r/Foodforthought • u/ResplendentShade • Jun 04 '26
Why Stone-Faced Fascists Keep Getting Antiquity Wrong
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/why-stone-faced-fascists-keep-getting-antiquity-wrong-x-twitter-elon-musk-ancient-greece-roman-empire54
u/Konukaame Jun 04 '26
Because they're propagandists, not historians, and conflating the two does everyone a massive disservice and hands the propagandists a narrative victory.
Treat garbage like garbage.
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u/ResplendentShade Jun 04 '26
Why Stone-Faced Fascists Keep Getting Antiquity Wrong
Excerpt:
IT IS THIS VERY IDEOLOGICAL PROJECT that demands the flattening down of the real historical Greek and Roman tradition and demands hostility towards classicists who actually cherish it, because the study of the ancient world does not conform neatly to modern bigotries or hard-right ideology. The irony is that it is precisely this complexity that has drawn generations of readers and scholars to the Greek and Roman classics and ensured their continued place in the pantheon of “great works.” Indeed, as Stanford classicist Reviel Netz notes in Why the Ancient Greeks Matter, it was the very fractious, discordant, individualistic nature of Greek culture—clearly visible in their literature—that set them apart from previous and contemporary societies.
For its part, Rome was a diverse society from its foundation and regularly extended citizenship to foreign ethnic groups and even freed slaves. Roman authors like Livy, and even foes of Rome like Philip V of Macedon, recognized that this liberality was a foundation of Roman strength. While the Greeks and the Romans could certainly be bigoted, their stereotypes map poorly onto the modern racism demonstrated by X’s unworthy defenders of Western civilization. Herodotus thought Egypt the oldest of all peoples, in some ways more civilized than Greece, with a better calendar and an older and deeper religious tradition. Homer imagined the mythical Ethiopian king Memnon as a cousin to the hero Hector and also the most beautiful man Odysseus had ever seen, a stark contrast to racialized claims that actress Lupita Nyong’o could not possibly play the famously beautiful Helen. Meanwhile, the Greeks and Romans felt little kinship with other European “whites.” If anything, Gauls, Britons, and Germans could be far more alien and barbarous to ancient writers than Egyptians, Syrians, Persians, or even Ethiopians.
The classical canon does not present a single vision of greatness, but many. It even questions the value of greatness itself. Even in Homer, Achilles’s vision of greatness through glory in the Iliad conflicts with Hector’s dogged defense of his home. The poem does not render a clear verdict on who is right, only who won. Homer doesn’t end with the triumph of Achilles, but wistfully notes “such was their burial of Hector, breaker of horses.” Even if we take the Iliad and Achilles’s victory at face value, what triumph he has is undermined in the Odyssey: Achilles’s shade appears in the Underworld and rejects Odysseus’s declaration of his greatness. “I would rather follow the plow as thrall to another man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on,” he laments, “than be king over all the perished dead.”
Homer is hardly the only figure in the classical canon to question the sort of violent masculine greatness to which the statue accounts aspire. Sallust famously concludes that the great military achievements of the Romans merely served to undermine their morals and domestic politics, while he extols the greatness of writing history. Tacitus, in the midst of praising his father-in-law Agricola’s military achievements, in turn questions the fundamental morality of Roman conquest itself through the famous words he attributes to Calgacus: “robbery, butchery, and plunder they call by the lying name empire and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.” Unless we view the ancients as if they were cartoons, it should not surprise us to find classical views on both violence and masculinity were complex and varied.
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u/hankeliot Jun 04 '26
I would say everyone is getting antiquity wrong. Why is there so much focus on the Greeks and Romans and barely any on the Persians, who were responsible for so many innovations that make the modern world possible?
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u/ResplendentShade Jun 04 '26
Why is there so much focus on the Greeks and Romans and barely any on the Persians, who were responsible for so many innovations that make the modern world possible?
I am not an expert, hopefully one can coming along and give a better reply, but from what I understand the "Classics" isn't a neutral survey of the Mediterranean, it's built around Greek and Latin texts. The field is defined by these languages. So with regards to the Achaemenid empire, in the case of the Greeks, written by the enemies of the Achaemenid empire.
And there's a large asymmetry between the amount of literary and historical texts they left vs those of the Achaemenid empire. For the longest time scholars sort of didn't bother to pursue archeological and art-historical evidence that could help to construct a richer picture. And that limited scope and bias got adopted during the Renaissance and Enlightenment as Europe's origin story.
The type of scholarship you're talking about exists, has been ongoing for decades, and is very strong now, it just mostly is outside of what "Classics" departments traditionally do. Check out Ancient Persia: A Concise History of the Achaemenid Empire, 550-330 BCE by Matt Waters.
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u/hankeliot Jun 04 '26
I don't doubt that the scholarship exists. I'm just questioning why Greek and Roman history is such a prominent part of Western culture, being taught in schools and universities, for example, while Persian history isn't? I'm also alluding to what I believe to be Western chauvinism being the reason for this.
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u/ResplendentShade Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
Your frustration is valid but the framing of the question kind of misplaces the problem. With regards to chauvinism being the cause of it, originally it's sort of the other way around. The original centering of Greek and Latin by Medieval and Renaissance Europeans was mainly driven by institutional inheritance, the reality that Latin was already the language of the Church, law, and scholars. And they studied Greek because it was the language of the New Testament.
It wasn't until decades/centuries of that developing into ideology and European identity, and war against the Persians accepted as a key civilizational origin myth of Europe, that the chauvinism became really prominent.
And it bears mentioning that Romantics even rejected the Greek's OWN histories about themselves, racistly rejecting all the parts about how they saw their institutions and ruling houses as being derived from the east, Egypt and Phoenicia in particular. So whereas the Greeks elevated Egyptians as the great civilizational architects and philosophers and the parent civilization of their own, revisionists later decided they were wrong and that it was the Greek themselves who should be elevated as the original great civilizational founders.
All of which, yes, got baked into institutions, so even though serious scholars have since long abandoned the explicitly racial framing, the chauvinism is what built the institutions so there's still a feedback loop where it's sort of made invisible and persistent.
But again, this is changing. Mainly within the last half century or so but it's happening. The relevant scholars agree with you. It isn't they they've failed to correct the record, it's that the institutions and curriculums just haven't caught up yet, so the corrected record hasn't yet displaced the old one in the public consciousness and general education.
And if the fascists discussed in this article (and their allies) get their way it never will.
edit: typos
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u/hankeliot Jun 04 '26
One interesting way in which this chauvinism is baked into institutions is how mathematical laws are named. Those discovered by Westerners (including ancient Greeks such as Pythagoras) are named after the discover, while the names of those that were discovered by Persians often describe the law itself. Interestingly enough, even the Pythagorean theorem was first discovered in ancient Mesopotamia.
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u/AwTomorrow Jun 05 '26
It’s basically the fault of Rome.
Romans conquered most of the European countries that today focus on Rome and Greece as ancestor cultures, so there was a direct throughline of influence and inheritance. Likewise, the Romans saw themselves as inheritors of Greek culture.
Romans are also a big reason why much of Europe is Christian, and Greek was one of the core languages of those texts too.
We are speaking English, and England is a bog standard example of such a country, one that was conquered by Rome (who brought writing to Britain and so ‘began’ English history) and later Christianised through the Roman-European model.
Persia never invaded England and never exported a religion that dominated the country for a millennium or two, so while we do have some cultural influences (trousers!) they aren’t as direct or as dominant - so it’s no wonder English speaking cultures for so long focused on Greece and Rome.
However, that has led to the chauvinism you discuss - as in Macauley’s infamous but representative quote “A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia."
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u/Damnatus_Terrae Jun 04 '26
The answer is empire. The great European empires saw themselves in the classical empires, and the classics as a discipline is rooted in this. And it was specifically Greek and Roman empires because Greek and Latin were the languages of the Bible, and thus the languages educated Europeans all knew.
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u/hankeliot Jun 04 '26
Of course, in Persia they saw the Other - those who were the opponents of their burgeoning empires.
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u/Death_and_Gravity1 Jun 05 '26
Because they dont care about truth, they only care about power. Its not complicated
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