When Past is Present
Do writers, artists and political thinkers from the ancient world have anything to say to us today? You may be surprised to learn that they still speak, and they still shape today’s writing, painting, sculpting, films and politics. And that’s a big reason why the Classics still matter.
By Christelyn D. Karazin and Joseph Wakelee-Lynch
If a debate exists about whether the Classics are still relevant, just look around.
Maybe you just texted a friend about this weekend’s party. Perhaps you spoke “face to face” to your daughter at college on your new Web camera. Even here on the Westchester bluff, when was the last time an undergraduate had to study Latin to get a degree? (Answer: That era ended in 1956.) Is it any wonder the Classics seem, well, ancient?
But not one text message could be sent without the use of the alphabet, and take a guess where that originated. (The Near East, which includes the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt to Cypress, including Jordan and Syria.) Greek ideas about government have shaped democracies ever since. Even modern art isn’t a total break with the past: Roman artists invented perspective.
The Classics — including literature, histories, philosophy and religious texts from ancient Greek, Roman and Near East cultures — shape today’s culture through the influence of that period’s ideas, art, sculpture and architecture, as well as government and politics. At LMU, majors are offered in Classics, Greek, Latin and classical civilization. Minors can be pursued in Classics, Greek, Latin, classical civilization and archaeology.
Despite durable ancient ideas and inventions, it’s easy to overlook them in today’s world, says Shanna Kennedy-Quigley, visiting assistant professor in the Department of Classics and Archaeology. “We’re so accustomed today to the way images are used as advertisements, propaganda and decorations that when I explain to my students about the notion and function of imagery and how it works in the ancient context, it’s like taking them back to the alphabet and explaining how it actually works,” she says.
Kennedy-Quigley is not alone in lamenting the declining interest in ancient civilizations. “The study of [Classics] literature, unfortunately, is being neglected,” says Ethan T. Adams, assistant professor of Classics and archaeology. He says there’s a price to be paid for that neglect, because the past still shapes the present. “By not studying the past, we’re doomed to repeat it, so the old saying goes.”
Old Artists and New Media
Kennedy-Quigley is amused that today’s modernists boast of innovations while artists of the ancient world developed revolutionary techniques, such as the use of shading and perspective. Those techniques may appear straight out of Art 101, but Kennedy-Quigley insists that “when you go back to see these ideas emerging, being tinkered with and improved upon over time, it’s quite impressive.”
Kennedy-Quigley points specifically to the Hellenistic Period in ancient Greece, roughly between 323 and 31 B.C., when a type of art emerged that acknowledges the presence of a viewer, which seems a modern characteristic. Take Aphrodite of Cnidus, a nude statue with the subject covering her genitals. “For the Greeks, this was totally new,” she explains. “It was exciting, sexy and titillating at the time. We’re so used to the TV and Internet being interactive, but someone had to come up with the assumption of interaction between art and viewer.”
That’s Entertainment
The impact of the Classical era even shapes today’s entertainment industry. Theatrical hits from “Ben-Hur” to “Gladiator” still enrapture moviegoers, and the appeal of historical blockbusters like those probably will never fade.
Matthew Dillon, professor of Classics and archaeology, frequently spots ancient themes in contemporary pop culture. In the entertainment world, he says, those ideas often are watered down into simplified tales of good vs. evil: the 2000 film “Gladiator,” for example, is a tale of bad emperor vs. good general.
But deeper, more complex themes rooted in ancient literature still percolate through the work of contemporary writers, Dillon says.
Questions of heroism still are very much with us,” Dillon explains. “Iliad” is not about the Trojan War, he says, it’s about the meaning of heroism. Achilles feels he has a responsibility to himself; his counterpart, Hector, feels he has a responsibility to his city. Those are two different projections of heroism, and they are both valid in their own ways.
“Look at James Joyce, who structures the city of Dublin as the Aegean world in ‘Ulysses,’ or Derek Walcott, the West Indies writer, whose poem ‘Omeros’ — which means Homer — resets the story in the Caribbean. Take Wole Soyinka, who is our Marymount Institute professor in residence here at LMU and a Nobel Laureate. He reworked ‘The Bacchae’ of Euripides, which deals with devotion to a cult, into a work with African themes,” Dillon says. “The ancient themes are universal.”
But the influence of the ancient world starts even earlier than the Greek and Roman traditions. Greek mythology and biblical studies are rooted in Near East cultures, says William Fulco, S.J., National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Studies. Astronomy and elements of geometry — even writing — find their origins in the Near East as well, and that’s one reason why studies of the Near East go hand in hand with Greek and Roman civilizations.
“One of our glories in the Department of Classics and Archaeology,” Fulco explains, “is our collection of artifacts related to writing. The notion of a visible symbol representing oral reality was an enormous abstract breakthrough. It developed by going from pictogram to phonogram — from a picture of reality to a visual representation of divisions of sound. That development is something we take for granted in the Western world, but in terms of human abstraction, it’s an enormous breakthrough. And that we owe to the Near East. You can’t have literature without writing.”
A Way with Words
Although the storytelling power of ancient literature reamins strong, the languages associated with those cultures are in peril of being lost. And with that loss goes an ability to fully respice, adspice, prospice (Latin for “look to the past, present and future”).
LMU’s Classics and archaeology professors are on a mission to revive student interest in ancient languages, especially Greek, Latin and Near Eastern languages. That’s a tough sell, because of the complexity of the languages and the memorization required to master them. Student interest in classical history and philosophy is fairly high, Dillon says, but language learning requires a deeper commitment.
Adams echoes that view. “Often, my students compare learning Latin and Greek to mastering a Rubik’s Cube, which is a good thing,” he says. “It contributes to higher learning of complex things.”
That the Classics deal so well with complexity is why Robert B. Lawton, S.J., LMU president and professor of Classics and archaeology, reads them:
“I read the Classics just as I read a novel: I’m trying to understand myself. … Take the biblical story of Solomon. Everybody thinks that if there is one adjective to describe Solomon, it’s wise. But the story is much more complex than that. The story really questions a person who is wise in the eyes of the world, yet does not have a larger moral purpose. At the end of Solomon’s reign, the kingdom falls apart. In some ways, he wasn’t wise. So what is the relationship between worldly wisdom and how we are to live our life? The Classics speak to me because they speak to that complexity.”
Politics as Usual?
If the study of classical languages is still powerful today, so is the study of classical ideas about politics. The courts, the Senate, the Electoral College — they all have precursors in the ancient world.
Lawrence A. Tritle, a professor of history who specializes in ancient Greece and Rome, suggests the early American leaders likely were familiar with the writings of Plutarch, the Greek philosopher, Livy, the Roman historian, and others. The Founding Fathers’ knowledge of Athens and its direct democracy — for men, but not women and slaves — shaped their thinking about a political phenomenon they considered dangerous: the tyranny of the majority. Institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College put brakes on the power of the majority.
“For the Founding Fathers, democracy was anathema,” Tritle explains. “It’s as if they said, ‘We’ll base the political system on the people, but, by God, we won’t let them rule.’ They looked at the democracy of Athens as basically being mob rule, which, at times, it was.”
Nonetheless, Tritle says, democracy in ancient Greece and Rome gave the Founding Fathers ideas to emulate as well as avoid.
“In Athens, the word democracy meant ‘power of the people,’” Tritle says. “What it reflected is the idea that the right ideas about government, political life and political responsibility lie in the many, not in the few and not in the one. That’s a Greek idea, and it’s at the root of the Western world, which is one of the reasons for arguing for Western civilization today.
“That’s one thing I teach students in my Western Civilization classes. I tell them that when you have a melting-pot nation that is based around a core of ideas that comes from the West, you have to bring everybody up to speed. Everybody has to know where these institutions came from. And, in some ways, a number of them go right back to the Greeks and the Romans.”
Christelyn D. Karazin is a freelance writer in Temecula, Calif. Her "New Media Wizards" appeared in Vistas (Fall 2008). Joseph Wakelee-Lynch is editor of Vistas.