ANTIQUITY
Crisis in the Classics
Michael R. Jackson Bonner describes a feeble attempt to project
modern biases into the ancient world
T he revival of classical learning, or more
specifically of Greek learning, was one of
the most important events in European histo-
ry. With roots in the Benedictine movement of
the middle ages, it was the beginning of what is
commonly called the Renaissance — the great
effort not merely to equal the achievements of
Antiquity but to surpass them. When Europe-
ans and Anglo-Saxons think of the rebirth of
the Classics, they tend to think of the influence
of Greek and Latin texts upon the erstwhile
barbarian peoples of Europe. Who can blame
them? Classical learning was a powerful solvent
and invigorating liquor which refreshed minds
after centuries of scholasticism. So it is easy to
overlook the long influence of the Classics on
the rest of world.
But Hellenic culture and literature were al-
ready ‘classical’ when Alexander the Great had
achieved the conquest of the Persian Empire
in the early fourth century BC. Baths and gym-
nasia arose upon the island of Bahrain and the
shore of the Oxus river in what is now Afghani-
stan, and the natives of Bactria were taught to
declaim the verses of Homer and to sing the
tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. Twenty-
four centuries later, the Persian and Arabic lan-
guages are infused with an enormous mass of
Greek words, and Alexander has attained the
position of universal monarch and prophet of
the One God. The Aramaic tongue, the language
of Jesus and his disciples, was once the com-
mon speech of the entire civilized world outside
China, and it was the idiom of the Persian im-
perial administration. In its more polished lit-
erary form, Aramaic borrowed a huge portion
of Hellenic vocabulary, and entire Greek gram-
matical structures were (we might say) cloned
Autumn/Winter 2017 The Dorchester
in Aramaic. By the 6th century AD, most if not
all Greek and Latin classics had been translated
into Aramaic, and from there they passed into
Persian and Arabic.
The Greeks themselves acknowledged their
ancient debt to the cultures and literature of
the east. The myth of Cadmus, founder of the
Theban monarchy, ascribes a Phoenician origin
to the Greek alphabet — a claim which we now
know to be true. A large portion of Greek vocab-
ulary, especially in Homeric texts, has a Semitic
origin. James G. Frazer’s Golden Bough proved
in exhaustive detail that much of the Greek reli-
gion was derived from Levantine cults, such as
the worship of Adonis and Tammuz. How to Kill
a Dragon by Calvert Watkins demonstrated the
formulaic phraseology and themes common to
Greek epic and all Indo-European poetry. And
M. L West’s extraordinary book The East Face of
Helicon showed that even phrases from ancient
Babylonian epic can be found in Greek poetry of
the Homeric and Classical ages.
But a new generation of Classicists appear
to disagree with all that. Donna Zuckerberg,
sister to the originator of Facebook, is a classi-
cist who is director of communications at the
Paideia Institute. That organization aims pro-
motes Classical studies throughout the world,
and (as its website says) “to increase access to
and engagement with the classical humanities
across all sectors of society.” About a year ago,
Zuckerberg argued in Paideia’s online magazine
Eidolon that the study of classical literature was
fundamentally white and male, and that this
must change. Zuckerberg’s recommended solu-
tion is to “focus on the parts of antiquity that
aren’t elite white men.” It was in this spirit of
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 Crisis in the Classics
diversity in the Classics that the BBC released
an educational cartoon about Roman Britain a
few months ago. In this cartoon a “typical” Brit-
ish family involved an ostensibly white mother,
a black husband, and children of mixed race. A
frenzy of hostile accusation, self-justification,
and profanity-laden tweeting filled the Internet
when a commentator often associated with the
Alt-Right attacked the
cartoon. Paul Joseph
Watson’s criticism was
that, although such
families surely existed,
they could not possi-
bly be said to be typi-
cal of Roman Britain.
The force of the BBC
cartoon was mostly to
justify Blairite immi-
gration policy, and it
was hardly an example
of rigorous scholarship.
A Twitter argument en-
sued between classicist
Mary Beard and statistician Nassim Nicholas
Taleb. That fight was acrimonious and at times
vulgar. Online observers contributed a barrage
of insulting Tweets directed at Mary Beard, and
Taleb called her a “bullshitter” and a member of
“the politically correct Gestapo.”
In support of the BBC cartoon Beard argued
that Roman Britain was “diverse” and that mixed
marriages occurred. The figure of the black man,
for instance, was loosely based on the real-life
Quintus Lollius Urbicus, a man from what is
now Algeria, and who was governor of Britain in
about AD 139. The truth is that we have no idea
what Quintus looked like, but a single example of
a north-African in Roman Britain — in any case
more likely of olive complexion (see illustrations
on this page) — is hardly enough to support the
BBC’s idea of diversity. Taleb insisted further-
more that genetic evidence refutes the idea that
Roman Britain conformed to the BBC’s claim.
But that was not the most interesting part of
the debate. Taleb accused Beard (and the BBC
cartoon) of perpetuating a form of racism. If the
offspring of one white parent and one black par-
ent are considered “diverse” or “non-white,” then
(as Taleb argued) whiteness is not a racial charac-
teristic but rather an expression of purity which
76 The Dorchester Review Autumn/Winter 2017
can be diluted or eliminated by “diversity.” In Ta-
leb’s opinion, Beard’s argument means that one
non-white person can be substituted for another
and that this will create diversity. As Taleb wrote
in a blogpost after the Twitter fight, “if that’s not
racial supremacism, what is?” Taleb, who him-
self is a Lebanese Christian, claims that Beard’s
opinion perpetuates an old form of racism or big-
otry, viz., the dichotomy
between northern and
Mediterranean peoples.
The result of this opin-
ion is that Greeks and
Romans become white
and therefore distinct
from the neighbouring
peoples of North Africa,
the Levant, and western
Anatolia. Taleb’s point is
that, ironically, Quintus
Lollius Urbicus would
have been more similar
to a Roman than either
was to an ethnic Briton.
Common sense would seem to align with Taleb.
S adly, Zuckerberg is guilty of the same sort
of racism as Beard. The injunction to “focus
on the parts of antiquity that aren’t elite white
men” implies that there was an important dif-
ference between the imperial centre, which
was apparently “white,” and the provinces that
it ruled, which were “diverse.” But no such ra-
cial distinction (i.e., one based on whiteness
and non-whiteness) would have been compre-
hensible to ancient inhabitants of Italy and the
other Mediterranean peoples who surrounded
them. Moreover, the Romans had no difficulty
imputing to themselves an origin quite different
from Zuckerberg’s theory of whiteness. The Ro-
man founding myth traces the origins of Latin
civilization to Aeneas: a refugee who fled the
destruction of Troy, the civilized Asiatic state
whose elites are described in the Iliad as of
mixed race.
Many other examples could be adduced to
show that Zuckerberg is wrong. But I must call
her bluff. The discipline of Classics has suffered
from too narrow an academic focus, and this is
becoming worse as scholars are increasingly ex-
pected to confine themselves to ever-tinier nich-
 Crisis in the Classics
es. Obviously, more or less rigid periodization is
necessary to focus on a manageable amount of
material. But the history of Graeco-Roman civi-
lization demands a much broader view than is
now common. Between the founding of Rome in
753 BC and the fall of Constantinople in AD 1453,
there are 2,206 years — an enormous expanse
of time which includes such memorable events
as Alexander’s conquest of the first Iranian Em-
pire, the Macedonian rule of Egypt and the Near
East, the appearance of Christianity and its even-
tual triumph over paganism, the rise and fall of
three(!) major Iranian Empires, the appearance
of the Huns, Turks, Slavs, and other important
peoples, the birth of Islam, the crusades, the
Mongol conquest of the world and the destruc-
tion of Baghdad, amongst many other momen-
tous events. The terms “Antique,” “Hellenistic,”
“Roman,” “Late Antique,” “Byzantine,” and so
forth, are artificial distinctions of chronology,
which rarely represent major social or political
changes.
So there should be no dearth of material with
which to expand the scope of Classics beyond the
politically-motivated canard of the “elite white
man.” And yet, without too much exaggeration, it
may be said that Latinists rarely study anything
before the death of Julius Caesar or after the writ-
Autumn/Winter 2017 The Dorchester
ings of Tacitus: about a century and a half be-
tween 44 BC and the early second century of our
era. Hellenists generally focus on the so-called
Golden Age of Athens in the 5th century BC. To
judge by Mary Beard’s prodigious list of publi-
cations, she has never ventured far beyond the
narrow span between the late Roman Republic
and the end of the first century AD. An exception
to this is her recent and popular book SPQR: A
History of Ancient Rome which terminates at the
reign of Caracalla in the early third century. The
timeline is indeed longer than one might have
expected, but the book focuses narrowly on the
person of successive emperors and certain high
officials and senators such as Pliny and Cassius
Dio. Surprisingly, Zuckerberg’s doctoral thesis
(Princeton, 2014) deals with “intertextuality” be-
tween Aristophanes and Euripides, contempora-
neous late 5th century writers whom she would
certainly describe as white and male.
In my opinion, no good will come of Zuck-
erberg’s advice. Nevertheless, I believe that the
need for diversity in classical studies is impor-
tant. When I was an undergrad, my interest in
the Late Roman period was considered unusual
and my obsession with Byzantium quaint. Ori-
ental Christianity was regularly derided by my
instructors. The dominant view, however, is
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 Crisis in the Classics
totally unjustified since the overwhelming ma-
jority of Latin and Greek texts come from the
Roman period and were preserved by Christian
scholars of so-called Byzantine times. By way of
a shout-out to Zuckerberg, hardly any of those
scholars would conform to her theory of racial
origin, so it is odd to me that she ignores writ-
ers such as Procopius, Ammianus Marcellinus,
John Malalas, and Anna Comnena. Worse, al-
though many admitted (as I recall) that Iran
was the only power which Rome acknowledged
as an equal, and which had ruled Eurasia for
much of Antiquity, few could understand why
a classicist should study it. To study Antiquity
and to focus only on the Graeco-Roman world
can be compared to studying the 20th-century
without knowledge of the Soviet Union and the
Cold War.
B ut instead of rehearsing further complaints,
I would like to make my own recommen-
dations for classicists who want to attain the
broadest possible view of the ancient world.
First, apart from learning Latin and Greek
well, classicists must study the common tongue
of the Near East for most of its history: Aramaic.
Aramaic is much easier to learn than the two
classical languages; but without it, scholars will
never fully understand a huge portion of the An-
tique world. Like the writers of the New Testa-
ment, many of the most learned and informative
Latin and Greek authors of later Roman times
considered Aramaic their mother tongue. Much
the same could be said for Coptic, the indigenous
language of Egypt, although it was far less influ-
ential than Aramaic.
Second, if classicists want a diversity of voices
in the ancient world, they must study Latin and
Greek as they were actually used in real life. This
means studying papyrus fragments, learning to
read ancient handwriting, and coming to grips
with the fact that ordinary speech and writing
differed greatly from the more formal and eccen-
tric language of Cicero and Thucydides. Papyrol-
ogy forms no part of any undergraduate course
that I have ever known or heard of, and yet even
a small introduction to it would be rewarding.
Most of our papyrus fragments come from Egypt
and the Levant, and so there is no question that
papyrology would conform to Zuckerberg’s in-
78 The Dorchester Review Autumn/Winter 2017
junction against the work of “elite white men.”
But, of course, it is interesting in its own right
and it is the surest way to knowledge of other an-
cient social classes apart from a real or perceived
elite.
Third, classicists must study the rise of Is-
lam. The appearance of that religion is often
construed as the death-knell of classical civili-
zation. But it is better to think of Islam, at least
originally, as an amalgam of the most prominent
features of Late Antiquity. Roman and Iranian
ideas of universal monarchy and a single world
religion, Jewish monotheism, and a seeming
resolution to the theological disputes which had
assailed Christendom for two centuries all assert
themselves within Islam. Even Roman imperial
terminology for currency, the postal system, gra-
dations of nobility, and the imperial civil service
survived. Famously, the military road construct-
ed in northern Arabia by the emperor Diocletian
gave the Arabs one of their most important theo-
logical terms. The so-called Strata Diocletiana
was abbreviated to Strata (the origin incidentally
of our word “street”), and this became the Arabic
word sirat meaning “path.” So the opening prayer
in the Koran which asks Allah to “guide us on the
straight path” (Koran 1:6) is an allusion to a Ro-
man road: the straightest and most reliable path
the Arabs had yet known. Even the Koranic word
for the place where the deeds of mankind are re-
corded, sijjin (Koran 83:7-9), is derived from the
word the Latin word sigillum, through its Greek
transcription sigillon which is the late Roman
word for “imperial edict.” Those are just two ex-
amples, among many, which attest to the sur-
vival of the Antique world within Islam, and this
phenomenon deserves further study. I suspect
that modern votaries of Muhammad, and those
of Donna Zuckerberg, would bristle at the idea
that the Koran fairly brims with Arabicized Latin
and Greek words, but it is true.
Antiquity was most certainly not dominated
by Zuckerberg’s straw man of the “elite white
male,” but neither did Antiquity conform to
Mary Beard’s theory of diversity. The variety and
strangeness of Antiquity with its long-estab-
lished, ancient cultures should appear entirely
unfamiliar, and to reimagine the classical world
as a prefiguration of modern multiculturalism
is a total misunderstanding. Anyone who delves
below the surface will see this.