The Five Stages of Good Grief

Bemusement So, my new book Classics: why it matters has been reviewed on the Classics For All webpage by Richard Jenkyns – I’d asked for a copy to be sent to them (I don’t know if they’re on the regular distribution list for review copies) as they’re a worthy organisation seeking to promote the study of classics in state schools rather than keeping it as preserve of the elite, and that’s one of the points of the book. Jenkyns is one of their patrons, so it’s entirely reasonable that they asked him to write the review – and he didn’t like it much… Okay, I wouldn’t have expected my comments on the place of ancient languages to win much favour with an eminent Oxford classicist, but is it really true, as is implied, that the book only shows any liveliness when it’s attacking classics? How must I have failed to express myself clearly, if someone thinks that I’m recommending David Engels’ prophecies of doom as a model for classical studies, rather than offering them as an example and symptom of alarming politicised appropriation of the ancient world? And as for the idea that Thucydides is straightforward to read in translation whereas such an approach in the case of Tacitus would inevitably lead to misinterpretation and misunderstanding…

Amusement Actually this is hilarious. I’ve always tended to avoid reading reviews of my work, suspecting that my fragile ego won’t cope very well with even a hint of criticism and so I don’t deserve to enjoy any positive comments, but this is different. I hate Twitter accounts that celebrate themselves by retweeting praise, but it’s hard to resist quoting choice snippets from this one. Because I reference Nietzsche, and refer only in passing to Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, I am “the Uebermensch of the West Country” (the downside of this is that I can now never move, or I’ll lose the use of that title). “Proud Philistine” is even better, for a child of the punk era who is therefore instinctively in favour of assaulting elite culture, but whose cultural tastes tend more towards high-brow German novels and abstract European jazz. I need to get a t-shirt made…

Acceptance It’s not just the principle that no publicity is bad publicity – there’s nothing like a rousing academic spat to build up interest in a book, suggesting the existence of a titanic intellectual struggle between the Progress League and the Legion of Gloom (though that implies I should be thinking up some equally memorable insults for Prof. Jenkyns, which really isn’t my style). Rather, it’s the nature of the attack, and its embedded assumptions; this is exactly the sort of response that my book ought to be provoking, expressed in a way which perfectly represents the sort of Classics that I’m criticising (whereas I always feel that dear old Nietzsche was actually expecting conservative German professors of philology to read The Birth of Tragedy and hail him as the true future of the discipline, and only later decided that philology was inherently flawed and doomed to irrelevance after it had rejected him). With criticism like this, who needs supportive cover quotes?

Depression But this isn’t all about my book, except as a symptom; it’s about the current state and future prospects of the discipline. That there are still people – thoroughly eminent senior figures in the field, indeed – who dismiss the study of material evidence as at best ancillary compared with the wonders of the Texts, who insist on mastery of the languages as the only acceptable approach to studying antiquity, and who fail to recognise the problematic limitations of how the subject has been conceived or the dangers of the arrogance of assuming that classicists are automatically the best people to study classical reception, not the specialists in the periods and societies in which classical texts are being received. Apparently this shows disdain for classicists – but surely not half so much as suggesting that any work that departs from the narrow path of traditional philology is likely to be “lively perhaps, but slight, easily satisfied and short of self-criticism.”

Anger I owe a lot of these later thoughts to Liv Yarrow, who wrote a thoughtful blog post in response to the review. I can find this episode hilarious, because I’m an established professor who isn’t going to suffer any adverse consequences from the fact that an eminent retired Oxford classicist thinks I’m a grumbling intellectual lightweight. But what of the numerous young scholars who see their work being dismissed like this, or at least the potential for such policing? What of all those who are worried about the future of the discipline, who see possible problems with the image of classical studies being waved away or even unwittingly exemplified? What of the young people, especially from backgrounds which don’t traditionally engage with classical antiquity, who are presented with a world that really isn’t for them unless they wholly submit to its traditions? If my book says nothing very new about the discipline of classical studies, maybe that’s because the problems with it have been known for a long time, and its grandees still refuse to accept that anything needs to change…