Ongoing Relevance: Ancient Greek Culture and Its Impact On

ONGOING RELEVANCE: ANCIENT GREEK CULTURE AND ITS IMPACT ON

AMERICAN PROFESSIONALS AND AMERICAN PUBLIC MEMORY

A Project

Presented to the faculty of the Department of History

California State University, Sacramento

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

History

(Public History)

Caroline Graham Whyler

SPRING 2018

Caroline Graham Whyler

ONGOING RELEVANCE: ANCIENT GREEK CULTURE AND ITS IMPACT ON

AMERICAN PROFESSIONALS AND AMERICAN PUBLIC MEMORY

A Project

Caroline Graham Whyler

Approved by:

______, Committee Chair Christopher J. Castañeda, PhD.

______, Second Reader Despina M. Kreatsoulas, MA.

______Date

iii

Student: Caroline Graham Whyler

I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and that this project is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for the project.

______, Graduate Coordinator ______Anne Lindsay, PhD. Date

Department of History

Abstract

ONGOING RELEVANCE: ANCIENT GREEK CULTURE AND ITS IMPACT ON

AMERICAN PROFESSIONALS AND AMERICAN PUBLIC MEMORY

Caroline Graham Whyler

Statement of Problem

This project will prove that Ancient Greeks were not simply a fantastical civilization relegated only to the past. They remain deeply still relevant and influential to American public memory.

Sources of Data

I will use three different sources of data. The first is the works of Homer, which are referenced constantly throughout the project. In addition, I will use secondary sources that reflect the relationship between Ancient Greece and memory. The third type of source that I will draw from, are six oral history interviews that I personally conducted.

Conclusions Reached

I discovered that the Ancient Greeks remain relevant in our modern society because

Americans can relate to their legacy and ongoing importance. The Ancient Greeks were extremely important in the promotion of the humanist philosophy, which enabled both their successes and failures to be prevalent in American Public Memory.

______, Committee Chair Christopher J. Castañeda

______Date

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Preface: Introduction to a Project ……………………….……………………………….ix

Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………....xi

Illustrations ……………………………………………………………………………...xii

Chapter

1. MEMORY AND THE VERY DISTANT PAST: A STUDY OF ANCIENT GREEK

COLLECTIVE MEMORY THROUGH MODERN LENSES ………………………..1

2. PROJECT NARRATIVE FOR ORAL HISTORY OF AMERICAN

PROFESSIONALS ………………………………………………...…………………16

3. RESULTS OF RESEARCH ON THE IMPACT OF ANCIENT GREEK CULTURE

ON AMERICAN PROFESSIONALS ………………………………………………..25

4. ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSION ON THE ONGOING RELEVANCE OF

ANCIENT GREEK CULTURE AND ITS IMPACT ON AMERICAN

PROFESSIONALS AND PUBLIC MEMORY………………………………………32

Appendix A. Self Interview with Caroline Whyler (Author) …………………………...40

Appendix B. Oral History Interview with Timothy Sandefur …………………………..49

Appendix C. Oral History Interview with Andrea Eis …………………………………..82

vii

Appendix D. Oral History Interview with Harriet Stratis ……………………………...104

Appendix E. Oral History Interview with Renee Pappas ……………………………...130

Appendix F. Oral History Interview with Col. Rose Mary Sheldon…………………..159

Appendix G. Oral History Interview with Mary Louise Hart …………………………186

Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………..….205

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PREFACE:

Introduction to a Project

Interest in the subject of memory and relevance of the Ancient Greeks evolves from years of academic passion and the education that I gained along the way. I was inspired to consider this project by Despina M. Kreatsoulas of The Politismos Museum of

Greek History. I wanted to do an oral history project, and she suggested the idea of interviewing American professionals about the impact that the Ancient Greeks have had on American society. My decision to research and write my thesis on this subject was reached with finality when I realized that memory would play a pivotal role in the subject. Only upon conducting the interviews did I realize that I needed to expand

Ancient Greek history to include Byzantine and Modern Greek history. A study of the impact of one particular time period on the modern day cannot be studied in isolation since it is inextricably linked to the times that came before and after it.

I have learned the importance of understanding the author of a work, especially during my graduate studies. Being aware of the author’s background, where he or she was educated, and who he or she is associated with helps to clarify the academic choices he or she made. For this reason I feel it is important to summarize my history, how I came to study the subject, and why I feel it is relevant. It can be found as Appendix A. I originally wrote a chapter that was dedicated to my reasons for choosing this project.

Instead, I decided that it would make more sense within the scope of my project to answer the questions that I eventually posed to my narrators.

The reader would not only get to know me, but also start to formulate an understanding of the questions that form the crux of my research.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Despina M. Kreatsoulas of The Politismos Museum of

Greek History. Not only did she help me in every step of the process, she was always a wealth of knowledge and encouragement.

I would like to thank the faculty and staff at the California State University,

Sacramento, History Department. Especially, Dr. Christopher Castañeda, and Dr. Anne

Lindsay who allowed to me take on this non-traditional project. LoriAnn Rodriguez, also deserves recognition for all of those times that I would come in with questions, and she would always find a solution for me.

I would like to thank Dante, who has been a constant source of encouragement and inspiration since the first day of our graduate career.

I would like to thank John and Brittany for always congratulating me on successes, and faithfully listening to my meltdowns during times of doubt.

Lastly, I would like to thank my parents. Words cannot express just how much this project is as much theirs, as it is mine.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Illustration 1: Comparison of manly Greek to an effeminate Persian from the film 300.

xii 1

Chapter 1

Memory and the Very Distant Past: A Study of Ancient Greek Collective Memory through Modern Lenses

Introduction

Memory is commonly used in the study of the recent past; however, it can also be used in the study of ancient history. The ancient record becomes more susceptible to loss and distortion as study goes further back, but the study of the ancient past can be impacted by collective memory, even when all of the people of the time have long since passed. Amos Funkenstein writes, “No memory, not even the most intimate and personal, can be disconnected from society, from the language and the symbolic system molded by the society over many generations.”1 Historians must consider not only the impact of the collective memory of ancient peoples, but also the impact of modern peoples’ current perceptions of the ancient past. For this reason, the connection between memory and ancient history is just as varied and useful as the connection between memory and contemporary historical events.

Since the core of my work depends on the public memory of the Ancient Greeks,

The Politismos Museum of Greek History is the ideal candidate with whom to receive this oral history project. The Politismos Museum of Greek History is an online museum that focuses on the history and culture of Greece from antiquity to modernity. The online museum opportunities to learn about the Greeks from the comfort of one’s smartphone, computer, or tablet. Politismos has a strong online presence. It also hosts a variety of

1 Amos Funkenstein, “On Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness,” History and Memory 1, no. 1. (1989), 7.

2 pop-up exhibits and lectures that are curated by experts from both the United States and

Greece. Politismos is also working on children’s programs that will be accessible to children, both physically and online, and allow them to learn about Greece. Not only will it allow children to embrace new cultures, it will also be affordable for many school’s departments.

In Greek, “politismos” is equivalent to “civilization” and “culture.” Throughout history Greeks have made extraordinary discoveries and contributions in science, philosophy, art, education, mathematics, government, literature, and architecture.

Intellectual and moral refinement in the modern world are indebted to the Greek civilization.

The term “politismos” encompasses all that the Museum wants people to understand about the Greeks. It is a term related to the Greek spirit and to overall cultural progress. Moreover, as “politismos” is characterized by a diversity of cultural traits, so is

The Politismos Museum of Greek History. The goals and endeavors of the Museum expand to a variety of fields. Culture continues to advance, and The Politismos Museum of Greek History continues to adjust, and advance its content in an effort to keep pace.

As this chapter will prove, the same themes that are used to analyze modern historical societies can be used to study the ancient world. Since ancient history is deeply affected by collective memory, it is impossible to properly study the Ancient Greeks without a solid understanding of the influence of collective memory on the written record. As a result, Ancient Greek collective memory can be studied through the lenses of literature, landscape, and the concept of landscape as a separate entity.

By the term landscape, I refer to monuments, sites, and locations that have cultural significance to people of the region—the Acropolis, the Washington Monument, or the Pyramids of Giza. These are grandiose examples, but less prominent spaces can be just as meaningful. For Native Americans the landscape might be the plains where their ancestors once lived. For my family it is the land that has been a part of us for five generations. The outstanding nature of the site and the number of people affected are not the point. Landscape encompasses any location significant to any number of people that has impacted them in a cultural sense. These areas are considered separate entities. A cultural population can be studied through the lens of the landscape, and the landscape can be studied through the lens of the people, but one cannot be studied without the other.

The interrelated nature of history and memory is as ancient as history itself. In fact, it is a relationship that has its foundations in Greek mythology. The correlation starts to form in Greek etymology. Mnema is associated with the idea of memory and memorialization. Historia is often seen interchangeably with logos or narrative. A historian is called a suggrapheus (one who writes down facts), logographos, or historikos. In Greek mythology Mnemosyne, also known as Memory, is the mother of the Greek muses. Clio, the muse of history, is the daughter of memory, which gives the relation of history and memory ancient credibility and association.2

At the time of the Ancient Greeks, the line between history and memory was almost nonexistent. Historical works were part of an oral tradition. History was much

3 Attilio Favorini, “History, Collective Memory, and Aeschylus’ ‘The Persians,’” Theatre Journal 55, no. 1, 2003, 99.

4 more narrative than analysis, and as much a work recalled from memory than from the written word. Ancient Greek historians were as motivated to tell a good story as they were to relay actual historical facts. That should not be considered a criticism of the work they did, because historians of ancient history are indebted to these individuals. The method of historical writing was simply different from, and not as stringent as, the modern form of historical writing.

Studying and Deciphering Ancient Greek Collective Memory

No study of the relationship between history and memory can begin without the understanding of Paul Connerton’s work “The Seven Types of Forgetting.” Connerton uses seven categories to illustrate the distinctions of forgetting. The categories include: repressive erasure, prescriptive forgetting, forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity, structural amnesia, forgetting as annulment, forgetting as planned obsolescence, and finally, forgetting as humiliated silence.3

Connerton explains that repressive erasure and prescriptive forgetting are tools of states and ruling bodies.4 Formation of new identity and structural amnesia are more varied, and typically used by smaller groups.5 Annulment can apply to both large and small groups. Planned obsolescence is the product of members of an economic system.

Finally, humiliated silence is seen more commonly in civil society.6 These seven types of forgetting are instrumental when studying all aspects of history, including the Ancient

Greeks.

3 Paul Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting,” Memory Studies, accessed April 19, 2017. 59. 4 Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting”, 61. 5 Ibid., 64. 6 Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting”, 67.

As an example of repressive erasure, Connerton uses the elimination of noble titles post-French Revolution, which helped bring an end to the ancien régime.7

Connerton also contends that curators promote certain time periods, which is a form of repressive erasure. He cites an example as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New

York. The Met promotes Greek, Roman, Egyptian, European, and High Renaissance art, but relegates Medieval, Oriental, and non-Western art to a position of secondary importance.8 Covert acts such as this are dangerous, as they allow the act of forgetting.

In another example, Connerton refers to archives that are controlled by the state.

In an era that is facing an overload of information, an archive allows knowledge to be safely stored away, and in effect, makes it safe for people to forget the information. This is an example of forgetting as annulment.9

In the article “History, Collective Memory, and Aeschylus ‘The Persians,’”

Attilio Favorini discusses how the ancient play The Persians was both a coping mechanism for wartime defeat and a way of forming a new identity that would promote

Greek nationalism and pride in the wake of shame. Favorini uses the play as a way to study the collective memory of Ancient Greeks. Through close analysis of the play, he surmises that Aeschylus tried to balance the use of history and memory. He wanted to remain close to the facts, but also spin the story in a way that would allow the Greeks to move past the tragedy. Favorini writes, “As a historian, then, Aeschylus wanted to objectify the experience and draw lessons from it. But as a memorialist, Aeschylus

7 Ibid., 60. 8 Ibid., 61. 9 Ibid., 66.

6 wanted to hold the experience close and repeat it.”10 At the time Aeschylus was writing

The Persians, history and collective memory were one and the same. Aeschylus, according to Favorini, can arguably be seen as the turn of history from an oral to a written tradition.

Aeschylus, being not only a playwright but also a soldier, had much invested in the idea of shaping perceptions about the Persian Wars. He had his own political messages that he was trying to promote, but those are vague and not within the scope of this project. The goal of Aeschylus was two-fold. First, he wanted the soldiers who fought to feel no shame. Second, he wanted younger generations to feel pride when they looked upon their parents and grandparents. This sugarcoating, and almost celebration of defeat, is a common theme of memory, especially in times when history is passionately contested.

Maurice Halbwachs, in his work On Collective Memory, sets forth a similar idea when he writes, “…there is a kind of retrospective mirage by which a great number of us persuade ourselves that the world of today has less color and is less interesting than it was in the past,…”11 People who grew up with the aftermath of the war, but who were not actually a part of it, would be unable to comprehend all of the hardships. Those who did personally suffer the hardships might have chosen to forget, or at least pretended to forget, the disturbing or humiliating things they remembered. David Blight, in his book

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, writes, “Just as reminiscence

10. Favorini, “Aeschylus,”107. 11 Maurice Halbwachs. On Collective Memory, ed. Lewis Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 48.

7 reflects essentially the need to tell our own stories, so too crusades to control history demonstrate the desire to transmit to the next generation a protective and revitalizing story.”12 An example of Blight’s quote is how the South attempted to control history after defeat in the Civil War. There is a well-known, but uncitable, phrase that “history is written by the victors.” The South tried unsuccessfully to counteract this premise with an intellectual movement that played up the fact that they were victims.

National victimization in the wake of defeat was also used by Greeks. The

Greeks found commemoration in a past that was gone, but not forgotten, and most certainly sugarcoated.

Another article that covers the relationship between collective memory and the

Ancient Greeks is “Destruction and Memory on the Athenian Acropolis” by Rachel

Kousser. Kousser takes a different approach than Favorini and looks specifically at the

Athenian Acropolis. She uses the site of the Acropolis to study how the Greeks coped with defeat and how they commemorated the sacking of the old Acropolis. Kousser argues that the display of damaged objects, and then a shift to monument building, demonstrates the shift in collective memory that surrounded the sacking of the Acropolis, and the Persian Wars as a whole. Kousser studies this relationship with the help of

Orientalist methodology and the separation of identities between the barbaric eastern

Persians and the civilized and victimized western Greeks.

12 David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 291.

Sacking old and sacred places was not an uncommon practice in ancient warfare.

It was a quick and efficient way to break the morale of the enemy, and it was employed by both sides. However, the notion that the practice was barbarous and indicative of

Persian impiety and proclivity to violence did not take shape until the sacking of the

Illustration 1: Comparison of manly Greek to an effeminate Persian from the film 300.

Acropolis in 480 BCE, 13 and even more so when the rebuilding of the Acropolis commenced nearly 30 years later.14

The Athenian people coped with, represented, and sometimes forgot the tragedy of the Persian sacking by commemorating it. Commemoration took two forms. The first was validating the event by spotlighting the Acropolis’ damaged terrain. The second was by depicting the Persians as barbaric, cruel, uncivilized, and effeminate (illus. 1)15 in the

13 Rachel Kousser, “Destruction and Memory on the Athenian Acropolis.” The Art Bulletin 91, no. 3 (2009), 264. 14 Kousser, “Destruction and Memory”, 269.

15 Photo: N.d. Web. 15 May 2017.

9 literature and art of the time. The film 300 is a modern rendition of the story of Greek resistance at Thermopylae against the Persians. The film portrays an ancient stereotype about the effeminate nature of Persian peoples. The movie demonstrates how modern stereotypes and biases can change how history in the ancient world is perceived. In ancient times, this illustration would have been seen as a way to slander the “uncivilized” and “barbaric” Persians.

Different Greek leaders have been credited with the strategy that, after the sacking, the burnt buildings and temples would lay in disrepair in commemoration. As a result, the ruins became linked to memory, and the remains of the buildings a testament to Persian impiety and violence.16

The Parthenon, as we know it today, was rebuilt with the understanding that the new temple would be constructed amongst the ruins in order to emphasize the destruction. Damaged pieces were used to rebuild the new Parthenon, both out of pragmatism and sentimentality. Building materials were difficult to acquire at the time, but also, it demonstrated the poetic message that the new and spectacular Acropolis and

Parthenon were built on the stones of a defeated past. With this stroke of genius, the defeated past became a belief in a victorious future.17

As more time passed, buried and burned statues were discovered. It was not uncommon to bury statues since they were believed to be vessels for the spirits of gods or supernatural entities, and they were buried out of respect. However, another argument can be made. Burying the statues could be an act of trying to forget them and the defeat

16 Kouser, “Destruction and Memory”, 269. 17 Ibid., 271.

10 they represented.18 Generations after the sacking, Greeks would not dwell on a defeat that was so far in the past, particularly since the rebuilt Acropolis symbolized Greek victory and power. Perhaps the attack needed to be forgotten for the sake of a strong national identity and proud collective memory of their past.

Nicole Loraux, in her book The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in

Ancient Athens, discusses memory and forgetting in late fifth century Athens with an emphasis on the reconciliation agreement between the oligarchs and democrats in 403

B.C. The reconciliation agreement ensured that Athenians would not recall previous events that occurred during the rule of the Thirty Tyrants. She discusses how this undisrupted history of Athens, with the help of erasure, managed to form a new history where harmony was more likely to be reached.19 Although most historians argue that erasure is the disdain of their profession, Loraux focuses on the positive aspects that came from the amnesty clause. First, it promoted feelings of brotherhood and unity, especially in the generations to follow. Also, forgetting the past eliminated blame, especially in a judicial setting. If trials did not take place, then polarizations of opinions and divisions in the population did not occur.20 The agreement not only shaped how

Athenians viewed themselves, but also how we view the Athenians.

The Divided City illustrates how memory is not only used to study specific events, but also to study landscapes as entities. Loraux’s study confirms Connerton’s research

18 Kouser, “Destruction and Memory”, 272. 19 Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: Forgetting in the Memory of Athens (New York: Zone Books, 2002) 145. 20 Loraux, The Divided City, 158.

11 that outlines the different means by which people forget, and demonstrates that multiple types of forgetting can coalesce.

Repressive erasure is often utilized by totalitarian governments. The repressive erasure method of forgetting was employed by Athenians to forget the rule of the Thirty

Tyrants. Connerton writes,

…rulers and other powerful persons who at their death or after a revolution were declared to be ‘enemies of the state’: images of them were destroyed, statues of them were razed to the ground, and their names were removed from inscriptions, with the explicit purpose of casting all memory of them into oblivion.21

Prescriptive forgetting is similar to repressive erasure. Connerton uses the events of 403 B.C. as an example of prescriptive forgetting.22 How prescriptive forgetting and repressive erasure differ is that prescriptive forgetting has the nuance of “forgetting for the greater good.” It was in the best interests of everyone, and the livelihoods of the polis and its people would be better off, if the Thirty Tyrants were forgotten.23

Another of Connerton’s views demonstrated in Loraux’s The Divided City is of forgetting as constitutive in the formation of a new identity. The Thirty Tyrants were the pro-Spartan conservative government that held control of Athens for over a year after the end of the Peloponnesian War. Their oppressive rule is documented to have killed 1,500

Athenian residents. Many moderates fled the city and returned with an army to regain control of the city at the Battle of Piraeus in 403 B.C.24 Although the Athenians managed

21 Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting,” 60. 22 Ibid., 62. 23 Ibid. 24 Encyclopedia Britannica, 2011. The Thirty Tyrants.

12 to regain control of their city, it came at a great cost. To celebrate the fact that they had regained the city meant that they had to acknowledge that Sparta, a longtime rival of

Athens, had controlled the city. With Athens as the center of Greek civilization, this could have caused a rift that might have split the city-states that fought on opposite sides of the Peloponnesian War. If everyone forgot the pro-Spartan regime in Athens, a reconciliation between Sparta and Athens was possible and a war across all of Greece was prevented. Forgetting the rule of the Thirty Tyrants made possible the formation of a whole and unified Hellenic world.

Gordon Shrimpton in History and Memory in Ancient Greece grapples with the relationship between human memory and historiography in Ancient Greece. He first discusses how the historians of the time tried to tell the story of their region in a flowery narrative form.25 He takes a different approach than other historians. Whereas most historians feel as if society wants to forget certain aspects of the past, he credits the

Greeks with the forethought to consciously remember the past. Shrimpton goes on to explain how Ancient Greek historians shifted from war stories to histories of specific individuals. He argues that it was the community, not the individual that was the arbiter of history.

Collective forgetting has a different meaning for Daniel Schacter in The Seven

Sins of Memory. Schacter writes that it is important to understand the way that memory works. Memory is not infallible, but it is also not without its uses and credibility.

Schacter goes into detail about the sins of misattribution, suggestibility, and bias. He

25 Gordon S. Shrimpton and Kathryn Mary Gillis, History and Memory in Ancient Greece (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 28.

13 points out that although memory has its distortions, ways exist to counteract those distortions.

Schacter offers an insightful concept. “Sometimes we forget the past and at other times we distort; some disturbing memories haunt us for years.”26 This quote goes to the core of the relationship between memory and history. Schacter believes that it is not simply a matter of who was in power. It is also about how they were able to change the perceptions of the masses. “History is written by the winners.” Perhaps the people might have needed to have their memories and past reaffirmed, or maybe they might have needed to feel that they had a collective memory with others.

The study of memory and the Ancient Greeks would be incomplete without the research of Jan Assmann. In his book, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing,

Remembrance, and Political Imagination, Assmann argues with regard to cultural memory, “... the contents of this memory, the ways in which they are organized, and the length of time they lasted are for the most part not a matter of internal storage or control but of the external conditions imposed by society and cultural contexts.”27 Simply put, collective memory is shaped by society. One of Assman’s main assertions is that cultural memory is a creation of society, rather than something that naturally happens. Cultural memory is created by repetition and interpretation, which helps to form cultural continuity. A pivotal link exists between power and forgetting, whether or not it is deliberate forgetting that leads to structural amnesia and impacts how society sees itself

26 Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 1. 27 Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 5.

14 in the past and in the modern day.28 With terminology such as “structural amnesia” and

“deliberate forgetting,” it is a safe assumption that Assmann found inspiration in the work of Connerton.

In his work, Assmann discusses how The Iliad unified a divided Greece when it faced the Persians. When Alexandros of Macedonia tried to negotiate a treaty that would make the Athenians subservient to the Persian emperor, they refused and stated that if even one Athenian remained standing, they would be willing to die to remain Greek.29

At this time, The Iliad was widely distributed. It served as a way for the Greeks to identify as one collective people, rather than a group of rival city-states.

But why The Iliad? In The Iliad, Homer depicts how all of Greece was united against a common enemy. The Trojans were portrayed as barbaric and the instigators of the affair because the Trojan prince Paris had stolen Helen from a Greek man. Parallels can be drawn to the Greeks facing Alexandros, the negotiator for the Persian king, five hundred years later.30

Conclusion

“It’s ancient history” is an idiom used when describing an event or information that is irrelevant because it is outdated or forgotten. I believe this is a telling reminder of how many people feel about the field of ancient history—that it is no longer relevant.

Using memory as a lens to study the ancient world is a way to show people that the

28 Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, 55. 29 Ibid., 247. 30 Ibid., 248.

15 ancient world has, whether they are aware of it or not, impacted their lives, and that they can draw comparisons between the distant past and the modern day.

As a historian, it is distressing to think about the impact that memory has had on history. We strive for the truth, but the absolute truth is an unobtainable standard. The past is riddled with misattributions, susceptibilities, and biases. “The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon… control of the past depends above all on the training of memory.”31

Defeatist postmodernists believe that historical sources are too biased to have any credibility, because they are too riddled with the biases of others. If nothing else, that proves that the ancient world, ripe with biases, is the perfect time period in which to study the influence of memory. Just because ancient peoples do not have a human voice, it does not mean it is impossible to learn what they thought and what they wanted to forget. Human memory is like a sieve, straining out some things while keeping others. In the end, something new remains. As we move forward into the future, new ways will be found to aid us in interpreting the ancient past. The work of the historian, and especially the ancient historian, will never be complete.

31 Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory, 138.

Chapter 2

Project Narrative for Oral History of American Professionals

As with most thesis projects, mine began with a broad idea, and then I refined it as I progressed. I knew that I wanted to interview individuals who worked in professions that had been influenced by the Ancient Greeks. I believed they would be significant in trying to understand the impact that the Ancient Greeks have had on American public memory.

During the conceptual part of the project, I worked closely with Despina

Kreatsoulas of The Politismos Museum of Greek History. Since this was an idea that she initially proposed, and a project that would ultimately come under the care of her institution, she had contacts in mind. We agreed that it would be important to interview people in professions associated with disciplines that were deeply influenced by the

Greeks, including history, art, cultural relations, law, the military, and museum work.

This would provide a broad sample of professionals to evaluate how the Greeks have influenced the United States.

This is not a standard oral history project. Generally, oral histories are created because of a lack of knowledge in the archival record and to give a human perspective to historical events.32 This project not only studies a time period that is too long ago to do that, but is also a secondary account through the minds of the narrators. I am not asking an Ancient Greek about his or her life. I am asking modern Americans about their perspectives about the Greeks and their impact on America.

32 Donald A. Ritchie, Doing Oral History (NY: Oxford University Press, 2015), 35.

Another purpose of oral history projects is to give voice to a community that would otherwise be silenced.33 I do not believe that the professionals have a lack of agency in making their voices heard, but I do believe it is a community. It is a community of people aligned under the common goal of ensuring that ancient civilizations and principles are not forgotten.

Assuming that not everyone I contacted would be able or willing to participate in this project, I sent emails to eight people and successfully interviewed six of them.

 Timothy Sandefur: Lawyer at the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, Arizona  Andrea Eis: Artist, and Professor of Cinema Studies at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan  Harriet Stratis: Senior Research Conservator in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois  Renee Pappas: Public Relations Strategist in Chicago, Illinois  Colonel Rose Mary Sheldon: Ph.D. and Professor of Ancient History at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia  Mary Louise Hart: Associate Curator at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California

I was fortunate to have worked with Despina Kreatsoulas at The Politismos

Museum of Greek History. Kreatsoulas was an invaluable resource because of the extensive networking system that she had developed in the process of creating

Politismos, and her access to so many people connected to Politismos and the Greek community, in general. Perhaps more important was her willingness to take time from her busy schedule to help me. Kreatsoulas had met several of the potential interviewees.

She made the initial contact with them by email, and I followed up with further communications and interview planning. Andrea Eis was one of my recommendations.

33 Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 36

She had curated an online exhibit that was published on the Politismos website. I asked

Kreatsoulas if she thought Eis would be a suitable interviewee, and she agreed wholeheartedly.

I sent several emails to, and made several attempts to telephone, a Byzantine cuisine chef in Chicago and Dr. Stylianos Spyridakis, my former advisor and Ancient

Historian at the University of California, Davis. I also tried to meet personally with

Spyridakis during his office hours. I was never able to reach these two individuals.

The standard for conducting oral history interviews is defined by the Oral History

Association. The number of interviews required for a thorough project depends on different variables, including considerations such as time span, funding, staff size, subject matter, and length of the interviews.34

I decided that for the purposes of my project, six to eight interviews would suffice, each being 45 minutes to one hour in length. The six interviews that I conducted ranged in time from 37 to 61 minutes.

As a general rule, interviews should not be longer than 1-1/2 to 2 hours.35 The interviewing process is tedious for both the interviewer and the narrator. Even one hour is a long time for the narrator to speak, and for the interviewer to listen while coming up with follow-up questions. If the interview becomes too lengthy, the narrator might become impatient or detached, and the interviewer might become bored or distracted.

Either situation runs the risk of offending the other person.

34 Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 37. 35 Ibid.

There were both advantages and disadvantages to undertaking an original oral history project. I was free to construct my own set of questions that would cover the general information that I hoped to elicit from the interviewees. Several revisions of questions were drafted before I was satisfied with the final interview questions. I typically started with a question that was too broad, but in the process of narrowing the scope of the question, I was unintentionally leading the narrator to a preconceived answer. At this point, I would essentially start over. It also took a great deal of thought to formulate questions appropriate for, and applicable to, all of the different professions.

I wanted to follow an outline for my project, while at the same time giving the narrators the freedom to address the questions as they saw fit.

The conversations started out like standard oral histories, because I wanted to get a sense of where the people came from. I started each interview with a question about their lives growing up. This often flowed nicely into a conversation about their families, heritages, and educations; and naturally led to information about their work and connection to Greek culture.

I then asked them if they could see connections between the time periods they studied and today, or between the very distant past and the modern day. Although their responses varied in content, they all felt a connection existed. I switched from the theme of connections to the topic of misrepresentations and misconceptions surrounding Greek culture, both ancient and modern. They all agreed they were present, but disagreed on the degree of severity.

During the course of the first three interviews, I realized that I would not be able to keep this project centered exclusively on Ancient Greece. In hindsight, I felt I should have anticipated this. It is impossible to connect the ancient and modern day, while completely ignoring all that happened before and in between. Therefore, halfway through my interviews I decided to pose another question: “It seems as if the general public views Greek history as ending after the death of Alexander the Great, and not starting back up until independence was gained from the Ottoman Turks. Why do you think the time span in between is neglected?” This question seemed to capture the attention of the interviewees and allowed them to explain the gap, or in some cases the lack thereof, between the Greeks of ancient history and the Greeks of today.

As I hoped, and as I was striving to achieve, the questions drew connections between the Greeks of yesterday and today, spoke to misconceptions about Greek culture, and reflected on the relevance of the Greeks in modern western culture.

The interviewing process of the six interviews went smoothly. All of the interviews were conducted by phone. It is important to note that phone interviews are not the standard practice. It is believed that in-person interviews bring about better interaction between the interviewer and the narrator. Unfortunately, the narrators were spread across the country, which made in-person interviews impossible. To ensure that the interviews were as complete and intelligible as possible, I recorded them on two different devices. I used both a portable recorder and the recording function on my laptop computer.

At the beginning of the phone conversation, before recording had commenced, I briefly outlined how I planned to proceed with the interview. I told them that I would keep my presence on the recording to a minimum, because I wanted this recording to be about them and what they were saying. I had previously emailed the list of questions to each interviewee so they could think about their responses in advance. I asked them if they had been able to look over the questions, and if so, if they had any questions for me.

I informed them when I turned the recorders on. Once the interview started, I was careful not to interrupt them or their thoughts.

As is customary in oral history interviews, I took handwritten notes to aid in the transcription process. While some interviewers may ask for clarification of names, locations, or words in the course of the interview, others make a note and ask after the interview is over.36 I decided to ask questions after the interview to prevent any disruption for the narrator. At the conclusion of the interview, and after the recorder had been turned off, I quickly reviewed my notes and had them spell words and names and clarify portions of the interview that I had not understood. For example, the narrators might have been speaking rapidly or using Greek words that I was not familiar with. The transcription process was much easier because I had done this.

The transcription process for the interviews was straightforward. I interviewed six educated and articulate people who were successful in their respective fields. Since I was not always familiar with their areas of expertise or geographic backgrounds, I tried to take particular care in transcribing names and locations.

36 Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 58.

In the interest of clarity, I took the liberty of eliminating filler words, such as

“um,” “so,” “and,” and “then.” However, I left, in my opinion, enough to provide a sense of the narrators’ personalities and speech patterns. I eliminated false starts, incomplete thoughts, and corrected statements. If there was nothing gained by including the miscommunication, then I left it out to prevent ambiguity. I used my discretion in adding punctuation, not where it was grammatically correct, but where it would give correct emphasis to what was being said. For example, I might add a comma or dash to create a pause where there was a pause in the speech.

Lastly, I asked each of the narrators to sign a basic release form. The release, which is signed by the interviewer, narrator, and collection holder, states that each of the three parties understands their roles and responsibilities in the dissemination, collection, and care of the oral history. All six narrators signed the form, in addition to Despina

Kreatoulas, on behalf of The Politismos Museum of Greek History, and myself. Release forms are more critical when the subject matter has the potential to be controversial or sensitive. In some instances, narrators will place conditions or restrictions on the use of the information. For example, a restriction might be imposed that requires a certain time must pass before the information can be made public. Another example might be that the interview and transcript can be released to the public, but certain portions must be blacked out or omitted. There are no restrictions or conditions placed on my use of the six interviews, or the transcripts thereof, for this thesis project. The information will be made public in the scope of this project and will eventually become a part of the archives of The Politismos Museum of Greek History.

Upon completion of the transcription process, I emailed a copy of the transcribed interview to each of the respective narrators for his or her review. For Pappas and

Sheldon, I asked for clarification of specific portions that I could not decipher. I also encouraged all of the narrators to read through the transcribed document to check for accuracy, if they so desired.

Eis responded by email with several suggestions for revision. I misunderstood the name of one of the colleges she attended and made that change on the transcribed interview to reflect the correct school. She felt that one portion of the transcript needed clarification. Upon review of her proposed change, I agreed with her assessment and believed the modification would make that portion of the interview significantly more useful for the purposes of this thesis project. However, I did not feel that making the changes to the original followed prescribed methods of transcription. Instead, I included the changes referenced in her email within brackets, with a footnote, within the body of the original interview transcription.37 This method allows the reader to benefit from Eis’s clarification, while maintaining the integrity of the original interview. All of the remaining modifications proposed by Eis were either formatting or grammatical changes.

I felt these edits were merely cosmetic in nature, so I did not make them.

Sheldon responded by email and filled in a word that I had not been able to understand. She confirmed that the transcript was accurate.

37 Baylor University Institute for Oral History Style Guide: A Quick Reference for Editing Oral History Transcripts, Baylor Institute for Oral History, Baylor Institute for Oral History, 2015, 6.

Hart responded by email to specific questions I asked her. She provided me with the correct names of places she had visited in Greece, and also the correct year that she started working at The Getty. Hart approved the transcript otherwise.

Sandefur responded by email and provided me with the Greek phrase of his alma mater. He approved the transcript.

Pappas responded by email and provided me with the correct spelling of names and places. She made no other changes to the transcript.

Stratis responded by email that she had received the transcribed interview. She advised that she would review it and communicate any changes at a later date. I did not hear from her again. Although I found Stratis’s interview interesting, and she was one of only two narrators that was of Greek heritage, the information that she provided consisted of paper artifacts from a much later period than the Ancient Greeks. As a result, I did not include any of the information contained in her interview as a part of this thesis project.

Chapter 3

Results of Research on the Impact of Ancient Greek Culture on American Professionals

In the course of the interviews, I noticed that certain themes started to emerge.

Some of those themes were fairly specific--literature, misconceptions about Greek culture, and the cultural gap between the times of Alexander the Great and Greek independence. Other themes were more overarching—the relevance of Greek history and the concept of humanism in Greek culture.

The six interviewers all mentioned literature, particularly when the narrators discussed their educations. Many were inspired by the literature of the ancient world.

Sandefur, Eis, Sheldon, and Hart specifically mentioned Antigone, which was always brought up in the context of relevance to the modern day. I consider that significant.

The story of Antigone takes place in the context of the Theban Civil War. Creon, who is the new King, declares that his nephew, Eteocles, who sided with him, will be properly buried, while the rebel nephew, Polyneices, will not be granted the same respect.

Antigone defies Creon’s edict and buries her brother. Creon discovers this, and Antigone is thrown into a cave to die. Creon holds that he is within his legal right to punish

Polyneices since the young man led a foreign army to lay siege to Creon’s own city.

Antigone claims that it is the will of the gods that her brother be properly buried. It is a question of who is right, with both of their sins being that they are unwilling to compromise and see the other’s point of view.

Timothy Sandefur claims that Antigone is a representation of conscience and doing what is right even when the state disagrees. Considering that Sandefur is a lawyer and his specialty is liberty and citizens’ rights against the government, his opinion about, and appreciation of, Antigone is understandable. Sandefur concludes his thoughts with,

“… we still speak in the terms of ancient mythology, often without even realizing it because they had such tremendous influence on our society and our civilization.”38 He further states that in a nation where humanity is so deeply polarized, and the ability to compromise seems impossible, the story of Antigone still has major relevance in the modern day.

Andrea Eis, by contrast, is an artist and photographer who is inspired by Greek literature and myth. When she discusses her art she says:

I would refer to a Greek myth in the words that I would use on the sculptures. These photographs would have the words placed over them to make people think about the idea that the people of Greek myths and their experiences were not so separate from what we are experiencing today. There is a resonance and a relevance to their experience.39

She also describes how she creates installation art in order to emphasize the experience of

Greek myth. One of her pieces delves into the story of Antigone. Eis recreates

Antigone’s cave. You walk in and have a choice as to which path you will take. If you go one direction you see Creon’s point of view, and if you turn the other way you see

38 Timothy Sandefur, "Oral History Interview with Timothy Sandefur." Telephone interview by author. April 5, 2017, 63. 39 Andrea Eis. "Oral History Interview with Andrea Eis." Telephone interview by author. May 4, 2017, 86.

Antigone’s. You must turn your back on one way in order to see the other, which is supposed to represent their unyielding and uncompromising positions.

Another recurring topic throughout the project is misconceptions about Modern

Greek and Greek American culture. These concerns are covered most ardently by

Sandefur, Pappas, and Hart. Renee Pappas has spent her career promoting the acknowledgement of Greek contemporary art. She spent many years in Greece working to advance the contemporary art scene. Upon her return to the United States, she was discouraged to find that there was virtually no awareness of the art coming out of Greece, even among Greek Americans. Pappas continues talking about this lack of appreciation and expands it to include contemporary literature as well. She is confused and bewildered by what the American Greek schools are teaching, because “It appears that they don’t teach anything about contemporary Greek literature, art, or even music.”40

She is troubled that there is a pattern forming in the United States where Greek

Americans believe that Greek culture disappeared after their grandparents emigrated from the homeland.

Pappas talks in depth about the apparent ambivalence that Greek Americans have about their Greek heritage, and implies that Greek Americans are complicit in their forgetting and loss of culture. She seems to be in agreement with some of the other narrators in this regard.

Mary Louise Hart, who is an Associate Curator at the Getty Villa, has a different take on the situation. Hart expresses a different impression of modern society and the

40 Renee Pappas. “Oral History Interview with Renee Pappas.” Telephone Interview by Author. June 20, 2017, 153.

28 stereotypes that surround Greek and Greek American cultures. Some of the stereotypes she finds humorous, and not necessarily incorrect. She uses the film My Big Fat Greek

Wedding as an example. In the film, the Greek family has a very distinctive decorating aesthetic. The Greek flag is seen all over the house and yard, so you never have to guess about their heritage. Hart claims that she knows people who are very much like this.

However, she continues by saying she does not feel the Greeks are unique in this regard.

Every immigrant population that comes to the United States has to deal with ethnic depictions or profiling. As a whole, the Greeks and Greek Americans are usually portrayed as a happy-go-lucky, dish-breaking, Opa!-yelling, food-serving group of people.

Hart becomes serious when she mentions that there is a darkness to the Greek culture that is sometimes portrayed, but largely forgotten. “They have been through so much in their history through so many different peoples and still cling on to the essential meaning of life with great ferocity, I would say.”41

One misconception that is addressed throughout the interviews is the idea that

Greek history ended after the death of Alexander the Great, and did not resume until the

Greeks declared independence in 1821. Why is there such a disconnection between these time periods? Why are they not as well known or studied? Pappas, Sheldon, and Hart have interesting views on this subject.

41 Mary Louise Hart, "Oral History Interview with Mary Louise Hart." Telephone interview by author. July 17, 2017, 195.

Pappas explains that at the time of Greek independence, which happened in increments, there were many educated Greeks living outside the country in Vienna,

Trieste, Paris, etc. They did not want to deal with the bitterness and resentment caused by the long occupation by a foreign power. A way to avoid the acrimony was to emphasize Ancient Greece instead. Many of the intellectuals of the time had classical educations with knowledge of Greek language and history. These people presented their idea in different parts of Europe and launched a campaign to focus attention on Ancient

Greece. Baron de Coubertin helped to establish the revival of the ancient Olympic games, which not only helped to unify Greece, but to unify Europe as well. People could be proud of Ancient Greece’s history and overlook the degrading state of occupation.

Colonel Rose Mary Sheldon, a Professor of Ancient History at the Virginia

Military Institute, voices a similar view in discussing the Ottoman occupation of Greece.

“Your culture doesn’t get to reach its apogee.”42 Greek independence was gained, and the British gave aid to the Greeks in the hopes of protecting a romantic notion of Ancient

Greek democracy and cultural influence. Lord Byron and Percy Shelley fought in the war, motivated by their romantic notions of the country. Their works and actions helped to spark a flame of interest in the British people. The British helped to fight for an ideal of what Greece had been--the center of western civilization.

Hart adds a perspective derived from her involvement in the Getty Villa exhibition Heaven and Earth, which brought together a large collection of Byzantine art

42 Col. Rose Mary Sheldon, "Oral History Interview with Colonel Rose Mary Sheldon." Telephone interview by author. July 27, 2017, 174.

30 from around the world. The Greek American community flocked to the exhibit in far larger numbers than had previously visited the Museum, to see the extensive collection of

Ancient Greek artifacts. When I asked her why that was, she responded that it was due to the religious difference. The Ancients were pagans. The Byzantines were Christians.

This exhibit was far more relevant to the lives of Greek Americans because of the commonality of Christianity. During the exhibit’s opening reception, the Minister of

Culture sensed that Americans did not know Byzantine history. He felt that with the financial crisis looming in Greece, this exhibit would be a wonderful morale booster.

Show the people the beautiful works of art that came from a period of occupation. Show them that even then they were a culture to be proud of and a culture that has endured hardship and attempted appropriation. Many cultures continue to deal with occupation, so this concept is relevant to modern peoples throughout the world.

The primary question that I wanted to answer by researching this project is whether the Ancient Greeks are still relevant in the western world, and the reasons therefor. All of the narrators answered this question, but their responses were varied and covered politics, science, literature, law, art, history, philosophy, mythology, and culture.

What I gathered from the narratives is that it is not the specific things that the Greeks did that warrant their legacy, but rather, that their civilization transcends time and culture.

As Sheldon states, “…the Greeks beat you to it.”43

Sandefur states that what we can learn from history is that ideas have consequences. He believes that modern society is starting to see the ancient world as

43 Sheldon, “Oral History Interview”, 183.

31 almost evil. People have a difficult time seeing the Ancient Greeks in the context of ancient times. Instead, they analyze the morals of the Ancient Greeks through modern lenses. Judging past civilizations by modern standards is dangerous and unjust. It will inevitably make the ancient civilizations appear backward, immoral, and evil. Why the general public…

tends to disregard the importance of the Ancient Greeks, is because under the guidance of multi-culturalism and cultural relativism and postmodernism and all these fashionable doctrines that tell us that there are no shared human values – we’re all locked in culture and we can’t reach across cultural boundaries—they have no place for the Greek vision. The Greek vision is a humanist vision.44

Even though the narrators have their personal opinions as to how the Greeks have influenced American society, they all agree that the Ancient Greeks are relatable.

Humanism, which emphasizes the idea of common human needs, permeated the Ancient

Greek civilization. The Ancient Greeks were curious, industrious, ambitious, progressive, innovative, and intellectual. These are all traits in which Americans take pride, so there would naturally be a feeling of commonality.

44 Sandefur, “Oral History Interview”, 72.

Chapter 4

Analysis and Conclusion on the Ongoing Relevance of Ancient Greek Culture and Its Impact on American Professionals and Public Memory

The Ancient Greeks have captured the minds and imaginations of people throughout the modern world. People are fascinated with the Ancient Greeks because they can relate to them. The issues faced by the Ancients are not so different from the issues we face today, and they did so in a way that embraced human abilities.

It is the element of humanism that makes the Greeks relatable to the people of today. Humanism is the philosophy that humans, and not divine entities, are at the center of world events. This philosophy gives more personal agency to the human condition than does Judaism or Christianity, where God is the center of life.

The myths and legends of the Ancient Greek culture and legacy have engaged people in the modern day. Therefore, literature is a logical means to study the relationship between Ancient Greek humanism and the United States of today.

Greek myths have broadly spread throughout our society and culture. The reason for this must be answered in two parts. First, how did the literature and legends affect the people in ancient times? Second, how do the myths influence and relate to people in the modern-day United States?

According to Jan Assman in his work Cultural Memory and Early Civilization:

Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination, one of the reasons that the Ancient

Greeks have remained relevant into the modern day is because of their epic pieces of literature, The Iliad and The Odyssey. At the time that The Iliad was composed, the

Greeks (Héllenes) were facing domination and appropriation by the Persian Empire. It was The Iliad, a story that demonstrates the unity of the Greek city-states that was able to bring the Panhéllenes together to fight for the now-conscious idea of “Greekdom.”45 The

Greek people viewed these myths and their historical past as the same. Greeks vying for power tried to trace their genealogies and lineages back to the players of the heroic age.46

Remembrance and idolization of the heroic age—the mythological timeline in The Iliad and The Odyssey--form a bridge between the then modern times and the then distant past.

The Iliad, which covers the Trojan War, portrays the human-like qualities of the

Greek Pantheon. The gods were in control of the livelihoods of the Ancient Greek people, so the importance of understanding the gods and their personalities was tantamount to survival. Not only did the people need to know which god to pray to in any certain situation, they needed to know how to go about worshipping that specific god or goddess.

For example, if the people of Athens were praying for a successful battle, they would pray to Athena, goddess of war. They needed to know that one way to properly worship

Athena was a tribute at a place representative of her, such as her temple at the Acropolis.

Homer’s The Iliad demonstrates the personalities of the deities and their human natures. Mostly it demonstrates how the human natures of the gods and goddesses cause and exacerbate the Trojan War. At the top of the Pantheon of the Gods is Zeus, god of the sky. Zeus was famous for his extramarital affairs, as well as for his attempts to keep his celestial family united. This was not an easy task. He was not usually known for using his intelligence; however, consider this example. When he was given an apple

45 Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, 247. 46 Ibid., 248.

34 titled, “to the fairest”, he realized his dilemma. In choosing the recipient of the apple, he needed to pick Hera, his wife and goddess of marriage. He also needed to pick his daughter, Athena, the goddess of war and wisdom, because she protected him from Hera.

But, he also needed to pick Aphrodite because she provided him with the women for his affairs. Unable to choose, he assigned the job to Paris, the youngest prince of Troy, who chose Aphrodite.

Zeus’s delegation of power would prove the catalyst that would spark not only the

Trojan War in the mortal world, but also a civil war among the immortals. In the end, the very thing that Zeus feared happened. The Pantheon had chosen sides and become decentralized. Tempers ran high among the immortal ranks, while the body count grew on earth. The war ended with the death of Patroclus, Hector, and many others.

All of the Olympians were infamous for meddling in human affairs. Homer portrays them as powerful and very much immortal. On the other hand, he also portrays them as human. The divine characters suffered the same emotions that plagued the mortals--vengeance, wrath, love, loyalty, insincerity, courage, and sometimes compassion.

When Ancient Greeks and modern Americans alike look to the myths for answers, they show how humans in their mortality dealt with the divine. They also demonstrate how the gods dealt with mortals. In the end, they were all very much human, either in body or mind.

As mentioned early in this project, because of my previous graduate studies of

Ancient Greece and my personal relationship with my Greek aunt, I noticed uniquely

Greek qualities that posed another question for me. What other comparisons can be made between the Ancient Greeks and the modern day?

Homer composed The Odyssey in approximately 700 B.C. Following the collapse of Mycenaean society, there was a repopulation of large tracts of the Greek countryside.47

This had a significant impact on the future of Greece: the tribes organized; the Dorians inhabited the Peloponnese, Crete, southwest Asia Minor, and its offshore islands; the

Ionians claimed Attica, Euboea, most of the Aegean Islands, and the central coast of Asia

Minor; and finally, in the north, the mixture of people called the Aeolians occupied

Lesbos and northwest Asia Minor.48 Most of these peoples concentrated in their own areas, with room to spare. These clustered regions evolved and formed the city-states

Homer wrote about in The Odyssey.

The Odyssey consists of 24 books recounting Odysseus’s journey home from the

Trojan War. Book 9 of The Odyssey tells the tale of Odysseus’s adventure with

Polyphemus, the terrible Cyclopes.

In Book 9, Odysseus and his men land on the island of the Cyclopes. They are tempted by the smell of meat and food and enter a cave. They sacrifice an animal to

Zeus. Polyphemus returns, finding the men and a sheep missing. Odysseus tries to reason with Polyphemus and be a good host, so as not to be punished by Zeus. The monster curses the gods and eats two of the men. Odysseus tries to trick the Cyclopes by telling him that his name is “Noman.” For the next day and a half, Polyphemus gorges

47 John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray, The Oxford Illustrated History of Greece and the Hellenistic World (Oxford University Press, 2001), 69. 48 Boardman, Griffin, and Murray, Oxford Illustrated, 14.

36 on the men two at a time. The Greeks devise a plan. They stab Polyphemus in the eye.

Polyphemus calls upon his fellow Cyclopes to help him. He proclaims that “Noman” is harming him. The other Cyclopes think that he is going mad. The Greeks flee to the safety of Odysseus’s ship on the underbellies of the sheep. As they are leaving, Odysseus proclaims his true name to Polyphemus, and Polyphemus remembers a prophecy wherein a man named Odysseus blinds him. He throws part of a mountain into the ocean to bring the ship back to shore, but the men are able to escape once again. Another stone is thrown, which sends them in the direction of their next adventure.49

Writing of Polyphemus, Homer claims: “There a monstrous man was wont to sleep, who shepherded his flocks alone and afar, and mingled not with others, but lived apart, with his heart set on lawlessness.”50 In Homer’s time, the security of remaining within the boundaries of an insulated region gave way to the need for goods from outside the Hellenistic world, and more extensive trade with other regions started to increase.

Therefore, the intermingling of different areas would have been common, making the isolation of Polyphemus appear strange and uncivilized.

Polyphemus and his fellow Cyclopes had all the resources needed to broaden their knowledge and see the world. They had harbors that would have allowed for ships and trade, but they did not want to leave the comforts of their self-sustained island. On the other hand, the Greek civilization was noted for its navy. The acts of isolation by

Polyphemus and the other Cyclopes limited their access to new knowledge. Homer writes:

49 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Walter Shrewing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 50 Homer, Book 9, Line 177.

For the Cyclopes have at hand no ships with vermilion cheeks, nor are there ship-wrights in their land who might build them well-benched ships, which should perform all their wants, passing to the cities of other folk, as men often cross the sea in ships to visit one another—craftsman, who would have made of this isle also a fair settlement.51

The Greeks would have considered the lack of community and social structure among the Cyclopes to be primitive and barbarous. In the classical period of the 5th and

4th centuries B.C., there were hundreds of communities of Greeks scattered throughout the Mediterranean that spread from the Aegean to Turkey, southern Russia, Spain, and

North Africa. These populations were like kinship groups that were organized by hereditary tribes. These areas would evolve into the concept of a polis.52 The idea of living on the outskirts of society would have been strange to the Ancient Greeks.

More examples can be made based on Book 9 alone, but the message of Book 9 of The Odyssey is clear. In order to be a good citizen, it is necessary to act like Odysseus.

To avoid being considered a barbarian, it is vital to shun behavior attributed to the blind and ignorant Polyphemus. Homer’s Odyssey may not be useful in extracting historical information, but it is an invaluable source for recreating the cultural environment within which Ancient Greeks were expected to conduct themselves.

The Iliad and The Odyssey demonstrate how literature can be a reflection of

Ancient Greek culture and how the Ancient Greeks wanted to be portrayed. In The Iliad,

Homer depicts what is possible when a nation that is usually divided is able to band together against a common enemy. In The Odyssey, he presents the model of how

“good” humans are supposed to act and what is right and proper behavior, based on a

51 Homer, Book 9, Line 116. 52 Boardman, Griffin, and Murray, Oxford Illustrated, 198.

38 superior sense of hospitality and respect. These are fundamental elements in the philosophical concept of humanism.

An opinion voiced by more than one narrator is that there is nothing we have had to face that the Greeks did not have to face in their own time. Whether it be the challenge of governing an empire that is both expansive and severely polarized, or the demand of commanding a nation that is a world superpower, we can learn from the Greeks.

My final closing thoughts with regard to the contemporary relevance of the

Ancient Greeks are simple. It is not necessary to dedicate your life to the study of the complex culture and people of Ancient Greece to appreciate the contributions made by them. I do not want to be misinterpreted as suggesting that an individual cannot be personally or professionally fulfilled without an in-depth understanding of the subject.

Nor does a person need to be able to walk into a museum and identify every piece in a collection in order to enjoy it. Sometimes it is enough to enjoy a piece simply because it is beautiful. However, western civilization, and history as a whole, have been profoundly impacted by the Ancient Greeks, and it remains deeply relevant in the modern day.

To deny its relevance is akin to, on a personal level, denying the relevance of your own family history. Genealogy, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, is “the study of family origins and history.”53 Today’s generations are connected to past generations in many ways. Those connections influence a person’s appearance, ethnicity, health, spiritual beliefs, intellect, social relationships, geographical location, family traditions,

53 Leslie Gilbert Pine "Geneology" (Encyclopedia Britannica. 1999) https://www.britannica.com/topic/genealogy.

39 political affiliations, educational endeavors, career choices, economic privilege, financial limitations, child-rearing philosophies, and on and on and on. Or put another way, I have been shaped by my parents, who were shaped by their parents, who were shaped by their parents, and so on. For anyone to assert that their origin and history are irrelevant to who they are seems ridiculously oblivious and absurdly arrogant. The very essence of an individual is formed by the ancestors who led their lives in the past.

Apply this same logic, on a much larger scale, to the United States. Ancient

Greece is a part of our origin and history—the ancestor of western civilization. The

Ancient Greeks are responsible for our ethic of humanity. A community can accomplish great feats with a passion for innovation, improvement, progress, and sometimes even greed. It is also capable of amazing acts of kindness, care, and compassion for the greater good of humankind, or simply for a single stranger in need. Every natural disaster or senseless tragedy turns ordinary people into heroes. If I could teach modern people just one thing with regard to the Ancient Greeks, it would be to appreciate their fundamental gift of humanism.

Appendix A: Self Interview with Caroline Whyler (Author)

1. Can you tell me a little about your life growing up?

I was born and raised in Willows, California. Willows is a small farming community of approximately 6,000 people. It is located on Interstate 5, about halfway between Sacramento and Redding. I am the daughter of fifth-generation farmers on my father’s side. We primarily grow walnuts, but also some rice, alfalfa, and seed crops.

I attended the public schools in Willows from Kindergarten through 12th grade.

When I graduated from high school, I attended Butte Community College in Oroville,

California. After two years, I transferred to the University of California, Davis, as a junior. I had taken several history courses at Butte and knew that I wanted to major in history at UC Davis. I graduated from UC Davis with a Bachelor’s Degree in History.

My specific area of interest was Ancient History, especially Egypt. I had the immense honor of working with Dr. Stylianos Spyridakis, whose contributions to the study of the ancient world cannot be overstated. My senior project, under Dr. Spyridakis, was on the influence of the Goddess Isis in the Ancient Mediterranean, specifically Greece and

Rome.

I applied for the graduate program at California State University, Sacramento, because I wanted to work with Nikolaos Lazaridis, an ancient historian educated as an

Egyptologist. During my graduate studies my research began to include Greece and

Rome. My major research centered mostly on the Julio-Claudian Dynasty of Rome and the transference of power from Julius Caesar to Augustus Caesar. In addition, I conducted research on how the cavalry of Alexander was pivotal in the success of his

41 eastern campaign. Since my research subjects were varied, I feel I gained at least an elementary understanding of the cliché concept that “history does not happen in a vacuum.”

My motivation was not to teach history, but to work in a museum compiling objects and designing exhibits. I realized when I graduated with an MA in History that I needed further training in order to achieve that. I applied to, and enrolled in, the Public

History MA program at Sacramento State. I felt the hands-on aspect of the Public

History program made sense for me. During my coursework, I started to understand the importance that memory has on history. I began to formulate the idea of whether it is possible to use memory to study the ancient world through a modern lens. This project is an attempt to consider this question.

2. Was Greek history/tradition/culture important in your household?

The short answer to this question is no. I am the product of two farming families in Northern California, both of which have Eastern European roots. I am not of Greek heritage.

My first exposure to Greek culture came from my grandmother’s in-laws. My grandmother, Beverly, had an older brother, Richard, who married a woman of Greek heritage. I have very fond memories of my great-aunt Georgia; but unfortunately, my only real exposure to Greek culture was her baklava and that she always made way more food than was required for every occasion.

3. How were you exposed to Ancient Greek culture?

I cannot pinpoint my earliest exposure to Ancient Greek culture. I remember loving the animated Walt Disney movie Hercules, and being able to recite My Big Fat

Greek Wedding verbatim. Growing up I was fascinated with Egypt. I did a project in the

6th grade that included making a clay model of the Sphinx of Giza, complete with long front legs and a broken nose. That project led to a childhood obsession with anything

Egyptian, and I still feel that passion today.

A few years later in high school, my class was assigned a research project about the Greek and Roman gods, goddesses, and heroes. I cannot recall whether our particular subject was assigned or if we were allowed to choose, but I researched Demeter and her

Roman counterpart Ceres. Looking back, it seems appropriate that the daughter of farmers should study the Goddess of Agriculture. That was the first formal project that allowed me to research the Greeks in depth, at least that I can remember.

4. What was it about the Ancient Greeks that sparked your interest?

The mythology and legends of the Ancient Greeks did not merely spark my interest. They had such an impact on me that my educational path emerged as a result.

Whether that intrigue came from a desire to expand my knowledge beyond Disney, or whether I was curious to find out how accurate the movies were, it was definitely the stories that got me interested in the Ancient Greeks.

When I began to dive deeper into the religion, mythology, and literature of the

Ancient Greeks, I noticed a consistent theme. The Ancient Greek people devoutly centered their lives on worshipping the deities. However, their devotion was based as

43 much on fear as it was their love of the gods. I was raised to believe in a good and loving

God, so this concept of fear seemed strange to me.

The Ancient Greeks feared the wrath of the gods. This tenet is more prominent in the polytheistic religions because they tend to have very human-like tendencies. The gods were extremely powerful, but they had the same flaws as mortals, such as vanity, arrogance, wrath, and ignorance.

Since the gods’ and goddesses’ personalities were humanlike, there were often clashes with mortals. Greek mythology centered on the human condition and the struggle between the gods and humans. The same theme applies to the relationship between the gods and demigods. Demigods tried to do the impossible with their godlike qualities— challenging the gods, challenging fate, or challenging their destinies—against the odds.

This “can do” spirit is certainly a trait of humans today. They use their larger-than-life or godlike ambition to attempt to conquer the seemingly impossible.

In simple terms, which will be expanded upon throughout this project, the Greeks are still relevant to us today, because we can still relate to them. To take that premise further, they are still affecting American public memory because the ethos of the Ancient

Greeks is fundamentally the same as Americans in the modern day. We thrive on the possibility of being better, achieving more, and being more productive than the generation before us. In this context, many comparisons can be drawn between ancient and modern societies.

5. What made you want to go into your field?

Since the idea of teaching did not appeal to me, I wanted to explore alternative paths. Even in the earlier stages of my Bachelor’s Degree, I saw myself ultimately working in a museum. Although I have always enjoyed history, I was also aware that many, or possibly most, people do not feel the same way. Beyond those who are academics in history and the humanities, not many people are going to voluntarily pick up an academic history book. In order to have a work of historical scholarship published, the author must follow stringent, but necessary, standards. The end result is usually a work that is dry, dense, and unappealing to the general public.

On the other hand, museums can offer a far more public-friendly platform to display historical information. Museums and exhibitions can allow interaction or hands- on participation, as well as provide an opportunity to see pieces up close. People will generally respond better to and learn more from an experience than from a book. In The

Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, Rosenweig and Thelen write, “The people who talked with us trusted history museums and historic sites because they transported visitors straight back to the times when people had used the artifacts on display or occupied the places where ‘history’ had been made.”54 I find this notion very exciting.

I like the challenge that comes with interpretation and exhibit design. It is not just a matter of creating an exhibit that is interesting to the general public. It is important to consider that people will not necessarily have the same background in the subject as the

54 Roy Rosenzweig, and David Paul Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 105.

45 curator. In addition, the general public will have varying degrees of knowledge of the content of the exhibit. To complicate the matter further, it is essential that a balance is reached between thoroughness and brevity. If the subject is controversial it poses yet another issue. Often in this situation, it is difficult to figure out how to accurately outline the information without provoking people.

Planning and producing an exhibit can be like writing a term paper. After a topic is chosen, the designer must correctly and succinctly present the information. However, exhibit design allows the creator to build a physical manifestation of the ideas that will then be viewed by a large number of people. I want to organize and construct displays that people not only look at, but experience in a way that they are personally-engaged and eager participants.

6. How do you keep apprised of relevant news and information in this field (the relationship between memory and the Ancient Greek culture)?

I primarily keep apprised of information pertaining to memory and the Ancient

Greeks by conducting research on the subject in my academic endeavors. I am aware of the historiography of the subject. Most of my information comes from books, articles, and information that I have learned about Modern Greek culture through my association with The Politismos Museum of Greek History.

When it comes to the study of broader Ancient Greek history, I find most of my information in books, articles, and online media. This method of research is not always the most compelling approach, but there is a wealth of information.

Not surprisingly, I eagerly and enthusiastically learn about the ancient world by visiting the sites whenever possible. I firmly believe that experiencing the sites in person adds a dimension to the overall understanding that cannot be learned by reading a book or researching on the internet. For example, I did not understand nearly as well the impact that the Parthenon had on the identity of Greeks and Greek Americans until I saw how it looms over Athens. Or, I did not fully appreciate the expense involved in travelling to the Delphic Oracle. I rode an uncomfortable bus over that terrain, so I cannot imagine how long and tedious the journey would have been for someone who did not have the luxury of modern-day transportation.

It is invaluable to travel to the sites of the ancient peoples in order to understand things that were important to them. The ancient ruins and sites are imposing pieces of evidence relating to memory and the Ancient Greeks. It is impossible to understand the ancient culture, unless you have an understanding of the ancient ruins and sites.

7. Why do you think it is important that people still study and understand the Ancient

Greeks?

The Ancient Greeks had a monumental impact on western, and especially

American, culture. Unless you study them, however, it is difficult to recognize these influences. Government, law, art, theater, military strategy, and other fields as well, would not be nearly as advanced without the contributions made by the Ancient Greeks.

The Ancient Greeks also dealt with the same situations and issues that we do. As a civilization, we struggle with public matters, such as war, the threat of foreign enemies, ineffective government policy, and overexpansion. The Ancient Greeks did as well. We

47 deal with a myriad of personal issues; whether it be taking care of the basic needs of the family, or making sure that crops are planted and harvested. So did the ancient people of

Greece.

Simply stated, there is a connection between us and the Ancient Greeks. Modern- day Americans are obviously far more technologically advanced than the Ancients, but the fundamental nature of human beings is unchanged. The same emotions, flaws, and human characteristics control us now, as they did them then. Ignorance, greed, vanity, wrath, and jealousy—the same disagreeable qualities that plagued the gods--are prevalent in us today. Anyone tempted to judge the Ancient Greeks for distasteful, offensive, or backward policies should be cautious, because it is likely that there is a parallel misdeed in our own history. For example, slavery was a crucial part of the Ancient Greek economy. Clearly, there is a parallel to be drawn in American history. The Greeks had a stratified class system. So does the United States. Greek society was patriarchal.

American women continue to fight for equality.

With the regrettable comparisons also come positive ones. The Ancient Greeks had an unquenchable passion to understand the scientific and spiritual worlds in which they lived. No question was seen as unimportant. No question was unworthy of an answer. No question was too large to consider. For instance, the Ancient Greeks were progressive and innovative in the field of medicine. Contemporary scientists strive to improve health and cure disease in the immense and varying populations of today.

8. Do you have words of wisdom for someone interested in the classics?

I feel that it is important to keep in mind that even though the Ancient Greeks lived so long ago, they were still people. We tend to romanticize them so that they are viewed almost as fictional characters or figments of someone’s imagination. The Ancient

Greeks were people who lived, worked, loved, hated, grieved, and celebrated. They embodied all of the desires, fears, and ambitions that are fundamentally human, regardless of the historical time period.

It can certainly be stated that the Ancient Greeks lived long ago. It cannot be said that the Ancient Greeks are irrelevant. Much of history is recorded during times of difficulty and conflict. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”55 The scope of history is immensely broad, and there are countless opportunities to learn from past mistakes, as well as past successes.

55 George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Or the Phases of Human Progress (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 284

Appendix B: Oral History Interview with Timothy Sandefur

Oral History Interview

with

Timothy Sandefur

Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute

April 5, 2017

By Caroline Whyler California State University, Sacramento

Mission Statement

The mission of this project is to address two different concepts: 1) How Greek Civilization is still relevant in our modern and fast-changing world, and 2) How modern Americans and Ancient Greeks are still connected. In the course of the project, I plan to interview professionals that have jobs that were influenced by the Ancient Greeks. These subjects are varied and numerous, so I hope to interview professionals such as attorneys, Ancient History professors, museum curators, astronomers, chefs, and military officials. I hope to put together from these interviews a collective memory that centers around, but is not limited to, Ancient Greek civilization and its relevance in the present day. The oral histories will be compiled, transcribed, and presented to the Politismos Museum of Greek History.

Interview History

Interviewer / Editor:

Caroline Whyler B.A, UC Davis, History M.A, CSU Sacramento, History

Interview Time and Place:

1 session: April 5th, 2017, over the telephone. Session approximately 61 minutes

Editing:

Caroline Whyler used light editing to produce a nearly verbatim transcript. For the sake of clarity, Whyler removed false starts, and filler words such as ‘um’, ‘so’, and ‘and.’ Contractions were kept, in order to maintain the individuality of the narrator.

Recording and Transcript:

A digital audio recording and an interview transcript of the interview is located at the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at the Library of California State University, Sacramento. Another copy of the audio and transcript will be given to The Politismos Museum of Greek History.

[April 5, 2017]

Whyler: Today is Wednesday, April 5th [2017] at 11:17 a.m. This is Caroline Whyler,

interviewing Timothy Sandefur, Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater

Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. Timothy, thank you for being here with me

today.

Sandefur: Thank you.

Whyler: Okay, so let’s get right into the questions. Can you tell me a little about your

life growing up?

Sandefur: I was born in Pasadena, California, in 1976, and lived there and then in Los

Angeles, and then back in Pasadena until 1989. When I was about 13, we

moved out to San Bernardino County, and I lived there except for a couple of

years at college in Michigan until I moved to Sacramento in 2002, and I lived

there until 2014 when I moved out to Phoenix. I went to public schools and a

junior college in the San Bernardino area before I went to college in Michigan

at a school called Hillsdale College, a small liberal arts school in Southern

Michigan that emphasizes the classics pretty heavily. And then after

graduating I took a year off and then I went to law school in Orange County,

California, at Chapman University.

Incidentally, since we’re going to talk about the Greeks, I’ll tell a story. When

I was in college I took three semesters of Ancient Greek, and so I learned just

enough to be a pain in the butt. So, when I went to Chapman, the school motto

of Chapman is “ὀ Χριστòς καì ἡ Ἐκκλησíα ”, which in Ancient Greek means

“Christ and the Teacher.” I was in the student bookstore one day and I noticed

that there were some folders for sale with the school seal and the Greek was

misspelled. Instead of an omicron with an aspiration mark it had a delta,

which to the untrained eye looks very much like an omicron with an aspiration

mark, but what it says is “(Greek phrase)”, which I guess is like ghetto Greek

or something. So, I took this to a professor at the law school. I said, “I know

this is going to sound hopelessly dirty but this Greek is misspelled.” And he

got a very serious look on his face and he said, “Oh, I’m so glad you told me

that, that’s the sort of thing that donors really pay attention to.” And sure

enough, those folders disappeared from the bookstore and have never

reappeared. Every time I go back to visit my old school, which happens pretty

often, I always check and I have never seen it misspelled again. So, I’m glad

to think that I had some part in rescuing the school from the opprobrium of bad

Greek spelling.

Whyler: That’s amazing.

Sandefur: In any case, after graduating from law school I went into public interest

litigation, so I practice civil rights law suing the government for a living and

I’ve done that since I got out of law school. Now I am in charge of the legal

department here at the Goldwater Institute, where we focus on issues relating

to private property rights, the right to run a business without unreasonable

interference from the government, and other kinds of constitutional protections

for individual freedom.

Whyler: Okay. So actually your interest in the Ancient Greeks makes quite a bit of

sense. Overall, would you say that history was a big part of your childhood?

Sandefur: Yes, primarily because of my mother. My mother has always been interested

in history, and my parents both are particularly interested in 19th Century

Victorian America, and maybe late Victorian/early Edwardian periods. So

they have always loved Victorian houses and Model T cars, and that sort of

thing. They were the caretakers at Heritage Square Museum in Los Angeles

from 1981 to 1986. The museum consists of several Victorian-era houses that

have been rescued from demolition and moved to a site next to the 110

Freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway, between Los Angeles and Pasadena, off

Avenue 43. It’s open to the public to this day. At the time that we lived there,

only one of the houses had been fully restored—that’s the Hale House which

was built in 1885—and we lived upstairs in that house for those five years as

caretakers to prevent vandals or accidents from damaging any of the houses.

Since then, they have more or less restored one more of the houses, but most of

them are still not fully restored. So anyway, I grew up in these Victorian

surroundings. The downstairs of the Hale House is fully furnished and

everything, and so I think, unusually for a child growing up in the 1980’s, I

was very familiar with life from a century before. I have often wondered

whether kids today learn things like popular songs of the 19th Century that I

grew up hearing because it was just always around and that sort of thing.

Anyway, so we moved out of there into another old house, actually a craftsman

bungalow in Pasadena, and from there into another Victorian house in

Pasadena. So, I kind of grew up with 19th Century history. Then, the biggest

thing in my life that made a difference and is relevant to our conversation is I

discovered Thomas Jefferson when I was in 9th grade. I became obsessed with

Jefferson and the revolutionary era, and have never stopped being obsessed

with that. Only more recently have I really gotten interested in 19th Century

history from the Civil War era and so forth. That’s been within the past decade

or so. So, yeah, I had history from an early age and have always been

fascinated by the lessons that you can learn from it. It seems to me that history

is in many ways like the experiment room of philosophy. The lessons that we

can learn from history are what sort of social ideas, political ideas, cultural

ideas, that people had and what have been the consequences and effects of

them.

Whyler: Wonderful! It sounds like you were maybe exposed to Ancient Greek culture

more in your undergrad? Would you say that is correct? Was that something

that your parents also introduced you to or was that something that happened

more in college?

Sandefur: It was almost entirely in college. I discovered Jefferson in the 9th grade, and I

became so interested in him I really consciously kind of modeled my life, my

education, after him. I emulated him. I tried to learn the classical education

that he would have had. Jefferson, of course, would have had a classical 18th

Century education, so that meant a grounding in the Ancient Greeks and in the

Romans. He would have learned Greek and Latin. Actually, Jefferson was

fluent in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Anglo Saxon, and I think that’s

it. Although, he was said to have learned many of his languages from books so

that his accent was terrible. But, he was extremely good at Ancient Greek,

well enough that in the collection at Monticello there is an Ancient Greek

grammar textbook that he went through and painstakingly corrected the

typographical errors that he found in it. Because he was familiar with these

things, I wanted to be familiar with them. So, in my senior year of high school

basically, I set about making myself a curriculum to learn as much as I could

on my own, because I knew there was no way of really getting a professional

classical education. I began reading Homer and the other Greek writers, and

trying to learn about Greek history as best I could. In my freshman year in

college I read Will Durant’s The Life of Greece, which is a fantastic book for

all of its shortcomings, and took classes aside from ancient history, also in

classical mythology, and then when I transferred to Hillsdale College I took

Ancient Greek for three semesters. I took classes in the ancient philosophers,

Plato and others—we had a particular class on Plato and Xenophon that I took.

There was a very heavy emphasis on the western tradition and on Athens and

Rome.

Whyler: What would you say it was about the Ancient Greeks that sparked your

interest? Besides the fact that you had learned to love and admire them like

Jefferson had, what was it that personally sparked your interest?

Sandefur: There are kind of two answers to that. Just a little hint for those that might be

listening, if you’re going to go into law school, don’t take Ancient Greek. It’s

really not very useful. (Sandefur laughs) I know no Latin at all, and law is all

in Latin. Science is in Greek. For a while, I was dating a girl who was going

to veterinarian school and when she would come home from school I could

read her homework, because it’s all in Greek roots, so I could figure out what

the words all meant. But with Latin, I still have to ask other lawyers to help

me. (Whyler laughs) It really was not very helpful to me. Mostly, there are

two aspects to how Greek was of interest to me. The beginning was in order to

learn the basics of political philosophy and understand where the American

Revolutionary founders were coming from and what they would have known,

in order to understand them as best I could. The second wave came when I

discovered philosophy itself, and that happened a few years after I discovered

Jefferson. When I was in high school, I discovered the works of Ayn Rand,

who is a philosopher very heavily influenced by Aristotle and admired

Aristotle tremendously. Her philosophy is really largely a mixture of Aristotle

57 and Nietzsche. I became interested in learning more about Aristotle and pursued him mostly for that reason. Through that I then discovered the philosophers like Epicurus and in my Greek class of course we studied the historians. But it was primarily Aristotle, Epicurus, and the philosophers of that school that drew my particular interest. To this day, as I grow older, I only become a greater admirer of Aristotle. At this point it seems to me if you have a new idea that hasn’t already been thought of by Aristotle, you’re probably wrong. (Whyler laughs) Jefferson, ironically enough, was kind of skeptical of the value of the Greeks. Although he admired the philosophers a good deal, particularly Aristotle, he would have considered himself an Epicurist, an

Epicurean actually. He called himself that. He also wrote a letter to an admirer once where he said that the Greeks were of almost no value when it came to understanding politics. The reason why he said that was that he said the Greeks were not familiar with the idea of representation. Although they had the idea of democracy, they didn’t understand the principle of representation. The idea of voting for people who would represent you in congress and that sort of thing was such a revolutionary idea for the modern world, by which of course he meant the 18th Century, that reading Aristotle for political ideas he thought was of little value. Now, the other point is that the

Ancients had no concept of the individual rights as we would consider them, or at least they had a very rudimentary concept of it. They had principles in natural law, but not of natural rights. Although their ideas on law and proper

order, and Aristotle’s distinction between a healthy constitution and a corrupt

constitution, and those sorts of things are very valuable, and of course I think

Aristotle and Epicurus were very correct when it came to ethics, their other

ideas on politics and economics are often, I think, deeply misguided.

Whyler: It sounds like you had an education that would have set you up perfectly to go

into history, or to go even more into the classics. What was it that made you

decide to switch from kind of this classical background that you had made for

yourself to going into law?

Sandefur: Well, I may have been a bit misleading in saying that I had a focus on classics

or history if it sounded like it was to the exclusion of other things. The thing I

admired so much about Jefferson is how extremely well-rounded he was—that

he was as fluent in discussing modern poetry as he was at architecture or at

astronomy. He had so many different pursuits and that was primarily what I

admired about him. So, I tried, and I did not succeed in this, but I tried to have

as fully rounded an education as he. Of course, looking back, there are some

obvious shortcomings. I was never much good at mathematics and I never

took calculus, for example. But, with history and philosophy, those are just

some aspect. I also tried to study art and literature and these other things as

much as I could. Although I did take a minor in history now that you mention

it, I never considered going into it professionally. For one thing, to be a

professional classicist would require that I actually know an ancient language,

and I found Greek incredibly difficult, prohibitive difficult. There is a passage

in Saint Augustine where he talks about having to be beaten by his teacher in

order to learn his Greek, and I totally sympathize. (Whyler laughs) What an

incredibly difficult language. It’s no surprise at all that it’s extinct. Anyway,

so ancient languages would have been a requirement for going into classics.

And as far as history, I love history but it never occurred to me to try and do it

professionally. I think because my primary interest has always really been in

politics; by which I don’t mean running for office or any nonsense like that. I

mean political philosophy and law. I kind of was destined for law from the

outset, and the history is a crucial component to understanding the law, so I

delved into it in that way. But no, it never occurred to me to do it

professionally.

Whyler: I agree with you. I feel like it’s a …..

Sandefur: I’ve often said that the reason I went into law was because it was the only way

that I could find to make a living as a writer. (Whyler laughs)

Whyler: Well, don’t worry. All in a history or public history grad program are always

going to have their days of panic or regrets feeling like they’ve possibly made

a wrong decision.

Sandefur: Yeah, right. (laughs)

Whyler: It’s not like I’m speaking out of self-experience. (laughs)

Sandefur: No. (laughs) I mean, obviously, none of these pursuits is one that one does

because one wants to get rich. If you go into law because you want to get rich,

you really should try something else instead, because although it is very

possible to get rich in law, that has to be a consequence rather than a cause.

You have to love the law first, and if you don’t, then even if you do get rich,

you’ll just be unhappy so there’s no point in it.

The other problem with doing history professionally is that I strongly disagree

with a large part of the way that historiography is done. I am very much the

opposite of a Marxist for one thing. I don’t believe that economic forces shape

our purposes. I believe that people have free will, and that seems to be not

much admired in the history world. I believe there is such a thing as courage

and heroism, and those things are often disregarded in the historical world, or

treated as childish prejudices. Plus, I understand the law and, no offense,

historians who understand the law seem to be as rare as diamonds in this

world.

Whyler: I won’t disagree with you.

Sandefur: It’s shocking how many books or articles I will read by historians purporting to

discuss important decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court—Dred Scott or

Slaughterhouse cases or something—where there is absolutely no correct legal

analysis in the book. If I tried to write a book on history that performed as

poorly, people would laugh at me. But historians often feel that they can talk

about legal issues without any familiarity with the law. I don’t understand it.

Whyler: No. No, I’m not disagreeing with you. Even in my own experiences, even

though I am a historian and that is the life I am choosing for myself, I feel

historians kind of feel a real urge to be idealistic and to not be practical in

many, many cases.

Sandefur: In their own lives, but I also find that they tend to be just the opposite when it

comes to analyzing the lives of others. So often I encounter historians who

will say, “Oh, yes. So-and-so….” Name a person, let’s say Frederick

Douglass. “Yes, Frederick Douglass looks like he was a hero, it appears on the

surface that he did great, heroic things and is an admirable man, but really

what was going on ….” It seems that there is this desire to find some hidden

motive or to lay bare the clay feet of the idol or something. Of course, one

should pursue the truth, but it seems like there is a prejudice on the part of a lot

of historians who think that if somebody did something noble and apt, he is

just hiding something, and that we’ll unmask and show that he was genuinely

motivated by some other cause. To me, the name that jumps out immediately

when I talk about this is Joseph Ellis, who seems to me to embody everything

wrong with historiography of the American Revolution. If you read his

biography of George Washington, time and time and time again he says, well,

Washington said it did this thing, but really what he meant was this other thing.

Repeatedly in the book he uses the word “elemental”, which jumps out at me

because the basic idea is that although Washington may have spoken in terms

of the natural rights of man and so forth, he was really pursuing more

elemental, more fundamental things, which means of course, personal gain or

something. I don’t understand that mindset that says that no matter what, there

must be some more crude motive behind any action that a historical figure has

undertaken.

Whyler: Wonderful. I think we would be okay to move on to another question.

Sandefur: Yeah, sorry. That is a bit of a digression, isn’t it? (laughs)

Whyler: No. You’re completely okay. You’re completely okay. In all of your

research--you’ve studied the Revolutionary era, you’ve studied the Civil War

era--were there certain resources or authors or books that you looked to when

doing your studies of the Ancient Greeks, whether it was books, or articles, or

documentaries, or travel? What was your research process when trying to

study them?

Sandefur: I mentioned Will Durant, who is just a wonderful introduction to the Greeks.

Another one, of course, is Edith Hamilton. Hamilton has been kind of

denigrated again by more recent historians. It’s understandable because

Hamilton is not trying to do hard-nosed professional intellectual history. But

her book, The Greek Way, is just a masterpiece in broad strokes of getting at

what is truly great about Ancient Greek civilization—about its humanism, and

63 its realism, and its lack of romanticism. So The Greek Way really, really perfectly embodies what I love about Ancient Greek civilization. She wrote several other books that are much less known. Of course she wrote a sequel to

The Greek Way, called The Roman Way, which contrasts Greek and Roman civilization. And she wrote a couple other books on Greek and early Christian history that are harder to find, but so beautifully written and very much worth looking at. In college, I took a class on ancient mythology. That was a lot of fun. One of the things we were exposed to was we watched the film version of

Iphigenia At Aulis, I think it was, and I can’t remember the director’s name offhand, but it is a Greek director who did a series of sort of modernized film versions of classic Greek plays. The movie version is just called Iphigenia, and what a masterpiece. And that one then got me really interested in the ancient playwrights. So, the movie I’m speaking of is a 1977 movie directed by Michael Cacoyannis. In any case, I was reading Homer already I guess, but then I read in that class, as a result of seeing this movie, Prometheus Bound, which is translated by Edith Hamilton, which is just magnificient! What a great play! I really got obsessed with the Greek tragedies, and so I sort of made a habit actually in later years I would try and read one a week. They are very short and easy to read, and so I did that. That is how I encountered

Antigone, which is by far the best. What an amazing and thought-provoking play. I later wrote an article contrasting the Sophocles version with the Jean

Anouilh version that was printed after World War II. What’s interesting is that

64 in the Sophocles version, Antigone seems to be a representative of the conscience, standing up for what is just even when the state says the opposite.

Obviously, that would be of interest to me since my primary interest is liberty and the citizens’ rights against the government. But in the Anouilh version,

Antigone’s sacrifice is made to be essentially pointless because she lived in a totalitarian state where nobody will ever hear about her resistance against the state, and so her protest is essentially valueless. Nobody ever hears it, so nobody can emulate it. Nobody can cherish the memory of her, and so what value does it have? Anouilh is basically making the point that in a totalitarian state, even though the idea of resisting the state is made pointless, Antigone does it anyway, because it is important for her that she do it. Now that part is glorious. Another part of the play that is troubling is that she says later in the play that she doesn’t know why she is doing it. It’s essentially an existentialist play, which would have been totally alien to the Ancient Greeks. Aristotle would have said why in the world would you do something if you don’t know why you’re doing it? And he would be right about that. Anyway, so my mythology class was also a wonderful introduction to the relationship between the Ancients and today, because we still speak in the terms of ancient mythology, often without even realizing it because they had such tremendous influence on our society and our civilization. And then, of course, Aristotle and my philosophy classes--Aristotle, through people like Aquinas and Bacon,

so heavily influenced the development of science and logic. That was

basically what drew me into that.

Whyler: It seems like you fall back on a lot of those sources now in your own research.

Sandefur: Oh yes. Richard McKeon’s single-volume book of Aristotle, I had to get a

new one because I wore my old one out, especially the Nicomachean Ethics,

which I am happy to say is available on audio book now. I would recommend

against trying to read Aristotle on audio book. It’s not the most lively (laughs)

thing to listen to. I mean I love the guy, but there’s a line in the movie

Beetlejuice when they say it reads like stereo instructions. A lot of Aristotle

reads like stereo instructions. I was lucky that at Hillsdale College I had

professors that are very well versed in the Ancients and were able to guide me

in the right directions. Now, I had a professor for a class on Greek history who

used Victor Davis Hanson’s book The Other Greeks, and was very skeptical

toward it. He had us read it, but he disagreed with it and so he kind of

introduced us to some of the tensions in the historiography of Ancient Greece.

Hanson’s argument in The Other Greeks is that what we know of its

democracy developed off of the mores that were generated by Ancient Greek

farmers--the small-scale, individual farmers of Ancient Greece who came up

with the idea of democracy and of self-government and so forth. There is a lot

of truth to that, but I also think that it’s a little flattering, and therefore we

should be skeptical of it, that Hanson, who himself was a farmer, would be

arguing that farmers invented democracy. I remember I was attending a

66 speech by Hanson, and he made this argument that farmers basically were the source of all virtue in the world and believed in independence and freedom. I raised my hand, and I asked him if farmers believed so much in freedom, why did they all vote for Franklin Roosevelt? His answer was, “Well, I don’t think they …”, and then he stopped and he said, “Well, I guess my parents voted for

Franklin Roosevelt.” So, you know, I’m not really sure that I’m persuaded that farmers are the true basis of freedom; in fact, quite the opposite. In recent years, I’ve come around to the opposite view that freedom was invented by city dwellers. This is an argument that I’ve been introduced to by the brilliant libertarian polemicist Tom Palmer, who is a Fellow at the Cato Institute and has written on this. It was really in the Middle Ages’ cities that the ideas that we now know of as individual liberty really took flight, and that what the

Ancient Greeks came up with was the idea of political independence, that if a city or city state, a polis, had the right to govern itself without interference from aliens. That is very different than the idea of individual sovereignty of the rights of the person as against the society. That latter thing, which we think of as real freedom, was really the invention of Middle Ages’ cities. Anyway, so that’s another book that I found very thought-provoking, although I disagree with it, is The Other Greeks by Victor Davis Hanson. Incidentally, I should add, Thomas Jefferson would have loved that book, because Jefferson did believe that freedom was invented by farmers. So, although I admire Jefferson

very much, there are a number of things I disagree with him on, and that’s one

of them.

Whyler: Have you travelled to Greece or to a lot of these different places?

Sandefur: No, the only international travelling I’ve ever done, other than Canada and

Mexico, I’ve been to Great Britain. I’ve never been to Greece or to the

continent of Europe. I would love to see Greece. I would particularly love to

see the Theatre Epidaurus. I love that stuff, but I haven’t got around to it.

Honestly, to be quite frank, I’m just more interested in seeing America. I love

American history more than anything else, and I made it a goal years ago to

visit all 50 states, which I managed to do a while back. I never get tired of it,

so whenever the idea of travelling comes up, I always just kind of go to a site

in America. There are plenty of sites in America to visit that are associated

with Greece. The Getty Museum in Malibu, particularly the Getty Villa, which

I went to as part of my classical mythology class in college. What a fantastic

place to go if you’re really interested in Ancient Greek civilization. Another

one is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, which has so much

Ancient Greek stuff that, frankly, you’ll get bored if you try to look at it all. It

is incredible the collection they have. And, there is a replica of the Acropolis

in, I think it’s Nashville, Tennessee, which I have never managed to make it to,

but (laughs) I’m interested in seeing some day.

Whyler: Actually, if you wouldn’t mind going back to something that you’ve

previously talked about, when you were talking about your mythology class,

and you were talking about Antigone and how there were two different

versions that you had seen. You were talking about Sophocles’s version, and

then I wasn’t quite able to catch the name, but you talked about a version that

was made in post World War II, in that era.

Sandefur: Yeah, a French writer named Jean Anouilh, it’s spelled A-N-O-U-I-L-H. Only

a Frenchman could pronounce that “On’ wee”, but anyway, he is most famous

for Becket, the play about Thomas Becket that was made into a movie--it was a

fantastic movie—and is also a very existentialist kind of message that we

choose to struggle against opposition, kind of just in order to oppose it. So this

is very much in the line of Albert Camus and other existentialist writers who

were writing around the same time. My own philosophy, the philosophy of

Aristotle and Ayn Rand, is actually pretty similar to that, but has an important

difference. Anouilh or Camus would have argued that we set ourselves against

obstacles in order to prove our freedom, and that we show that we are

something other than the terminalistic cogs in the machine, by our opposition

to fate. And that ultimately this is doomed, but by taking on the challenge,

striving against the odds, we prove ourselves free. Now, I think there is a lot

of nobility to be said about that, and there are great achievements that people

have accomplished by setting themselves against things, but I don’t view it as

being essentially pointless. I think that you can argue that it’s not necessarily

just doing it for its own sake, or they would have called it an “acte gratuit”, a

gratuitous act. I don’t think that that’s a gratuitous act; I think that is the

meaning of life. And I don’t think that is an empty or pointless pursuit. So,

anyway, in Becket, for instance, Anouilh’s character decides to stand up for his

religious principles knowing that it’s hopeless, because taking a futile stand

proves that he is a free and virtuous person. In Antigone, which is set in this

sort of alternate universe totalitarian world, Antigone decides to resist Creon

even though she knows that there’s really no point to it. So in the original

Antigone, you’ll remember that Antigone buries her brother against Creon’s

orders, and the reason Creon has ordered it is because her brother Polyneices,

if I remember right, rebelled against the city, so he is a traitor. In the Anouilh

version, it turns out that Polyneices isn’t a hero, he wasn’t a rebel, he was

basically just an idiot kid who did something stupid. There is no point in

Antigone honoring his memory, but she chooses to do so anyway, even

knowing that her resistance will just get her sent to a concentration camp and

nobody will remember anything about it. She does it because taking a stand is

her way of demonstrating her freedom. It’s an interesting twist on the

Antigone myth, and it stands as a good comparison to show the difference

between the Ancients thought of the world and the way that we think of it in

the post-totalitarian age of the 21st Century.

Whyler: Thank you so much. You rounded that off wonderfully. We’ll go to another

question. It’s a big question. Why do you think it is important to still study

and understand the Ancient Greeks? I am under the personal impression that

people are starting to see the ancient world and the Ancient Greeks as

irrelevant. Also, considering the political state that Greece is in at the moment,

do you agree, or why do you feel that it is important to keep studying and

understanding them?

Sandefur: Not only would I say that they are starting to see the Ancients as irrelevant, I

think they are starting to see the Ancients as positively evil. I think the rise of

the doctrines of cultural relativism, multi-culturalism, the hostilities to western

civilization that now dominate large parts of the academy, have led many

prominent people to denounce western civilization as inherently exploitative,

or at best, as being something that doesn’t belong to them. I will never forget

in my freshman year in college when a professor claimed that Aristotelian

logic was different from other kinds of logics. To use her example, there were

Asian logics that instead of being linear went in a circle. This was fashionable

post-modern nonsense. There is no such thing as “other” logics—there is

either logic or not logic, and that’s what makes it logic. That’s why it’s

different from, say, mythology. Mythology really is different from culture to

culture. The Greeks’ stories about the gods are different from the Hawaiians’

stories about their gods. But logic is logic. Recognizing that fact is the first

step toward recognizing that human is human, and that as human beings we all

share certain common values and can come to common understandings. That’s

important because if you can’t come to a common understanding across

71 cultural lines, then the only alternative left is violence and warfare. If you can’t talk to people, the only other thing you can do is kill them. That’s a broad generalization, but it’s fundamentally true. If we as human beings cannot discuss and deliberate and come to an understanding about shared values, there’s nothing left to do but to go to war with one another. The

Greeks, fittingly enough, kind of demonstrate this. They have this idea that the

Greeks were the people who spoke Greek, and everybody else was a barbarian.

The barbarians were just fundamentally not us, and could not be part of a political society with us. In The Oresteia, the final play [attempts to recall the name], The Eumenides is a play about the creation of justice. In The

Eumenides, the climax is with Athena creating the justice system. Every lawyer should read this play because so far as I know it is the only classic work of literature ever written devoted to how law came into existence. What

Athena does is she invents the idea of a trial and she invents the idea of the law, but she also says in the play that within city walls we are all brothers and are governed by persuasion, and we should not go to war with one another—

Within the city walls. Of course, barbarians are outside the city walls. The idea that came about in the 18th Century-- well, again in the Renaissance, but really came about in the 18th Century in the Enlightenment—was the idea that there are human values, that we can create a world civilization by deliberation and discussion and understanding. We can come to share human values. The idea of scholarship is fundamentally based on that. So, there is a classic

72 passage in Erasmus when he is reading the dialogues of Plato, and he quotes a passage and he says, a heathen said this to a heathen, and yet it has truth and justice to it, and I cannot help but thinking St. Socrates pray for me. What

Erasmus is doing there is he’s reaching across cultural boundaries and coming to an understanding with people who spoke a different language and had a different background and a different culture, but as a human being is sharing values with them. In this case, it’s Erasmus of Rotterdam and Plato of Athens.

They were able to understand one another across the centuries. So, what the

Ancient Greeks do for us is they open a door, I think, for us to understand--for one thing, among other things, they do a lot of things for us-- but one of the things they do for us is allow us to reach back thousands of years and read something from Aristotle and see what he said about the human condition. It’s as valid today as it was when he wrote it. You know, it’s just an astonishing thing. We often lump the Greeks and the Romans together--we say in the

Greco-Roman world—you could hardly be more different than the Ancient

Greeks and the Ancient Romans. And yet, Cicero finds in Plato things of value written by a man centuries before, from a completely different place, from a completely different cultural background, and a completely different language. Well, we can do the same thing. So, the first reason why I think that modern scholarship, if you can even call it that, tends to reject or despise the

Ancient Greek legacy, is because modern scholarship—the cutting edge, the avant-garde of today’s world—has rejected this idea. They believe that there

73 are different logics and that you can’t reach across cultural boundaries. If you try to reach across cultural boundaries, you are accused of “appropriation.”

That’s the popular term today. There is an art gallery in New York City that, as we speak actually, is exhibiting a painting of the martyred victim of lynching, Emmett Till, which was painted by a white artist. There is now a controversy over the fact that a white artist painted a black victim of lynching, that this is a form of appropriation. This is insanity. This woman is an

American. She has every right to regret and mourn for a victim of racial violence in America, as any of the rest of us do regardless of race. If she can’t reach across racial boundaries, then what’s the point of being an artist? That’s what art is supposed to be. The first answer to your question of why modern scholarship, I think, tends to disregard the importance of the Ancient Greeks, is because under the guidance of multi-culturalism and cultural relativism and post-modernism and all these fashionable doctrines that tell us that there are no shared human values--we’re all locked in culture and we can’t reach across cultural boundaries—they have no place for the Greek vision. The Greek vision is a humanist vision. When Aristotle talks about human values, he is saying man as man have these needs, have these desires, have these hopes and dreams, have these values and disvalues, and that we, no matter where we are, can understand where he is coming from on that and say that it is either true or false. These doctrines are, as I’ve mentioned, are as valuable today as they were in the ancient days. Take Epicurus; here is a philosopher who had a

74 theory that matter is composed of atoms before the invention even of the microscope, let alone the discoveries of modern physics. He comes up with this elaborate physical system on this basis of pure though. The intellectual achievement there is incalculable. And he comes up with the ramifications of this idea in terms of ethics. If it’s true that the universe is composed of atoms, what does that mean when it comes to the question of what is the right thing to do? I mean, it’s an amazing idea, but he’s right about it. I think that touches on what I’ll end on, which is the most important contribution of the Ancient

Greeks, is the idea of naturalism. What we tend to call materialism. The idea that the world is composed of physical objects and forces that act upon them; and not of supernatural miracles. They have a religion and they have the idea of supernatural forces, but even those can be explained in terms of physical forces. That is the crucial discovery, probably the most crucial discovery in all of intellectual history. Because if you allow for the idea of magic in your view of the world, then there is no reason you can’t just use “it’s magic” as an excuse for everything. Why does the sun rise in the morning? It’s magic.

Why does the sun set in the evening? It’s magic. Why does the earth behave in this way, or why does the weather behave this way, why does electricity behave this way? Any question you have, you can say it’s magic. For century after century, many civilizations have done just that. What the Greeks managed to do, and what is to their everlasting credit, is to say we can explain this in terms of other natural phenomena. The philosopher to read on this is a

little known philosopher named Wallace Matson. He just died a few years ago.

He taught at Berkeley, and he wrote, not very many books, but he wrote a

wonderful book that encompassed all of this. I’m trying to remember the title

of it. His best book is called Uncorrected Papers. Ah, here it is: Grand

Theories and Everyday Beliefs. He argued that the most important intellectual

of all time was Thales, who was the first person really to give voice to this idea

that natural phenomena can be explained in natural terms as opposed to just in

magical terms. And once you have that little seed, then you have the key to all

science and all good philosophy. A long answer to your short question. I’m

sorry.

Whyler: No, I don’t mind at all. Okay, so, I think we’re actually pretty good, but I’ll

end with one more. Is there anything else you would like to add, or that you

think is important for people to understand, or any other possible

misconceptions that you think people have?

Sandefur: Well, there are a lot of misconceptions about the Ancient Greeks, and I think

for the person who is just beginning in this direction, it can be pretty daunting,

because there’s big words, and there’s lots of people, with lots of degrees,

talking about very sophisticated ancient things that can be very intimidating if

you’re in the position that I was some years ago with no formal training in

Ancient History or Ancient Philosophy or anything like that, and no idea of

how you first start approaching it. So, it can be very scary when people throw

76 around these names like Epicurus and Aristotle and Empedocles—that’s one of my favorite names. It can be pretty scary. And instead what you do is get these introduction books that I mentioned, Will Durant and Edith Hamilton, and just start approaching it like these were real people. They were fallible in their ways. Some of them were brilliant. Some of them were stupid. Some of them were smart. Some of them were crazy. I would recommend not reading

Plato, because I’m not a big Plato fan, and because if you start reading Plato you’ll think what is this? (laughs) Thomas said of Plato that thousands of volumes had not explained Plato because nonsense can never be explained.

(Whyler laughs) So, be ready for it to be nonsense. There is huge nonsense in the creations of the Ancient Greeks, but there’s also a lot of really good, solid, fascinating good sense. Don’t be put off by the alien-ness of it. Just give it a shot, and if you don’t understand something, just skip it and then come back to it later, is my recommendation. I think a lot of people are intimidated by the

Greeks, particularly because their words are so big. I mean, it’s amazing when you look at Ancient Greek. Also, keep in mind that the American Founding

Fathers knew their Greeks through the Ancient Romans. The Greeks themselves had relatively little influence on our civilization because it was covered up so much by the Middle Ages. The Greeks, and then the Romans, and then the Middle Ages eradicated a lot of the original Greek stuff, so that people in the 18th Century were left with the Romans talking about the Greeks.

It was only after that that the original Greeks have really started reaching the

west. So, people like Jefferson would have known their Plato through Cicero,

for example. And he would have known his Epicurus through Lucretius, the

Roman poet. If you keep those things in mind, I think it helps to be not so

intimidated when you approach this stuff. And it’s great stuff. I mean, Homer

is as lively and fascinating today as it ever was, if you get the right translation,

of course.

Whyler: Yeah.

Sandefur: It’s an exciting adventure story. It’s an action thrill kind of story. These things

are not scary, and they’re not boring. Some of it’s boring, yeah, I know, but a

lot of modern civilization is boring too. A lot of Aristotle is impenetrable stuff

that you really do have to be a professional to understand, but also, a lot of the

stuff is very easy to read. You read Medea, and it’s about the feeling of

betrayal. You read The Trojan Women, and it’s about the grief and suffering

that war inflicts on women. It’s as valid today as it was thousands of years

ago. My advice is just try not to be intimidated by this stuff if it’s new to you,

and see what you can that has value in it.

Whyler: Well, first off it seems what you’re definitely trying to imply is that, and I

agree with you, that a lot of these works, especially Medea, The Trojan

Women, The Odyssey, and The Iliad, can also be seen as social and cultural

commentary for the time.

Sandefur: Yeah. Oh, definitely, especially Euripides. I mean, it’s very obvious that

Euripides is a political commentator in his day. Of course, they all are, but

Euripides is particularly clear about it. And when you think that The Trojan

Women was put on in Athens in the middle of a war, that kind of free speech

did not exist again in the west until the United States. Here is a city state that’s

at war with its bitterest foe, the Spartans, and Euripides puts on a play about

how awful war is, in which the characters are essentially the victims of the

Greeks, because the Athenians thought of themselves as descendants of the

Trojans’ enemies. They have it be the Trojan women who are sitting around

talking about how they’re going to be enslaved and brutalized by the Athenians

when they win the war. That’s all the play is. The play is just these characters

sitting around talking about how bad war is. When you think about that that

was put on in Athens during wartime, that’s an astonishing degree of free

speech that wouldn’t, at many times in American history, would not have been

tolerated. There’s a lot of social commentary in other ways. Some of them are

more general, and some of them are more specific. For those who don’t know,

there’s only four playwrights from Ancient Greece from the classical period

that we have--that is Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes.

Aristophanes is the comedian. There’s a lot of social commentary going on

there, but comedy is a thing that fades fastest over time, so I think we don’t get

a lot of the jokes that would have been obvious back then. I have a personal

pet theory, by the way, that the reason why old comedy seems to be so full of

79 fart jokes (Whyler laughs) or other kinds of bathroom humor, and yet I’m right. I mean, it really is that way. You go to a Shakespeare comedy, and you come away thinking that all the jokes were just silly words for bodily functions. The reason why it looks that way is because those are the only jokes we understand today. All of the really clever stuff we don’t get because it is too subtle for us. If you look at a really clever social commentary today, if you were to watch an episode of The Simpsons today, a lot of the really clever jokes are so fleeting that people won’t even get them a year from now. That sort of joke is very timely, very subtle, very clever, and it fades very quickly. I think that’s what happens with old comedy. So, if you read or watch an

Aristophanes comedy, it sounds like it’s a lot of jokes about farting, but that’s because that’s the only stuff we understand now. And that’s not really fair to

Aristophanes. A lot of his jokes are still good today. Assemblywomen is a wonderful send up of socialism. There is a great passage where one of the characters says what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna just sit around and we’ll all be rich. We’ll just share everything together and we’ll all be happy and not have to work. Finally, another character says well, yeah, but who’s gonna make all the food, who’s gonna make all the stuff, and she says, well, the slaves, of course. (Whyler laughs) It’s very clever insight into what we now think of as modern-day socialism, but it is as old as time. These ideas have been around forever. One of the few passages in Aristotle where he makes a joke is when he satirizes Plato and socialism. He says some writers have this

idea that if we all just share all of our property, everyone will just be

everybody’s friend. Which, of course, is absurd, and it’s disputes over

property that do destroy a socialist state, and they are the same disputes then as

they are now. Anyway, so, yeah, there’s a lot of social commentary in the

Ancient Greeks, and I think that historians are asked to go for that stuff. And

rightly so, because it’s fascinating stuff. But when I read something like

Antigone or Prometheus Unbound, I love the broader themes, the arguments

about justice and what virtue is. These things are as valuable today as they

were long ago. It’s just modern conceit to say that the Greeks have nothing to

teach us today. That’s the kind of childishness, well, that only a child could

have. Only a child says that grownups have nothing to teach them, and only a

mental child says that the Ancients have nothing of importance to teach us.

That may sound like a trite thing to say, but I constantly hear people say things

like, “Oh, well, I don’t have to read anything Thomas Jefferson wrote because

he owned slaves, and therefore, he is of no interest to me and there’s nothing

he can teach me.” Or the same thing with Aristotle. Frequently, people say,

“Oh, well, Aristotle wrote in defense of slavery in his books on politics, and

therefore, everything he wrote is tainted by it.” That’s absurd.

Whyler: Also, for the fact that Ancient Greek slavery is not at all the same system that

slavery was in the American sense.

Sandefur: Very different. Yeah, very different.

Whyler: Well, I think that’s it. Anything else, or are you happy?

Sandefur: Yeah, I could go on forever, but (Whyler laughs) I am getting hungry as I

mentioned, and you mentioned Greek food, so now I’m [grumbles].

Whyler: Okay, well then …

Sandefur: That’s the other thing. In addition to Greek literature and philosophy, the thing

I love most about Greece is the food.

Whyler: Well, I think that is a wonderful place to end the interview, Mr. Sandefur.

Thank you so much.

Sandefur: Yeah, sure. Thank you.

Appendix C: Oral History Interview with Andrea Eis

Oral History Interview

with

Andrea Eis

Professor of Cinema Studies at Oakland University in Michigan.

May 4, 2017

By Caroline Whyler California State University, Sacramento

Mission Statement

Interview History

Interviewer / Editor:

Caroline Whyler B.A, UC Davis, History M.A, CSU Sacramento, History

Interview Time and Place:

1 session: May 4th, 2017, over the telephone. Session approximately 51 minutes

Editing:

Recording and Transcript:

[May 4, 2017]

Whyler: This is Caroline Whyler interviewing Andrea Eis. It is May 4, 2017, at about

2:16 p.m. Andrea is a Professor of Cinema Studies at Oakland University in

Michigan. Andrea, thank you for being here today.

Eis: You’re welcome.

Whyler: So let’s get started. Can you tell me a little bit about your life growing up?

Eis: Okay. Well, I was born in New York City. I have a small family—two parents

and one sister, although we were strongly connected to our local relatives in the

area. After a few years living in New York City we moved out to New Jersey,

where I spent the rest of my growing-up years through high school, in a small

town in a suburb just east of New York City. My background is not Greek. We

are Russian Jews. All families were from 20 miles away from each other in an

area that is now Lithuania actually. I went to public schools and then I went out

to college. I have three degrees—I have a BA in Classics and Archaeology,

which included a year of study abroad in Greece. That is from Beloit College in

Wisconsin. And a BFA in Photography, Film, and Video from the Minneapolis

College of Art and Design. Then, I did a year of graduate work in Classics at

the University of Minnesota, but my Master’s Degrees and MFA’s in

Photography are from Cranbrook Academy of Arts in Michigan. Now I live in

Michigan and teach at Oakland University. I’ve been married for over 30 years

to another artist and we have two adult children and a young grandson. So that’s

my story.

Whyler: You said that you had gotten your BA in Classics and Archaeology. How did

you get exposed to that degree? What was it that sparked your interest about the

time period?

Eis: Well, there were two separate things. One is about the archaeology and the

other is about the classics as an area of studies. The archaeology part came from

the earliest days. I wanted to be an archaeologist from the time I was in the fifth

grade. My parents regularly took us to museums in New York City. My

favorite one was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I actually went to young

archaeologist lectures on Saturdays. My parents and sister would go off into

New York City and I would sit there are and take in all this archaeology. So I

spent a lot of time in the ancient galleries at the Met, and my mother, who was a

teacher, encouraged my interest in ancient culture. We had a lot of books in our

house that I could read more about it and so it was really through my parents and

my experiences at the museum that I became interested in this. Then when I

went to college at Beloit, my first semester when I was signing up for classes,

they said they were having an ancient Greek class on the computer, which was

new at that time. That was a long time ago. It was actually more like a teletype

machine. And I thought this sounds interesting. It was actually a disaster

because it was all transliterated Greek, it wasn’t Greek letters. I got into the

second semester of Greek, we weren’t on the computer anymore, and we had a

new teacher who wrote a Greek word on the board and none of us knew what it

was because we didn’t know Greek letters. And so, at that point it was a

combination of embarrassment and fascination. There is this language, there are

these beautiful letters, and this gets to my art degree. I actually think the letter

forms are just so beautiful and they have become a part of my art. I had great

professors and I became so fascinated with the classics that I decided to double

major. So, that is where my interest in, specifically in Ancient Greek, and

Ancient Greek everything—culture, literature, language, all of that came about.

It was two-pronged, I guess I would say.

Whyler: That’s fine. And then after your BA, you went into, you said, MFA?

Eis: Yeah. Well, I had my BA and a BFA and an MFA. So, the BA was in Classics

and Archaeology, then the BFA was in Photography, Film, and Video, and that

was after I moved away from …. I had gone for a year of graduate school in

Classics and decided that maybe that wasn’t what I wanted to do, was Classics

and Archaeology. I think that I just actually went to the wrong graduate school.

It wasn’t that it was a bad graduate school, it was just not the right fit for me. I

had been interested in photography for much of my life. My father had done a

lot of amateur photography and we had a dark room, and so I thought that would

be a good thing to go into. I originally thought, okay, now I’m going into

photography. I’m going to become an artist. This is where my area is, but I still

needed some vision—what I was going to say and do with my art. And the

thing that I knew the best and cared about the most was Ancient Greek culture

and language and literature and art. So, that’s how my art became about this.

Whyler: Just to give a little context for people who maybe haven’t seen your art yet,

could you give a description of your art, your style, and background? I have

seen examples of your work, but somebody else might not have.

Eis: Right. Well, I’ve kind of gone through an evolution of a variety of ways of

making my work in photography and in film. In photography, I started with

photographing Greek sculptures, and then overlaying them with words. At first

they were words that I wrote; phrases that I would reinterpret, the body language

or the expression that was being created by the sculpture, and reinterpret it in a

more contemporary way, and in some way connect it to contemporary

experience. I also started reinterpreting Greek myth. I would use the sculptures,

and I would refer to a Greek myth in the words that I would use on the

sculptures. These photographs would have the words placed over them to make

people think about the idea that the people of Greek myths and their experiences

were not so separate from what we are experiencing today. There is a resonance

and a relevance to their experience. If we step back from the fact that their lives

were very different than ours, that our experiences were the universality to the

human experience; that they learned all these lessons that we can connect to

these.

As I went on, I also did installation art, which is something I don’t think you’ve

seen, where I would make spaces that people could walk into. The spaces that

kind of recreated a conceptual vision of Greek architecture. I made a labyrinth

out of silk string that you could walk into, and that was a labyrinth for Theseus

and Ariadne. You would follow the path of Theseus and [end up in the center of

the labyrinth, looking back out thought the string into the world; then you’d you

lead back out into the world as Ariadne led Theseus].56 I made Antigone’s cave

where you’d walk into it, and it was a cave made out of felt. If you looked in

one direction you saw Creon the king and his point of view, and if you looked in

the other direction you saw Antigone and her point of view, or photographs that

represented them. This was my expression of how they were so rigid in their

perspectives that they couldn’t see the other person’s point of view. In the

installation, you as the viewer, could not see both of them at the same time. You

had to turn your back on one in order to see the other, which is to me

conceptually what they were doing. They couldn’t compromise, they couldn’t

work out a way to see each other’s perspectives.

56 This bracketed section of the interview transcription was modified. I received an email from Eis on 1/7/2018, which leant minor clarification to the previous statement.

Then, my most recent work is I’ve been photographing marginalia, the words written in the margins of books. I found a series of books from the early 1900’s that were in a library in Greece, and they were owned by an American woman.

She was studying for her Ph.D. at Columbia University in Greek and Latin. She had written English words in the margins as she was learning how to translate

Greek texts. And they were just fascinating to me. I found a poetry in her words. They were random, but significant, and they were kind of obscure and mysterious, and they could relate to the text itself or they could relate to just experiences that we know about, but that are actually ancient experiences. So, it connects back to the same idea that I think that not only are her words relevant-- and she was doing this in 1909, 1910--but also that what she was studying it was relevant to her and now it’s relevant to us.

And then finally, there are my films. These are films in which I recreate—I wouldn’t say I recreate Greek stories, because I don’t make narrative films; they’re kind of experimental art films, and I am interested in how images can express a story or emotional content. I have retold the story of Penelope and her odyssey of the 20 years that Odysseus was gone, and how her cunning and her strength enabled her to achieve things that most women didn’t in that period of time. I have a very feminist approach to much of my work. I was interested in finding a way to make her story the center. There was a fascination to me in the fact that she and Odysseus in Homer are equals. That was an amazing thought to me, and that is not something that is generally expressed about male/female

relationships in Ancient Greek culture. So, it set me off on racing into a lot of

things about ways that I could express things through my art. My photographs

are generally large-scale; they can be five feet wide or tall. Sometimes I print

them on fabric, translucent fabrics, which to me expresses the idea that the past

and the present are kind of intermingled, because with a photograph of an

ancient sculpture and an ancient language laying on top of that, if it’s a

translucent fabric, you can see the present through the past, literally. Because

the fabric is translucent, you have to see the gallery or whatever kind of space

that piece is hanging in, you see the present world through the past and you can’t

see one without seeing the other.

I guess that is what I would say. I mean, I don’t know if that describes it well

enough for the purposes of somebody who hasn’t actually seen it. If you want

more, I can ….

Whyler: No. No. That was perfect. That was perfect. Thank you. So, it does sound

that it was kind of a mix of your education that inspired your art, along with

finding the words of the grad student in the Greek text books. Is that what you

said they were?

Eis: Yes. That’s from more recent work, because the earlier work it was all coming

out of my education and what I had learned. And then, the marginalia work,

which is the more recent work, it was very much inspired by this one particular

woman, who, I found, was kind of a powerhouse. The woman was the president

of a women’s college for 20 years and things like that. It’s amazing that a

chance encounter with her ended up with this …..

Whyler: What was her name?

Eis: Her name was Meta Glass, which is a wonderfully Greek inflected name.

(Whyler laughs) I just, by chance, when I found these books in Greece, so in the

usual contemporary way I googled her. The likelihood that I would find

anything out about her I thought was fairly minimal, but it turns out that she was

actually quite well known, and she had a family that was very important in

Washington D.C. Her brother was Secretary of the Treasury and she worked

with the government in education for women. She had a lot of interest in terms

of education and Classics and a belief in the importance of Classics that I do. It

was a great connection, so I feel then that I also got to know her through her

words in these text books. And now, at first I would write down what book I got

it from, but I really didn’t connect a great deal to the actual literature. Now, I’m

thinking more about that. I’m thinking about, okay, if she wrote these words in

the Antigone, then how does that connect to what she was saying, what is in the

original text, what I want to say about that. So, I’m actually making it even

more and more about the original text and the original ideas that were coming

from the Greeks.

Whyler: Sorry. I’m trying to think of how to phrase it. You said before that there are

very strong, almost feminist undertones to your work. Did you ever notice that

when you were looking at some of the stuff from Meta Glass, did you notice

anything similar…especially since you described her as kind of a powerhouse,

that maybe that was part of your attraction to her?

Eis: I don’t know if when I originally started photographing those words if I really

consciously thought about that. There were certainly attractions in the way she

wrote the words. Well, like, an example is, “the doer of this insolence.” I relate

that to the insolence of Antigone’s standing up against Creon. To be honest, the

first thing that I did once I found these books is I just photographed every single

page that had marginalia on it in every way that I could think of that was

visually interesting, but I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. So, it took

me a while to really live with the words and to actually become more interested

in and knowledgeable about Meta Glass and her life. She was president at

Sweet Briar College in Virginia, and I contacted the librarians there to see if

they knew why the books were in Greece, which they didn’t, and we still don’t

know how they got there. But, they sent me some of her speeches about

educating women and about speeches that she gave to the Sweet Briar freshman

coming in, and college speeches that she gave on speaking tours after she retired

as the president of Sweet Briar. That was when I found her own power, and it

just made me want to work with her language even more. I don’t think it was

connected immediately directly to feminist perspectives, but I think I felt some

of that in some of the words that she was using, but was not a direct feminist

influence in the original discovery of her work. One other thing I will say

though, is that I found this book when I was on sabbatical, and so I was living in

Athens for four months on sabbatical. I was spending a lot of time at this

particular library where I found the books, and I was reading a lot of feminist

classical scholarship, which had not existed when I was in school for Classics.

It’s a more recent phenomenon than my degree (laughs). I was discovering all

of this because I had not kept up with classical scholarship, and I didn’t know

that all these amazing feminist scholars existed. I was reading and reading and

reading all of these reinterpretations of Penelope and Clytemnestra and Antigone

from feminist perspectives. I was steeped in that at the time I found the Meta

Glass books, so there’s probably a connection somewhere. (laughs)

Whyler: (laughs) Actually, that was actually a lovely segue into my next question. This

will, again, be centered more around the inspiration for your art, especially when

it comes to the classical aspects that you have. How do you keep apprised of

new or relevant information in the field? Are you inspired by film, which I

realize would be a very big inspiration for you—so, film, literature, the

mythology? Is that what you always tend to be apprised of?

Eis: This is going to sound odd coming from a cinema professor, but film is probably

lowest on the scale of things that I’m influenced by in terms of films that deal

with classical subject matter, because generally I don’t often like how they do it

(laughs). I’m more influenced actually by, I would say, avant-garde and new

wave approaches to fragmentation in telling stories in ways that you can rethink

94 the past. I’m not interested in Hollywood reinterpretations of the classics at all

(laughs). But, I’m more interested in reinterpretations within literature and poetry, and in a poet like Anne Carson, and just a whole range of different authors who have written reinterpretations of Greek myths and, more particularly, ones who make them relevant to their own period in history. Even though I know the films do that too, maybe because I am so steeped in film, I just don’t want to deal with those. So, I read a lot of literature and poetry that is inspired by Greek culture and literature. I go to a lot of conferences. I find amazing inspiration at conferences. I just in the last few years started getting back to classics conferences, and classics is now more a field in which they’re open to interdisciplinary approaches. I went to a conference on classics and modernist translations, and classics and feminism. There’s a conference that happens every four years—I wish it happened every year—but it’s called

“Feminism and the Classics”, which is an astounding conference. It’s very small, but it’s very intense and it’s all these people who are thinking in all the ways that I am, but they’re scholars and usually not artists. But I found kind of like a home at these conferences, and these scholars are an inspiration to me.

They have been very open to looking at my art and my films and talking to me about it. That’s been very, very helpful. And some of them were the women whose books I was reading when I was in this library in Greece, and so to find them all at this “Feminism and the Classics” conference. I went to the first one

probably a week after I got back from my sabbatical, and it was thrilling, to be

honest. I don’t know if I fully answered that question for you. I could go on.

Whyler: Oh, no. No. That was fine.

Eis: Okay.

Whyler: Well, I think it would be okay to go on to the next question. Throughout my

studies, and throughout my lifetime with my background in both Ancient and

Public History, I’ve kind of come under the impression that people feel as if

history isn’t relevant.

Eis: Mm, hmm.

Whyler: I was wondering if you’ve ever felt as if people feel that way, and more

importantly, why do you think it’s important that we still study the classical

period, and more specifically, the Ancient Greeks?

Eis: I do feel that people don’t study the Greeks in the same depth and feeling that it

has the same importance as they used to. I think that is a big mistake. I believe

strongly in the relevance of Ancient Greek knowledge. I think it’s not that they

had it all figured out, or that they were perfect, but they struggled with these

lessons; they struggled with issues of human strength and frailty, about power

and corruption, and arrogance, and about the entanglements of family and

relationships, and government, and democracy. What has entranced me is that

they were able to turn these into art—into plays and poems, and even rhetorical

96 expressions and philosophical musings that are expressed through artistic vision.

But the problem is that these lessons keep getting forgotten, and they have to be relearned by every civilization, and they are relearned through tragedy. They don’t have to be if we reinvigorate our knowledge of the wisdom and the tragedies of those that have gone before us. The Greeks sometimes didn’t pay attention to lessons that should have been learned, and that’s how some of the great plays came about, was for those who didn’t understand, that the playwrights were using this expressive medium to show people how there were examples there of what you needed to think about and care about. I think that human experience is universal in certain aspects, and the Greeks understood what we could learn from experience and by presenting it in these incredible ways. They made it more accessible for people to think about. For me, I am trying to use that in my work as a way to say that there is a way for this to be relevant without making Troy with Brad Pitt. You can still make people think about the relevance of what these stories were about in naturally much better ways than Troy did. You could think about how a woman like Penelope could have something to say to women today; how someone like Antigone, who stood up for her conscience and beliefs against a king who was trying to use his ultimate power over her. These are things that are so important today in ways that I think we need to care about. I think that there’s a way in which defining this in the Greek past is helpful to our experience of current times and current problems and issues. I think there was a feeling that feminism was no longer

necessary, that we had sort of learned everything we needed to, and things had

changed. Well, we know that’s not true now. I think that we need to go back to

these ways in which we can pull from Greek culture, and pull from that past that

still permeates our present because of the human experience. It can give us a

perspective on our current situation, and remind us about hubris and how that

can result in tragedy. But also that there’s a possibility of wisdom, and a

possibility of joy, and that there are just ways that the Greeks had so much for us

in so many important ways. I just think we need to connect back to that in a

way that is more about the core aspects of what it is that Greek wisdom and

Greek artistic quality expressed to us.

Whyler: It sounds like, in summary, that you’re studying ancient literature or studying

the ancient world through a modern lens.

Eis: Yes.

Whyler: You’re studying it through our contemporary social issues and biases, and trying

to show the comparisons within both societies.

Eis: Yes. And I think that in this sense it’s important to me that I am doing it in a

contemporary way. I make my art digitally. I print it digitally. I photograph—

I’m using contemporary means because this is not about, for me anyways as an

artist, dressing people up in Ancient Greek garb and having them attempt to play

Ancient Greeks. I am trying to make these as contemporary as I can. I mean, I

use the actual Greek letters and words in my work, but I know that most people

don’t read---can’t read them. That’s why the marginalia was a perfect find

because I combined the English text with the Greek letters, and Greek letters to

me are just beautiful and visual expressions as well. I can read them, and it’s

always important to me what the Greek says in my artwork. I’m trying to find a

way to make my artwork both connected to Ancient Greek experience and

culture and very much of the present. I don’t mean to be lecturing with my art,

it’s more about enabling people to make connections for themselves, and

interpret for themselves. Some of the things are just, when you really think

about it and realize it, incredibly contemporary and so connected to things I’ve

experienced and that others have experienced. Definitely with the political

situation, we are back in a situation where, as in many of the Greek plays or

Greek myths or Homer, that people did not learn from situations. So, it’s totally

contemporary. (laughs)

Whyler: You’ve mentioned quite a bit about different ancient works. More specifically,

you’ve mentioned Antigone and The Odyssey, more from Penelope’s standpoint.

Are there any works that you would recommend people read, almost trying to

find this connection with the Ancient Greeks? Is there literature that you feel

would be easy for them to connect to through a modern perspective?

Eis: I think it’s probably often hard for people to connect to Homer from a modern

perspective, and I think the aspects of Penelope are somewhat buried within a

99 much larger story of Odysseus and his wanderings. That one was a tough one, and I actually was not very interested in Homer when I was studying Classics. I was more interested in classical Greek, but I learned, and this came out of the feminist scholars, the reinterpretations of some things out of there that were important. I would say that Antigone is actually the one that is the easiest to connect to contemporary experience because it’s the struggle of the individual against the state, it’s the struggle of male against female or female against male, and of how you live with your conscience and take a stand based on your conscience. I think those are all there very clearly, I think, in that play. That’s probably the most powerful one to me, and that’s probably why Antigone keeps being produced and keeps being retranslated and reworked so many times.

There are poets that express even things like the flux of time that is expressed through some of the early pre-Socratic poets. The philosophers who expressed their philosophy through poetry. I seem to keep coming back to Antigone. I think that there are aspects of Clytemnestra’s experience, even though she was a warped and terrible person, that were done to her by Agamemnon killing their daughter to be able to sail to Troy. So, there’s this aspect of the sacrifice of women. If you think of it not in the literal sacrifice, but also the way in which the abuse of women and the abuse of power by men over women, it is a very contemporary issue. It’s a little harder for people to deal with it in the Greek plays because Clytemnestra is often seen only for the horror of the fact that she killed Agamemnon. That’s a really complex one. I think it’s hard to hold her up

100

as a paragon; and she wasn’t. Not that Antigone was a perfect character either.

She was very rigid in her perspective, and yet I think highly of her for her

standing up for her beliefs. So, I guess it’s …

Whyler: No. That’s fine. That’s perfect. Do you have any words of wisdom for

someone who would be wanting to go into the Classics, or the mix between art

and Classics? Is there any advice that you would like to give people?

Eis: I would say read all that you can of the Ancient Greek literature. Learn Ancient

Greek. I think that made a huge difference to me that I knew the language. My

connection to the thought processes and the understanding of Greek grammar,

it’s such a nuanced and subtle approach to thought, and I think that there is

something about the way the Greeks expressed themselves that can be important

in artistic vision. I would say that people can go to Greece. (laughs) I’ve been

lucky enough to be able to travel a great deal. I’ve probably been to Greece the

most of any other country, other than being here. I would say it’s probably 11 or

12 times that I’ve been there--sometimes for my year abroad when I was in

college, I went on sabbatical for four months, I went on a fellowship for a few

months. I try to go back for periods of time, not just place hopping. I try to not

go as a tourist, but to really experience both the ancient sites and the modern

culture. It’s important to me to have both sides of that. I think the survival of

the modern Greek state at this point, and the importance of its ability to get

through what it is dealing with right now, is critically important and shouldn’t be

101 forgotten. I think that to experience Greece in two ways is important, particularly to artists.

One is the power of place. I do think that when you spend a lot of time in a place, like if you go to an archaeological site, and you don’t just walk around trying to find the places or listen to a tour guide, but you sit in the place. Greece is a place, to me anyway, where the power of the past is still physically strong.

You experience that through sitting in these places, and being quiet, and letting yourself experience the place--places like Delphi. The Parthenon is a little harder because it’s so overrun by people, but there are a lot of places where you can be alone. I could be alone in the Tomb of Agamemnon. One of the films that I made was about reimagining Clytemnestra walking into that tomb and having it cleared as a space for where Agamemnon would be when she took her revenge. So, I’m rethinking that, but if I hadn’t been there and experienced that particular space and what it’s like, I wouldn’t have had that ability to express that.

Then, there’s the aspect of the modern Greeks. Their openness to people and their sense of hospitality, which is there in Homer, I mean it’s so clear in Homer, and it’s still there. I think that that is also an interesting way to think about the contemporary experience being connected to the past.

The last thing I would say about this is to read and see a lot of the new interpretations of Greek texts and Greek myths. If you want to be an artist who

102

pulls from this, it’s not about seeing what other artists do and then recreating

that. It’s about seeing what they do and being inspired by the fact that people

could take these stories on as their own, and that they can make them their own.

These stories are so powerful in ways that we all can connect to them, and yet,

make them our own while they still retain their power as ancient work. So,

those are my ways that I would suggest people think about immersing

themselves in this area if it was important to them to pull from this for their art.

Whyler: Thank you. Is there anything else in closing thoughts? Any other ideas or

anything that you would like to state?

Eis: I guess there’s just one thing. I think I sort of referred to it at some point—about

the idea that all of these lessons of human experience--that the Greeks translated

these into art and expressed these through art. That, to me, is personally a

connection to the way in which art is so central to human civilization and to

being a civilized culture. They referenced to me the importance of art within

our life—that it’s not a luxury, it’s not an add-on that if there’s time or if there’s

money you put into education. It’s a central core of what is important to us as

cultured human beings, as a civilization that cares about more than just how to

make a living, but how to live well. That sounds like a cliché and it sounds very

…. I just didn’t like how that sounded, so I’m probably not expressing exactly

what I want to express. But I think art is so critically important, and the Greeks

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understood that, even if they thought about it in very different ways than we do.

We need to reinvigorate that in our contemporary culture. I think that’s about it.

Whyler: Okay. Well, that was actually my last question, so thank you so much for

agreeing to talk to me.

Eis: You’re very welcome.

Whyler: It was wonderful. Thank you very much.

Eis: Okay. Certainly. You’re welcome.

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Appendix D: Oral History Interview with Harriet Stratis

Oral History Interview

with

Harriet Stratis

Senior Research Conservator at the Art Institute of Chicago

June 9, 2017

By Caroline Whyler California State University, Sacramento

105

Mission Statement

Interview History

Interviewer / Editor:

Caroline Whyler B.A, UC Davis, History M.A, CSU Sacramento, History

Interview Time and Place:

1 session: June 9th, 2017, over the telephone. Session approximately 56 minutes

Editing:

Recording and Transcript:

106

[June 9, 2017]

Whyler: This is Caroline Whyler interviewing Harriet Stratis, Senior Research

Conservator at the Art Institute of Chicago. It is June 9th at around 3:30 p.m.

Harriet, thank you for agreeing to let me interview you today.

Stratis: And thank you.

Whyler: Well, let’s just start off with our first question. Can you tell me a little about

your life growing up?

Stratis: Yeah. I grew up in a suburban New Jersey town called Paramus. I am an only

child, and my parents were both born in Greece, and I was born in Jersey City,

New Jersey.

Whyler: So, I’m guessing by the last name of Stratis, do you have Greek heritage?

Stratis: Oh yeah. My parents were both born in Greece. My father came from an island

called Andros, which is a Cycladic island that’s very close to Athens. And my

mother came from a part of the Peloponnese called Pylos. My dad came to the

States when he was in his 20’s. My mom came as a 6-year old. So, very

different, and sort of the usual, you come and mutual friends kind of introduce

you, and that’s how they met. They actually met here in Jersey City. I’m just

107

trying to think, and so that was where that whole community settled, my mom

and her parents and her brothers and sisters. And it was different because my

dad came as an adult. So, that was kind of the beginning and as I said, I’m an

only child, so no brothers and sisters. It was sort of that typical immigrant,

second-generation growing up in Jersey.

Whyler: Would you say that Greek history, tradition, and culture, considering your

parents were both originally from Greece, was a very big part of your

childhood?

Stratis: Yes. Completely. It was a completely Greek household. Greek was spoken at

home. When you think about traditions, or you think about the connection to the

Church, and all of the traditions that go along with the traditional Pascha, or the

traditional Easter, traditional Christmas, very centered around families gathering

for all the holidays, and all of those traditional foods and customs were part of

everyday life completely growing up. In fact, I didn’t speak English until I went

to Kindergarten. Even growing up in the United States, or being born in the

United States, being immersed in that community, the first time I was really

exposed to English in a, I don’t want to say serious way, but in a prolonged way,

was when I had to start going to school.

Whyler: Wow!

108

Stratis: Yeah. (laughs) And, of course, children learn languages very quickly, especially

when you’re suddenly in a school setting and you’re with all of these children.

Also, I learned English very quickly, so as many people will tell you, the parents

are trying to speak another language to get their children to be bilingual, and

then the kid answers in English. From what I’ve heard, that’s exactly what I did.

They would speak to me in Greek and I would answer in English.

Whyler: Was it your family and your heritage that introduced you to Ancient Greek

culture?

Stratis: Oh, that’s interesting. Actually, not so much my own parents, but believe it or

not, there was another Greek family that lived right next door. There were two

little girls there who growing up were my best friends. We were always

interested in art and making art, and drawing, and from a very, very young age

in elementary school I would go into New York City with my two friends and

their mom or their grandmother. Really, I would say, the most intense exposure

to Ancient Greek art and culture was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and

we went there a lot. What struck me, I’m not quite sure at what age, we’d

always go to the Greek and the Roman art. We would always go and see the

red-figure vases and the black-figure vases, and all of the marble sculpture, and

that was all we saw. So, finally when I got a little older and realized that there

was other art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was kind of a big surprise,

(Whyler laughs) which was pretty funny. But I just remember you would go, I

109

knew these galleries backwards and forwards, I knew when we were starting, I

knew when we were finishing because you’d come to a certain section, and

you’d know okay we’re here now, we must be leaving soon. It never occurred

to me that there were other parts of the museum to go to. That was it, and you

were brought to see all of this amazing Ancient Greek art. And if you’re going

to see it, the Met is a pretty wonderful place to see it in the United States. So, I

think that was really the first taste of art, art that wasn’t just making art, but

looking at art and appreciating art, and the work of the Ancients. Then studying

ancient history, and certainly as a kid, archaeology is always very appealing.

Thinking about the ancient sites and excavating, that’s always been something.

While the artifacts themselves are important, thinking of them in their context—

coming out of the ground, coming out of these architecturally-significant areas--

-was also a fascination. What was this culture? What was the trajectory? How

did these civilizations develop from the mid Cycladic and Minoan? Looking at

what they left behind was fascinating to me. And the one thing I think I regret

now is that I never actually went on a dig on my own as part of my education or

part of my life experiences. Even though I’m a conservator, I never actually

took part in a dig in Greece or anywhere else, which is too bad.

Whyler: You’ve hinted at it along the way, but could you maybe tell me more about how

you got to where you are, education wise, because you hear about people who

either take the teaching tract or they go into museums, but you did something

different. I am very curious about how you got there.

110

Stratis: My career?

Whyler: Yes

Stratis: Well, it’s interesting because when you start having appreciation for artifacts

like that, and you spend a lot of time looking at that, looking at icons, Byzantine

art, medieval art, I went to college thinking I was going to be an artist. Then

you get to college and reality kind of sets in, and you say, you know, are you

really going to be an artist? I always had this love for material culture, for this

stuff, and how did artists make it, and what materials did they use, and being

someone who is making art at the time, that was something again that you just

want to learn more about. So, while I was in college, I was doing a double

major of Art History and Fine Art—print making, painting, not so much

sculpture, which is interesting, but the idea was to combine both. Then I started

to learn more about art conservation and what did it mean? Instead of making

my own art, to enter into a field where I would be helping to preserve other

culture’s and other people’s art. With that idea, in order to get training in this

field, I had to do a lot of chemistry.

Whyler: Oh!

Stratis: I was just fortunate enough that as a sophomore in college being able to put

together the Fine Arts and the Arts History, the studio art and the art history, the

chemistry becomes very important. One, because again, you need to really

111

understand the materials. What are things made of? How do they deteriorate?

What do they look like when they deteriorate? Also, the materials used to repair

art and artifacts that have been damaged. What is the chemistry that’s involved

in say, a material that you might clean marble with, or an adhesive that you

might repair glass with. It’s all very, very specific. You need to start with the

most general chemistry and then narrow it down to the chemistry for the field. I

was able to combine all of that and a good bit of time, and then entered one of

three graduate programs in the United States for art conservators.

Whyler: So, ……

Stratis: I think I lost you there.

Whyler: No. No. I think what kind of confuses me is because history majors or people

in this field always kind of joke that we don’t do numbers, we don’t do science.

We’re not wired that way. But I think you have just proven me wrong.

Stratis: Well, you’re not really wired that way. I mean, there are people in the field who

have more of an inclination toward the sciences, and having to add that

component was very challenging for me, because it really does require you to

have this added discipline and all the math that goes with it. You’re often taking

courses with lots of pre-med students, which is challenging in its own right

because you’re not going into medicine and you don’t want to be a doctor.

(laughs) Yet, you’re taking all this chemistry with people, at least when I was

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doing it, were primarily pre-med students. It made it challenging. Really, for

me, the toughest part of my education was the chemistry.

Whyler: I do not find that hard to believe. That would be very tough for me too.

Stratis: Yeah. Yeah. But you know, it’s the means to an end.

Whyler: Exactly.

Stratis: So, if you find something that you really think you could excel at and enjoy, you

just have to set your sights on the goal. So, you get through the chemistry and it

really is a field that you can’t do without chemistry.

Whyler: Just for a little bit of clarification, in your job you’ve talked about material

culture. What is the material culture that you spend more time with? Do you

kind of run the gamut with what you work with, or is it more specialized?

Stratis: It becomes more specialized. When you get your education, you are trained

very broadly to understand a variety of materials—so you study metals, you

study paintings, textiles, paper. So, in the final assessment I ended up choosing

to be a paper conservator, so I work on anything that’s on paper—drawings,

prints, watercolors, pastels, paintings on paper—which is a very fragile material

compared to some of the other disciplines where you think of paintings, and

objects which to some degree the materials are more robust. Paper has a much

more delicate touch, to some degree, that is required because of the nature of

paper.

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Whyler: Thank you. We can move on to our next question. Do you work with ancient

sources at all?

Stratis: It depends what it is, and it depends on how ancient. Here at the Art Institute,

we have Renaissance material, a lot of Old Master Italian drawings. To say that

we have anything that is truly ancient or Byzantine in my particular field, no, we

don’t. In the collection, there aren’t a lot of Byzantine manuscripts, and

certainly works on paper. A few years ago we did a beautiful exhibition called

“Heaven and Earth” which brought a lot of fabulous Byzantine art to the Art

Institute, mostly from Athens and from a number of Greek museums. That was

a fabulous opportunity to work on that exhibition, and to be a part of the

installation of the art that went into that show. But that’s mostly when

specialized work like that comes from other institutions. I’m not actually

directly involved with the conservation or the care of Ancient Greek artifacts.

We have a team of Objects Conservators here, and they will have specializations

in marble, or in glass, or metals, they work on metals, and then moving further,

they sometimes work on wood. But you can imagine, there’s a gamut of

materials that we’re confronted with here.

Whyler: The exhibition you were just describing, it sounds wonderful. I’m extremely

jealous.

Stratis: Yeah, it’s a beautiful, beautiful exhibition. I don’t know where you are in

California, but the Getty Villa has some amazing collections. That is part of it

114 too. For me, it was the Metropolitan Museum of Art because it was there. We were nearby. It wasn’t a time when we were traveling to Greece. But even when you think about traveling to Greece, what are you drawn to? You’re drawn to the great sites—the Acropolis, Delphi, Abasa. It’s finding those, what would you say, remnants of ancient communities, and trying to understand their history, how did they function as a community, and their time and space.

Certainly it’s a very rich history going into Asia Minor and following the Silk

Road and seeing how moving forward from Ancient Greece into more modern

Greece, and what the changes were. There’s a lot of really significant ruins that are in what today is known as Turkey, and they are amazing sites. Pergamon is there, Ephesus is there, and again, these are very large archaeological sites that you’re going through. At least in Ephesus, a lot is preserved. It’s just amazing to walk in those spaces to try to imagine what it would have been like for people living there at that time. Certainly the language that’s come down to us is quite different. You know, Modern Greek versus Ancient Greek—but it’s that continuous thread. It’s how you get from those civilizations, and you follow that thread all the way up to today. I have to say, I feel much more comfortable thinking about history and preserving the past than I am sort of in the space where we’re at today. I don’t relate very well to the world of 2017. I’m not a very technical person, I don’t have all the gadgets, I don’t do all the Facebooks and the tweeting and whatever it is we do today that puts us in contact more with the screen than it does with each other, to some degree, and with these cultures

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that we kind of derived from and evolved from. It’s very different and I know,

of course, there’s so many people who love it and feel so comfortable with it,

but it’s sort of like if someone offers you a Kindle or a book, I’ll take the book.

(Whyler laughs)

Whyler: I get that.

Stratis: Yeah, so, it’s just interesting. I’ve had friends who’ve asked me what is it about

the past that’s so fascinating. Why are you so interested in old stuff? I’ve had

that question—old stuff. I really am. I really am, there’s so much fascination

for me with it, and it really does stem from those galleries. That experience

colored all of that. So, to be able to work in a museum profession where I get to

touch everything every day. People will often say, “They let you touch that?”

And I think I work in one of the rare professions where, yeah, we touch that.

(laughs) We have to. That’s what we do. We fix, we clean, we make art and

artifacts presentable. And the key is just to be able to do this in such a way that

the modern hand can be differentiated from the original hand. We do that by

using materials that you can tell the difference. You can tell the difference

under a blacklight. We do that with the techniques we use, so that we’re not

trying to fool anybody into thinking that our restorations are original. That’s

very important too. What we do then becomes part of the history of the object.

When you’re working on an Old Master Italian drawing, like a Rembrandt—

well, that’s not Italian—how do I put this? So, you’re working on something

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that’s from the 15th Century or the 16th Century, you have to be able to

differentiate the materials and the hand of the Master from the modern materials

of the restorer. We work very hard to do that.

Whyler: I’m afraid this question might come across as confusing, but kind of rewinding

to a thought that you had earlier, you said, “I feel much more comfortable in the

past than I do in 2017.” Do you know why that is? Could you describe why

that is? Or, why is it that you feel that way, besides the influence of technology

and social media?

Stratis: You know, it’s interesting. When you think about what you read, and I tend to

do a lot of work in the 19th Century, and I work on a lot of 19th Century artists—

artists like Degas, Gauguin, Whistler, Cassatt—so, in order to study those artists,

you have to immerse yourself to some degree in the literature of the period--

reading the popular novels at the time, reading the poetry at the time, reading the

art criticism at the time. I find that really fascinating, and I enjoy that. I enjoy

19th Century literature. It’s not to say I don’t read books that came out in 2015,

and I do, but in a way there’s a bit of a disconnect. It doesn’t interest me as

much. It’s hard to explain. I always make the joke that if it happened after

1900, I don’t know about it. Don’t ask me about it. Of course, people talk

about books they’ve read and music they’ve heard, and certainly music is all

over the place today. It’s this sort of notion of popular culture, and what does

popular culture signify when you think about art. I guess for me, it’s like when

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Andy Warhol started taking the Campbell’s Soup can and sort of merging art

and popular culture. It’s not to say that that wasn’t done in the 19th Century or

before, but it’s just that the earlier stuff I find much more appealing, probably

because for me there is that historical element. Whereas, other people are much

more interested in the events of the 20th Century or the present day. I don’t

know. That’s not where I’m at. I read the newspaper and do all that stuff. If

someone said what is your idea of the best vacation, the best vacation for me

would be to go around the world seeking out ancient archaeological sites, and

just walking them, being a part of them, trying to look at the light, look at the

landscape around them, to try to get an understanding about what it would have

been like to just stand in that place thousands and hundreds of years ago. I find

that very appealing. You can never reproduce it, but there’s just something very

compelling about that to me. If I think about major trips I’ve taken, what’s been

the most significant moment of the trip? Was it going to see a concert, was it

taking a hike, was it eating good food? For me it would be, I went and saw

Stonehenge and I was able to be a part of that. Or, I went to see some old Abby

and church ruins, and I was able to walk among the ruins. Also, I find it very

aesthetically beautiful. There’s also that aspect. It isn’t just its place in history,

it’s that as you walk those paths they really are beautiful.

Whyler: It does seem, especially in your line of work, it’s not just a matter of the

conservation. It seems you really are trying to understand what it was the

product of. What was the world that produced this piece?

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Stratis: Yes. What were people reading at the time, or what were they looking at that

caused them to draw something a particular way, or paint something a particular

way? It’s always trying to put it, to some degree, in that context. Not

necessarily for the restoration part, but just to appreciate it in its time and space.

Also, not to discount just the beautiful object. I still believe there’s merit to just

liking something because it’s beautiful.

Whyler: I can’t agree more. Actually, sometimes you can just like a piece because you

think it’s pretty.

Stratis: Right. Why not? You know, why not? When you’re going to a museum like

the Benaki and look at all that fabulous ancient gold and jewelry, the reaction is

almost visceral, because it is just gorgeous. And that’s okay. It can just be

about that, and nothing more than that immediate reaction.

Whyler: By some of the references that you’ve brought up before, have you traveled

quite a bit throughout Greece?

Stratis: Not Northern Greece. It’s interesting. What a lot of Greek families tend to do is

bring you back to where they came from. So, I have toured some of the sites.

I’ve certainly gone through the western side of Turkey to see a lot of the ruins

over there. But, for example, I’ve never been to the Meteora. I’ve never been to

Salonika. I’ve never gone to Northern Greece. Where my mother is from there

is an area there, Nestor’s Palace is over there. So, there is a lot of emphasis on

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that site. When I was there, there wasn’t much going on, but in recent years it

seems like they are starting to do more there. Seems like the possibility for

excavation and for archaeological studies in Greece is endless. There is a lot of

potential. And who knows, maybe when I retire someday I’ll go, and I’ll spend

a summer on a dig. I don’t know. It’s hard to know. But I have traveled quite a

lot for my work, mostly because we do a lot of exhibitions abroad and with co-

organizers. I would travel with exhibitions when we wanted to borrow works

for the exhibitions. I would often travel with the curators to help negotiate loans

and select works of art for exhibitions. That is part of what I do. There was a

good bit of travel for that, but you’re not going to find a lot of art on paper in

places like Angkor Wat in Cambodia, so that’s some place that I really, really

want to go someday.

Whyler: Considering you have seen some of these ancient places, as extensively as you

have traveled, do you see the impacts that these ancient cultures had, either on

the art that you are studying, or even on us in the modern day?

Stratis: Well, it’s harder for me in the modern day. You certainly see the ancients being

studied, emulated, when you look even at the Sistine Chapel and you see ancient

precedence there. You go into the 18th Century and you see history painters, and

they are depicting scenes from ancient history, scenes from mythology. There

was a resonance there. There was something that we find compelling about

those stories and about that past. I don’t see a correlation with the present day.

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I really don’t. I think you either love it, and you make that a part of what enriches you, certainly in fields like philosophy and law. I can see a more direct link than I do to at least art making. Popular aesthetic has changed so much.

Maybe an artist can be very, very inspired by a story from mythology, and then from that do a painting that is completely abstract, or do a performance piece or a piece of time-based art where unless you knew that the artist was inspired by ancient precedence you wouldn’t necessarily see it in something that is a literal narrative. It comes more from the gut than just mere representation. Whereas, I think if you look back to earlier precedence, it was representing a particular battle, representing a particular myth, conveying what that might have looked like, what the atmosphere might have been like, what the color of it would have been, what atmosphere mostly was it in smoke, or fire, or light. All of that in a contemporary art scene doesn’t appear unless you’re looking at the art of an artist who’s working in a very realist manner. So it goes from something that is very realistic, to something that’s not realistic at all. That, to some degree, requires more work on the part of the viewer. Understanding what does influence a particular artist, learning about the artist, and then looking at their imagery and understand what they’re trying to convey with something that might not be at all literal or realist or realistic. That requires more on the part of the viewer, but I think going through that effort can be extremely gratifying. I guess what I’m saying is it is still there, it’s just not overt. If it’s something that

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someone wants to pursue in finding the ancients in 2017 or in the 21st Century, I

think it’s there, you just have to delve more deeply because it’s not as overt.

Whyler: As you were saying previously, or at least you got me thinking, you mention

these mythological stories that are represented in the ancient art, you see it

represented in the Renaissance, you see people representing it to this day—I’m

trying to think of an example—…

Stratis: Well, Picasso in the 20th Century. He was doing in many respects in some of his

prints—I mean I don’t want to say realistic—but narratives that were you to read

the story that they related to, you would understand it.

Whyler: Why is it, do you think, these stories from thousands of years ago manage to

transcend cultures, transcend countries, and still manage to be a sense of

inspiration to artists so long after the fact? Because you would think after a long

amount of time, new stories would come up that would be inspirational, but it

always seems that they go back. I wonder, why is it, you feel, these stories

manage to remain so popular?

Stratis: One could simply say it’s just because they’re really good. (laughs) It’s hard to

know. You read the stories, you read the Greek myths to your kids, and it’s as

good or better as any movie that they’re going to see today. That is where I do

see some cross-over, is in modern children’s literature and young adult

literature. In fiction where they take Ancient Greek myths and give them, let’s

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say, a modern spin. Why they’ve endured, to me it’s just simply because they

do capture people’s imagination and they are good, and they are compelling. If

there wasn’t something about them that was alluring, they would have

disappeared a long, long time ago. Somehow maybe it is the visuals, maybe it is

seeing the marble sculptures, and maybe it is having those experiences, I don’t

know. But certainly, you read these stories from the time you are a little kid.

Why do some of the great classics survive, I don’t know. I hope they continue

to survive. That’s the question that you wonder how long this material will

endure, but it has endured this long. Why people are compelled, I’m not really

sure. I certainly am. So, it’s hard to know why, it’s just something for me that

always was. Is it just second nature because I came from a Greek household?

No. That can’t be the only explanation, because there are certainly many, many,

many people that are not of Greek heritage who are as fascinated by this

material as Hellenes are. I don’t think I have an answer to why. That’s a huge

question.

Whyler: I understand that (laughs) and I apologize.

Stratis: No. No. It’s okay. I wish I had a kernel to give you. I guess what inspires,

what sparks the imagination. That’s really tough. I don’t really know, but it

certainly does it very effectively. We talk about the museum experience, and

you talk about these exhibitions of ancient art, people are lining up to see them.

Maybe just stating it this simply sounds too simplistic, but is it simply the

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beauty of it? I don’t know, but they’re sure in these galleries day in and day out,

and I don’t think it’s because they have to be there, because they certainly don’t.

Museums in this country aren’t free, so they’re also making a financial

commitment to going in and having this experience. So, somehow they are

enriched by it, as I think it should be. I think everybody should go into art

museums and in some way be enriched. As I said, whether it’s simply looking

at something as a material and saying this is so beautiful, whether it’s

understanding the narrative that’s being depicted, or putting it in a historical

context, I’ve never really thought about the visitor experience as to what they’re

taking away. I know as someone who helps organize exhibitions, we try to tell a

story. In telling that story, we hope we’ve added something to the museum-

viewer’s understanding of a particular artist’s work, or a particular period of

work. You hope that something sticks that inspires in some way.

Whyler: Maybe it is my own personal experience, but I feel like I’m definitely having to

make the argument that history does matter. The past does matter. It is

important to know these things. Almost as if people are starting to feel as if

history, especially the very distant past, has little relevance that impacts us in the

modern day.

Stratis: See, that I don’t even understand. Don’t people want to understand where

they’re from? Don’t people want to understand civilization and how civilization

evolved? To me, it sounds very insular, and I can’t live in a bubble. When you

124 say that the only thing that matters is like the last 50 years, that’s a very narrow view of the world. I can’t even comprehend that. I really can’t. That there wouldn’t be some sense of wanting to know the continuum of history in some way. Maybe someone isn’t interested in ancient history, but are they interested in American History? Or is it just I was born, I exist, I live in the moment, I listen to my music, I read my books, and I don’t need to put anything in context?

Maybe, it’s generational. I’m probably a lot older than you are, and I just don’t see how you exist like that. I think we today have a direct connection to the past, whatever that might be. It’s important to kind of link yourself to something. Maybe that’s just old fashioned. I don’t know. Here’s another example, I have a son who is adopted from Guatemala. Guatemala is very rich in Mayan archaeological ancient history. Although some of those stories can be very bloody and brutal when you think about ritual and you think about battle, not that Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome and Ancient Egypt weren’t, but I want him to see those ruins. I want him to go to a place like Tikal, I want him to walk among these forests and come upon these sites of an ancient culture that he is a direct descendant from. Somehow that’s important to me. Now, I need to find out, he’s 10 (laughs), I don’t know how he’s going to feel about it, or if it’s going to be, “Mom! Are you really making me go to another archaeological site?” I don’t know if he’ll see that link, but I sure do. To me it’s very important.

125

Whyler: Actually, that answered one of my questions. Maybe it was just my personal

feelings toward it. Do you feel as if there seems to be this, maybe not so much

ignorance, but indifference, or do you feel as if maybe the tides are turning?

Stratis: Oh, I don’t see tides turning. No. Is it indifference? Disinterest. Disinterest

maybe. I also think we’re at a point where people want information fast. They

want sound bytes. I think in part that comes from the digital experience. Think

about how much visual information we are confronted with every day. What

you can see. I can’t even begin to start—you think about video games, you

think about seeing whatever you want on You Tube, you have immediate access

to imagery and information through Google, and coming to a museum and

standing in front of a, let’s just say a beautiful piece of Ancient Greek pottery,

requires more than that instantaneous fix. If you want to understand the

narrative that’s being represented on that pot, you have to spend some time with

it. So, is it simply that with the passage of time information is given much more

quickly in the modern age? So, maybe even 50 years ago, we had more time

because time moved slower. To step back and appreciate, I don’t know, it

seems like there is an immediacy, we want it and we want it now. If you don’t

respond to an email fast enough, why haven’t you responded? There is this

sense of almost urgency and I’m not even really sure why.

Whyler: That’s understandable. Would you have any words of wisdom for somebody

who is trying to find a career in history and art and the past?

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Stratis: I just think no matter what career, it can be anything, that if someone is fortunate

enough to be able to study what they love, then the rest of it falls into place. I

work with a lot of artists and they work in the museum doing all kinds of jobs.

The job is almost secondary to the art-making. So, when they leave here and

they go home and they’re in their studio and they’re making art, that’s their

passion. So, I would say to someone who wants to pursue Ancient History, the

Classics, just find a way to do it. That’s hard, because that might not be what

you actually do to earn a living, and sometimes it’s just the very lucky person

that finds a way to combine it, to be able to earn a living doing what you love.

Again, in the modern age, it’s a very, very complicated question, because you

have to earn a living. It’s very hard in taking that path, and getting a Ph.D. in

the Classics, getting a Ph.D. in Philosophy, and then saying what do I do with

this now that I’ve got this degree? Do you stay in academia? Do you go and try

to teach in high school or elementary school and try to shape a younger

generation? It’s hard to know, but I think it’s almost a luxury, but I think people

really do have to follow, if they can, their passion. I was just very lucky. It

would have been great to be an artist, but once I got to college I realized that that

wasn’t where my strength was. Being around the objects and being around

artifacts, and in a museum environment, to me was more meaningful than

actually being the person who makes the art. In my chosen profession, it all

came together. So, if you work with people or you have fellow colleagues and

students who really have a passion, for as long as they can, I would encourage

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them. I really would. There are all kinds of people, there are all kinds of paths,

and there’s no right path and there’s no wrong path. It’s just finding what’s

right for you. Like I said, maybe that’s not necessarily what your day job is.

(Whyler laughs) It’s just hard. Maybe it means you teach in the public schools,

and maybe you’re a teacher who assigns all these great modern myths and

historic myths.

Whyler: Those were always the assignments that sparked my interest.

Stratis: Mm hmm.

Whyler: So, I have actually come to the end of my questions.

Stratis: Yes. I think we did it.

Whyler: Yes.

Stratis: I think we did it.

Whyler: Yes. Is there anything, any closing thoughts that you would like to add?

Stratis: No. I think we pretty much covered it. I think the project is really interesting,

what you’re doing. I would be fascinated to hear what some of the responses

are. I think it would also be very interesting, and I don’t know if you plan on

doing this, but given the group of people you have told me about, it sounds like

most of them are sort of adult, like older. I would find it very interesting if you

did something very similar with someone who might be say, third generation or

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fourth generation, and was maybe in their 30’s, how they perceive their

connection. When you think about it generationally, a first generation versus a

second generation versus a fourth generation, does that distance them from more

of the ancient part, the Ancient Greek? Once you become more and more

American, so to speak, does it lose its relevance? I certainly don’t know. I

know you see it in languages where you have first generation, second

generation, where people are bilingual, but by the time you get to the third

generation, that starts to slip and disappear. Is it similar to what happens just

with language? Do you learn language out of necessity, or do you also learn

language because of a love of language? It’s hard, again. There are so, so, so,

so many choices, and your subject asks more questions, in a way, than it

answers.

Whyler: Yes. Very much so.

Stratis: You kind of wonder, and it’s almost like amassing data. It’s like, okay, I’m

talking to three people, and now I’m going to talk to six people, and what’s the

demographic? How old are they? Are they men? Are they women? What

generation are they? Were they rich? What’s their level of education? All of

that is going to factor in to the way they answer these questions. That, in and of

itself, could be a lifetime’s work. (laughs)

Whyler: Yes. Absolutely.

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Stratis: Exactly. It’s like I’m just trying to get my Master’s thesis here, right? (laughs)

Whyler: (Laughs)

Stratis: I hear you. I hear you. When you go through this, if you have any more

questions, give me a call, and then I will go back and fill out this form for you

and scan it and send it to you.

Whyler: Thank you. We’ll turn off the recorders now.

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Appendix E: Oral History Interview with Renee Pappas

Oral History Interview

with

Renee Pappas

Art and Culture Consulting and Public Relations

June 20, 2017

By Caroline Whyler California State University, Sacramento

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Mission Statement

Interview History

Interviewer / Editor:

Caroline Whyler B.A, UC Davis, History M.A, CSU Sacramento, History

Interview Time and Place:

1 session: June 20th, 2017, over the telephone. Session approximately 75 minutes

Editing:

Recording and Transcript:

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[June 20, 2017]

Whyler: This is Caroline Whyler interviewing Renee Pappas. It is June 20th, 2017, at

about 1:05 p.m. Renee, thank you for agreeing to talk to me today.

Pappas: Well, thank you for taking the time to set up this interview.

Whyler: Let me also introduce you. You are in public relations and consulting for

different art and culture institutions. Could you tell me a little bit about your life

growing up?

Pappas: I was born in Chicago. My maternal grandparents were from a village in Greece

called Vervena, which is in Arcadia, and very high up in the mountains. My

mother was born in Chicago. My grandfather came here in 1897, my

grandmother in about 1910. My father was born in a village just outside of

Pyrgos, but that is the west coast of the Peloponnese, and he arrived in the U.S.,

I think sometime around 1929. I would imagine you could describe my

background as sort of a typical Greek American household in the 50’s,

surrounded by many relatives, many aunts, uncles, cousins, and so forth. My

father died when I was 8-1/2, so that certainly changed things a great deal. My

parents did speak Greek, not all of the time, but occasionally at home, and I did

go to one year of Greek school before he died. So I had that bit of Greek

133 language. After he died, we then moved to California, my mother, my sister, and I—Southern California. Of course, I went to junior high, high school, and then two years of junior college. Then I got into the music business and worked in the music business first at an agency, then I worked for The Beach Boys, then with David Geffen at his Asylum Records company. I met my first husband,

Jerry Wexler, who was one of the owners of Atlantic Records, and moved to

New York. At that point I went back to school. I went first to Finch, and then I finished at Marymount, and I majored in History and Art History. In our home, yes, we were very much ... We definitely knew we were Greek when it came to things certainly the food, the older relatives certainly spoke Greek among themselves. I would say that my introduction to Greek culture, however, really took place in my early teenage years. It’s interesting. I received a book on my

14th birthday. I have it actually in front of me. The Mermaid Madonna by

Stratis Myrivilis. He’s a very well-known Greek writer, sort of I’d say 1920’s and 1930’s. This is of course an English translation, and I enjoyed that book very, very much. Of course, growing up in the United States in the 50’s and

60’s, everyone took classes studying Greek mythology I think in the 3rd grade.

So certainly we all knew about the gods and goddesses of Ancient Greece.

What I think sort of kick started a lot of my interest in modern Greek culture was of course this book, and then when I was at Asylum Records there was a wonderful songwriter called Judee Sill, who was signed to the label. She gave me Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ. I read that and became

134 very interested in his other books and started reading them. When I moved to

New York after I married Jerry, and I went back to college, I was able to really get more formal education in terms of art history, and actually, when you think about Renaissance art, and even as you go into modern art, there is a huge influence from Ancient Greek art, certainly on the Renaissance and all subsequent periods. Actually, Jerry had a rather big collection of mainly surrealist art—Magritte, Dali-- and you could see even in some of their works influences of Ancient Greek art. So, I became quite involved in the arts living in

New York and so forth. As far as Ancient Greece, the first time I went to

Greece was in 1970. It was when I was working for The Beach Boys. My mother had gone to Greece and actually lived there for about a year and a half, and really traveled from north to south, east to west. She was all over the country. On that first trip to Greece that I made, of course, we went to the

Acropolis, and in those days you could even walk into the Parthenon and kind of walk around, so we did that. We went up to Delphi of course. So I was very much attracted to antiquities, and flirted with the idea of wouldn’t it be wonderful to study archaeology and so forth. When I graduated from

Marymount I had a Bachelor’s Degree in History and Art History. I started working as an interior designer, so I was quite busy with all of that. After my divorce from Jerry, I decided I was going to live in Greece, and so I did. I moved to Greece. I had met a number of people who were involved in the arts in Greece. I don’t know if you’re aware of Alexander Iolas. He was a very,

135 what shall I say, he was this incredibly flamboyant art dealer, who had galleries in Paris and New York. He had really started a career as a Greek artist like

Takis for instance, the sculptor. Anyway, he was an incredible person, had the most magnificent house that you could possibly imagine. I know it was featured in Architectural Digest at one point, with not only Greek art and some antiquities, but also de Chirico, Cezanne—I mean, he had a huge art collection.

When I first got to Greece, meeting Iolas, and meeting a number of other people,

I got to know people in the Greek art scene. It was a vibrant art scene. There always really has been in modern times. I was able to learn that there were a number of Greek painters who, starting I suppose in about the 1880’s or 1890’s, studied in different cities in Europe. There was one group who went to Munich and studied, and then of course many, many, many going to Paris in the 1920’s,

30’s, and so on and so forth. There was a small, but definitely active and very well recognized group, not only in Greece, but in the rest of Europe, of Greek contemporary artists. Of course, after World War II and certainly on into the

60’s and 70’s, you have many, many more contemporary artists who are Greek.

Again, many who went to study in Paris. You have Yannis Kounelis, really is associated with and lived in Rome for many, many years. So, I knew all these people. At a certain point, I would have to become the director of a music and performance arts festival near Ancient Olympia, near where my father’s village was. There was a village called Floka and the mayor had this incredibly ambitious idea, and he did do it. He built, I think it must have been at least a

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2,000 feet outdoor theater, out of stone, in the manner of an ancient Greek theater, and wanted to put on a music and arts festival. So, he asked me if I would be the director. I brought in another friend of mine called Dinos Tavridis, who had produced a number of shows in Greece, and productions and concerts and so forth. We were able that summer, what was really quite extraordinary, to book for the opening Mikhail Baryshnikov and the White Oak Dance Company that he had. That was the opening, so obviously the theater was totally sold out, and we had every news agency that had offices in Athens--we’re talking about

AP writers, the French were filming. It was quite something. That festival sort of continued on through the summer. Through that festival, one of the things that we did, is we were actually one of the first cultural entities in Greece to have a website. This was 1997. I had a friend who was one of the pioneers of creating websites. He showed it to us and I said, “Oh God! We’ve got to do that.” So we did. After the season ended, Alexis Alexandradis was his name, asked me if I would like to come and work with his company, because he wanted to start reaching out to museums in Greece to create websites for them. I was friendly with a number of people, not only Iolas, who by that time had passed away, but Ian Vorres who had founded a marvelous museum in Paiania.

A very interesting person from a very, sort of well-to-do Greek family, emigrated to Canada after World War II, and sort of made his fortune, as people want to say, and then came back to Greece and was really horrified when he saw

Greeks sort of chucking out their culture, throwing anything old out, (laughs)

137 and buying plastic stuff. So, he bought a number of houses in this village of

Paiania, which is now near the new airport, but then it was still real countryside.

He bought three or four houses, put them together, and started buying what we now would refer to as folk art. He bought pieces of furniture. He bought icons.

He bought literally things that people were tossing out, and created these beautiful gardens. Then eventually he built a modern annex and he also, at that same time, was collecting Greek and Greek American contemporary artists. So, in the new wing he had a wonderful museum of contemporary Greek art. I knew all of these people, and also Dolly Goulandris, who had the Cycladic Museum.

Along with Alexis, I was able to introduce him to different people at the different museums, and so forth. We started building websites for them. That was lots of fun. That was interesting. At a certain point, I guess in 1998, I was watching CNN International and a program had started called The Artclub. The

Artclub was a weekly show and they went to a different city every week. They featured artists, galleries, museums, and so forth. I watched it for a couple of weeks. I thought this would be so great to do in Greece. I tracked down the producers. It wasn’t an in-house production for CNN. It was another company based in London. So, I contacted them and I said, “Have you considered

Athens?” They said, “Well, yeah, it’s on the list, but is there any contemporary art in Athens?” I said, “Well, I’ll send you some stuff.” (Whyler laughs) So, I went to everyone. Everybody had at least some sort of brochure or some material that was in English. I put those things together and sent them off to

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London. In addition to Vorres and the Cycladic Museum, there’s also a rather important Greek collector called Dakis Joannou. Dakis Joannou has a huge construction company. He is world renowned as a collector of contemporary art. In fact, he was the president of the International Board of Guggenheim. He was opening his own—he didn’t call it a museum, he called it a space—which had some of his collection on display. There was some sort of a restaurant/bar kind of place. It was called the Deste Centre, and it was in Psychico. He was having the opening of this thing, I don’t know, three or four weeks’ time after I had sent the package up to London. So, I got this call and they said, “Okay, we’ll be there in two weeks.” Oh God! Okay. So we lined up places where they could shoot, and people that they could interview, and so forth, and one of them was the opening of the Deste Centre, which was, of course, going to be this glittery night with all of contemporary art-loving Athens there. We did that.

We did an interview with Dolly Goulandris at the Cycladic Museum. We went out to Ian Vorres’s marvelous museum and interviewed him. We went to the

Lalaounis Jewelry Museum. Also, at that point, one of the entities that the company had done a website for, was the City of Athens, who had just renovated the Gazi area, that was the old gas works, and they had created a whole cultural center there. We shot there. Also at that time, there’s an area in

Athens near Monastiraki—if you know Athens at all, there is Ermou Street,

Monastiraki is let’s say on the left side of the street and PSYRI is on the right side of the street—so PSYRI had formerly been this area where lots of leather

139 workers were, little workshops, as with Soho and Tribeca and places like that in

New York, artists were looking for spaces that were big so that they could have their studios, and galleries were looking for spaces. So suddenly, PSYRI became this hot place. It was galleries, it was artists living and working there, then restaurants followed, so we did some shooting in PSYRI. Anyway, this was very exciting. Everybody was thrilled. It was on CNN. I think it usually aired something like 20 times during whatever week on CNN International, so this was a giant publicity for Greece, and of course, for contemporary art in

Greece, which a lot of people didn’t know existed. From there, another friend of mine, who is an archaeologist, introduced me to a Greek journalist friend of hers who thought that this was just terrific, and decided to do a profile on me for

ERT [The Greek National TV Channel]. That was interesting. When The

Artclub people were talking about what to do next in Greece, I said I thought we should do something on the islands. It’s not just go to the beach, I mean, there are some marvelous museums, there are some great art, there are some really interesting things, and they said yeah, let’s do it. So, that was the summer of

1999. This Greek journalist friend said this is terrific, and he arranged for me to have dinner with him at the house of the then minister, her name was Elisavet

Papazoi, and she was at that time the Minister of Culture. We had dinner at her house. She had a beautiful little house in Plaka anyway, and I told her this is what I want to do, and go to these different places. I started doing some research on where we would go in the Aegean. So I now, at this point, had the

140 support of the Greek government, the Ministry of Culture, on it. For this show, we started off in Athens, we did a profile on a Greek painter called Achilleas

Droungas, who is quite well known and respected. A couple years later he had a retrospective at the National Gallery in Athens. We did a profile on him. He has a beautiful house facing the Acropolis and so we did something in his studio. Then, I had learned about something quite unique on the island of

Santorini. The Nomikos family, which is the shipping family, had worked with

Kodak to develop some sort of special process so that they recreated the

Santorini frescoes in their—well, the family also had vineyards and these had been the caves where they stored the wine—so, they created a little museum where you actually thought that they were the real frescoes. I mean, it was incredible. We flew to Santorini, we shot there. We also shot actually in the airport, in the lounge. They had an exhibition of paintings, and we shot there.

Then we went from Santorini, we took, I think, a hydrofoil to the island of

Syros, which is where Droungas also had a summer house. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but Syros is the capital of the Cycladic islands, and it was the first industrial city in Greece. I know that sounds really strange on an island, but it was. They had tanneries and other industries, so they had a rather successful mercantile class, plus of course, shipping. It was a big harbor. All of these people who were very successful, this is sort of 1860’s or 1870’s, built these magnificent neoclassical houses. They even built an opera house, which had just been restored, which was like a mini La Scala. It was just magnificent.

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We shot there. We shot this beautiful interior, and on the ceiling were these

wonderful portraits of Verdi and Rossini. It was just a gem. The City Hall,

which of course was designed by Ernst Ziller, who was one of the important

German architects who had come to Greece just after Greek independence in the

1840’s, and of course Ziller was responsible for some of the most important

neoclassical public buildings all over Greece. He designed the City Hall, which

is a copy or was inspired by the description in the Iliad of the palace in Troy, so

Priam’s Palace.

Whyler: Oh, okay. Okay.

Pappas: We had that, and then we helicoptered from there to Andros because the

Goulandris family, Basil and Elise Goulandris, had established a Museum of

Contemporary Art on the island of Andros. We did a wonderful interview with

her and shot the exhibition which was just incredible, it was called Masters of

the Twentieth Century, and you had Degas, you had Chegall, you had Picasso,

you had an unbelievable collection. From there, we went to Rhodes where we

shot an artist who had an exhibition in the wonderful medieval town. The city

of Rhodes also had a very extensive collection of contemporary art in the city,

and so we shot there. Also, another artist. So, we did a beautiful thing. So we

did art in the Aegean. This again was like a huge smash. Slowly but surely, I

was doing these things of getting exposure for Greece internationally. One thing

sort of led to another, and I realized that the museums in Greece, although they

142 certainly did a good job of publicizing their exhibitions locally, they really had no presence in the rest of the world. So having met so many of the journalists, especially during the music festival that I was involved with down in the

Peloponnese, I started reaching out to them, and reaching out to the museums, and saying these people are here, their office is here, they have staffs, let’s invite them to the openings. They’re here. You don’t have to fly anybody in. So that started, and I started working with the Cycladic Museum, The Goulandris

Museum in Andros, and so for a number of years for their openings I would bring anywhere usually about a dozen journalists for the weekend. Everybody was happy. They got stories published in many, many international publications. The journalists had a great weekend. I also started working with the municipality of Rhodes as well, because they were given a big building and created an even larger museum for their collection, so we did things like that.

That’s what I did. I sort of created a whole area of activity that didn’t really exist before, which was international press for Greek art for museums, for individual artists-I have a number of individual artist clients. I think the thing that I’m very proud of is that I was able to sort of put all of this on the map.

That’s what I did while I was in Greece. So I was quite active with all of that.

Then of course we all know the financial crisis hit Greece, and we know that the arts are always the thing to get cut whenever there’s a financial crisis. So things started winding down. Many museums were closing more days, cutting staff, all sorts of things. I was then offered a position to move to Chicago and become

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the Director of Development at the National Hellenic Museum. I decided that

that was something I could so, and that I was also in a position to be, I suppose,

a bridge of some sort between Greek Americans and Greek contemporary artists,

and so forth. I got to Chicago four years ago in 2013. I stayed at the Museum

for about a year and a half, and then I resigned. It just wasn’t going in the

direction that I had hoped it would. That’s kind of where we are. Since I hadn’t

lived in the U.S. for quite a long time, I think a lot of things, especially in the

Greek American community, surprised me. I found that, unfortunately, there

was little or no awareness that there was anything going on in Greece in

contemporary art. Also, that even among people who were extremely well-

educated people here, they had no idea whatsoever that, for instance, Greece has

two Nobel-Prize winning poets, George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis. A number

of them had never read Kazantzakis. I just find it tragic. I really don’t know

what these Greek schools do here. I don’t know what they teach, but I know

what they don’t teach. It appears that they don’t teach anything about

contemporary Greek literature, art, or even music. There are a number of Greek

composers who are considered extremely important composers in the world of

classical music--Stamatis Spanoudakis. It’s very, very, very, very sad for me to

see this.

Whyler: You’re talking about you definitely know what they’re not teaching, just for a

bit of reference, what is it, in your impression, that the Greek schools are

teaching, especially here in the U.S.?

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Pappas: Well, I know that they teach Greek and they teach a certain level of Greek

history, but modern Greek history … I’m talking about having conversations

with people—again, accomplished people, people who are well educated—and

it just … I don’t know what they’re teaching. I really don’t know. I know

they’re not teaching about Greek contemporary writers. The interesting thing is

almost all of these major Greek writers have been translated into English. It’s

not like, oh God, I have to read it in Greek. That’s not the case. All of them—

Cavafy, Seferis, Elytis, and certainly Kazantzakis. There are even a number of

Greek writers, I can’t remember his name, but there’s one who writes detective

novels for instance. He’s been widely translated. There’s another, Doxiadis is

his name. He also writes detective novels. He’s been translated into half a

dozen languages, but there just doesn’t seem to be, I don’t know, it’s like, my

grandfather came from a village, he was illiterate, okay, he worked hard, his

kids went to school, the boys went to college and everything, but there’s this

weird thing here of Greek Americans where they think that Greeks sort of

stopped when their grandparents or their parents emigrated from Greece. That’s

not that way at all. It’s a contemporary society, with all the good things and the

bad things. I found this of course as I lived in Greece for quite some time, but

there was always a group of Greeks who were in the arts, working in literature,

who were very sophisticated, well-traveled people. My grandfather wasn’t one

of them. He came from a village. He was illiterate, but as you live in the United

States and you are part of the modern world, and you are a well-educated

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individual, my God, why aren’t you learning about what’s going on in the place

of origin. I find it so depressing and so sad that they don’t know. Now, frankly,

there’s no excuse. With the internet, you can go online. Kathimerini has an

English version online. Kathimerini is a very serious Greek newspaper. Okay,

you don’t want to see the Greek’s news that’s happening, go to the section on

the arts. See what’s going on. See what exhibitions are going on. Every Greek

museum now has a website. Go to the Benaki website. Go to the Cycladic

Museum. You can click and it’s in English. Do that. See what’s going on

there. See what the exhibitions are. See what’s happening. There’s no excuse

now with the internet. I mean, maybe in the 50’s, okay, fine, there was a

distance. Anyway, that’s just my take on it. So, I think that Politismos

Museum, the website, will help a lot to get people to realize that being Greek

isn’t just about dancing Hasapiko every once in a while and making a moussaka

once a week.

Whyler: You’ve kind of touched on it, this sort of disconnect between …

Pappas: Oh, yeah.

Whyler: …this sort of disconnect between the present and the past. You’ve done a

considerable amount of work trying to promote, more so modern cultures, but

also ancient cultures as well. Do you find it hard to connect these two as if

they’re almost two separate cultures, instead of a very long culture? Do you feel

as if there is almost two cultures, instead of one?

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Pappas: No. I don’t think there’s two cultures. I think that Ancient Greek culture, first

of all, has influenced western culture for several thousand years. All you have

to do is look at the subjects of Renaissance paintings and you see, let’s say half

of them are Christian religious subjects—Madonna and so forth—but the rest of

them, The Birth of Venus, Botticelli, we go on and on and on. Ancient Greek

mythology and Ancient Greek culture, even when you think about architecture,

when you think about Palladio, when you think of people like architects in

England, you travel through the United States, and if you go to New England or

to the South, every public building is a Greek temple. So is Washington D.C.,

the capital building. The influence of Greek art and architecture is continuous

onto contemporary art. As I mentioned, you see the influence of Greek

contemporary art, there’s a period in Picasso for instance, when he did these

giant people, and of course, he had this fascination with the Minotaur, and so

you see all of these paintings with the man with the bull’s head. You have

contemporary Greek artists as well who can’t help but be influenced by things

around them, even though they might be abstract artists, they’re still something

going through. So you have that, but you also have Greek drama influencing

everyone from Shakespeare to Eugene O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra.

You have plays that are written today, (laughs) you even have a movie, the

George Clooney movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which is loosely based on

Ulysses coming home, you know, Odysseus trying to find his way home with all

the monsters and things that he confronts. It’s an integral part of western

147 culture, western civilization, in every medium, whether it’s literature, whether it’s liberal arts, and so forth. I have a dear friend who was the head of the

Classics Department of the University of California, at Santa Barbara; a wonderful professor Athanassakis, and he’s retired. He told me, Renee, I’ve taught the Classics for, what 40 years or something. I think there were a dozen

Greek American kids who took my classes. I mean, it’s like, what? You’re kidding me? No. Other people, people who were Irish or English or whatever, they were studying the Classics. I don’t get it. I don’t understand why there’s a disconnect, and it’s really, really, really, sad. I just wish that there were more cross-cooperations. I mean, let’s face it, a lot of Greek Americans go to Greece in the summer. The typical itinerary is I’ve got to go to the village and see these old relatives. Okay, I’ll do that, and spend a day there, two days, whatever, and get out of there. Then I’ll hit Mykonos. There are so many wonderful other things to see besides just going to the beach. I don’t know. It’s very sad for me to see that this rich culture, this heritage that is the basis of western civilization, has not been embraced by the average Greek American. Possibly this has to do with the fact that, again, and I’m talking about my family, when people arrive from Greece illiterate, poor, and everything else, they were just trying to survive. But then you get the next and the next generations, and I think that there need to be cultural institutions in the U.S. that are about Greek art and culture, that are not an extension of a church situation, because they have another agenda. They have their own agenda, they have their own things that

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they want to do, and that’s great, but contemporary Greek art, literature, that’s

not in their playbook.

Whyler: Okay. So, shifting the view from Greeks and Greek Americans, do you think

there are misconceptions that non-Greeks have about Greek culture, just because

of how it’s portrayed in many different media?

Pappas: Yes. I do. I think that there’s stereotypical characters. Okay. Not every Greek

owns a diner, okay? That’s okay. It’s all very well and you can have a comedy,

but there are other kinds of people, there are other sorts of people. It would be

refreshing to see a Greek character, and interestingly, there’s a book, I don’t

know if you know about this book, called—I’ll tell you the title. It’s a great

book written maybe 20 or 25 years ago, called Helenes and Hellions, Modern

Greek Characters in American Literature, by Alexander Karanikas. There have

been Greek characters in American literature since I’d say 1800 or maybe even

before that. But certainly with the Greek War of Independence there was

incredible awareness of Greece, probably like Byron, a very romanticized view

of Greece, but nevertheless, there were societies in New York, Boston, and

Philadelphia that raised money for the Greek War of Independence. There were

writers who wrote poems about the Greek War of Independence, just like Lord

Byron did. There were plays. There have been Greek characters been featured

in American literature. There’s the husband in The Postman Always Rings

Twice. There’s Nick Charles in The Thin Man. He was Greek. Mr. Lucky.

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There are these Greek characters that show up every once in a while. Now you have in the last 30 or 40 years, some Greek American writers who are writing serious books about Greek Americans. You think about Harry Mark Petrakis, and even Elia Kazan’s books. I just reread a book of his called Acts of Love, which takes place in a sort of conflict between a waspy woman who marries into this traditional Greek family, and these conflicts between the two different groups of people. Yes, I think there is a bit of a misperception, I think because

Greek contemporary artists have not been exhibited to the extent that I believe they should be in the United States. That, in fact, is one of the things that was colossally disappointing to me with the National Hellenic Museum, is that they did not do that. (laughs) They did not have exhibitions of very well-known

Greek contemporary artists who are in museums around the world and who have had exhibitions in every major capital of Europe. The fact that there was never an exhibition of any of these artists is really disappointing, because that would have done a lot to make the general public aware of the fact that there are contemporary artists in Greece. Now, at the same time, that that did not happen at the National Hellenic Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, about two years ago, did have an exhibition of young, contemporary Greek artists, which included even video artists and installation artists. That was great that they decided to do it. Greek artists need a heck of a lot more exposure.

Unfortunately, the National Hellenic Museum didn’t do it, or hasn’t done it as yet. I do think there are some films that have come out—there’s a film that

150 came out just recently that I saw—he’s the director and the writer, he’s also an actor, Papakaliatis is his name. It was really an excellent film because it really showed characters that were contemporary Greek people. His character was a guy who was in a high-tech firm that was suffering because of the crisis. The international company that evidently bought it was looking at how to make it more profitable. Do they downsize or whatever? Worlds Apart I think it was called. Anyway, that’s one of the best movies that I’ve seen coming out of

Greece that really gives you a picture of what modern life is like in that country with characters that aren’t stereotypical, that aren’t the Zorba character. It was very well done, I thought. There are some good films that have come out.

There is another one called Little England that was directed by Pantelis

Voulgaris, and that was a marvelous film that takes place in Andros among the shipping community. It takes place in like the 1920’s into the early 50’s, and is a very, very spot-on depiction of that world and those people. And don’t forget that we have this Greek director George Lanthimos, whose film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, four years ago, five years ago, something like that. Now, he just had a film that won something at

Cannes. There are a heck of a lot of wonderful Greek artists that are out there.

We just need to let people know about them, and give them the opportunity, if they’re artists, if they’re painters and sculptors, to exhibit in the United States. I wish that we could get Greek Americans interested in what’s going on now in

Greece. I don’t think that they have to fill their house with Greek art, but

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shouldn’t they at least know that it’s an option to buy a painting from a

recognized Greek artist? I’m talking about people who have a track record.

Why not?

Whyler: In my experience and my education, and not being of Greek heritage myself, I

find it hard to fill the void between probably Alexander the Great and Greek

independence. So there’s this whole colossal span of time in between, and I feel

it’s hard to grasp that time, especially if you are non-Greek.

Pappas: Oh no. But you see, that’s the fault of Greek educators. There was a lot that

was going on in Greece on the Greek mainland at that time. First of all, you

have the Byzantine Empire, which lasted a thousand years. Okay?

Whyler: Yes.

Pappas: I mean, this is important. But also, you had other things going on. People don’t

think of Greece in terms of feudalism and Knights in armor, but believe me,

Greece--just as in France, just as in Italy—it was the same thing. There were

castles built all over Greece, mainly by Normans. In other words, Crusaders

who were going to fight on the Crusades, and either never got there or just

decided to say this is a great place and I’m going to build my castle and I’ll

become a baron here. And they did. You have an incredible Renaissance

flowering in Crete, because Crete was Venetian, as were the Ionian Islands. So

you have this incredible epic poem Erotokritos, which was written in Crete,

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that’s right up there with Dante and so forth, and Chaucer. There were plenty of

wonderful, incredible, creative things that didn’t stop with Alexander, and then

just pop up again with the Greek War of Independence. There were a lot of

things going on. Greece was a bit divided up--first the Romans, then you get,

much later with the fall of Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire, but then you have

this Venetian thing. You have the other Italians, the Genovese, they were there

in parts of different islands. The Island of Syros was under the protection of the

King of France. That’s why you have all the Catholic presence there, and

Monasteries with Franciscan monks. There wasn’t just this void, but that part of

Greek history tends to be either overlooked or ignored.

Whyler: I know this would be hard to answer, especially on the spot, but why do you feel

that is?

Pappas: Well, I think one of the things is that Ancient Greek history and Ancient Greek

art is so overwhelming that you need to get your head around the fact that you

have the visual arts, you have architecture, you have theater, which really didn’t

exist until the Ancient Greeks. Every culture had religious ceremonies and so

forth, but the idea of writing down dialogue and telling a story and acting it out,

that didn’t happen before. The other thing is science. Aristotle, Euclid, and

mathematics—everything, whether it is science or the arts, within a span of a

couple of hundred years in this one part of the world, these disciplines sprang

forth. It sort of towers over everything else. But also, with the Greeks

153 themselves, when Greece became independent--or parts of Greece became independent because it became independent in increments over the year-- but when it became recognized as a country in about 1836 or whatever, the educated

Greeks, the Greeks who many of them lived outside of Greece, they were merchants, they lived in Vienna, they lived in Trieste, they lived in Paris. In other words, there was always this hard core of educated international people.

They felt, and they tried with many of the things that they did, these sort of founding fathers of modern Greece, to harken back and emphasize Ancient

Greece. They also knew that anyone who was educated in the west in those days, we’re talking 1830’s, studied Greek and Latin. They were saying, we’re the inheritors of this. We’re the descendants. They wanted to, I won’t say forget about, but they decided to leap over these other periods and these other parts of their culture. You have the revival of the Olympic Games. At one point, they wanted to and there was a big effort to, revive all of the ancient games. There were five games. There were the Olympic Games, there were the

Nemean Games, there were the Isthmian Games, and the games in Delphi.

These were the same kind of rituals that happened in ancient times. You had sporting contests, you had poetry, but these were in different places. The

Olympics are the ones that we know more about. By the 1860’s, these wealthy

Greeks, educated Greeks, sophisticated Greeks, decided that they should revive the ancient Olympics. There were Olympic Games before Baron de Coubertin came into the picture that were held in Athens. The competitors were Greeks

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from around Greece and they were held at the Zappeion, which is a wonderful

building that I actually was on the board of the Zappeion for about four years.

That was billed as an exhibition space by these two wealthy Greeks, Zappa, they

were cousins actually, and they created those games. The news of those games

in the 1860’s were noticed by a doctor in Manchester, and he was the one who

was inspired. Then, Baron de Coubertin learned of that, and then he in turn

really started the international Olympic movement. Of course, where was the

first place of the modern Olympics held? They were held in Athens in 1896. I

think that because that period from the occupation by Rome, let’s say, on until

independence, Greece was a conquered country by somebody else during that

time--whether they were Romans, whether they were Normans, whether they

were Venetians, whether they were Ottomans. Harkening back to the ancient

was a way of validating themselves, saying we’re the heirs of this. It’s

something to be very proud of that you are descended from these incredible,

giant people. But, at the same time, in those 2,000 years, a lot of the things that

the Ancients created, from science to theater and everything else, in many cases

they literally disappeared. I think that’s why these other periods of Greek

history are not that well promoted, if you want to put it that way.

Whyler: Yes. That’s a good way to put it I feel. It does seem, throughout the course of

this interview, that you feel as if it is important, not to just study one small part

of Greece’s history, but all of it.

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Pappas: No. Not at all. I think that certainly it’s wonderful and, again, I look at it from

somebody who studied art history, no matter what you do in your career, I think

the incredible pleasure of walking into a museum anywhere in the world and

being able to look at a painting, whether it’s a piece of ancient art, or if it’s a

Renaissance, or contemporary art, and know what the story is. You can look at

that, and then read it, and say, “Oh, I’m right.” To me, that’s knowledge. To

me, that’s something that’s a part of you. For Greek Americans, you have this

incredible rich heritage that has influenced all of western civilization, and you

don’t know about it? What does that say about you and what your priorities are?

Whyler: I agree. And I agree with you that there’s satisfaction in being able to walk up

and recognize a piece before you see the label.

Pappas: I just think it connects you with it. Maybe because it’s my world, and maybe

because that’s important to me, I think it should be important to everybody else.

My feeling is, again, that whether you’re a lawyer, or a doctor, or a computer

person, or whatever the heck you happen to be now, art enriches your life. Art

makes you human. Art makes you part of something that goes back thousands

of years, and you are a part of that chain. If you don’t want to know about it, I

think it’s like cutting off a piece of yourself. I just think that now we have no

excuse, like it’s far away, that’s ludicrous. You open up your damn computer

and you google “museums in Greece”, I don’t know, you google whatever.

Come on! Go for it! Why not?

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Whyler: Yeah. What do you have to lose?

Pappas: What do you have to lose? Don’t read something about the Kardashians, okay?

Spend your time reading about something more important. (laughs) So, that’s

it. I don’t know if I’m too opinionated in this interview, but ….

Whyler: No. I want your opinions. That is exactly what I want.

Pappas: I feel that Greek Americans on the whole are missing out on something so rich

and so important. It’s like ignoring a part of your own body. I would say to

them, “Get out there. Read some books, in English, okay, why not? I read

Greek, but I wouldn’t sit down and read a novel in Greek. I can read a

newspaper or a magazine. Get to know the place, and the next time you go to

Greece take the time to walk into an art gallery. See what’s going on there.

Maybe you don’t like it, but at least you’ll have an idea of what’s going on.

Again, it’s all there on the internet. You can find out all this stuff. Look it up.

Get some ideas. I just think it’s important. It’s important to me, and I would

hope it would be important to them. So, you know, that’s it.

Whyler: Well, I do actually think we have gone through all of my questions. Are there

any …

Pappas: Well, let me see. Where are we? Do I have any words of wisdom?

Whyler: I feel like you’ve answered that, though.

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Pappas: I do think it’s important that people study Ancient Greek culture and art and

literature, and everything else, because that’s what the beginning is. If you don’t

know about the beginning, how do you build from there? Yes. Of course, I do

think it’s important. And I just think it would be nice if Greek American

institutions would put a little more money toward culture than other things.

Whyler: I agree. Any closing thoughts before we conclude?

Pappas: I suppose my closing thoughts are for Greek Americans to be proud of your

heritage, but in order to be proud of it, you need to learn about it. If you’re not

getting it out of your Greek school classes, or your Sunday school classes, or

whatever, go find it yourself. Get out there. See what there is. It’s so

wonderful to own it. Okay? I’m very lucky because I spent more than 20 years

in Greece, and the Greece I know is a Greece full of talented, creative, really

interesting people. I just wish that their work and their creativity could get more

acknowledgment. There’s a great audience here. There’s what, a couple of

million Greek Americans, and I just wish they’d get more into it, and take

advantage of what is out there. That’s me, and that’s what I think. I think we

have something very important, something unique, and it’s a pity if you don’t

take the time to learn about it.

Whyler: Well, I believe all of my questions have been answered.

Pappas: Okay. Good.

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Whyler: I will thank you for agreeing to talk to me, and we can now turn off the recorder.

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Appendix F: Oral History Interview with Colonel Rose Mary Sheldon

Oral History Interview

with

Col. Rose Mary Sheldon

Professor of Ancient History at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia

June 27, 2017

By Caroline Whyler California State University, Sacramento

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Mission Statement

Interview History

Interviewer / Editor:

Caroline Whyler B.A, UC Davis, History M.A, CSU Sacramento, History

Interview Time and Place:

1 session: June 27 th, 2017, over the telephone. Session approximately 45 minutes

Editing:

Recording and Transcript:

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[June 27, 2017]

Whyler: This is Caroline Whyler interviewing Colonel Rose Mary Sheldon, Professor

of Ancient History at the Virginia Military Institute, in Lexington, Virginia. It

is June 27th, 2017, at approximately 10:15 a.m., California time. Colonel

Sheldon, thank you for agreeing to talk to me today.

Sheldon: Thank you for asking me.

Whyler: Well, let’s just go ahead and get started. Can you tell me a little bit about your

life growing up?

Sheldon: Well, I was born and raised in North New Jersey, and I had no connection to

Greece whatsoever. My family was Italian, which although nearby, nobody

had been to Greece. But when I went to college in 1965, to what at the time

was known as Trenton State College, but is now known as The College of New

Jersey, the history department brought all its new majors together and

introduced the faculty. On that faculty were two Greek. One was John Karras,

a Professor of History, and the other was John Baxevanis, who was a Professor

of Geography. I immediately knew I had to take courses with these two

people, which indeed I did. Then, in my junior year abroad I went to

Copenhagen. When the summer came and I had to leave, I had some money

162 left over and I said I’d like to go someplace else before I go home. I originally thought I would like to go to Paris, but this was 1968, and there were general strikes, and there were no buses and no trains, and I had no money to fly. I couldn’t get to Spain because I couldn’t get over France, so I said to the travel agent, “So, for the same amount of money in the other direction, where can you get me?” She said Athens. And I said, sure. So, I got on a train, 3-1/2 days from Copenhagen to Athens, arrived in noonday sun, checked into a hotel somebody had recommended, that night went to the Plaka, saw the light hit the

Propylaea up on the Acropolis, so I decided I’ve got to go up there tomorrow and see what all that stuff is about, because I had not planned on doing anything ancient. We were all reading Nikos Kazantzakis is those days, and we were going to dance on the beach and snap our fingers and smell the lemon blossoms, but it didn’t really include anything of ancient monuments. The next day I climbed the Acropolis and walked around, and I found my metier.

When I got back for my senior year, I contacted Professor Karras again, had to take both his semester courses on Greek history, and decided to do a Masters, which brought me to New York, to Hunter College, where I began studying

Greek. Seven years of Greek and Latin, and I finally got a Masters in Ancient

History. I won a Fellowship to the University of Michigan, where I majored in, again, Greek and Roman History and Archaeology. Won a Roman prize, so was in Rome for two years, and then when I came back to the States, I had to go on the teaching market. I first taught at Montana State, then at Norwich

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College up in Vermont, and finally, I got the job at VMI, where I have been since 1993.

I’ve been exposed to Ancient Greek culture through both professors that I’ve had, books they made me read, books I read on my own, and then going to

Greece. I return to Greece every so often, either to give conference papers or to bring my husband to Greece so that he could see what I was so excited about. He immediately fell in love with it. They keep building new things—I had to go back to see the new Acropolis Museum--and so I’ve maintained my interest because I teach Ancient Greek History, I’ve written a book on ambush in Ancient Greek warfare, which nobody had written a book about and thought that was a nice opening that I could get back into Greek studies, for some of my publications are on Rome. Through organizations—I belong to the

Association of Ancient Historians, and various Greek organizations that have contacted me through the years to be on their editorial board—I always keep up with what’s happening. My students very much like Greek History. I consider it the foundational culture of western civilization, which is a controversial thing, I suppose, to say these days. It’s in the middle of cultural wars between those who believe that you should teach Ancient Greece as the center of western civ., and those who believe that you should be teaching world civilization, and somehow the Greeks and the Romans shouldn’t be in the center of it, but everybody else should be in the center of it. I’ve lived through that entire warfare. But I still defend the Greeks and the Romans, and

164 give as much space to it in a world history class as they will allow me to give.

But then I have my other two classes on Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome that I teach separately. I think it can be misused for political reasons. Just to give one specific example, Victor Davis Hanson, thinks that the Greeks were too pure to do ambush. That’s why I wrote the book I wrote, because no they weren’t. They were just as good at it as everybody else. They were no different. And they were quite clever at it. You can always go back to the

Greeks when you want something to find out who thought about it first. They may not have been the best, but they were there first and they thought about these things. They didn’t normally invent things based on those ideas, but somebody thought about it in Ancient Greece. You have to take it that far back to figure out where the beginning of, whether you’re talking about atomic theory or astronomy, it always starts with the Greeks. The Ancient Greeks are amazingly curious people, and fearless. When you look at Socrates saying question authority, I always chide my cadets and say, “Yeah, go tell the

Commandant you want to question authority and see how long you’ll live.”

It’s not exactly the dynamic of power. You never speak to who’s in power, people don’t like that, but yet, that’s what Socrates said to do. The Greeks come in handy whether you’re talking about warfare, whether you’re talking about culture, whether you’re talking about language and literature. Things that come up in Greek plays are relevant, not because it comes from a Greek play, but because it is humanism, because it comes from things that happen to

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human beings. It happened then and it happened now, whether it’s sorrow, or

pathos, or tragedy, comedy, what makes us laugh, which makes us cry. It

always goes back to them, and it’s always easy to understand it if you start by

reading the Greek source.

Whyler: Actually, if you would be willing to back up a little bit, you had studied these

other histories, what was it about the Greeks that so sparked your interest that

you were willing to change it all and focus on the ancient?

Sheldon: It was definitely the trip to Athens. It was the sheer beauty of the Parthenon,

of the buildings, of the cultures, I love the food, I love the people, the starkness

of the countryside, getting a bus and going to Delphi, getting in the sea if you

go to Crete. There is just something difference about Greece that was just not

the same as anyplace else I’d ever been. Just because it’s in the

Mediterranean, it doesn’t mean like, well you’ve been to Italy, you’ve been to

Greece, same thing. No. There’s something unique about the culture,

something primal, it was always less commercialized than the Italians were.

People were simpler, and of course, that was back in 1968, so it was a long

time ago. When I visited, remember, they were still living under the colonels,

so there was political stuff going on and that interested me too. I grew up

watching Melina Mercouri in movies, and then seeing her get into the

government, and then seeing her despised by people in the government. I’ve

seen a lot come and go. I was interested in the Greek Revolution, the role of

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the communist party after World War II. So, it just grew. It just grew from

something physical that grabbed me when I got there. And then I did the

reading. Then I found out, who created all this? Where did these people come

from? Why are they eating this food and drinking this wine and speaking this

language? And when you study the language, of course, then you understand

even more profoundly. I’ve always preferred Greek over Latin, although I

wouldn’t want to be quoted on that. I wouldn’t want my Latinist friends to

turn on me, but the fact of the matter is I just think Greek is a beautiful

language. There’s nothing rational about it. It wasn’t like a thought in my

head, like I’m going to make that choice. I kept trying to do that with various

European cultures, and it wasn’t working. It was simply an emotional reaction

to being there.

Whyler: I’ve traveled to both, and I actually do very much have to agree with you.

There is something very different about Greece.

Sheldon: There is. It’s more primal. It’s just more primal. It’s rockier, it’s poorer.

These people have had a hard scrabble life since the first Greek had to go out

in a boat and catch a fish and come back and feed his family. You know,

trying to eek out a living growing olives in that rocky soil. You’re getting kind

of away from civilization—I don’t want to say that they’re uncivilized—but

people were still living in villages when I was there. There were very few

cities. I also traveled to Thessaloniki, which I liked very much because it had

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no tourists in those days. It was much more Greek than Athens was, in a sense,

because there were no Americans there and very few people visited in those

days.

Whyler: You’ve talked about how you’ve traveled back to Greece and given conference

papers on it to keep apprised. What were some of the subjects that you talked

about?

Sheldon: When I started first writing the book about ambush, I tried out parts of the

book as conference papers, having to do with where is the beginning of the

idea of the thought of ambush in Greek literature. Of course, you have to take

it back to Homer, and then take it through Herodotus, and through then the

Roman writers who were Greek, Polybius, and that kind of thing. I gave little

papers on each of those authors, showing what they had to say about ambush in

their time period in the context of Greek warfare.

Whyler: I want to delve a little more into the book that you wrote on ambush. You said

before that they were—I can’t quite remember how you phrased it— you said

that people thought they were above it, and so that’s why there wasn’t anything

written on it, and that is why you covered it.

Sheldon: Right. Victor Davis Hanson, who wrote a book on The Western Way of War,

claims that in the West, we are above trickery. We fight mano-a-mano on the

battlefield, face to face, you know, and that ambush and trickery and sneaking

168 up on you are nasty things to do, which he contributes to Easterners. They do that. Westerners do not do that. And he blames the Greeks--that we got that honest, upright tradition from them. And he is absolutely wrong. It’s racist.

The reason people ambush is not because they come from East or West, the reason people ambush is because you’re occupied by a foreign power that has a bigger army. You have no choice but to rise up, and sneak around, and to ambush the larger force. If the Greeks are in a position where they’re outnumbered, then they will use ambush just as well as anybody else. The

West has been doing it, and the East has been doing it. But, in modern times we have this, what we would call Orientalism, that there is something about those sneaky Arabs, or those sneaky Persians, you know those people out there that do it that way. We don’t do that. Well, that’s because we’ve had the luxury of having the biggest military in the world for a very long time. But when your country is occupied by a larger force like that, and I use the example of the Romans in Judea. The Romans take over Judea. They ban the

Jews from having weapons. Then when they get attacked by terrorist operations, they go, “Oh my God. I can’t believe those people are just sneaking up on us.” Well, yeah. That’s what you do, because one man’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. So, I wrote the book to defend the Greeks against that racist slant, because I don’t believe it’s true. And I came up with, oh by the way, 316 examples of Greek ambush. So for something they didn’t do, wow, there’s a lot of examples of it. And we don’t

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even have one-tenth of one percent of Greek literature that has survived from

the ancient world. Can you imagine if we had all the histories how many more

examples there would be?

Whyler: Our job would certainly grow tenfold.

Sheldon: True.

Whyler: (laughs)

Sheldon: One more historical parallel: In World War I, the Germans saw themselves as

the Spartans and the British saw themselves as the Athenians. You are either

for open society, or you’re militaristic. Now, suddenly, we have people on the

out right identifying themselves with Sparta, and writing books about how

America should be Sparta. And I’m going, wow, that sure changed in a

century, didn’t it? Again, using the Greeks, you can use any example in the

world, but you decide to go back to the Greeks.

Whyler: I agree. You have done a considerable amount of work on the subject of the

Greek military. It sounds like you do not find it difficult to make the

connections between the modern day and the ancient world.

Sheldon: Well, I think you can, but I think it’s a misnomer. I’ll tell you why. Ancient

World: They fought with spears. Anything that came before the Industrial

Revolution really has nothing to do with anything that comes after the

Industrial Revolution. You can look back and say we’re just like the Greeks,

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but it’s in your own head. Okay? We don’t learn from people who use spears.

We’ve got bombs, we’ve got nuclear weapons, we’ve got machine guns, we’ve

got all kinds of stuff like that. We don’t necessarily think like the Greeks. I

think that too many military schools or colleges, for example the Army War

College or the Naval War College too, they get active vicinities and they think

they’re going to mine it for the way we should look at things. There’s nothing

inherently wrong with it, but I don’t think that you’re going to find anything.

You’re going to justify what you think you’re finding, but I don’t necessarily

think you’re going to find anything new. I think it makes people feel good

sometimes, when they find a Greek example—well, the Greeks said this and

therefore it proves that we’re right and we’re still doing it—but a lot of those

parallels can also be wrong. People use examples like that for their own

political reasons.

Whyler: I have to agree with you.

Sheldon: I mean, sometimes I want to say, “Leave the Greeks alone!” but I don’t want

people to ignore them. I want people to study them. If you feel inspiration--

when I was visiting these cities I got this idea … Fine. But I don’t feel like

you can open it up and here’s the wisdom of the ages right there, it’s

everything you need to know. They do the same thing with Sun Tzu and the

Chinese. It’s one of the most overrated books ever written. It’s good, I’m glad

you read it, maybe there’s some important things in there, but, they’ve been

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discussed since. It’s not like the magic book that you read it and then it

changes your world. Maybe that’s heresy. Maybe I shouldn’t say that. I don’t

know.

Whyler: We can move on to our next question.

Sheldon: Okay.

Whyler: There are many different ways that Greece is represented, both in the ancient

and the modern sense. Do you feel as if the media and other forms of

entertainment give an accurate representation of Greek culture?

Sheldon: Greek culture is used. Greek culture is not represented accurately. I’ll tell you

why. If we’re talking about movies, okay. Movies are never history. Movies

are movies. Movies are never accurate, they’re never historical. All a movie

has to do is convince you that you’re in a certain time and a certain place. That

is why you can always analyze a movie and find all the things they get wrong--

they got this wrong on the costumes, somebody is wearing contact lenses,

when Spartacus came over the wall somebody was wearing a wristwatch, that

kind of stuff. You try the best you can to get the anachronisms out of the

movie. You try to give a picture of something that happened, like let’s say,

The 300 Spartans. You know, the old movie. It’s a movie about courage. It’s

a movie about a small number of people defending their backs against a large

number of the enemy. It’s been made into a movie two or three times, the

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most recent being 300. There’s almost nothing accurate in the movie, but it’s a

good movie. People love it. People go to see movies to be entertained, and

that’s great. And that’s the only thing the movie really has to do. It has to

entertain you, and make money at the box office. They are not there to give

you an accurate view of the Greeks. Too many of my colleagues who have

signed up to be the historical advisors on movies, have gone away kicking and

screaming because they won’t go along with what the moviemaker wants to

do. No matter how it happened in the ancient world, if the director says we’re

going to do it this way, that’s the way it’s going to be. I think movies are good

to watch and maybe be inspired—little children can watch 300 and if they say,

ten years later after I grew up I decided to go to college and major in Greek

History and read about the real 300, great—but it’s not an accurate portrayal of

the Greeks. I mean, the minute the Spartans started yelling democracy, half

the Classicists in the audience died laughing.

Whyler: (Laughs)

Sheldon: I’m sorry, but (laughs) you’ve got the wrong site, Buddy. But all my students

have seen it, which is maybe why they took my class. So if it got them into a

class of real Greek History, that’s fine; but sometimes students will say, we

thought it was going to be like the movie. No. No, it’s not. I’m sorry, but

thanks for coming. As I said, with the media, if you’re talking about like Fox

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News, people on the alt right will use Sparta as an example, or go back to the

Ancient Greeks, and they’re just using it for their own reasons.

Whyler: Which makes me sad, because I like Sparta.

Sheldon: Oh, you do? I like Sparta too, but I don’t want to be a police state. I don’t

want to go to a place where you have to carry a passport and personal i.d.’s. I

don’t want to live in a place that’s got slaves that can be killed at will and used

for, you know, for nothing actually. Or that has a secret service.

Whyler: Yeah, you can like studying Sparta, but not want to be like it.

Sheldon: Well, that’s true, but there are people who are actually saying we should be the

Spartans, not the Athenians, though. I’m looking for longevity here. The

Spartans don’t exist after the 1st Century. What’s so sad about Spartan culture

is that three-quarters of the land of Sparta was a land of women because all of

the men were dead. The old Spartan customs of stealing cheese and doing

things and getting whipped and all that, was done for tourists, for pay. That’s

so sad. Have you been to Sparta? The real one? Ever visited Sparta?

Whyler: No. It was too far out of the way. I couldn’t.

Sheldon: It’s always far. There’s nothing there.

Whyler: Yeah.

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Sheldon: There’s nothing there! You know, a couple of fragments of pots, a statue, but

nothing. People always go to Athens, because that was the open city. That

was the schools of Hellas. That was the place where you could write the Greek

plays, and sculpture, and everything comes out of Athens. I would much

rather us be them. The key to it is to look at Thucydides, the words put to the

mouth in Pericles Funeral Oration for the people who fell in the first year of

the war. He said, “Look, Sparta, yeah their brave, but we’re brave too when

we have to be, and we don’t have to train 24-hours a day to do it.” We also

have time for leisure, and we have time for arts and culture. But when we have

to fight we can fight, and we can fight just as well as they can. So I don’t think

militarism is the answer.

Whyler: I know we have touched on it, but do you feel as if there are misconceptions

about Greek culture even more so in the modern day than way back when? Do

you feel there are misconceptions about ….

Sheldon: When you say modern, do you mean since World War I? Are we talking about

2017? What do you mean by modern?

Whyler: Yes, because I feel as if people feel there is this, in my own personal

experience, think there is a divide, pretty much from the death of Alexander

the Great until Greek independence. I feel as if they think there is this void of

Greek history and culture in between, and ….

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Sheldon: Remember, they were occupied by the Ottomans. And see, that’s what

happens when you’re occupied by other people. Your culture doesn’t get to

reach its apogee. The Turks get everything the Turks’ way. That’s why when

the Greek War of Independence comes about, you get so many British running

down there, because they remembered from their school-boy days of reading

about Athens, to liberate that place from the Turks. It’s so romantic that

somebody like Lord Byron could get himself blown up because (laughs) poets

should never go to war. The whole romantic notion of liberating Athens, you

had to have known what Athens was for you to be romantically thrust into that

war, thinking that this was a good thing to do. First of all, a lot of people,

remember, don’t know about Greek history, period. They know little vignettes

and this, that, or the other thing, and like nothing in between. So, you can

certainly study any period of Greek History, in and of itself, but to do research

in it you’d have to know Modern Greek, not just Ancient Greek. Classicists, I

know a lot of them that would just be quite happy if they would just get Greeks

off the archaeological sites and they could do it themselves, which is a little

dismissive. They feel the same way about the Italians. You know, these

people get in the way of my archaeology. Sorry, it’s their country. Get over

yourself. We look back in different ways. Was it 1901 that Harvard got rid of

Greek as a requirement for all of its undergraduate majors? There was a time

where in Boston, when they reviewed a new translation of Thucydides, they

would put on the front page of the Boston Globe, the Greek text and the new

176 translation so that readers themselves could judge how good the translation was. What kind of readership does Boston newspapers have that people could do that? That means that every person who went to a public or private school studied Greek. Greek and Latin. That was considered “the education.” That disappeared in the 20th Century. We went back to technical education, and communications majors, and criminal justice majors, and everything but the

Classics. And people started dumping on the Classics—that’s something for old white guys, and just throw it away, and bring out this new multicultural stuff. Bernard Knox wrote a very interesting book about dead old white guys and said when the culture is really good, when it is strong and it’s true, it will come back. It’s like turning the horse out of the barn, but the horse will find his way back into the barn again if you leave the door open. The horse will always come back. I think that Greek culture is like that. It may go through trends where people say we want to focus on this or that, but Greek culture isn’t going anywhere, because it is true and it is pure and it is good. I think this was the argument of Donald Kagan in that he thinks only western civilization should be taught, not anything else. I don’t happen to agree with him, but certainly agree that the Classics are the centerpiece of a good education. Maybe not for everybody, but certainly for Liberal Arts, I think you can’t get too much of a smattering of what the Greeks did. I don’t think you should throw it out; you may add some other things to it, but I don’t think you should ever discard it.

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Whyler: Why do you feel as if there is this aversion toward, not so much history, but

the Ancient, the Classics? Why do you feel as if there is an aversion to it?

Sheldon: Because up until quite recently, all of education was for white males. When I

was applying for colleges, of course I wasn’t allowed to apply to Yale,

Harvard, Princeton, Stanford. They didn’t take women. Okay? Technically, I

should have been because the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed in 1964,

and I applied to colleges in 1965. But it wasn’t until 1973 that enough

legislation had gone through, and litigation had gone through, so that these

things were challenged and women were let into these colleges. VMI didn’t go

coed until 2000. The first six years I was there, women were not allowed in

that school. I said how can you teach the humanities with half of humanity

missing? And what did they teach those white guys? The Classics. So, I think

you had the pendulum swung in the other direction—we need more literature

by women, we need more literature by black people, we need more literature

by Jews, all of these cultures that had been discarded or portrayed as second

rate to the Greeks. People wanted to study those again. Bring it back into the

mix. But the pendulum is going to come back the other way too, because I

don’t care who’s in college, or what color you are, what religion you were

raised in, you can use the Greeks for something. You know what I mean? It’s

because their focus is humanism, that if you’re a human being and you’re

breathing, they had something to say about you. You don’t have to study

Greeks because there’s a specific culture in this century in Athens in a certain

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place and a certain time, but you read it because when Antigone had to make a

choice between doing what is asked by her religion versus what is asked by the

state, that’s a moral choice. We still have to make those. Whether you’re a

general in the Pentagon and you’re black or female, which now could be

possible, you’re still going to have to make those moral choices. You may get

your guidance from reading what the Greeks said about it.

Whyler: Going off of a Classics background, are there pieces that you would

recommend to people to read?

Sheldon: Obviously Greek plays, tragedies and comedies. If you’re interested in the

theater, the Greeks invented them, so that would be a good place to start. It’s

interesting to see how audiences change. When I was a freshman back when

Charlemagne was in high school (Whyler laughs), it was a long time ago

(laughs), and I remember reading Lysistrata, and thinking this is so cool. Then

I tried introducing it to my freshman students and they think it is vile and dirty.

There is too much obscenity in it and too much sex, and they didn’t like that.

But then it got turned into a movie called Chi-Raq, so it all depends on how

you react to what’s in it. Sometimes it’s useful to people, and sometimes it’s

not. Have you seen Chi-Raq?

Whyler: No. I haven’t.

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Sheldon: It’s very hard because it’s in dialect, but it’s basically Lysistrata put in a black

context in Chicago.

Whyler: Sorry. How do you spell that?

Sheldon: C-h-i R-a-q.

Whyler: Perfect. Thank you.

Sheldon: I can’t think of the director. It’s the same guy that did Do The Right Thing.

What’s his name? His name escapes me. It will come back to me.

Whyler: That’s okay.

Sheldon: If you put in “Chi Raq” in a google search, you’ll find it.

Whyler: No problem. Thank you very much. What are the pieces that seem to be

trending now, or the works that seem to be reaching out to people now?

Sheldon: I don’t know too many people that are assigning it around the country. I only

know what I use myself. We did use Antigone for many years, and as I said

Lysistrata, especially with Chi- Raq. I try to ask them what they read in high

school, because it seems that students that went to better schools have read

some of the top five, they might know Oedipus Rex, maybe the Oedipus at

Colonus. That was made into a Broadway Musical so I remember it, but it’s

very hard to tell what students are reading anymore. We’ve got kids who,

literally, get to college and have never read a book in their life. I’m confronted

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with an entire generation of people who are like a blank canvas. I’m lucky if

they know where Greece is. They’ve had no experience—here’s the

Mediterranean, see this thing that looks like a hand? That’s called the

Peloponnese. Literally, you have to go back to basics, and you’ve got to find

very modern translations--what we use in school would be considered archaic

by their standards—and get them to read it and understand what’s happening.

And because I teach in a military school, you can’t make them dress up in

Greek outfits and go running around doing that kind of stuff, or put on plays,

because their time is taken up with marching and the other stuff they do. Some

of which is useful, but a lot of it is just (laughs) interfering with my work.

Whyler: I know it’s been a major point of why we have been talking here today, but

why do you think it is important that people still study and understand the

Ancient Greeks?

Sheldon: Because I think if you don’t understand the Ancient Greeks or Romans, you’re

illiterate. I can’t put it more forcefully than that. There are certain things that

you have to grow up knowing. Every professor of every age might have a

different opinion of what those things should be. I’d like to think that when

we’re in grammar school, they gave us a basis of being able to read and write,

and subtract and multiply. You need to know a little bit about math. You need

to know a little about history. And you need to know something about

geography. We use to have to cut out the 50 United States and stick them

181 together—to mix up the pieces and be able to reassemble them. We had globes. We knew where things were. And then when it came to cultures, we were given a smattering of Ancient Greece and Rome, and this is where Africa is. I don’t know what they’re studying these days. I’m really lost. You can’t have a life, especially now if you work in Washington, where your idea of modern history starts in 1800 AD. I just think that gives you a very, very poor grasp of the countries that we’re working in, because countries themselves know their own ancient history. They know where they came from. They have long memories. We don’t. America just shows up in places and can’t speak the language, we don’t know their history, we have no idea why they’re doing what they do, and then we lose and get kicked out and we’re wondering why. This is why I’m against the international studies majors. The ancestry is different; the history is always the long view. You go back to the beginning.

And for western civilization, that’s always going to be the Greeks. Saying I know nothing about the Greeks and Romans is like saying I know nothing about China. You don’t have the option of saying that. You just don’t. I had a student once who I was arbitrarily passing through the aisle and class hadn’t started yet, and I heard him say, “Oh, Shakespeare is stupid!” And I said,

“You can’t say that.” You can say you don’t like Shakespeare. You can say you refuse to read Shakespeare. But if you say Shakespeare is stupid, what you are really saying is that you’re stupid. Because nobody in the world believes what you’re saying, and you’re wrong. So, if you say I don’t do the

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Greeks, or I don’t read history, then fine, but you’re illiterate and you’re

ignorant, and you can’t pass yourself off as a literate person or as an educated

person. It used to be every British functionary in the Foreign Service knew

Greek and Roman, Greek and Latin, knew their history, and would often

manage to organize the biggest empire quite nicely. They didn’t think of

themselves as stupid or ignorant. It’s a good place to start, because it’s a good

basis for your language. How many Greek words come up? All the time my

colleagues will say, “Where does this word come from?” It’s Greek. (laughs)

(Whyler laughs) If you just know certain things that they don’t know, certain

conjugations they don’t know, it makes you understand the English language

better. I don’t feel that I’ve had a bad education. I work with people who are

very good at what they do, and they are all specialists in their own field. There

are 15 of us. But I really feel that I can hold my own, not because I know a lot

about their field, but because the Ancient Greeks have given me a basis for

understanding how history works and how history is written. Because

remember the Greeks invented it. If it worked for me, it can work for

anybody.

Whyler: You said earlier that Americans just kind of come in and they don’t have a

good grasp of other people’s history. We may have a small understanding of

our own, but not other people’s. Do you think that is a uniquely American

trait?

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Sheldon: No. The British were the same way, but we have the current empire. We’re

the big dog in town. All big empires act that way. They’re interested in

themselves, and not much interested in the people they step on. We’re just the

latest ones to do it. The British were no better. The Romans were no better

before them. You come in, you trample on the people’s culture, you break all

their toys, and then you go home. But what did Alexander do? You know,

kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill all the way back, drop dead. When you think

about it, Greek culture was spread kind of inadvertently by what he did.

Conquest does that. It’s kind of monomaniacal. He wanted to conquer and see

what was out there—not too much else. Aristotle’s nephew, remember, told

him treat the Greeks like men and treat everybody else like vegetables and

plants. So to them the Persians were broccoli. They didn’t want to be like

them, they wanted to go home to where real civilization was. It was the

Greeks who invented xenophobia. Right? The fear of foreigners. It was the

Greeks who invented the word “barbaroi.” Right? Barbar speakers; people

who don’t speak Greek, or by definition, barbarians. Even for us, we can’t say

we’re the first with this kind of attitude, because it goes all the way back to the

Greeks.

Whyler: Negative and positive—it all goes back to the Greeks.

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Sheldon: That’s right! That’s it—for good, bad, or indifferent. It’s probably been done

before, and the least you can do is check to make sure you don’t say something

stupid about we did this, we did that. Nah, probably the Greeks beat you to it.

Whyler: (Laughs) Do you have any words of wisdom for someone who is interested in

going into a field that studies them?

Sheldon: Yes. If you start off with an interest, it could start as mine did, you could

decide I’m going to go on a vacation. Let’s see, maybe I’ll go to Greece, and

discover that you’re interested and you want to read more about it. But you

could also read more about it and then decide you want to go to Greece, it

could work either way. There have been many, many Classics written about it.

My mentor, I mentioned John Karras, who from 1965 until he died this year,

we were in constant touch and when he died I got part of his library, and one of

his libraries is on Ancient Greek History. Some of his books are here too.

There’s thousands out ther. It doesn’t matter, read something. Whether it’s

reading The Iliad in the new translation, or just reading a popular book on

Greece, or reading a novel by Mary Renault that brings Greece alive, start

somewhere. It will either grab you or it won’t, but there’s something in there

for everybody. What you don’t want to do is take somebody else’s word for

what the Greeks did, because the Greeks have written enough that you can also

read them and see what they had to say about it.

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Whyler: Yes. Are there any closing thoughts, anything that you would like to add,

before we conclude?

Sheldon: Yes. I think everybody should go to Athens and see the Parthenon once before

they die, because it should be on your bucket list. I still think it’s one of the

most beautiful buildings in the world. And the Acropolis. And, of course, the

Greek islands are beautiful and all of that too, but I always come back to

Athens, because, again, it is the School of Hellas. It is the foundation of the

western educational system. It was once, I doubt it will be again in its entirety,

but I hope it will always be a part of western education.

Whyler: I agree. Well, Colonel Sheldon, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to

me today. I am very honored, and thank you so much.

Sheldon: It’s been a great pleasure. Thank you.

Whyler: Thank you.

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Appendix G: Oral History Interview with Mary Louise Hart

Oral History Interview

with

Mary Louise Hart

Curator of Antiquities at the Getty Villa

July 17, 2017

By Caroline Whyler California State University, Sacramento

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Mission Statement

Interview History

Interviewer / Editor:

Caroline Whyler B.A, UC Davis, History M.A, CSU Sacramento, History

Interview Time and Place:

1 session: July 17 th, 2017, over the telephone. Session approximately 37 minutes

Editing:

Recording and Transcript:

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[July 17, 2017]

Whyler: This is Caroline Whyler interviewing Mary Louise Hart, Curator of Antiquities

at the Getty Villa. It is July 17th, 2017, at about 2:10 p.m. Mary, thank you for

agreeing to take part in this interview today.

Hart: Thank you very much. I’m delighted to be here.

Whyler: Sorry about that. Technical difficulties. Let’s just start off with some easier

questions. Can you tell me a little bit about your life growing up?

Hart: Okay. I actually grew up not that far away from where you are. I grew up in

Fresno. My parents were sort of World War II generation. They were not

college graduates. They were very successful post-war bright people who

worked hard and had a good life. It was a very traditional 50’s/60’s

upbringing. They weren’t internationally forward so much. It’s not like I had

an international upbringing that included the Mediterranean or Greece. I did

not. I went to normal public schools in Fresno. Then we moved back East,

and then we moved to Idaho, and I didn’t really get interested in Ancient Greek

culture until I went to college at the University of Washington in Seattle to

study Art History. So, my interest in Ancient Greece came through not even

the Art department, but the Classics department, which had a Classical

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archaeologist who taught Ancient Greek art and archaeology. Even though I

was more interested in majoring in paintings, specifically Spanish paintings—I

was particularly interested in Goya— and there wasn’t really an opportunity to

do graduate work in that field, and at the same time I was getting more

interested in Ancient Greek art and archaeology. So I moved in that direction,

and I did a Master’s Degree there in Seattle at the University of Washington.

Then I took a little bit of time off and I worked at the University, and while I

did that, I took Ancient Greek language and German for reading fluency. Once

I had done that, I came down to Los Angeles to UCLA. I got my Ph.D. at

UCLA in Classical Art History, not in archaeology. I’m not an archaeologist.

I’m still interested in the Greeks as artists, more on the aesthetic side and the

art historical cultural side than on the archaeological side. But when you work

on Ancient Greece, the two are really kind of blended together. I came to The

Getty, to the Antiquities Department, not immediately, but after I had been a

Professor of Ancient Greek Art for six years, at which time I was invited to

return to The Getty Villa to work as a curator here and to build a program in

Ancient Greek and Roman theatre for The Getty Villa property, which was

being renovated at that time. I started here 20 years ago in June of 2017

[sic].57 The Getty Villa closed one month after I started and then we spent the

next 9 years arranging, designing, researching, and building for The Villa to

reopen in 2006, in January. During that time, I spent at least a month a year in

57 Ms. Hart clarified through an email sent on 12/20/2017, that she meant 1997.

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Greece learning about Ancient Greek theatre, attending huge amounts of

performances of Ancient Greek drama--and there isn’t much Roman that’s

performed; it’s more Roman comedies—so I really became a specialist in

performances of Ancient Greek drama, and building the theatre program which

we now enjoy here at The Villa. We have one large performance in our

outdoor theater once a year in September, and then we have other smaller

programs during the winter inside in our auditorium. Those are productions

that are more experimental and smaller in nature, and sometimes some special

ones. That’s kind of a very quick update to where we are now.

If I go back to number 2, I think I mentioned, no Greek history, tradition, and

culture. I probably had some kids’ books about the gods and goddesses, but

nothing really to speak of. Honestly, I was exposed to Greek culture really

through travel and on-site studying. So, probably when I was about 20, I had

been to Europe before on a study trip when I was 17, and probably about two

years later or so, I went on another study trip that included Greece. That was

the most foreign place I had ever been. Somebody at dinner gave me a plate

with a whole fish with a head on it, and I was pretty freaked out. (laughs)

Whyler: (Laughs)

Hart: That was the most foreign thing I’d ever seen. You know, Greece does have

this way of shocking you into recognition that’s actually very clear and sort of

wonderful. From that very first short trip, it wasn’t a very long tour, but it

191 made me very curious. It made me want to go back. It was quite a few years later that I studied Greek art and archaeology. Then I applied to and was accepted to the American School in Athens, and I went there for the summer and studied Ancient Greek art and archaeology at that time. What got me into my work, if you mean specifically being a curator, it was just total timing and just the way things turned out. I had always planned to be a professor, and even when I was asked to join The Villa, it was really just a matter of timing and chance. I mean, that played a role. It was the best thing to do at the time.

I did not think I would stay. I thought I would go back into academe, but The

Getty is a very interesting place to work and provides a lot of opportunities. I think partly because I was enjoying it so much, and getting so much out of being in Greece so often, that that really induced me to stay and to keep building these interesting programs, and working on exhibitions, and building the collection, and all these sorts of things. So, a lot of what I do does come out of my interest in performance. I did an exhibition on the art of Ancient

Greek theatre that was here at The Getty Villa from August 2010 until January of 2011. After that, the next three years were spent on an exhibition called

Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections, and now we’re all working on some different kinds of projects, but also on researching the permanent collection more deeply and importantly. The work is diverse and really interesting, and if you have a passion for art you will always find

192 something to do when you come in. You certainly never get bored and there is tons of work to do.

Now I keep apprised of relevant news and information, I am involved and a member of certain associations. The Modern Greek Studies Association, that one is really good. They have an active list-serve, I guess it’s called, of their members who are always posting things happening all over the United States.

There are some people in Greece, and these are always people going back and forth to Greece. That group has been especially helpful. Certain members of that group who are economists have been very active involving the recent economic crisis in Greece. That has been exceptionally edifying and interesting. And to see the programs that are happening in the Modern Greek

Studies programs all over the United States--from Harvard, Boston, and San

Francisco, Ann Arbor. There are some that are extraordinarily active, and that’s wonderful to see. They’re doing lots of interesting things. So that’s more on the modern side. Then, on the ancient side, there is the Society for

Classical Studies. That’s the academic organization to which all of the philologists or the Ancient Greek and Latin teachers and professors at universities belong to that. Then the American Institute of Archaeology, which is where all the archaeologists go. Those two societies are also linked together.

They have their convention together. So that’s if you have an interest in paper on a work of art or something more philological. You can go to their meeting in January and present things there. I also travel. I continue to travel a lot. I

193 was in Sounion just quite recently in May, where we had meetings at Lavrion, which is about 20 minutes away. We stayed at Sounion, and we worked during the day at Lavrion in some interesting buildings. This is a modern

Greek phenomenon that I’ve noticed in a number of communities in Greece, where old, unused buildings have been taken over by the city and refurbished for new uses. They are often used for arts events and gallery spaces and exhibition spaces. We were using part of Lavrion’s facilities. Lavrion is an old mining town. These facilities were old buildings where minerals were processed in some way, and they’ve now been transformed into conference centers. We had a conference fair where we invited students who had been our students from all the years of past meetings. We invited them there to give update papers on their work, which was really interesting. So, that’s still happening. I got a little bit ahead of myself. During the last 17 years, I’ve been in Greece almost every year for about a month, staying at Epidavros, which is the port of Epidaurus to the English speaker and Epidavros to the modern Greek speaker, where we held intensive courses on the study of the performance of Ancient Greek and Roman drama, and that was linked to the festival at Epidaurus in the big theatre. The University of Athens, which organizes those courses, would bring in the students. They were always bright students from the best universities all over Europe, and they would come for two weeks and stay. We would work with them all day and then we would go to the performances on the weekends. The directors, actors, etc., were all

194 brought in. It was a very, very strong and wonderful course. It has been financially weakened by the crisis primarily, and so we’re trying to bring that back together again. That’s what the meeting this year was about. So, I hope that works, but it does help to give you some background on my identification with Greece, I suppose through drama, but also through art and spending hours and hours at the Benaki Museum, which is my favorite museum in the world-- the embroideries and the types of art that were made there through its entire history. It’s the only museum where you can really understand the through- line of Greek art and history.

So, do I find it difficult to connect past and modern cultures? Not at all. Very, very easily. But I would say you have to kind of beware of that. And if 7, 8, and 9 are sort of, I guess, coming together, for instance, I think the histories in

Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Greece are extremely different one from another. I think that we contemporaries tend to look back to easily on the

Ancient Greeks as being our progenitors in philosophy and literature and democracy, and all of these things that we think they bequeathed to us, because they were probably much more different from us than they were like us. I think they should remain, in many ways, an inspiration. But I think were we to be dropped into Ancient Athens, we would find it a very, very alien place, and very different and not always one that we would think was appropriate in terms of, for example, the treatment of slaves and women, and the imperial attitude of Athens over everything else. But I think in terms of performance art it

195 would be extraordinarily fascinating. It’s something that everyone I know that works in my field would really like to do.

The media giving accurate representation: There is a very stereotypical representation, absolutely. Of course, I think of different films, most recently the two films My Big Fat Greek Wedding, those accentuate the stereotypes in a very light way. But I’ll tell you that a lot of Greeks I know might carry one or two of those along with them (chuckles). I really have to laugh, I mean at their details that could be anybody, but then there are things like the house with all of the Greek decorating motifs. I know modern Greeks with a very definite decorating aesthetic that’s not like anybody else. You have to be a Greek to understand it. I think that there is this culture of “Opa!” They think that

Greeks jump up and down, and all they do is dance and play bouzouki and things like that, and of course, it’s not the case. I think that every ethnic group or immigrant group that has come to this land has been subject to stereotypical profiling. I mean, we all know that Greeks love to break dishes after midnight.

(Laughs) I don’t know anybody who has ever done it. But, we get it also from the old Greek movies. If you watch Zorba the Greek, it’s a brilliant film for understanding the power and in some very real cases the darkness, I think, of what’s inside a particular society of the Mediterranean. I wouldn’t say it’s only the Greeks, by any means, who live day-by-day and who are on the edge, but also who have patterns of behavior that are, I guess I would say, little bit more outside conventional norms and that are closer to natural forces in a way.

196

That movie, Zorba the Greek, which has Alan Bates as the American standing

up for everybody who isn’t Greek, trying to understand who they are. It’s

really a brilliant film. I did meet Irene Papas once. She came here to The

Villa. This was probably 15, gosh maybe 14, years ago. It was a long time

ago. We were hoping that she might come here and do a program for us. She

was enticed to come and see The Villa, and she LOVED it. We had dinner and

I asked her why she became an actress. She said that she wanted to right the

wrongs. She was just as fierce in her real life as she was in so many of her

films, and very much a prima donna, very much a force of nature, and really

quite a brilliant and strong person. In her own way, she seems to symbolize

one side of a Greek woman that is very powerful and very dark at the same

time. And very talented, obviously. She is anti-romanticized and cleansed in a

world where everybody dances. She is very, very serious.

Misconceptions about Greek culture: Well, so I think that maybe I have talked

about that a little bit.

Whyler: Yeah. You have.

Hart: I would say there is more of a dark side, rather than just the funny, dancing

side. They have been through so much in their history through so many

different peoples and still cling on to the essential meaning of life with great

ferocity, I would say.

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Number 10 is interesting. “…seeming as if the general public sees Greek

history ending.” You know, I have to say I don’t quite agree with that, and

that’s because of this exhibition, Heaven and Earth, Byzantium and Greek

collection, which was an exhibition that was organized by the Greek Ministry

of Culture and the Benaki Museum. It was first in the National Gallery in

Washington, and then it came out here to The Villa. At The Villa it attracted

over 100,000 visitors in the four or five months that it was on display. I

believe it is the second-most visited exhibition we have ever had and it was

over 110,000 people. It was on the Top 10 list of exhibitions for that year, for

2013 I think, or 2014. I can’t remember.

Whyler: That’s amazing.

Hart: I’m just looking for this date. Yeah, it was April through August of 2014. So

it was on the LA Times, Christopher Knight reviews, Top 10 List 2014, which

was a great honor and privilege. I felt very gratified because it was a huge

amount of work. Partly, that standard was achieved because the Greek

museums sent world masterpieces that they still had in Greece- just

extraordinarily powerful, extraordinary things. We added to it here. We added

some antiquities to help bridge that exhibition with the museum display, and

most of those people were probably Greeks. The Greek community and the

woman Elizabeth Fotiadou who was the Greek Consul in Los Angeles at the

time, worked diligently in order to energize the Greek community to see The

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Villa as their place for those months. They really came out for it in a way that

they don’t come out for our collections. The Greek community hasn’t, for

example, put together like an annual party at The Villa because we have

Ancient Greek art here. But if we had Byzantine art here, they would be out

here all the time. We don’t have a collection of Byzantine art. We have a very

few number of Byzantine manuscripts that are up at the Getty Center, but less

than five I think. So it’s very small. We have a great, beautiful collection of

Greek antiquities, and though the Greek community loves them and treasures

them, they don’t have a genuine, specific tie-in meaning to their daily lives.

That’s because of the religious difference I’m sure. It’s because the religion

that most modern Greeks follow is Byzantine Orthodoxy. It’s based on that

and it’s all in Greek. I think this exhibition was much more relevant to their

lives. We did a lot of programming, and the party was a lot of fun, it was a

huge opening, and a big deal. Famous Greeks came from Greece and it was

really, you know, it was a big, meaningful, emotional event. So, I don’t say

that those people see Greek history ending after the death of Alexander the

Great. However, the reason this exhibition was organized by the Minister of

Culture at the time was because he was educated in the United States and he

sensed that Americans did not know this history.

Whyler: Yes. Yes.

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Hart: During the early years of the crisis, he thought it would be good and morale

boosting for them to make an exhibition that would show the glorious works of

art that came out of that period. I think it was a great success.

I don’t know much about the Turkish period and I think that might be, as far as

I’m concerned, it’s neglected, but then on the other hand I wouldn’t expect

Departments of Modern Greek studies to really focus on that period other than

to acknowledge that it happened. I would say that unless you’re near to a

Modern Greek Studies program, it’s never going to be put in front of you. It

was never put in front of me in terms of a history class. I had, however,

Byzantine Art History as a Master’s student when I was in University of

Washington, so I knew what was going on. I knew what it was, and I’d been

in Byzantine churches in Greece, but I have not been to Thessaloniki. We had

a wonderful, very enriching study trip, the other curators and I for two weeks

to Greece to go see all of the art and all of the churches and spend time in

Thessaloniki, Kastoria, and Serres up in the north and it was very moving and

quite spectacular. Since then I have been to Istanbul and to Hagia Sophia,

which is a place that everyone should visit. I think that maybe it would be

more interesting for your Modern Greek historians to answer this way: Why is

the Turkish part neglected? I mean it’s obvious, but what I saw in doing this

exhibition was Byzantium ended at 1453 when Constantinople was taken, and

then there is this fascinating period at Mystras, and in Mani in the

Peloponnese, and then we pick back up in Nafplion with (laughs) Laskarina

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Bouboulina when modern Greece is born and Greece is liberated from the

Turks. The only thing that happens in between, really for me, is the stealing of the Elgin Marbles by Elgin, so (laughs) I think it really is neglected in history unless you make a point and most kids in school don’t know to look for it.

That’s what I would say about that.

Now, why do you think it’s important that people still study and understand the

Greeks? Because for everything I said about how different they are, I think we are all the Greeks. Still, and the more you read from Greek philosophers along with others, the more enriched your life will be, I think. If you want to learn more about Greek culture, you should learn the language. You should learn some Ancient Greek and some Modern Greek. Ancient is a really hard language and it takes dedication. For my Ph.D. I did a minor in Classical

Greek, and so I was reading Aeschylus and Pausanias, and it was really hard.

I’ve been taking Modern Greek for 25 years (laughs) and I always say that I’m going to write a book called “How to Learn Greek in 25 Years or More.” I have a friend who actually found a book titled that that she gave to me last year for Christmas (laughs). It’s just really hard and you have to be there in order to understand it. Reading Ancient Greek is one of the purest intellectual joys I think that a person could have because it’s just really redolent of fabulous ideas just in the way the syntax is formed, the vocabulary, the words that are used, and that we realize how much of that is still inherent in the way that we read

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and think and speak today. It’s very exciting when you come upon those

realizations.

Whyler: I’m sorry. Not meaning to interrupt, but are there Greek works that you would

recommend? I have asked a couple of the other people I have interviewed

what pieces they would recommend.

Hart: Well, one should read … To read in English?

Whyler: Yes.

Hart: I love Herodotus. I bet others have said that too, probably. And I think the

Oresteia. Are people saying that?

Whyler: A couple of them have said Antigone.

Hart: Yeah.

Whyler: Antigone, Lysistrata …

Hart: Yeah.

Whyler: So, actually, I believe you’re probably the first one who has said Herodotus.

Hart: (Laughs) Well, maybe it’s because the thing about Antigone is you read that so

that you know that nobody is all right and all wrong. There is no right and

wrong. And that’s such a Greek thing. Have you studied Ancient Greek?

There is a very common phrase in Ancient Greek that is translated as, it’s more

202 of like an attitude, and translated it comes out as “on the one hand but on the other hand.” It’s very (laughs) horrible and it’s like there is never just one way is the right way. So, I remember when I took a Greek tragedy class and we read Antigone, our teacher said, “Well who’s right?” Some people would say,

“Oh, Creon’s right.” “No, Antigone’s right.” And then you realize actually they’re both. It’s very instructive. But I’d say Aeschylus is bigger to me because it is larger in every way and it can’t be construed to be anything less than the greatest. I think it’s the greatest piece after … Well, Homer. I mean, they have to read The Iliad and The Odyssey. There’s no reason to study

Greek if you don’t read those first. And Herodotus later, and Plato, of course.

But, Aeschylus is about coming out of a former world where blood guilt is known and accepted into a new world where we are civilized. I think that is really huge. It’s the birth of civilization. The reason I was interested in the

Greeks, I think I may have skipped over this a little bit, but the reason I was so inspired by the Greeks was because they seem to be the originators of a vision that was new and modern. That happened at the same time as the Oresteia.

My dissertation was on the Iliupersis, that is The Sack of Troy, in Athenian vase painting. So it’s the Athenian’s vision of their mythos history of the sack of Troy. That one night, that one part, and so it started off with the literary remains of the foundation. It doesn’t come from Homer. I mean, The Iliad stops before that time, and The Odyssey begins after that time. It comes from other epic poets and makes you realize how much is going on in poetry that we

203

don’t have. We have so little and they were so incredibly fluent and rich in

their output of philosophy and poetry. They were an extraordinary

phenomenon in everything that they did. I think there is no way once you dip

into that, that you can’t be astounded or inspired by it. That’s why I pick

Aeschylus. I’ve been working a lot on Euripides lately, who was incredible.

But there are many of his plays, and I’m not sure which ones I would

recommend. I think that, you know, I would go Aeschylus or Euripides. Of

course, Euripides is the most popular and it wasn’t in the years after his death.

Aeschylus was the most popular in antiquity. Which is an interesting thing.

So, okay, I went on and gave some new things.

Whyler: That’s okay. That’s okay.

Hart: (Laughs) Do you have any other questions?

Whyler: Well, you’ve actually very efficiently gone through them.

Hart: Yeah, I did. I tried to.

Whyler: That’s okay. That’s okay. That was perfect. So, actually, that was wonderful.

Thank you so much.

Hart: Okay. Good.

Whyler: And I will now turn off the recordings.

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Hart: Okay.

205

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