"Classics" for an Age of Anxiety

Abstract

"Classics" for an Age of Anxiety Hunter Gardner To start, many thanks: Thanks, Antony, for that introduction, and for a few last-minute zoom chats, plus the many reminders of how the conference used to operate in-person. I'd also like to thank my predecessor as President, David Schenker, for his work on the nominating committee as well as various ad hoc committees, but especially for answering my many emails and offering indispensable advice throughout the past 9 months. Special thanks to Davina McClain for all she has done during her second year as Secretary-Treasurer, and especially for the planning and work of making our first in-person (but also unofficially hybrid) conference in three years a reality; to her assistant Drew Alvarez; to all the tech people working before and during the conference, Jennifer Ranck in particular; and to the folks at Wake Forest: Julie and Bryan, plus Mary Pendergraft, whose retirement we celebrated few hours ago. Thanks to the welcoming committee comprised of classics faculty from all over the triangle area: Jonathan Zarecki, Rebecca Muich, Jessie Craft and Danetta Genung. I'd also like to thank you, the members of CAMWS, who make this organization work: to committee chairs and members, to vice presidents, to all of you who presented papers and presided over sessions, and especially to the CAMWS Executive Committee, who have been so helpful in providing advice and helping steer CAMWS in a positive direction at those moments when I felt like I was in over my head. In a year when finding time for service outside the parameters of our home institutions has been particularly challenging, I've been relieved and heartened by your willingness to step in and serve. All of this makes me encouraged—despite the challenges faced by our discipline that I'm going to address. We've got the right human elements to make "Classics" a more accessible and stronger field of inquiry, and to inspire in others the same sense of wonder and curiosity about the ancient world that brought us here in the first place. To begin, I should perhaps clarify the title of my address and the quotation marks around "Classics." As some of you may have suspected, it's my way of deflecting (though I hope not entirely deferring) the fraught conversation of just what we who study ancient Mediterranean societies should call ourselves: Classics [End Page 222] as a moniker smacks of elitism, but its problematic nature also underscores the very topic I'm addressing, that is, anxiety, emerging in part from our identity as Classicists, felt not only on an individual level, but as a phenomenon rippling throughout classrooms, as well as our academic institutions, our political bodies and around the globe. Our identity crisis as a discipline has only become more acute if we look to the figures from popular culture that reflect on what it means to be a "Classicist": for instance, Jane Campion's Oscar-nominated Power of the Dog, in which Benedict Cumberbatch's figure of toxic masculinity is one honed by years as a Yale Phi Beta Kapa Classics major, who explicitly invokes Romulus and Remus as models for the familial lineage he shares with his brother. Ayelet Lushkov's article, originally published in the LA Review of Books and recirculated in the blog Pasts Imperfect points to recent novels, Alex Michaelides' The Maidens (2021) and Mark Prins' The Latinist (2022) as reinforcing the more sinister connotations of "Classics" in popular culture. But as Phoebe Wynne's Madame (2021) also demonstrates (a novel near and dear to our President-elect, Sophie Mills), there is a liberatory power in the classics—still appreciated and recognized among the world beyond academia. I would also add that, even in the first two novels, it is not so much Classics—or even "canonical" Classical authors—who come off badly, as much as those who study them. The Latinist, despite the questionable motives of its antagonist and protagonist, figures as a veritable love-letter to the power of ancient verse, Ovid's Metamorphoses in particular. I should also say that tonight I will not be discussing W. H. Auden's well-known...