Classics and the Alt-Right Conundrum

Brenna Miller  

Welcome to History Talk, the podcast that brings together a panel of experts to discuss current events in historical perspective. I'm your host, Brenna Miller.

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson 

And I'm your other host, Jessica Vinas-Nelson. On a recent trip to the UK, President Trump bemoaned that, quote, "allowing the immigration to take place in Europe is a shame. I think it changed the fabric of Europe and unless you act very quickly, it is never going to be what it was, and I don't mean that in a positive way. I think you are losing your culture".

 

Brenna Miller  

The conclusion that immigration changes existing culture for the worse is a common view among white nationalists in the US, and existential fears of losing what is seen as Western civilization have animated many within what is considered the alt-right. However, the valorization of Western civilization is often rooted in romanticized notions of ancient Greece and Rome, which alt-right groups have appropriated and promoted and recent propaganda. Why and how do nationalists in Europe and the US draw connections to Ancient Greece and Rome? What are the consequences of this for understandings of the ancient era? And what should scholars in the classics and history do about it?

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson 

Today, we've invited three scholars to discuss the alt rights appropriation of classical history. On the phone, we have Denise McCoskey, a professor of classics and affiliate of black world studies at Miami University in Ohio. She's the author of "Race: Antiquity and Its Legacy", and most recently, an article for Origins entitled "Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts: How Neo-Nazis and Ancient Greeks Met in Charlottesville".

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey 

Hello, thanks for the invitation.

 

Brenna Miller  

Also, on the phone, we have Donna Zuckerberg, the editor in chief of Eidolon, an online publication for informational classical scholarship, and author of soon to be published book from Harvard University Press, "Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age."

 

Dr. Donna Zuckerberg 

Thank you for having me.

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson 

And from Vassar College’s recording studio, we have Curtis Dozier, visiting professor at Vassar and the Director of Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, a site devoted to documenting and responding to appropriations of ancient Greece and Rome by hate groups. He is also the producer and host of The Mirror of Antiquity, a podcast about classical scholars, and how their research intersects with the contemporary world.

 

Dr. Curtis Dozier  

 Hi.

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson 

 So to begin, how has the classical period been appropriated into white supremacist narratives of history?

 

Dr. Curtis Dozier  

I think the best way to sum up what they say is that the classical world provides either a positive or a negative model for us. So they've noticed that Plato seems to recommend eugenics in the Republic and so they say we should have eugenics. They notice that in classical antiquity, women had fewer rights than men, so they say we should imitate that. On the negative side, they look, especially at the end of the Roman Empire and they say that Rome fell because of immigration and sometimes they also say, because of the decline of morality, and so they say, we should be worried about that, because immigration leads to collapse of society. You know, sometimes things can be both positive and negative. So I've been working on a page right now saying that classical Greece was founded by basically Nordic invaders. So they say, these sort of Aryan white people made Greece great, but then they also make that a negative model, because they say, well, and then classical Greece declined  because of race mixing.

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey 

I could just add to that, you know, and let me just give props to Curtis. He's in charge of a website. Now, that's been tracking a really wide range of appropriations, but I think, what's the sort of immediacy of this issue is some of the intersections with what the alt right wants from classics and what we might call contemporary identity politics. So they are very revitalized not just around the idea of a Western culture, but about a purity of race and appropriating the ancient Greeks and Romans as some kind of paradigmatic white race or the foundation of the greatness. So they adopt slogans about, you know, that sort of mirror other contemporary slogans about making things great again and so I think that's really the moment I mean, Donna has done some great work on ways that they're appropriating ideas, or constructing ideas of gender through antiquity, and also recently, some very important comments about homosexuality. So I think that's really the immediacy, right now, they've started to use the ancient world to fight back against, again, for lack of a better word, what they might perceive as identity politics.

 

Dr. Donna Zuckerberg 

I would just add to that part of the ideology that gives them legitimacy, or in their own eyes, that is, is the idea that the contributions made by essentially white people, or, you know, Western civilization, if you want to gussy that up have been greater, great contributions to society than those given by anybody else. So they like to gesture toward Ancient Greece and Rome as sort of this originary moment for Western civilization, and the achievements of mostly Athens and Rome, in areas of art, monuments, literature, all those things, then become proof for them of the gifts that white people have given society.

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey 

I've seen on a Neo-Nazi message board, a list of the accomplishments of the white race, a very long list. Literal list. Wow.

 

Dr. Curtis Dozier  

All the things at the beginning our quote unquote, discoveries of ancient Greeks.

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey 

That's where it starts, right.

 

Dr. Donna Zuckerberg 

I mean, I don't think there's anything before that for them.

 

Brenna Miller  

So we can see how they're using ancient history to justify their perspectives today. So as scholars, do you see anything wrong with the alt-rights use of classic history? How might they be misusing it? And is it even fair to call what they do history?

 

Dr. Donna Zuckerberg 

That's such a complicated question?

I mean, it's part of what makes it wrong is just that they're using it to promote racism and sexism. A big part of whether or not you think that it's wrong is going to largely depend on sort of where you stand politically. With that said, yes, often, their version of history is extremely lacking in nuance and complexity, or sometimes even the flat out wrong,

 

Dr. Curtis Dozier  

I feel it's important to say that it takes a very narrow lens, and a very extreme act of boundary building to try to cut the Greeks and the Romans off from the rest of the ancient Mediterranean world. There's no question that they are deeply linked to all sorts of cultures in those areas, that Greek culture doesn't just, you know, emerge out of Athena's head, but it's something that's growing and building and so I think, speaking personally, it's sort of shocking to come back to this model at this particular moment, because I think classicists in the past 20 years have been really trying to figure out a way to understand this world of the ancient Mediterranean and so to come back to this focus on these sites, as if they are disconnected from all that I think is extremely distorted.

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey 

There's a little bit of a difference I've seen between how white supremacists use classics and how anti feminists use classics because to a certain extent, when you're looking at anti-feminist appropriation of classical material, often they are seeing something that to a an extent is there in the text, there is misogyny in the text, and they're making it the most prominent feature of the text and also using it as an aspirational model, the white supremacist material, you don't see that as much because they're reading was of anything involving race in antiquity, are so tendentious, and reductive and often just incorrect.

 

Dr. Curtis Dozier  

I feel like in this, to some extent, there is a kind of germ of accuracy in some of the white supremacist stuff, maybe maybe not about their understanding of race, which I agree is very reductive, and anachronistic in a lot of ways, but I made the point earlier about eugenics, it is true that Plato seems to advocate eugenics in the Republic. So to the extent that they want to use antiquity as a model, which I think both anti feminists and the white supremacist do in many ways, they tend to be more cherry picked, or tendentiously interpreted but not completely wrong. This thing I'm working on right now, and Denise has contributed to it and actually you have to Donna is about the claim of this Dorian invasion that brought Nordic people to Greece, there is this myth that the ancient Greeks had of the return of the children of Heracles, who went into exile and then came back and established themselves as the ruling culture and, you know, what the white supremacist have done is turned that into a totalizing narrative that explains everything about Greek culture, when it actually from our point of view seems to be a story that was very implicated in the politics of the time Sparta zones attempt to claim a mythological history of Heracles for themselves and actually, Athens has a political angle in it too. But that myth is there. And so they pick up on that and then turn it into something that means what they want it to mean.

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey 

Yeah, I think, you know, part of the mistake is to try to portray the ancient world as some sort of model of multiculturalism. You know, I think that there's no question it's a multicultural world, but there's also as Curtis and Donna are suggesting, you know, deep seated philosophies of inequality and domination and I think where the alt right, is, I think, very misleading, is their attempt to join the Greeks and Romans. And certainly for the Romans, for example, the Germans are to them as racially different as Ethiopians are. So this idea that they can kind of cling on to the most powerful people at the time of the ancient Mediterranean is a real distortion of how the ancient Greeks and Romans saw the world and constructed their own ideas about race. But it this is not to say that they were somehow enlightened people when it came to exerting ideas of difference and playing those out and things like Empire and slavery.

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson

So is that the idea then to try to make them seem more respectable, more appropriate, by clinging to this idea of this ancient lineage? What is their appropriation of this history do? What are its real ramifications?

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey

I mean, I think the ancient Greeks and Romans have a tremendous amount of cultural power in today's world and so to wrap themselves up in it, and to create an invented genealogy that's become not just cultural, but now racialized, I think is, speaks to a lot of their attempt to regain some kind of power today. I mean, I think, you know, Curtis was talking before about the myth of the children of Heracles , I think, myths and stories and the ways that they get mobilized are extremely important in the current moment, and it's it for quite a long time, it's been very powerful to mobilize yourself as the legitimate heir of the Greeks and Romans. That's a little bit what I tried to write about things like how did the British get the Elgin's marbles? Will they do it by creating an ideology in which they are better inheritors of ancient Greece than the modern Greeks themselves? And so I think the alt right, you know, is very clever in the narratives that they're choosing. And I think we underestimate their power at our peril.

 

Dr. Curtis Dozier  

It's also, I think, a real setback, in some ways for classics as a discipline. Because, as Denise was saying before, we'd like to think that classics as a discipline is now in this place where we're thinking about the ancient Mediterranean world in a much more inclusive and holistic way. And also, we're trying to make strides within the discipline toward greater inclusion and diversity. But it's a rocky road, and anything that has a wide cultural spread, that reinforces the idea that classics are about how great white people are, is going to trickle down to classics as a discipline and and set us back in a direction that we don't want to go in.

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey 

How deep would you assess the alt rights, knowledge of classics as a discipline?

 

Dr. Curtis Dozier  

Well, I think some of the ideas they're getting from earlier classical scholarship, that's what I think is sort of so frustrating at this particular moment, because classics has really moved on. Yeah, this is a reinvigoration of ideas that many, not all, only but many ideas that classicists themselves were promoting at the end of the 19th century and throughout the early part of the 20th century. So I think that's part of the role that you know, what makes it so pressing for classicist themselves to get involved and to really speak against some of this because some of this, they've sown the seeds for.

 

That's one reason Denise's article for Origins and you know, a lot of the work she's doing in other ways to is so valuable is because it It shows the long history of classical histories implication in these politically regressive ideologies.

 

Dr. Donna Zuckerberg 

In places like read, you have these movements against sort of the Western Canon and teaching classics, and part of the concern that the students have is that the study of these texts reinscribes white supremacy. Now, I don't by any means, think that that must be the case. But what the alt-right is doing these texts certainly confirms that idea. So unless we put a lot of effort to actively pushing back against it, I think that what they're doing could really endanger the study of classics in the future.

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey 

Anything, classics is just a very hierarchical field, you have to acquire so much knowledge to enter into it that it can be really difficult. I think, at times for classics to change quickly. I'm really lucky because I teach a cross listed course in black world studies and classics and, you know, I think a lot of the ways that I think about the classical world comes from students who haven't been trained by the field of classics to only ask certain types of questions. I was teaching the Trojan War myth, and we just started talking about this Ethiopian warrior, Memnon, and this fabulous student in my class said but what in the world is Memnon doing? Why is he fighting there? And I thought, you know, that's the story I really want to know, why does this Ethiopian warrior come to Troy, and I never thought about it And so I think that's a lot of what classics really has to do it just not very flexible, not very good at retooling itself quickly.

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson 

 And so for a little bit of context, when did the field of classics arise?

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey 

 I would say it really gets going as a professional practice in that late 18th and then throughout the 19th century

 

Dr. Curtis Dozier  

Which is not coincidentally, probably, the same period in which national identities are, as we think of them in the contemporary world are being formed and kind of the foundations for the modern forms of stratifying of the human species into different categories are being laid by various intellectual movements.

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey 

Certainly scientific racism is arising at the same time, Martin Brunel and Black Athena tried to kind of connect the origins of classics, both to ideas of romanticism, and then also to the changing ideas about race itself and, as Curtis is saying, it's increasing connectedness throughout the 19th century to ideas of human biology, and, you know, quote, unquote, science.

 

Dr. Curtis Dozier  

just like with all the alt-right studies of history, I mean, even that account could be told in different ways. You know, my reaction when you asked, when did classical scholarship start? Well, I mean, back into the fifth century, BCE, or, or even, or even earlier, but I mean, I'm bringing that up, because, you know, I mentioned this myth and, and Denise referred to it to the return of the children of Heracles. I mean, there was a study of myth in Antiquity and there's a recent book out by this guy, Lee Patterson, about kinship and myth and one of the points he's making is the way that the study of myth in Antiquity was connected to the project, often of making connections between disparate groups of people, and creating politically expedient, but necessary connections between people. And of course, it was also used to oppress and to separate people, but it doesn't have to be used in the way that the scholars of the 19th century used it, they were a product of their time and so I mean, there is an opportunity to articulate different ways of using antiquity.

 

Brenna Miller  

I'm curious to know about the relationship between the rise of classics and these ways of thinking of modern civilization and democracy and the emergence of nations and nationalism in the 18th and 19th centuries.

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey 

I think it you know, becomes classics becomes a sort of goes back to what Curtis is saying a form of storytelling about where people come from. And I think classics becomes enmeshed in a number of different stories about nation and particular kinds of nations to just look at the Roman side for a second, you know, you have texts like Tacitus' Germania that are extremely important in trying to pinpoint the idea of who the Germans are at a time when they are coming into status as a nation and in fact, as Christopher Krebs at Stanford has shown into the Nazi period, this text of Tacitus has become so important for understanding the origin of the German character that there is a desire by Nazis to even inquire the manuscripts of Tacitus as a kind of legitimacy. So I do think, especially in Europe, that people are situating themselves in and around the ancient world, as nations are emerging and finding ways to tell stories about their own selfhood through classics.

 

Dr. Curtis Dozier  

You know, the question you asked a little while ago, you know, whether it was right to call what the alt right is doing history or not, to me is a kind of hard question to answer, because I guess I feel like they are using the past in a very, very time-honored way of using the past, which is to support a political position. So in that, from that point of view, I do think what they're doing is, is history not in the sense that I think the discipline of history or even Classical Studies has traditionally thought of history, I think we tend to think of it more as like a search for truth. You know, going back as far as we can go back, the past is used for these political ends and in that sense, what they're doing is history and it's more a contest of whose version of history is going to be put forward and I think there's an opportunity for us as classical scholars to put forward a vision of history that doesn't take us backwards politically.

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson 

Were there groups before the alt right, who were using classical history for their own goals?

 

Dr. Donna Zuckerberg 

Always, I mean, yeah, the, the Nazis, right, are the, the huge example there, and they're sort of fascination with, especially Sparta, but also the American South, post reconstruction, sort of like the daughters and the American Revolution. They're heavy classical undertones that are used there as well.

 

Dr. Curtis Dozier  

If you read the Federalist, Hamilton and Madison are using antiquity all the time in trying to get the US Constitution ratified and their way of talking about classical Athens is a very, frankly, anti-democratic way of representing that as sort of mob rule in support of their version. It doesn't feel to me as toxic as what the Nazis did, but I, I do think there's a kind of tendentious to it, again, in support of a particular political mission.

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey 

And I, you know, I think if you look at a place like France, you know, there's a lot of in early French history and attempt to really understand I can never say his name in French, but what Vercingetorix, Caesars rival in the Gallic wars, and using Caesars Gallic wars to build him up as a kind of proto national hero, you know, the British have to do extraordinary back bends to try to figure out how they can situate themselves as the inheritors of Rome and not the Celts that were conquered by Rome. So I think there's all sorts of different ways that modern European nations in particular have had to situate themselves around the Greco Roman past, there's some really interesting stuff that's done before between the Irish and the English, and how they use the classical past and sort of conflicting ways, just in that in that area of the world to try to figure out where they come from out of antiquity.

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson 

So should we be weary of thinking of ancient Greece and Rome as the roots of Western civilization? And really, to whom does this history belong? If anyone.

 

Dr. Donna Zuckerberg 

This history belongs to anybody and everybody, including to a certain extent, to the alt right, I mean, that's, that's something, I think that that's something that we absolutely have to sort of appreciate if we're going to move productively on.

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey 

When I, when I teach my classes, I think one of the things that's most interesting to students and they're really unprepared for is the degree to which the concepts that we think we somehow simplistically inherited from the Greeks, for example, were the subject of enormous debate and agonizing at the time. I mean I taught a course in Greek tragedy this semester, and Greek tragedy is entirely worried about democracy, what democracy is about and who suffers in democracy and who is gets advantaged and I think, when we act as if there's somehow this singular, positive, glorious inheritance, we really simplify the degree to which these cultures were, you know, ardently, and critically involved in debating these things. They were never simplistic topics at the time, and I think we really underestimate people's ability to grapple with that I think my students actually found it exhilarating to understand that it's not one dimensional, but that the Greeks themselves were already really interrogating these complicated ideas. I mean, freedom is a great one. You know, we, the Greeks, and many people think of, you know, coming out of the Persian Wars, how much the Athenians promoted ideas of freedom, and yet, you have at the same time, Athens is a slave holding society. So how can we come to terms with that?

 

Brenna Miller  

What does the ancient world really tell us about ideas about race and misogyny, and these things that the alt right is, is using them so much for?

 

Dr. Curtis Dozier  

You know, whereas they want us to see antiquity as providing the answers to those questions that misogyny it is a natural reflex of human biology, for example, or that they want to use antiquity to say that race exists as a meaningful category. For example, I think what the ancient world shows us or can show us, that misogyny, racism, those things are contingent, that they take many different forms and many different periods. They exist in one form and one period and a different form and another period, that they have a history that they change, maybe they can even go away, some aspects of them can go away. So to me, you know, antiquity is useful to sort of undermine the apparent naturalness or essential existence of those forms of hatred.

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson 

What has been the alt rights response to this pushback from many classical scholars?

 

Dr. Donna Zuckerberg 

It's around a spectrum, from just sort of dismissing what classes are doing as politically correct bullshit, or attempts to rewrite history for deeply ideologically motivated reasons as though that's not exactly what they are doing. And then, so that that's one end of the spectrum and then, on the other end, some classists have been experiencing, you know, more serious pushback in the form of harassment, occasionally violent harassment, Twitter harassment.

 

Brenna Miller  

So thinking about how scholars fit into all this picture, what should scholars of these areas, and in other areas, like history do, when they see their fields being appropriated is their responsibility that they have to make corrections to that or to respond in some way?

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey 

I think our popular culture is so infused with images of the Greeks and Romans, that a lot of people think they know them. And so I think breaking through that can be very difficult. I think, you know, you asked about response, you know, they're just simply people who don't believe that we know the Greeks and Romans better than they do, because they've seen 300, or, you know, so I think that can be, I think, a difficult thing to break through that, that a lot of people's knowledge of the Greeks and Romans just seems like common sense, seems like something they know. So that, to me, is one of the biggest challenges is breaking through that and getting people excited about what they don't know. Because a lot of times too, when you start trying to fill in a bigger picture, then people start to get disappointed, because they actually prefer, you know, a one-dimensional thing that they can take away.

 

Dr. Donna Zuckerberg 

I don't necessarily think that anybody has a responsibility to engage in public scholarship. However, I do think that we all have a responsibility to support those of our peers, who do choose to go in that direction. I mean, if your if your personal choice is that you want to, you know, write a commentary on a text and never engage with an audience of readers outside of the discipline, then I think that that's a fine choice to make. But discipline needs people like that. But I do think that it's important to, it's important to acknowledge and support the people who are doing this work, because this work is very challenging. And it's often not rewarding in the sort of tenure and promotions sense.

 

Dr. Curtis Dozier  

No, I mean, Donna said it very well. And I'll just mention that yeah, the person who chooses just quote, unquote, to write a commentary, actually, that scholarship is something I'm going to use on my site, trying to, you know, correct or put forward politically progressive vision of antiquity. So I depend totally on the people doing that kind of disciplinary discipline specific work. I agree with Donna that, that we don't have a responsibility to do public scholarship. But I hope everyone will recognize that if there aren't people doing public facing work, then our material has the risk of being picked up by the alt right, or any form of non-specialist who's working from an inexpert, possibly outdated, possibly, politically regressive position. But you know, I guess I wish people would consider whether that's good for their disciplines to kind of leave the leave the public facing realm in the hands of people outside the discipline, or the material is just available for anyone who wants to do anything they want with it

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey 

Just quickly to kind of add on to Curtis and Donna and just speak about where we are now, because I'm a bit older than Curtis and Donna. And I remember when Black Athena, I was a graduate student when Black Athena and was really gaining traction and, in my opinion, classics missed an enormous opportunity to engage with people outside the discipline and in fact, a lot of senior people in that field, I think, decided pointedly not to do that and this is a very different environment to me  and a lot of it is really due to people like Donna and Curtis. I mean, I think there's a more critical mass I think of classicists who understand that the survival of our field is at stake. We can't simply turn away from these deep, deep questions about who we are and what we do.

 

Brenna Miller  

Would you be able to explain just briefly what Black Athena is?

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey 

Black Athena was a project as a series of volumes written by Martin Bernal, a specialist actually in China, who decided that he was going to take on kind of classics and really understanding of origin which is coming up again. But he basically set out to make the argument and he had a number of different arguments. He argued that the ancient Greeks had a vision of their world. But that in the 18th and 19th centuries, classicist had sort of whitewashed what the Greeks themselves knew about their own world, and it positive instead, when he called an Aryan model, which really sought to do some of the things that alt-right are currently doing, which is to project this idea of the Greeks as kind of self-standing and miraculous and the font of Western civilization, but in the end, when he wanted to kind of dismantle the area model, he suggested, what he called his revised ancient model and so it was a lot to take on board, because there are really three models that he was talking about and there was all sorts of disagreement on all three fronts. Some people didn't like his reconstruction of the ancient model. Some people didn't like the model that he himself proposed. But I think classicists themselves really were most unwilling to, in my opinion, most shamefully unwilling to really grapple with what he had shown with the Aryan model. And many classicists became extremely hostile to the idea that classics itself was founded on certain racist principles and it was a really kind of just an explosion in the field. And I think most people just turned away and didn't want to engage with it at all. But as a graduate student, I can attest that at that time, people outside classics were absolutely fascinated by this idea, by the connections that ancient Egypt in particular might have had to the ancient world and Bernal became a real focal point for people outside of classics for trying to think about whether or not the Greeks weren't who we thought they were and I think this is a real opportunity to talk to people openly and honestly about that.

 

Brenna Miller  

Turning from scholarship, then to teaching, are there things that up-and-coming scholars in the classics, and people in history and other fields can do to help correct or disrupt some of the assumptions about the ancient world so for example, by incorporating different types of geographies, or emphasizing certain themes, or even as maybe not advertising it as the foundations of Western civilization and tradition and things on that order.

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey 

Think it's a real challenge, because we teach a course and introductory course called Greek civilization and its Mediterranean context, which is really trying to balance certain things, because on the one hand, we want to enable students to explore the things that they love about Greeks, you know, or they think that they love about Greeks, but we also try to unsettle a little bit about what they think they know and it's, it's a difficult balancing act to love something the way they do from popular culture, and to ask them to actually become more excited about its complexity. You have to kind of tread carefully, but I, I have personally found students really willing to explore what they don't know about the ancient Greeks and get really excited did about that.

 

Dr. Curtis Dozier  

When I started working on Pharos, Donna's article, "How to be a Good Classicist Under a Bad Emperor" was the, you know, total inspiration for that project and one of the things she said we need to do in that is find better reasons to study classical antiquity, then this idea of it being the foundation of everything good. And that is a really big challenge, not only because we're so used to saying that, but especially in the current landscape of higher ed, where the humanities are, you know, being forced to justify themselves and in various ways, it's hard to square that kind of cultural landscape with an approach that is willing to be very explicit and open about the politically unpalatable and kind of unattractive things about your own tradition and so I think what classical scholars need to do, I'm trying to make, you know, my own small contribution to that and I think there's a lot of interest in that in this more broadly, but what we need to be doing is taking up that challenge of finding ways to promote what we study that don't require expressing our disciplines, superiority to other disciplines, the superiority of what we studied other things that are studied.

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey 

And I think students can really attach to, you know, I think of Donna's work and some things that I've read recently that are looking at things like toxic masculinity, I mean, there's a lot texts and antiquity that will allow you to examine that and although there's a lot of misogyny in classical texts, there's also a lot of texts that are very critically exploring ideas of masculinity, and really trying to think about what makes a man a man and I think students are extremely receptive to that. Certainly, sexuality has been really important for a lot of students, I would say and so when we teach courses on gender and sexuality, they're able to understand or to  look at ideas about sexuality that are different from ours and I think there's a liberation and really opening these categories. Sort of like Curtis was saying up to greater interrogation, not just taking things for granted, not treating these ideas as natural, but seeing them played out in a very different society, I think is, is liberating for some of our students.

 

Dr. Curtis Dozier  

And to go back to something Denise said earlier, I think what Denise said was, it's hard to make the ancient world into a model of multiculturalism, I think she said something like that and that's right, but there's a way of teaching that kind of embraces the diversity of the ancient world much more explicitly and gives more time to that rather than representing, say, the Greeks says one thing or the Romans as one thing, or the ancient world as only the Greeks and Romans, you know, bringing in the other groups of people, the non-Athenian, non-Roman, say, non-Spartan Greeks, talking about the sexuality is it feels to me like one of the areas we've made the most progress in, like, in sort of, representing the range of experiences and evidence for those experiences that we seem to have, you know, expanding the field, expanding what we teach in the field, expanding, what we write about in the field, in those areas, is a way to produce a vision of antiquity that doesn't so easily fit these narratives, that the alt right is putting forward about it.

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson 

So as we come to a close that we wanted to give you an opportunity to give any final thoughts.

 

Dr. Denise McCoskey 

 I, you know, I think for myself, I, I there's a lot of toxicity about dealing with these topics. And, you know, as Donna has spoken about very well, it can often come at really personal cost, but I have to say that what's kind of been transformative for me is talking to my students more openly about some of this, and I do, you know, I students are complicated as a group of individuals, but I've been really inspired by students willingness to go certain places in thinking about the ancient world. So it's, that's been a remarkable kind of optimism next to some of this other stuff and I do want to say, I'm very lucky at Miami, I have an affiliation and black world studies. So a number of the courses that I teach are cross listed and that's just been absolutely huge in my intellectual and teaching development to be able to face students who just come to the ancient world with completely different questions. So I guess my final comments that I would share is, is I do think there's also a real reward for doing this and some of it is the students and what they bring to this material.

 

Dr. Curtis Dozier  

I've noticed in some of the responses, I've gotten to my work, an anxiety. This is on the part not of people resisting what we're doing it doing justice to the classics.org, but just a just to kind of fear that if we talk too much about white supremacist using antiquity , it will make people not want to study antiquity. I guess I can't say for sure that that's wrong, but my instinct is what Denise is saying is that I sort of more honest assessment of the history of our discipline and the wave of the material is used, and the way it can be used, I think that will excite a new generation of students who are who are who are hoping for that kind of honesty and an interested in learning about those kinds of histories and being critical of them and so I don't think we need to be afraid to, to talk about what you're talking about what we're talking about on the show today. In our classes and in our field, I think recognizing this threat to what we're doing and thinking about the best ways to either respond to it or just to represent our discipline in in better ways, than the way they are representing us can be a source of real intellectual energy and excitement.

 

Dr. Donna Zuckerberg 

That's certainly been my experience as well that I'm told all the time that Eidolon could kill classics because we make it seem like it's, you know, it's all negativity all the time. That that, what we publish our only reasons not to study classics, but my experience has been the opposite, that people are really excited about what we're doing and seem to feel that there's new energy and new and exciting reasons to come to these texts with different eyes.

 

Brenna Miller  

Well, we'll wrap it up on that note, thank you to our three guests, Doctors Denise McCowsky, Donna Zuckerberg and Curtis DozIer. This episode of History Talk podcast was brought to you by Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, an online publication of the Public History Initiative and the Goldberg Center in the History Department at The Ohio State University in Columbus and Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Our main editors are Steve Conn and Nicholas Breyfogle. Our executive producer is David Staley, our audio and technical advisor is Paul Kotheimer, our audio producers and hosts are Brenna Miller and Jessica Vinas-Nelson. Song and band information can be found on our website. You can find our podcasts and more on our website at origins.osu.edu on iTunes and on SoundCloud, and as always, you can find us on Twitter and Facebook. Thanks for listening.