Among the many claims about the field of Classics made in the New York Times' lengthy profile of Princeton Classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta was that “Classics as we know it today is a creation of the 18th and 19th centuries.” As has already been pointed out, it's a claim that only holds up if we allow the phrase 'Classics as we know it today' to do a lot of work. Classics as a modern academic field within a modern, research-intensive university system may well owe its origins to the emergence of the modern research university in 19th-century Germany. But Europeans have been turning back to classical cultures of the Greeks and the Romans pretty much since Rome fell.
So much is clear from more or less every stage of European history, from the Dark Ages, when monks kept the classical literary tradition alive by copying Greek and Latin manuscripts; through the Renaissance, when humanists like Politian translated and emulated classical writings; to the Enlightenment, when, as Rachel Poser, the author of the New York Times piece, puts it, “a sort of mania” for Greece and Rome took hold of the intellectual classes. The idea Europeans simply invented the classical tradition out of whole cloth in the Renaissance is, in other words, contradicted by virtually the entire history of European culture before then.
It might be objected at this point, as a last-gasp effort to save Poser from what seems like a fairly obvious clanger, that her focus was on the United States, not Europe. 'How these two old civilizations became central to American intellectual life,' she writes (with my added emphasis) 'is a story that begins not in antiquity, and not even in the Renaissance, but in the Enlightenment.' So perhaps her hypothesis isn't that a relationship with Greco-Roman culture became central to European culture only in the 18th and 19th centuries (after all, that's plainly wrong); but simply that Greece and Rome only became big in American culture during the Enlightenment.
Now, that's obviously true, but it's true for what should have been a fairly obvious reason. Greco-Roman culture only becomes baked into American culture and institutions during the Enlightenment because that's when the United States developed into an independent nation. In other words, there was no United States of America before 1789, and there weren't even any permanent Anglo settlements in North America until 1607. Depending on where precisely you place the Enlightenment, that makes it inevitable that the Greek and Roman classics won't have a big presence in American life before then.
But still, wouldn't the kind of engagement with Greek and Roman history that is on show in the Federalist Papers have been impossible without the Enlightenment? When colonial Americans did wrestle with the Greco-Romans, didn't they always do so in an Enlightenment vein? Well, no. According to Eric Adler, Greek and Latin formed a large part of the curricula of the colonial colleges. And they were taught in a way that reflected two traditions, humanism and scholasticism, that stretch back well before the Enlightenment.
They were, in fact, taught largely in a Christian vein. This brings us to a fact about Western cultural history that's so obvious that we are, it would seem, no longer capable of seeing it. The Europeans that settled North America in the Early Modern period were, almost to a man, Christians; and Christianity is a religion with roots in the ancient Mediterranean world. When the British settled North America, their religious and educational elites brought the study of Greek and Latin with them in large part because many of their holy texts (the Gospels; influential translations like the Septuagint and Jerome's Vulgate; the works of the Church Fathers) were written in those languages.
We can, as it happens, actually test the thesis that, had Europeans come to the Americas before the Enlightenment, they would have brought an interest in the Greco-Roman classics with them. We can do this because, as you might be aware, Europeans (mainly Spanish and Portuguese) did actually arrive in the Americas well before anyone's starting-point for the Enlightenment. And, sure enough, if we look at Spanish accounts of their encounters with local people, we find references to Greek and Roman historiography. Many of these accounts were, of course, written by priests of the Christian religion, a religion which, it bears repeating, was a central part of the Europeans' cultural inheritance and which has its origins in the Greco-Roman world.
The real reason that Greece and Rome play such a significant role in the culture of the nascent United States, then, should be fairly obvious. Early Americans (at least the educated ones) talked about Greece and Rome because they came from Europe, and European culture was rooted in the Greco-Roman past. European settlers in the Americas, from Quebec to Buenos Aires, brought European culture with them, and European culture had a significant classical component. The specifically Enlightenment style of classicising engaged in by men like Georgia founder James Oglethorpe, whose utopian schemes were influenced by Plato, was simply the latest wave of classical influence. That it involved engagement with the classics was, in itself, more of a continuation of pre-existing European cultural habits than anything fundamentally novel.
All of this should, to repeat, be fairly obvious to anyone who knows anything about global cultural history. But the power of the ideology that currently has a stranglehold on US colleges is considerable; so considerable, in fact, that it leads college professors to write statements that any layman can see are plainly false. For Rebecca Futo Kennedy, for example, of Denison College, Ohio, modern Americans ‘are no more or no less the heirs of the ancient Greeks than they are the heirs of ancient China.'
In fact, Americans are clearly more indebted to ancient Greece than they are to ancient China. Their monumental architecture is Hellenizing in style; banks and state capitols look vaguely like the Parthenon, not the Foguang Temple. Modern Americans' political system was created by men who drew on and discussed Polybius and Plutarch, not Confucius and Shang Yang. The higher registers of their main language, English, is full of borrowings from Greek, not Mandarin. And the holiest text of the dominant religion (the New Testament, Christianity) is written in koine Greek, not Old Chinese.
Once again, virtually everyone who hasn't spent too much time around a modern American Humanities department knows this, and knows why this is the case. Americans are more indebted to ancient Greece than to ancient China because the United States was created largely by Europeans; and European culture, for stunningly obvious reasons, has always been more indebted to ancient Greece than to ancient China.
But this simple fact destroys one of the central contentions of the extreme 'social justice' approach to Classics profiled in Poser's New York Times piece. This contention, as Poser describes it, is that ideas about the classical tradition 'cannot be separated from the discourses of nationalism, colorism and progress that were taking shape during the modern colonial period, as Europeans came into contact with other peoples and their traditions.' 'Enlightenment thinkers created a hierarchy with Greece and Rome, coded as white, on top, and everything else below,' she goes on. And she quotes Harvard professor Paul Kosmin: 'That exclusion,' he tells her 'was at the heart of Classics as a project.'
This is wrong-headed in any number of ways. For a start, as the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has had to remind historians, the idea that exclusion, inter-group violence, and slavery was a product of the Enlightenment gets things exactly the wrong way round. One of the things that most clearly distinguishes Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment cultures is precisely their relative inclusivity and pacifism, not to mention their distaste for slavery, an eccentricity that in itself sets them apart from virtually all previous civilisations.
But the simplest way we can see that the radical revisionist view is wrong is by going back to the obvious facts about Western cultural history that I've referred to in this post. The new would-be orthodoxy is that the classical tradition 'cannot be separated' from ideas that took shape in the modern colonial period. In fact it can, as a simple glance at the classical tradition before the modern colonial period makes clear.
