacou (eds) The Olympic Games in Antiquity. Bring Forth Rain
and Bear Fruit, pp. 22–39. Athens. (Parallel Greek-English texts.)
Finley, M.I. (1964) ‘Classics’, in J.H. Plumb (ed.) Crisis in the Humanities, pp. 11–23.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Foxhall, L. and Salmon, J.B., eds (1998) When Men Were Men: Masculinity, Power
and Identity in Classical Antiquity. London and New York: Routledge.
Goldhill, S. (2004) Love, Sex and Tragedy. How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives.
London: John Murray.
Hall, E., Macintosh, F. and Wrigley, A., eds (2004) Dionysus Since 69. Greek Tragedy
at the Dawn of the Third Millennium. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hardwick, L. (2003) Reception Studies (Greece & Rome New Surveys in the Classics,
33). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Phillips, D. and Pritchard, D., eds (2003) Sport and Festival in the Ancient Greek World.
London: The Classical Press of Wales.
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 4 ( 2 )
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Postgate, J.P. (1902) ‘Are the Classics to go?’ Fortnightly Review 72 (n.s.), November:
886.
Rehm, R. (2004) Radical Theatre: Greek Tragedy and the Modern World. London:
Duckworth.
Solomon, J. (2002) The Ancient World in the Cinema (Second edition). New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Stray, C.A. (2004) ‘Promoting and Defending’. Classical Association Centennial
Address 2003, in The Classical Association: The First Century 1903–2003. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Toner, Jerry (2002) Rethinking Roman History. Cambridge: Oleander Press.
b i o g ra p h i ca l n o t e
pau l ca r t l e d g e is Professor of Greek History in the Faculty of Classics, and
a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. His most recently published book is
Alexander the Great.The Hunt for a New Past (2004, Pan Macmillan). Other recent
publications include The Spartans. An Epic History (second edition 2003, Pan
Macmillan). Current research interests include a history of ancient Greek political
thought from Homer to Plutarch. Address: Clare College, University of
Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1TL, UK. [email: pac1001@cam.ac.uk]
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