Who Owes What to Whom? Some Classical Reflections on Debt, Greek and Otherwise

Abstract

Who Owes What to Whom? Some Classical Reflections on Debt, Greek and Otherwise LOUIS A. RUPRECHT JR. The name of antiquity has become a prejudice, but even this bias is not without its uses. One always imagines that there is much to find, so one searches much to catch sight of something. Had the ancients been poorer, they would have written better about art; compared to them, we are like badly portioned heirs; but we turn over every stone, and by drawing inferences from many tiny details, we at least arrive at a probable assertion that can be more instructive than the accounts left by the ancients, which, except for a few moments of insight, are merely historical. One must not hesitate to seek the truth, even to the detriment of one’s reputation; a few must err, so that many may find the right way. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity There are many ironies embedded in the Classics as a discipline. And, of course, there are ironies aplenty embedded in the classical materials themselves. One irony of particular interest to the topic before us is this: in the wake of the important curricular reforms demanded by students in the United States and Europe in the late 1960s, the discipline of Altertumswissenschaft, arguably the first truly multi-disciplinary premonition of our contemporary Area Studies arion 26.1 spring/summer 2018 Johanna Hanink, The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); 337 pages. $29.95. curricula, was re-conceived as the far less relevant provenance of “dead white men.”1 This new attention and commitment to workers’ rights, minority rights, women’s rights, sexual liberty and the like were as welcome as they were overdue, and they created much of the curricular terrain we now inhabit. The irony of that moral and political expansiveness lay in the simultaneous retraction of classical curricula in many educational quarters which some of these reformers believed was required. The curtailing of Classics programs in the wake of these reforms created a fork in the curricular road in the late 1980s and early 1990s, such that Classics either was reduced to a curriculum of intensive language study—that is to say, stricter Philology—or else it was expanded to address some of the most emphatic ethical and political interests of the day. Those programs that (re)discovered the relevance of Anthropology to the study of classical materials in particular produced some dazzling new approaches to the Classics.2 The creation of the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology in 1988 also demonstrated ways in which the new interest in multicultural identity-formation could heighten the relevance and insights of Classical Archaeology as well. In short, Classics in the last generation has either expanded or contracted, become more narrowly philological or more intentionally multidisciplinary. As classical scholarship also gradually outgrew a certain allergy to the period of early Christian formation and Late Antiquity, the disciplinary net was cast even more widely. The last decade in particular has seen a refreshing expansion of classical scholarship which recognizes the fact that the New Testament, and subsequent Patristic materials, may perhaps best be viewed as two significant chapters in the very long story of Greek Literature and Greek religion.3 These days, we are better aware of the fact that the ancient Greeks were neither white, nor western, nor secular, nor philosophically predisposed to monotheism. A still more recent and equally salutary development has been the willingness of classicists, with the requisite profes166 who owes what to whom? sional training, to add Modern Greek Studies—both the language and the history—to the classical mix. These scholars have depended on the resources of the American School of Classical Studies (ASCSA) to do so. A recent book by Johanna Hanink (published tellingly enough by the Harvard University Press), may best be read in light of these generational disciplinary developments.4 Echoing the Romantic trope of “the ancients and the moderns,” the new challenge is to sort out what in our current classical imagining we owe to ancient iterations of Hellenism (that is, to ancient Greece), what we owe to nineteenth century...