Reassessing Greece & Rome

Introduction: Reassessing Greece & Rome Matthew S. Santirocco Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/145/2/5/1830902/daed_a_00371.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 The past remains integral to us all, individually and collectively. We must concede the ancients their place. But their place is not simply back there, in a sepa- rate and foreign country; it is assimilated in ourselves, and resurrected into an ever-changing present. –David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country1 It is difficult to square the rhetoric about the current “crisis” in the humanities with the abundant, if anecdotal, evidence that Greco-Roman antiquity continues to thrive in the popular imagination. As I am writing this, Mary Beard’s new history of Rome is flying off the shelves; general interest magazines publish articles on Greek papyri; the first transla- MATTHEW S. SANTIROCCO, a tion of Homer’s Iliad by a woman has appeared to Fellow of the American Academy wide acclaim; the challenge of teaching ancient since 2009, is Professor of Clas- Greek made it to the op-ed pages of The New York sics, Angelo J. Ranieri Director of Times; a remake of the filmBen-Hur is scheduled for Ancient Studies, and Senior Vice release this summer; a traveling exhibition of large- Provost for Academic Affairs at scale Hellenistic bronzes has become a “must see” New York University. His numer- show of the season; productions of Greek tragedies ous publications include Unity and Design in Horace’s Odes (1986), and and their adaptations continue to be a staple of pro- the edited volumes Latinitas: The fessional and amateur theater; and television pro- Tradition and Teaching of Latin (1987), grams abound on ancient topics ranging from Cleo- Recovering Horace (1994), and Saving patra to the Colosseum.2 Of course, this preoccupa- the City: Destruction, Loss, and Recov- tion with the past has a negative side as well, since ery in the Ancient World (2003). A past even the modern attempt to mythologize Zenobia editor of the apa monograph se- as an Arab queen who resisted Roman power was ries, American Classical Studies (1989 – 1992), and the journal Classical not enough to save her city Palymra from those in World (1993–2012), he currently Syria who were hell-bent on erasing any signs of edits the Palgrave Macmillan se- what they deemed to be unorthodox. But even such ries The New An tiquity. wanton acts of destruction, which seek to obliter- © 2016 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences doi:10.1162/DAED_a_00371 5 Reassessing ate history, only provide further proof that est pipeline into the profession, as some of Greece & the past is still very much alive in the pres- those latecomers to the field, upon gradu- Rome ent.3 ation, make up for gaps in their linguistic That said, there are different ways to as- training by enrolling in post-baccalaureate sess the health of a field than by measuring programs, yet another creative adaptation popular interest in the objects of its study.4 by which the field prepares students for These signs of robust interest–of a fasci- entry into doctoral programs and scholar- nation fueled perhaps by the way in which ly and teaching careers. Greek and Roman culture is simultaneous- The visibility of antiquity in the curric- ly familiar and foreign to us–do not tell the ulum testifies to the resilience of the field whole story. If we turn instead to data use- in the face of “crisis”–or, rather, “cri- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/145/2/5/1830902/daed_a_00371.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 fully amassed by the Humanities Indica- ses.” Greco-Roman studies has long been tors of the American Academy of Arts and recognized as the canary in the coal mine Sciences, and by other professional sourc- of the humanities, having faced early on es, we get a somewhat different picture at some of the pressures that the other hu- the institutional level–small (though rela- manities would encounter only later. In tively steady) numbers of students major- the late nineteenth and early twentieth ing in classics, respectable enrollments in centuries, the field lost its curricular hege- Greek and Latin (though modest by com- mony, as American colleges and universi- parison with many modern languages), ties jettisoned Latin as a requirement for and some retrenchment in faculty hiring admission or graduation. Then, as private (though it is not across-the-board and is schools, particularly Catholic ones, made offset by hiring in other schools and col- Latin optional or dropped it altogether, leges).5 one important pipeline for college majors Even more striking, and encour aging, is dried up. Later, as the quintessential home the fact that, as the number of individuals of “dead white males,” the field was at the specializing in the field has shrunk, more epicenter of the culture wars.6 And, now, students than ever before are encounter- in a climate of economic anxiety, vocation- ing Greece and Rome through courses on alism, and concern with financial return “classics in translation.” A staple of un- on educational investment, it is again vul- dergraduate general education programs nerable. Rather than circling the wagons, (whether distributional or core require- the field has confronted these challenges in ments) and popular as electives, these creative ways. The curricular engagement courses explore such topics as “Classical noted above was one of these strategies. In Mythology,” “Women in Antiquity,” “Sport fact, in a reversal of the usual model where- and Spectacle in the Ancient World,” “An- by research influences what is taught in the cient Religion,” “Greek and Roman Dra- classroom, this curriculum also became a ma,” and “Cinema and the Classics”– powerful driver (though by no means the to name just a few. Rather than “dumb- only one) of exciting new research agendas ing down” the field, as some critics have that focus on contemporary issues where claimed, and being harbingers of further the past has something to teach us. decline, these courses have succeeded in And so, if ancient Greco-Roman culture educating a whole new generation of citi- is alive and well in the popular imagination zens, hardly an unworthy goal. They have and in the general curriculum, the most im- also helped to recruit new majors who had portant evidence of its vitality must never- not encountered this material before col- theless be sought in the quality of current lege. And they have even supplied a mod- research. While the past several decades 6 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences may have seen no grand paradigm shift,7 it any one person could read in many life- Matthew S. is clear that our understanding of the past times. But new material regularly turns up, Santirocco has been dramatically enhanced–and in whether in a manuscript miscatalogued in some cases radically altered–by new ev- a monastic library, or in a “quotation frag- idence, new methods, and new questions. ment” (the work of one author cited by an- As befits a scholarly field whose history be- other), or, more commonly, on a scrap of gan to be written even in antiquity, it is not papyrus recovered from the dry and pre- surprising that there are periodic moments servative sands of Egypt.11 Indeed, one of taking stock. The year 2000 occasioned scholar estimates that “Over the last hun- several, including Classics in Progress, a vol- dred years, one literary papyrus has been ume of essays by British scholars that was published, on average, every ten days; the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/145/2/5/1830902/daed_a_00371.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 published for our sister society, the Brit- agglomeration provides, for Greek liter- ish Academy.8 This special issue of Dæda- ature at least, a small new renaissance.”12 lus was inspired by a different sort of mile- (For a recent discovery that has attracted stone, the important work of the American much attention, see the elegant translation Academy’s Commission on the Human- by Rachel Hadas of the so-called “Brothers ities and Social Sciences. The idea for this Poem” by Sappho in the box on page 40.)13 issue started to come into view at the same These discoveries not only enlarge our time that the Commission was preparing store of ancient literature, but also enable its report, The Heart of the Matter; and the us to restore what we already have, to rec- appearance of this issue coincides roughly ognize previously unknown connections with the publication of the Commission’s among works, and, on occasion, to rewrite follow-up report, which documents the ex- history, literary or otherwise. Meanwhile, tensive activities that have taken place over extant texts regularly require philological the past two years.9 There could be no bet- attention. To take just one example: new ter time to focus on the oldest of the hu- editions of authors are needed not only manities fields, Greco-Roman studies, and to incorporate the new discoveries noted to assess (in the words of this volume’s ti- above, but also to take into account sever- tle) “what is new about the old.”10 al phenomena, only recently understood. One is contaminatio, the fact that most fam- Taken together, the essays in this vol- ily trees of manuscripts (stemmata codicum) ume exemplify some of the most impor - are complicated by horizontal transmis- tant recent developments in Greco-Roman sion (the cross-fertilization of distinct tra- studies. Here I would single out only four.

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