Ancient Greece and Us

Michael Scott ("The Question of Life in the Ancient World") touches on some of the same themes as Mary Beard's "Do the Classics Have a Future?". A taste:

[M]ost newspaper articles either start or round up their coverage of the modern situation with some expression of nostalgic comparison to the glory days of ancient Greece. But to what exactly are we referring? Just what was life like in ancient Greece?

It's peripheral to his overall point, but I love that he's noticed this tendency of articles on the economic crisis to make token references to ancient Greek. It's particularly irritating to someone like me who relies on Google Alerts for blogging material and has limited interest (and expertise) in modern economics.

I came to grad school really excited about the 'relevance' of classics to the modern world, something that now makes me wince a little bit. Undergraduate programs often flog the relevance idea, understandably, as a way of attracting and keeping students. And of course I deeply believe that the study of antiquity is relevant to modern life. But there's discontinuity as well as continuity, which is why every single article about the economic crisis doesn't need to quote Solon, or refer to Athens as the birthplace of democracy.

Like Beard, Scott discusses the ongoing construction of 'the ancient world' in our minds:

In part because so little was known about the realities of ancient Greece in the 15^th-17^th centuries, the articulation of ancient Greece as an ideal rested upon modern re-imaginings of the pictures conjured up by ancient literature, populated with increasing numbers of pieces of ancient ‘art’ and architecture as they came to light, which were then ‘fitted in’ to that model. 

I spoke to an English class last month that was studying the Iliad, and I could tell it blew their minds a little bit to learn that until relatively recently, the Mycenaean world was regarded as quasi-fictional. Fascinating stuff.

H/T rogueclassicism Pin It