antiquity and modernity — used and abuses of the past

  1. Intro

  • All history is necessarily contemporary

  • Using the past to engage w the present

    • Especially significant in regards to the High, enduring prestige of Roman and Greek antiquity  (“western tradition”)

  • Study of the Greeks and the Romans were considered the highest form of study by the Italians bc they were the classics

  • Centrality of the Greeks and Romans lasts through till early-mid 20th cent

  1. 18th century enlightenment: gibbon and Roman Republic

  • Edward Gibbon (1737-1794): studied at Oxford, took grand tour of France and Italy which helped educate him. This trip significantly impacted him especially in Rome. 

  • Giovanni Paolo Panini (1691-1765): oil canvas painter

  • Piranesi: another famous painter

  • A History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – six volumes, 1776-1787

    • Gibbon made a thesis driven argument, questioned sources (ex. Tacitus),  and met a standard of academic rigor that was rare for his time

    • The collapse of civilization

    • Roman empire was less a political system but more so a trustee of civilization

    • Gibbon thinks of individual virtue as … a True republic must arm its citizens and those citizens are admitted to a share in gov and stake in the community thru property ownership

      • BUT this leads to too much luxury → too much leisure → moral corruption→ loss of military vigor… this was reminiscent of Gibbon’s fear of European expanionism

  1. 19th century Orientalism: Europe and the Construction of Egypt

  • Orientalism was canonized as a critical term by Edward Said (1935-2003)

  • Orientalism was constituted of 3 things:

  1. Academic field - study of the orient (Asia, MENA)

  2. Separation of the “Exotic, Backwards, Luxorious” East vs “Temporate, Rational, Boring” West

  3. Such attitudes became a tool of European colonial domination

  • Egypt: epicenter of the western imagination of the orient

  • Development of  “Scientific” Knowledge in Egypt started with Napoleon’s invasion

  • Description de l’Egypte (23 volumes, 1809-1828) – original frontispiece

  • France was expelled in 1802 from Egypt as they ganged up on by the Ottomans and the British. It was now nominally under Ottoman rule though de facto under British domination

  • Egyptian antiquities like statues, ceramics, and the Rosette Stone were halled in mass at European museums, the two most significant being the British Museum in London and the Louvre

  • The brits valued Greek art for its aesthetics, while Egyptian art is degraded as monstrous

  • The Louvre viewed (ancient) Egyptian art as equal to Greek art. However, they also denigrated modern Egyptians and believed that they were recapturing what was already theirs

  • 19th century saw the rise of racial pseudoscience… ex. Claiming Egyptian mummies weren’t really Africans. 

  • Manufacturing of an idea abt ancient Egypt that came from colonialism, violence, and extraction of resources

  • Othering and exoticization of the east – Exhibit A of “uses and abuses of the past”

  1. 20th century Fascism: Augustus and Italy

  • Fascist ideology:

    • Romanita (“Romanness”): spiritual destiny to recreate and surpass greatness of Roman Destiny

    • Fasces: double edged axes bound up by rods–symbols of authority

  • Benito Mussolini, “Il Duce” (1883-1945) was supposed to be a second Augustus, a unifier and preservor of Roman heritage. 

  • Propaganda: systematic diffusion of a set distorted ideas for the purpose to altering attitudes of the general public

  • Mostra della rivoluzione fascista – exhibition of the Fascist Revolution

  • Ronald Syme (1903-1989): writer of the “The Roman Revolution”

  1. Classics in the 21st century: A Reckoning

  • Classics are in an existential crisis, not bc of politics but more bc of internal issues

  • Three troubling conflicts: ideological baggage

  1. Long standing close association with the study of classics and leisure, landed-wealth, etc. 

    1. Inaccessible, lack of inclusion and diversity

  2. Close association of the classics w colonialist projects of modern european empires like the french and british 

  3. Close association with whiteness (not white people, but whiteness as a structural phenomenon) 

    1. Statues were whitewashed

    2. Rise of an ethnonationalist, extreme far right that draws heavily on the images of the Romans and Greeks 

      1. “Come and take them” – 2a

  • Classicism and other Phobias by Dan-El Padilla Peralta (an undocumented Dominican immigrant that was unhoused during his youth and later got a scholarship to Princeton where he was valedictorian): famous for the slogan “Burn it Down”

    • He claims Classics is associated w colonialism, violence, class and whiteness — its not just the way it was studied, but it is rather intrinsic to the material itself.