Today, the education industry is no longer marginal and the university faculty no longer fits the awkward-brainiac stereotype. Professors have become powerful politically — they are the core of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and they predictably hold Leftist views, treating us to spectacles such as the University of Michigan faculty senate accusing Secretary of War Pete Hegseth of “war crimes.” Much of the Leftist elite, in fact, comes from academia — for example, Sen. Elizabeth Warren taught at Harvard Law School for 20 years, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is the son of a famous radical academic, who teaches at Columbia University. 

Meanwhile, Luigi Mangione, the Left’s favorite alleged assassin, has two degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution. The parents of Katie Wilson, Seattle’s new socialist mayor, are both professors. Globally, elite university graduates have been the primary promoters of the most hysterical climate change theses, epitomized by British politician Ed Miliband, an Oxford graduate and Labour MP, who has served as the UK’s Secretary of State for Energy Security since 2024, and who is clearly oblivious to the economic consequences of his “net zero” fanaticism.

However absurd its beliefs, what academia thinks and how it imposes its ideology matters. Leftist professors are shaping generations, sending youth into the world spouting the standard progressive script and displaying proud ignorance of the achievements of Western Civilization. 

More from this author

Goodbye, Information Age

By Joel Kotkin

Virtually no major job category is more uniform in ideology. In 1990, 42% of professors identified as “liberal” or “far Left,” according to survey data by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. By 2014, that number had jumped to 60%. Today, roughly three-quarters of faculty are left of center, a trend that feeds on itself in hiring; even moderates are rare. Since 2002, at least 70% of political contributions from academics have gone to Democrats; the University of California faculty and staff sent $10 million to Democrats in 2004, but less than $300,000 to Republicans. Even at DePaul University, America’s largest Catholic university, almost 90% of contributions went to the Left.

This political skewing has the effect of turning universities into ideological re-education camps. For example, prominent schools of journalism, including those at Columbia and the University of Southern California, have moved away from teaching the fundamentals of reporting and now openly advance a social justice agenda. This enforced conformity isn’t good for students, or the quality of the pedagogy. Even some progressives, like the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, recognize that “students are less likely to get a good education, and faculty members are likely to learn less from one another, if there is a prevailing political orthodoxy.” 

At the university level, students coming to class, particularly in the liberal arts, are deficient in knowledge of such things as the failure of socialism in the USSR or the repressive nature of contemporary China. After all, socialism’s lethal failures are inconvenient facts for Marxist professors, who have, notes author Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, “surrendered to revolutionary kitsch.” Progressives would rather accuse Israelis, Americans, and Britons of genocide, while ignoring the fact that the greatest mass murderers in history did so under the Red banner. 

In this sense, today’s academics resemble Medieval clergy — or Marxist propagandists in the old USSR — more than open-minded and flexible intellectuals. Church authorities in the Middle Ages trained clergy in the defense of orthodox doctrine in order to combat heresies, a trend that also infected the universities of the time. The University of Paris became a staunch guardian of religious orthodoxy, and in the 1300s, it held a conclave to affirm the supposed reality that demons were afflicting society. 

Just as medieval universities resisted many of the ideas of the Enlightenment, today’s academics increasingly seek to banish the great liberal traditions that underpinned their own institutions’ ascendancy. And just as the medieval clergy preached against materialism, leading figures in today’s academia look askance at the idea of a dynamic economy, a spirit of innovation, and a commitment to improving everyday life. Some even suggest that progress is a myth. 

These approaches have consequences. Many college students who embrace socialism do so uninformed. Graduation speakers chosen with student preferences in mind are overwhelmingly from the Left, and those few non-Leftists who haven’t been canceled, such as Jonathan Haidt, are heckled. Yet when I taught a class on socialism at Chapman University, where I teach, only one student in 30 could identify a picture of Lenin. The exception was an Armenian who grew up in Moscow.

The academy’s unwillingness to teach the failings of Marxism helps explain why a recent Yale Buckley Institute poll found that a majority of all American college students express sympathy with socialism. In a global survey covering 28 countries and almost 21,000 respondents, half of respondents at least “somewhat agree” with the statement “at present, socialist ideals are of great value for societal progress,” including 39% of American respondents.   

Increasingly, university professors see their mission “to promote” a particular set of beliefs rather than “to teach,” notes British author, architect, and urban-planning expert Austin Rhys Williams. Not surprisingly, according to recent studies of cognitive behavior, today’s university graduates are inclined to maintain rigid positions on various issues. Confident of their own superior intelligence and perspicuity, students tend to be intolerant of other views. One recent study found that only 47% of people ages 18 to 34 said speech that might offend minorities should be allowed, compared with 70% of those over 55. 

Yet even as academia sticks to its radical agenda, the relevance of higher education becomes increasingly dubious, particularly due to artificial intelligence, which has turned schools into factories for slop, and displaced the remaining vestiges of intellectual formation. Professors, in their turn, have been slow to recognize the threat. They often seem in their own world, more like a guild or religious cult, with arcane rituals and folkways. Half a century ago, the Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin called this tendency “a frantic eagerness to know ‘more and more about less and less.’”  The vast majority of academic articles — so crucial for getting tenure — are almost never cited, especially in the social sciences and humanities. 

After decades of surging enrollment at American colleges, the numbers are beginning to drop, a trend hastened by the shrinking population of college-age potential students. Since 2010, undergraduate enrollment has dropped from 18.1 million to 15.4 million, and the percentage of BAs headed to graduate school has fallen precipitously over the past two decades. Over the past decade, 500-plus US private colleges have closed, three times the rate of the previous decade. 

In addition to the demographic reasons for the decline, students also appear to be concluding that academia is less valuable to them. At Harvard, 60% of grades are As, compared to 25% two decades ago. But this is no measure of student accomplishment: a recent NIH paper asserts that college students’ cognitive abilities are increasingly diminished by time spent online. And employers report that recent graduates are short on critical thinking skills. Overall, Gallup reports, the percentage of Americans who express “a great deal of confidence” in education has fallen in the past decade from around 60% to around 40%.

In particular, liberal arts majors are deciding their degree isn’t worth it. Producing such degrees has been a fertile source of employment for academics, but has also seemed oddly removed from basic reality. There are very few choice jobs in academia for such graduates, particularly at the tenure level. Roughly half of all faculty members today are part-timers, compared to one-third in 1987. Tenured positions have dropped from about 40% of all university teaching jobs in 1987 to around half that number in 2021. And capture by the ideological Left seems not to be helping: high-capture fields like history, English, and philosophy tend to be those that are losing the most students.

In contrast, less radicalized fields such as business, engineering, and hard sciences, although also under pressure to conform to such things as racial quotas, generally offer more promise both for students and society. And, for many, an increasingly likely option is to go to a trade school or simply get into the workforce. Both the federal government and companies such as Google, IBM, Apple, Ernst & Young, Starbucks, and Hilton, among others, are de-emphasizing credentials in favor of skills. It is in the skilled trades, as well as engineering, that the great opportunities of the future will be found. America is running low on skilled workers, doctors, and aerospace engineers; it faces no such problem with postmodernist English teachers.

Suggested reading

Why the ‘heterodox’ university failed

By Edmund King and Thomas Prosser

These shifts may ultimately weaken the current academic elite, but they also generate a potentially dangerous class of underemployed and overeducated people. Educated professionals, particularly younger ones, have replaced blue-collar workers as the radical constituency. We are seeing what one Marxist scholar described as a “swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs.” Historically, since the popularization of higher education, such people have played a role in revolutionary upheavals in Europe, Russia, and Latin America — and, potentially, they could do so in the United States as well. 

What happens at universities matters, and correcting the current situation requires a revised approach. To succeed, colleges need to focus less on activism and more on the basic task of imparting skills and educating young people as critical thinkers. Fortunately, there are some signs of a shift back to basics. This is occurring in schools such as Chapman, as well as numerous universities in the South, such as the University of Texas, the University of Florida, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Vanderbilt University. 

Simply put, we must rescue academia from the academics. This is particularly true in the humanities, where the number of doctorates has fallen by 15% in the past two decades. Rather than radical agitprop, students need a curriculum rich in classic literature and history, which naturally stresses eternal values and inspires debate. 

Today, university policies on curriculum largely ignore writers such as Homer, Confucius, Shakespeare, Milton, de Tocqueville, and the Founding Fathers. Some books are scorned for having been written by dead white males, who as a group are linked to such horrors as slavery, the subjugation of women, and mass poverty. 

Any return to basics will be fought bitterly. The academic establishment, as well as the serfs struggling to get any university-level teaching job at all, will fight like dogs over a bone, and will mount a rearguard action to preserve the regime, including DEI, until the end of President Trump’s term. In some places, notably the Northeast and California, they might even prevail, although perhaps at the cost of their own region’s economic prospects.

Ultimately, the fate of higher education will determine the future of the West. If students come out of college despising their own culture’s past successes and the value of merit, there is little hope of competition against societies where education is controlled by a state that values skills, even if such regimes aren’t strong in intellectual curiosity. Independence of thought may be the greatest strength of Western societies but, unless the academy changes, it will continue to recede, to the detriment of us all.

The first, Covid, showed that money mattered more than mission when universities continued to charge full tuition for an inferior online product: asynchronous lectures and “real-time seminars” where many students were just black squares on Zoom. Then, the revelation, after October 7, that universities had suffered extensive ideological capture — that much of what passes for higher education is actually indoctrination in cultural Marxism. Mobs of Ivy League students — radicalized by “critical theories” of oppression and victimization, yet wearing Covid masks and keffiyeh face-coverings to protect their future earnings — harassed and intimidated Jewish classmates while the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and Columbia merely watched on.

The third, the most seismic of them all, is ongoing. And it is not ideology, but technology that is precipitating the greatest crisis higher education has ever faced.

A recent article by James D. Walsh in New York Magazine, widely circulated among academics, reported that “just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT [in 2022], a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments”. The use of Generative-AI chatbots for required coursework is, if anything, even more widespread today. At elite universities, community colleges, and everything in between, students are using AI to take notes in class, produce practice tests, write essays, analyze data, and compose computer code, among other things. A freshman seems to speak for entire cohorts of undergraduates when she admits that “we rely on it, [and] we can’t really imagine being without it”. An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education quotes multiple students who are effectively addicted to the technology, and are distressed at being unable to kick the habit — because, as an NYU senior confesses, “I know I am learning NOTHING.”

One problem is that it’s difficult to prove that students have cheated with chatbots. They’ve learned how to detect “Trojan horse” traps in assignments, engineer prompts that won’t make them look too smart, and launder their essays through multiple bot-generated iterations. Nor is AI-powered software a reliable means of detecting such schemes. (This is unsurprising: why would providers like OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT Plus free during final exams, want to imperil huge student demand for its product?) And in the long run, market forces will always keep students one step ahead of their professors. Walsh’s article highlights a young man whose attempts to monetize dishonesty got him expelled from Columbia. This former student has raised more than $5 million to design a wearable device that “will enable you to cheat on pretty much anything” in real time.

More from this author

The grizzly truth about the West

By Jacob Howland

Faced with these difficulties, universities have punted. They’ve done little more than leave faculty to establish their own AI-use policies, which vary widely and are, in any case, largely unenforceable. (What is more, some professors are using chatbots to formulate assignments and grade papers. In their classrooms, machines are talking to machines.) This response is completely inadequate. Universities will not survive if they are little more than expensive diploma mills. Nor will the United States, for what will take their place in preparing future citizens, leaders, and builders to repair our broken institutions and maintain a healthy and prospering polity?

AI optimists would argue that such concerns are overblown. That’s because superintelligent machines capable of “usher[ing] in an age of flourishing the likes of which we have never seen” will soon be doing “the real thinking”, as the economist Tyler Cowen and Avital Balwit, an AI researcher, write in The Free Press. If the authors are right, students and professors need to concentrate on learning how to use AI, which will take over the management of human affairs. Yet they don’t explain what they mean by flourishing — a question begged by their admission that, by undermining our sense of purpose, radically degrading our agency, and making meaningful forms of work obsolete, AI will introduce “perhaps the most profound identity crisis humanity has ever faced”. Can human beings flourish when they’ve given up much of what makes them human?

That’s not the only problem with their predictions. In everything from diplomacy to medicine, real thinking — thinking at the highest levels, where strategies are devised and executed — requires practical wisdom: an adequate understanding, not just of the range of tools available to us and how to operate them, but of the ends these tools ought to serve. Cowen writes that, in his field of economics, he’s still better at posing questions than AI. That’s a significant admission, because the questions we ask are determined by our ends. The student who told Walsh that using ChatGPT allows her to spend so many hours on TikTok that “my eyes start hurting” asked the wrong question — How can I make more time for social media? — because she was pursuing the wrong end. She has some ability to engineer chatbot prompts — her grades are “amazing” — but doesn’t know how to employ that skill for her own benefit. And her prioritization of vapid entertainment offers a clue about how most people whose jobs are eliminated by AI will use their leisure, a question that inspired dread in the economist John Maynard Keynes when he realized, a century ago, that “technological unemployment” would eventually deprive mankind of its “traditional purpose”.

Simply to use AI well, it seems, requires a liberal education: one that teaches what makes for a good and meaningful life, and cultivates the well-formed loves and dispositions that motivate one to act on that knowledge. Where will AI acquire the knowledge and motivation it needs reliably to use its own capacities for the benefit of human beings? From AI researchers and developers, whose knowledge and intellectual powers may not extend much beyond coding? Its current training is not significantly weighted toward a study of great books, art, music, and “the best which has been thought and said”, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase. That’s clear enough from the case of the advanced Pathways Language Model (PaLM), as described in a 2023 article. Social media conversations accounted for 50% of the dataset on which PaLM trained; webpages, Wikipedia, news, and computer code comprised 37%. Only 13% consisted of books, doubtless of greatly varying quality.

Nor are the results of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT generated by the kind of deeply internalized judgment that liberal education aims to cultivate. LLMs respond to prompts based on complex calculations of probability across a vast, digitally-encoded reservoir of opinions: good, bad, and ugly, true and false. And as helpful as they can be in conversation with the most thoughtful users, they can’t be fully trusted to identify and communicate matters of fact, let alone to regulate themselves by an adequate understanding of the nature and conditions of human flourishing and the sources of meaning in human life. That’s clear enough from their notorious hallucinations, and from their disturbing inclination to lie — an inclination that’s presumably been strengthened by what these LLMs are learning from users who lie, to themselves as well as others.

AI can’t overcome these problems just by being, as Cowen claims, “smarter than all of us”. It would instead need to achieve real human intelligence: to comprehend qualitatively, not just quantitatively; to intuit, not merely to calculate. AI developers would object that human intuition is the product of a neural network that is not functionally different from that of AI models. This claim ignores the fact that digital computation, which “reads” information encoded in analogue signals by means of varying voltage levels, is merely a mechanical simulacrum of our native abilities. That is what makes it “artificial”. AI’s training is in any case as removed from the concrete and particular circumstances of human development, experience, and education as its software-based mind is from ours. For while our minds inhabit mortal bodies embedded in actually existing circumstances and communities, AI observes and imitates us from the ether of abstract operations whose relationship to particular pieces of hardware is purely contingent.

Cowen and Balwit reject transhumanism, which aims to make the natural or God-given condition of being human obsolete by connecting us to superintelligent AI through neural implants and other devices. They envision a middle ground where we retain our humanity under the governance of AI. That’s beginning to look like the best possible outcome of the arc of technological development over the next five to ten years. Yet it recalls the characteristically modern and impatient utopian dream of Karl Marx — a dream that relied on vague prophecies of what life would be like after the revolution, but swiftly evaporated on contact with reality. Because Communism would change the conditions of existence so radically that well-founded predictions were impossible, Marx wrote little about life in the post-revolutionary utopia. He was confident only that the violence required to bring this utopia into being would be worth it. Similarly, Cowen and Balwit admit that the advent of artificial superintelligence will do violence to human agency, meaning, and purpose. But they, too, are excessively confident that all will be well in the end.

More from this author

How Trump can make education great again

By Jacob Howland

The ultimate aim of a liberal education is fully to actualize the human capacity “to form an instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us,” in the words of John Henry Newman. If we are to maintain our humanity in the age of AI, an education that teaches young people to read, write, and think through the investigation of traditional sources of human meaning — goodness, truth, justice, beauty — and the cultural and political conditions in which they acquire a prominent place in human life, will be more necessary than ever. A recent conversation between Ross Douthat and AI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo, a principal author of the highly pessimistic AI 2027 forecast, makes this clear. Asked about “the purpose of humanity” in a world run by superintelligent AI, Kokotajlo channeled the core of the biblical and philosophical traditions in which Western civilization is rooted:

I guess what still matters is that my kids are good people, and that they have wisdom and virtue and things like that. So I will do my best to try to teach them those things because those things are good in themselves, rather than good for getting jobs.

Education is possible because the world at its core is good: it possesses a natural or created order that can never be fully comprehended, but to which our minds and hearts, souls and bodies, may be well or poorly attuned. AI or no AI, education at its best develops the virtues or excellences of thought and action, taste, feeling, and judgment, that fit one for all seasons, occasions, tasks and responsibilities of life. And that moral, intellectual, and spiritual attunement, not just to physical reality, nor to the largely unforeseeable contingencies of time and history, but to eternal or transcendent truths, is good in itself as well as for its consequences. This is the most fundamental teaching that the great thinkers and doers in all languages and fields of understanding — Kepler, Galileo, Newton; Al-Farabi, Maimonides, Aquinas; Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, and Lincoln — have internalized through reading even a few great books.

If colleges and universities have any hope of surviving, they must articulate a compelling vision of what higher education is, and what it is for — of its signal importance for individuals and society alike. If they are to equip students to find their way in an increasingly complex world, they must provide not just a technical education, but a genuinely liberal one. That’s the only way they can convince students not to cheat themselves out of the chance to live rich and meaningful lives by unreflectively turning over their distinctively human energies and capacities to AI. Let’s hope they succeed. For if higher education ceases to preserve, extend, and transmit the wisdom and knowledge our ancestors struggled and suffered to achieve, who or what will?

For one thing, Donald Trump has brought to the ascendant a general suspicion of the humanities and liberal arts as a preserve of decadent elites. Among the wilder fringes of his supporters, there are loud-mouthed admirers of Sparta’s warriors. But that hardly amounts to serious engagement with the past, and it risks tainting the entire legacy of ancient Greece.

America does, of course, have a distinguished cohort of traditionalist, classics-minded intellectuals and they have sought to protect the discipline from passing intellectual currents behind the high walls of private schools and colleges. But that too makes the subject ideologically charged.

On the cultural Left, meanwhile, there has been a searching of soul: is America’s tradition of classical learning, so beloved by the Founding Fathers, irredeemably tainted by association with white hegemony and colonialism? Such a view has found an eloquent exponent in the Princeton professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta who is not sure whether the discipline deserves to survive at all.

To those who fear that the diligent study of Mediterranean antiquity may now disappear in a cloud of ideological contention, help seems to be on its way — from an unlikely quarter, namely China. Even while Xi celebrated an anti-Western alliance when he fraternized with Putin in Moscow last week, the Chinese leader is busy appropriating what we think of one of the foundation stones of Western culture.

The enthusiasm of that country’s intellectual and political leaders for the study of Europe’s ancient world seems to grow by the month, as several recent developments show.

In November, the authorities in Beijing hosted a World Classics Conference, where hundreds of scholars from all over the world were lavishly accommodated and invited to give short papers. Tim Whitmarsh, a Cambridge professor of Greek history, wrote afterwards that the gathering was on a scale he had never experienced. President Xi Jinping sent his warm blessings, and there were rumors he might appear.

More from this author

How Orthodoxy can save Russia's soul

By Bruce Clark

At that event, it was announced that China would imminently open a research center for the Hellenic past in Athens — joining the 19 existing schools from Western countries, including the American School of Classical Studies which is probably the US academy’s most important offshore research institution in the liberal arts.

China has its Latin scholars (it organized a conference on the Roman poet Ovid in 2017) but recently the country’s cultural and intellectual diplomacy has put a particular focus on Greece: both the ancient Hellenic heritage and the modern state of Greece, which was invited to co-host the gathering in Beijing.

Academic synergy between Greece and China is burgeoning on many fronts, albeit from a low base. Four Greek universities are committed to a formal partnership with four Chinese ones: this makes possible joint research projects, seminars, exchanges of scholars and jointly administered qualifications. The Greek philosophy professor who has co-directed this cooperation effort, Stelios Virvidakis, was gratefully amazed to receive a personal letter from President Xi — and then multiple inquiries from China’s state media, inviting him to say how he felt about getting such a missive.

As Virvidakis has discovered, one Sino-Hellenic pairing which his Chinese partners especially like has involved Confucius as the father of Asian thought, and Aristotle as the progenitor of European philosophy. There have been three recent symposia on that wise duo: two in Greece and one in China. The Chinese also enjoy comparing their most famous sage with Plato and his pupil Socrates. People who visit the Athenian Agora may observe that this sacred, US-funded archaeological space is now adorned by a brash pair of Chinese-funded statues of Confucius and Socrates.

It feels as though a new chapter in educational history is being written. The huge American investment in the study of ancient Athens, especially noticeable in the cold-war fervor of the Fifties, had an obvious connection with the global contest between communism and what was then called the Free World. By showcasing the story of the world’s first democracy, American scholars were — consciously or otherwise — fighting the good fight against Soviet totalitarianism. The new Chinese zest for Greece also has a certain strategic dimension, given that the port of Piraeus is now controlled by Chinese interests and has flourished under its new bosses.

Commerce and economics aside, to what purposes are the Chinese now promoting the study of golden-age Hellas? The answer is both complex and surprising, according to Shadi Bartsch, an American classics professor at the University of Chicago.

As she shows in her book Plato goes to China, Greek philosophy (briefly introduced to China by Jesuits in the 16th century) has been put to many ideological uses over the past century. In 1912 the Chinese Republic saw a burst of enthusiasm for ostensibly pro-democratic texts from ancient Athens. Those texts were largely forgotten amidst the cultural revolution — but then rediscovered during the political spring that preceded the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989.

What happened next, as Bartsch describes it, is a spectacular piece of intellectual legerdemain. Chinese scholars have continued to read Plato, Aristotle and Thucydides — but much of their enthusiasm focuses on passages which deplore democracy and its tendency to degenerate into demagoguery.

For liberal lovers of Plato, one of his troubling ideas is the “golden lie” — his idea that states need a false but legitimating ideology which helps to underpin social order and a stable class system. Since Tiananmen, Chinese readers of Plato have warmed to that gilded falsehood, or at least to the idea that statecraft and philosophical integrity may be in conflict.

Among the Chinese political philosophers who have gained attention in the West is Tongdong Bai — a professor at Fudan University who is also a member of the Pontifical Academy in Rome. His book Against Political Equality carefully distills Plato and Confucius and their ideas for reconciling private and family concerns with the public interest. Confucius fares better — partially because he respects the family — but Plato is given a very fair hearing. Albeit in a moderate form, Bai’s whole approach reflects the idea that worthy elites can deliver better political and social outcomes than the voice of the mob.

As Bartsch demonstrates, the current Chinese reading of ancient Hellas is far from monolithic: there are those who study Greece, and its influence on the modern West, simply in a spirit of “know the enemy” while others see great wisdom in ancient Greek thought but regard the contemporary West as a poor successor.

At least one Chinese scholar has put forward the surreal notion that the medieval West simply invented the classical heritage as a fiendish trick; and in October 2023 a well-connected pundit on US-China relations, Jin Canrong, opined that Aristotle could not have produced such a vast oeuvre before the advent of paper.

Suggested reading

Why China will beat the West

By Wessie du Toit

For the time being at least, there is a striking contrast between the rather formal, stiff and cautious rhetoric which has been heard in set-piece interactions between Chinese and Greek officialdom, and the variety of views aired in Chinese academia.

In state-to-state cultural diplomacy, a very simple picture is often presented. It feels as though 19th-century nationalism is being revived, with a clear emphasis on undifferentiated historical continuity: Greece has always been Greek, just as China has always been Chinese. As Whitmarsh wrote after attending the Beijing shindig, this is a proposal for dialogue between (stereotypically defined) nations, but not within them. Its tone is almost at the opposite extreme from the internal turmoil of the American academy.

That siloed vision is a pity, because despite all the ideological pressures, China’s intellectual response to the European past and present — as described by Bartsch and others who know the scene — seems to have retained a measure of diversity.

For example, there is Chinese interest in Leo Strauss, the German-born philosopher who is also revered by American neo-cons. Strauss found much to admire in ancient Greek thought and much to criticize in liberal modernity; that could help to explain why his face fits in contemporary China. But what of the fact that the leading Chinese follower of Strauss, Liu Xiaofeng, is a self-described cultural Christian who wrote a doctorate on Christian theology in Switzerland? That fits no pattern.

Long may that relative diversity last. To put it mildly, today’s China is not a land of intellectual freedom. To quote the civil-liberty watchdog Freedom House, it is a place where “following a multi-year crackdown on political dissent, independent NGOs and human rights defenders… civil society has been largely decimated”.

In the officially encouraged romance between China and Greece, it is too early to tell what ideological constraints might be imposed. But if China replaces the West as the most generous sponsor of research into Greek history and thought, there is good reason to fear that such investigations will take place within narrower confines than was the case at least in pre-Trump America. Idealistic belief in democracy may well lie outside those confines, to judge by the zeitgeist of today’s China.

Veterans of Classical studies are watching with mixed feelings. If the new Sino-Hellenic moment really helps to save the serious study of classics from becoming collateral damage in America’s culture wars, that might be a blessing. But only if the global conversation about Ancient Greece and its meaning for today can still be pursued with intellectual freedom and parrhesia — the right to shock and offend. It is that sort of freedom which is exuberantly exercised in America by mavericks like Princeton’s Padilla. Let’s hope this does not become an exception.

Although the Met had planned an elaborate exhibition around the coffin for later in the year, it took the power of modern celebrity to reveal the object’s true origins. The widely-publicised photograph led to a tip-off to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. A subsequent investigation proved that the museum had unwittingly spent $4 million on a looted artefact. Unearthed by grave robbers in Egypt’s Minya region during the 2011 revolution, the coffin had travelled to New York City by slow degrees, each stage of the process further obscuring its rotten provenance with forged export licences and faked histories of ownership. The coffin was returned to Egypt in February 2019.

Kardashian’s coffin made global news. The beautiful object, further burnished by its fleeting contact with television royalty, was a wonderful story. But not all stolen antiquities are so instantly arresting, so immediately recognisable, or so obviously priceless. Their value is measured not in beauty, but in what they can tell us about the ancient world, and they are just as vulnerable to trafficking as a gold coffin. Such objects are explored in a fascinating new book by Roberta Mazza, Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts.

Mazza is a papyrologist: a specialist in the study of ancient papyri. She spends her days reading lines of Greek and Coptic on scraps of ancient reed. While some papyri are beautiful, most are rather prosaic objects. They are biscuit-brown or faded ochre, holed and tattered, the cast-off skin of an entire civilisation. The most extensive cache was excavated at Oxyrhynchus, near modern Al-Bahnasa, by the Oxford classicists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt between 1896 — 1907. The aridity of the Egyptian desert had preserved hundreds of thousands of fragments, many of them still legible to the naked eye.

Speaking to Mazza, she tells me what drew her to papyrology. “I was fascinated by two main things. The first was the materiality — this wasn’t philology or producing editions and translations — this was the real thing. The other was the idea that in order to be a good historian you had to get to the actual voices of the people.” For a papyrologist, these voices ring clear. A short browse through a tiny percentage of the finds from Oxyrhynchus reveals the city’s connective tissue. The sale of a two-year-old slave girl; receipts for wine, wheat, firewood, baskets, ropes, irrigation machinery, and military clothing; a wet nurse’s contract of employment; loan agreements; deeds of surety; a report of accidental death; a recipe for tooth powder; treatises on gangrene and haemorrhoids; and a cheery drawing of the god Bes. These are much more than desiccated fragments of reed. They are the inky shadows of the dead.

More from this author

Artists have forgotten how to draw

By Alexander Poots

Such texts, while hugely valuable to historians, don’t turn much of a profit on the black market. But literary and religious works were found at Oxyrhynchus too, and these are a different matter entirely. Although Mazza’s book takes in a broad range of depressing frauds, from forged Dead Sea Scrolls to aggressive eBay fences, her main subject is the strange case of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC. The museum is a pet project of Steve Green, president of the arts and crafts chain Hobby Lobby, a business founded by his father. Green, an ardent evangelical, intended to fill the museum with biblical manuscripts. He wanted visitors to trace the immutable Bible of evangelical Christianity across as many papyri, vellum codices, and early printed books as he could buy.

And buy he did. Green went on extensive shopping trips to Turkey, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates, where he hoovered up astonishing quantities of cuneiform tablets, medieval manuscripts and, of course, papyri. Anything even tangentially related to the Bible or early Christianity was fair game. His budget — purchases were paid for by Hobby Lobby, not Green himself — appeared almost limitless. But filling the Museum of the Bible’s galleries may not have been Green’s sole motivation. Once open, the museum would be an incorporated charity with 501(c)(3) status. Donations of cultural assets to such a charity receive tax relief of around 33% of the item’s fair market value. As Mazza writes, “In founding a museum dedicated to the Bible — that is to say, to the evangelical view of the Bible — the Green family could be instruments of God’s will, benefactors of humankind, and also see substantial tax savings.”

Naturally, these tax savings depended on whatever the fair market value might be. And this is where papyri differ from $4 million coffins. Any idiot can look at a gold-plated artefact and value it in the millions. But it takes a scholar to evaluate a papyrus. The range of skills involved is intimidating. A command of ancient languages is naturally vital, but so too is the art of recognising a potentially valuable document from a few fragmentary sentences. Given that there are often literal holes in the text, a papyrologist must make an educated guess as to the missing words. Finally, a knowledge of palaeography — the study of ancient handwriting — is essential, as changes in handwriting over time are one of the main clues to a text’s approximate date.

Buying a job lot of papyri, as Steve Green frequently did, is therefore a risky business from a financial standpoint. An appraising papyrologist might find that you’ve bought a bunch of 7th century copies of the Acts of the Apostles — all well and good, but not worth much. The dream is for a scholar to examine your purchases and declare that they have found something interesting, or better yet, extraordinary. The scholar then edits the papyrus in question and publishes their work in a prestigious academic journal. The fair market value of your papyrus rockets, and the 33% tax relief on donations potentially exceeds your initial investment many times over.

Any serious collector of papyri must therefore cultivate close relationships with individual scholars. The ever-growing Green collection, based in Oklahoma City, did so with gusto. Senior academics were invited to study the extensive holdings, and PhD funding was provided to train up future papyrologists. All very laudable, and as we have seen, potentially very profitable. Yet the atmosphere at the Green Collection was clearly rather different to that of other research environments. Mazza points out that “those who were offered the chance to study manuscripts and other objects were instructed to keep the material to themselves. They even had to sign nondisclosure agreements, typical of business but unknown in academia, especially in text-orientated fields like papyrology.”

This insistence on confidentiality may have been sparked by a growing realisation that much of the material acquired by Hobby Lobby was of dubious provenance. In August 2010, Green invited Patty Gerstenblith, a professor of law at DePaul College, to advise him on a purchase of cuneiform tablets and other artefacts from an Israeli dealer. Gerstenblith has stated that she “read them the riot act”. The items were obviously of Iraqi origin, and therefore potentially subject to a ban on cultural exports from Iraq that had been in place since 1990. Green bought them anyway, accepting the dealer’s convoluted account of the tablets’ history — which conveniently circumvented the ban.

Nevertheless, some of these artefacts were seized by Memphis customs officials in 2011. In the wake of a government investigation — and a $3 million settlement in 2017 — Hobby Lobby released a statement explaining that, “The Company was new to the world of acquiring these items, and did not fully appreciate the complexities of the acquisitions process. This resulted in some regrettable mistakes.”

Suggested reading

When Egypt cancelled Tutankhamun

By Tom Holland

Unscrupulous dealers are adept at mocking up the elaborate fictions — and the elaborate paperwork — required to sell looted antiquities to prestige clients such as the Green collection or the Metropolitan Museum. Kim Kardashian’s gold coffin, for example, was sold to the Met with a forged export licence stating that the coffin was in Europe before the Unesco ban on cultural exports from Egypt came into effect in 1972. The looting of archaeological sites required to supply this illicit trade continues unabated. Mazza notes that “despite all the measures taken nationally and internationally, the truth is that in Egypt illegal excavations, looting, and smuggling are endemic”.

Yet the strangest story explored by Mazza involves not a grave robber or a dodgy antiquities dealer, but an Oxford don. Dirk Obbink was Professor of Papyrology at Oxford, the general editor of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He was also at the heart of the Green collection’s greatest coup: the supposed discovery of the earliest extant fragment of the Gospel of Mark.

In the autumn of 2011, Scott Carroll and Jerry Pattengale visited Obbink in his rooms at Christ Church. At that time, Carroll and Pattengale worked for the Green collection. Carroll in particular had a key role in sourcing papyri and other objects for potential purchase by Hobby Lobby. The two men have different recollections of that visit to Oxford (and of subsequent events), but agree on one key point: Obbink showed them papyri that day. Three were fragments of Matthew, Luke, and John. The 4th and smallest papyrus was the most interesting. It was a fragment of the Gospel of Mark, said Obbink, and he thought that it might date from the late 1st century. This would have made it the earliest known surviving manuscript of the New Testament. Pattengale has stated that Obbink, who claimed to be acting on behalf of a private collection, then offered the papyri for sale. In 2013, Hobby Lobby purchased all four fragments.

They never received them. As news of the Mark papyrus spread within the academic community, it gradually became apparent that it was not an unknown fragment after all. It was identifiable as P.Oxy. 83.5345, a catalogued, though unpublished, piece of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, owned by the Egypt Exploration Society and archived at Oxford. The same was true of the other three papyri. In December 2017, Obbink emailed Hobby Lobby. Mazza describes what happened next: “Obbink wrote in the email that the four papyri were in the ownership of the Egypt Exploration Society and he had sold them ‘by mistake’, an explanation obviously hard to believe.” The general editor of the Oxyrhynchus papyri agreed to refund Hobby Lobby the sum of $760,000.

This was just the beginning. Concerned by the gospels fiasco, representatives from the Museum of the Bible met with the Egypt Exploration Society to go over previous purchases from Obbink. Some of these fragments were found to be parts of the Oxyrhynchus archive, and were returned to Oxford by the museum. In 2021, Hobby Lobby took legal action against Obbink, listing seven separate sales of papyri between February 2010 and February 2013. The numbers involved were staggering. In November 2010, Hobby Lobby’s 4th purchase from Obbink saw the business pay $2,400,000 for “papyri fragments and other antiquities.” The following July, Hobby Lobby purchased another lot for $1,335,500. All payments were made to a bank account in Obbink’s own name. In March 2024, an Oklahoma court ordered Obbink to pay Hobby Lobby the sum of $7,085,100, and prejudgment interest from February 2013 at a rate of 6% per annum.

Mazza suspects that we will never know the whole truth about l’affaire Obbink. Not all of the papyri he sold came from the collection that he was supposed to safeguard. Others, such as new fragments from the poetry of Sappho which Obbink unveiled to much fanfare in 2014, have even murkier origins involving London auctioneers and Turkish eBay vendors. We are unlikely to know how a man of such intelligence thought he could get away with it all. Hubris seems to be the only explanation for the actions of this brilliant, greedy classicist. Mazza favours a less abstract answer. As she said to me, “There’s this strange idea that academics are different from other people. But you have the same amount of crooks [as in the wider world].” At least Obbink got one thing right. His bizarre actions illuminated the murkier corners of the antiquities trade, and may have prompted a review of the entire Green collection. In 2020, Steve Green returned 11,500 artefacts to Egypt and Iraq. Mazza notes dryly that just 43 papyri have made it into the Museum’s gallery.

Mazza’s book details the grubbiness — the smallness — of the black market in antiquities. Ancient objects, whether papyri or gold coffins, become assets to be bought and sold. Some scholars use their learning to transform artefacts from records of human lives to numbers on a balance sheet. Others don’t care much about where a new fragment of Sappho or Callimachus comes from, as long as they get to write articles about them. Even passionate collectors can lose sight of what they long to own. “The collectors of ancient manuscripts often become real experts. In the case of the Greens, there was a great attachment for faith reasons, but I think that was the main drive. They were completely uninterested in learning about these papyri,” says Mazza. For her, this ignorance was summed up by an appearance Steve Green made on CNN. He had brought one of his papyri into the studio, a fragment of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. He did not notice that it was displayed upside down.

Over the last few years, the people of Britain are increasingly falling on the side of Lord Byron — who, in 1812, mourned the Parthenon’s sorry post-Elgin look: “Dull is the eye that will not weep to see. Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed.” According to successive YouGov polls, a clear majority of Britons want to see the Parthenon artefacts displayed in the magnificent New Acropolis Museum, in a special hall overlooking the defaced Parthenon.

Alas, the British government and Elgin’s surviving supporters are resisting tooth and nail, insisting that the Parthenon artefacts in the British Museum are its property and must remain so eternally. Their claim to legal property rights is both tendentious and detrimental to the British sense of justice. They point out that Elgin had a permit from the Ottoman occupying forces in Athens to take what he liked from the Acropolis — which, they insist, gave him the right to own and to sell on whatever he removed. Even if we set aside the fact that said Ottoman permit never granted Elgin permission to hack the statues and friezes from the monument with the use of saws, the claim is absurd and, indeed, quite dangerous.

Imagine if the Nazi occupying forces in Paris had granted some gentleman a permit to remove statues from the Louvre. Or if Putin’s men in Mariupol were, today, to grant a visiting antiquities dealer a permit to remove priceless artefacts from a local museum. The very notion that these permits bestow secure property rights over the removed artefacts is an affront to every decent person worldwide. As for the British establishment’s usual rejoinder — that the Ottoman occupation of Greece was centuries long, or that Greece had not been a modern nation-state before the Ottomans invaded it — it is terribly disrespectful to scores of Britons who, like Lord Byron, travelled to Greece shortly after Elgin had vandalised the Acropolis to fight alongside the Greeks reclaiming their liberty and founding the modern Greek state.

More from this author

A Greek Watergate threatens the West

By Yanis Varoufakis

This unending saga is back in the news. For the last six months or so, George Osborne, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer who currently serves as Chair of the British Museum, has been negotiating a deal with the Greek government. It will see a portion of the Parthenon sculptures sent to Athens, on loan, to be displayed at the British Museum in exchange for other antiquities. The real reason Osborne has entered into such negotiations is self-serving: he needs to raise £1 billion to refurbish the British Museum, but fears that, in view of British public opinion, unless he washes away the stench of Elgin’s larceny from the halls and corridors of the British Museum, sponsors will not be forthcoming.

Unfortunately, constrained by the British establishment’s determination to insist on maintaining full property rights over the artefacts Elgin brought to England, the deal Osborne is offering the Greek side is shameful. Indeed, it could not be otherwise, as long as the UK government and the British Museum insist that they own the artefacts outright.

Think about it: members of the British establishment, who consider the artefacts to be British, and know that the Greek side does not recognise their property rights, oppose even lending them to the New Acropolis Museum, fearing that a Greek court, if not the Greek government, might decree that they not be returned to Britain. The only way they would consider lending them is on the basis of the deal that Mr Osborne is now putting to the Greek government: a deal stipulating that, for the privilege of being lent half the removed Parthenon artefacts, Greek museums must send over other priceless artefacts to be kept in the British Museum as “collateral” — essentially as hostages that will force the Greeks to return the loaned Parthenon marbles.

No Greek government can ever agree to such a sordid deal. And no decent Briton should look at it with anything other than deserved scorn.

Suggested reading

Museums have always been problematic

By Mary Harrington

Speaking personally, I think it is absurd, after 200 years, to be having the same discussion. It is upsetting for us Greeks and it is dispiriting for the Brits. I am no cultural nationalist, in that I do not want to see every fragment, every statue, every frieze or vase produced in Classical Greece returned to us. The Parthenon friezes, metopes and pediments are a very, very special case. They were created as integral parts of the Parthenon and were hacked down by Elgin with a permit from our enslavers. They belong neither to the Greeks nor to the Britons. They belong to the Parthenon, with which they can be best re-united if they are displayed in the perfectly-designed room on top of the New Acropolis Museum. It is visually connected with the temple in a manner that would bring tears to any visitor’s eyes.

And what about the British Museum? Does it end up with an empty room where the Parthenon relics are now? Absolutely not. As an internationalist, and an Anglophile, I would loathe that. But imagine the following. Let the Parthenon Marbles be re-united with the Parthenon permanently. And let the Greek government commit to keeping the relevant room in the British Museum stocked with a permanent, rotating exhibition of priceless stand-alone classical era treasures. It would allow the people of Britain and international visitors a reason to visit the British Museum again and again and again.

In this manner, the Parthenon will become whole again. And the British Museum will be enriched by a never-ending parade of splendid Greek antiquities that function as joyous ambassadors of Classical Greece in central London, not as Mr Osborne’s sad hostages.

On 28 May, 1979, the occasion of Greece’s accession to the European Economic Community, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, then president of France delivered a speech in Athens and declared: “Europe without Greece would not be Europe… We are all, in our language and thought processes, children of Greek civilisation…” Today, he concluded, “Europe is rediscovering Europe.”

A century or so earlier, the Cambridge mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that “the safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”. Not to be outdone in philhellenism, commenting in 1941 on the Greek resistance to the Italian and German invaders, Winston Churchill famously added: “Hence we will not say that Greeks fight like heroes, but that heroes fight like Greeks.”

Surely any people showered with such lavish praise by influential foreigners would be forgiven for taking a certain pride in their culture. For Greeks used to hearing folks like Giscard d’Estaing insist that Greece is Europe, and vice versa, telling a pollster that they do not believe their culture to be superior would be tantamount to questioning the superiority of European civilisation. In fact, from a Greek’s perspective, it is the equivalent of asking the French, German, Spanish or Dutch to respond, with a yes or no answer, to the silly question: “Is European civilisation better or worse than other civilisations?” In this sense, modern Greeks are neither more nor less culturally chauvinist than Europeans who celebrate European civilisation as if the horrors of European colonialism had never happened.

But ask us Greeks about modern Greek culture and you will get a very different response. Sure enough, we have our fair share of looney ultra-nationalists, some of whom believe that Darwinism applies to every human except the Greeks, who stem from some divine extra-terrestrial gene. Yet the vast majority of my countrymen and women think very little of our contemporary culture, ways and behaviours. The past decade, especially since our wholesale bankruptcy, has left us reeling, insecure and verging on self-loathing.

More from this author

Ukraine cannot win this war

By Yanis Varoufakis

Yes, we still appreciate the glowing successes of Greeks who left Greece in search of a better life elsewhere. Yes, we celebrate the odd athletic victory and we appreciate the beauty of Greece’s land, sea and environment. Yes, we maintain some pride in uniquely Greek concepts like philotimia — a penchant for acting in a dignified way simply for the hell of it. But at the same time, we fear that these qualities, natural and spiritual, have been diluted terribly in recent decades; partly because we neglected and cannibalised them (our monstrous investment in tourism, for example), and partly because of a European Union that helped us lose our way.

When Giscard d’Estaing made his 1979 speech, a year before northern Europe formally admitted us to the EU, most Greeks rejoiced. Alas, we soon realised that a general loss of dignity was the hefty price we would end up paying for the privilege. I am often asked why Europe first let us Greeks into the Common Market and later into the euro. The correct answer sounds improbable today: because, back in 1979 when Giscard was waxing lyrical about Greek civilisation, the Greek state had one of the lowest levels of public debt in Europe and its citizens had next to none. Yes, we were a poor people but we managed within our modest means, living and breathing paradigms of parsimony. That’s what we brought into the EU: low debt and high levels of home ownership — a combination that was the Western banker’s wet dream.

Even in 1999, just before we were admitted to the euro, barely any Greeks had a mortgage, let alone a credit card. However, to enter Europe we had to lower our trade barriers and, later, to dismantle all capital controls. Immediately, a tsunami of imports, money and loans left northern Europe for Greece. Not that we resisted it, hungry as we were for the material trappings of modernity. Before we knew it, our factories were shut (and converted into warehouses for the imported washing machines and fridges that were once manufactured here); our bank accounts went from thin black to deep red; our dignity and philotimia were torn asunder.

Suggested reading

Who set Greece on fire?

By Aris Roussinos

It was only a matter of time before the global debt and banking bubble burst, before the same Europeans and Americans who once praised us as the pillars of Western civilisation turned on us. Conveniently ignoring that they had insisted we borrow mountains of their money — so we could buy their cars, washing machines and haute couture — they did not hesitate to call us all sorts of names unfit to print here.

Worse still, under our breath, we call ourselves similar names. When talking to each other, we have no qualms of being highly self-critical, often bordering on self-hatred. No Greek I know would, for instance, disagree with David Holden, the Times journalist who in 1972 depicted Greece as “rich in talent and poor in resources, developed in its tastes and underdeveloped in its capacities”. And so partly out of a false dedication to not disappointing those who talk up Greek civilisation, and partly due to our anger with ourselves and with a Europe that led us astray before treating us like cattle that lost their market price, we respond to idiotic survey questions with fake pride. Of course, we know it is fake — but, then again, fake pride is the last resort for those who have forfeited the real thing.

But it was also rather timely; in the past weeks, Classics has endured quite a hammering. At the beginning of the month, Dan-el Padilla Peralta — a Dominican-born, New York-raised professor of Classics at Princeton — gave an explosive interview to the New York Times Magazine in which he expressed his desire to do away with “Classics” as a term and “explode the canon”, on the basis of it being appropriated by xenophobes and white-supremacists. For Padilla, it’s an endemic problem: “The production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of Classics.”

What does this mean in practice? For Walter Scheidel, a professor of Classics at Stanford University who was also interviewed for the NYTM piece, we should simply get “get rid of” Classics altogether: “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field”. Which may seem like an odd thing for a Classicist to say, but it’s a view that’s becoming increasingly widespread, and even institutionalised. Already, some departments in the US have embedded Classics within courses such as “Ancient Mediterranean Studies”. (Such rethinks are, of course, unlikely to be a universal solution; Gormley, for one, is particularly upset about the British Museum’s supposed fixation with the Mediterranean.)

Tensions over the value and ethics of studying Classics have been simmering for some years. Indeed, it is hard to think of another subject that has required its devotees to defend their field of study with such frequency. We’re told that it’s the study of useless “dead languages”; that it’s the preserve of public schoolboys, such as our Pericles-loving Prime Minister; even worse, that it needs to burn because it’s an inspiration for far-Right extremists in the US.

Suggested reading

Why kids today should get hooked on the classics

By Gareth Roberts

The latest battle over Classics is a culmination of all the above. The fact that it remains a relatively marginal and unstudied subject in the educational system has made it an easy target in today’s culture wars. It means, for example, that Classics can be dismissed as simply the “history of Greece and Rome” — even though North Africa, Asia Minor, Gaul, the Russian steppe and many other territories also form part of it.

This cognitive blindness is made all the more peculiar when you consider how broadminded and enquiring Herodotus, Tacitus and many ancient historians could be about their fellow citizens. Although they were mostly interested in questions of national identity, when they did write on matters such as skin colour, they tended to do so with more curiosity than judgement, attempting — albeit mostly without success — to explain difference through factors such as climate and geography.

This meant that for Herodotus, the Ethiopians were dark-skinned on account of their proximity to the sun, while the inhabitants of colder territories were paler as they were further away from it. For Tacitus, the climate of Germany was such as to render its people naturally resistant to cold and hunger. It’s all nonsense, of course. But as Padilla himself has conceded, the Greeks and Romans “would have not really understood our racial categories”. One could be a Roman regardless of where you originated or what you looked like.

More importantly, these sources constitute the classicist’s raw materials; they are what lie at the heart of Classics as a field. Why is it, then, that in the debate that is now raging over the future of the subject and its right to exist, they barely get a look in? One would have thought that the actual texts and archaeological finds used by classicists today would be the first things to be considered in any reappraisal of the subject.

Suggested reading

Boudica is firing up a new generation

By Bidisha

Those who wish to banish Classics instead emphasise what has been done with these sources. They point to entitled Grand Tourists trundling over the ancient sites and pocketing things at will; to the likes of Winckelmann, the German art historian who idealised the whiteness of ancient statues despite the fact that they were once painted in bright hues; to the tendency of today’s far-Right to draw upon Classical imagery. Meanwhile, under the Third Reich the writings of Plato and others were mined and distorted so that they would appear to endorse Nazi eugenics.

But such a history of Classics, one which highlights only the ways the discipline has been used to incite racism and prejudice, is strikingly selective. Indeed, if the main argument against Classics resides, as it appears to, in its development as a discipline and reception in the modern world — more than in the ancient material itself — then the other side of this journey ought to be told, too. For example, it would be easier to refute claims of Classics’s Eurocentrism if attention were paid to things such the transmission of texts; if it wasn’t for the scholars of places such as Baghdad in the eighth and ninth centuries, who painstakingly translated and copied ancient manuscripts, the corpus of literature studied by classicists today would be considerably poorer.

More importantly, for every account of the abuse of classical material, there is another of inspiration. Take the growth in recent decades of “Classical Reception”, a relatively new field through which classicists engage with ancient material through the lens of more contemporary writers and artists. This specialism has helped to broaden the horizon of Classics by revealing some of the positive or at least enriching ways antiquity has permeated the modern world. The works of writers who have drawn legitimately and powerfully on ancient sources — whether it’s William Shakespeare, the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott or Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka – surely form a more meaningful aspect of the story of Classics than the misquotations extremists upload to online forum. Even Antony Gormley’s engagement with the classical tradition has inspired a number of academic papers in this area.

Suggested reading

Why America is haunted by Ancient Rome

By Tom Holland

If anything, the abuse of Classics ought to be used as an argument for saving it. For the alternative, abandoning it, would be to hand it over to those very groups Padilla and others identify as ransacking it. The field does not deserve to be razed because of the way it has been tended in certain quarters. If a study of Classics teaches us anything, it is how much easier it is to knock down than rebuild. As the so-called Liberators of Rome discovered to their regret, assassinating Julius Caesar, rather than what came after, was the easy part. Demolish Classics — and then what?

No one is denying that aspects of the ancient world and its reception are ugly — this is true of all cultures and periods — but that is no reason to abandon Classics itself. There is no call to study the ancient material through the eyes of Nazis. The arguments of Winckelmann can be read to be disregarded. The so-called Classics of white supremacist organisations such as Identity Evropa can be disregarded — they do not deserve the airtime.

The current climate, in which individuals cherry-pick classical quotations to their own ends, ought to be a summons to the original sources that form the heart of Classics. They ought to provide the impetus to return to Classics’ roots, to read old texts anew with our own eyes, to look at art that crossed the globe knowing no borders, to read legitimate engagements with the classical past, to think for ourselves. As Heraclitus wrote: “our eyes are more accurate witnesses than our ears”. So let’s not be afraid of using them.

The morning after the bombing of the Grand Brighton Hotel, she took to the stage of the Tory Party conference breathing a message of pure defiance. “The fact that we are gathered here now — shocked, but composed and determined — is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.” Indeed, her only concession to the attempted assassination of the cabinet a few hours previously was to omit from her conference speech a planned condemnation of large swathes of the Labour Party as the enemy within. Otherwise, the lady was very much not for turning.

A virus, however, is an altogether subtler and more insidious foe than a terrorist organisation. Covid-19 brings no demands, no ultimatums.

More from this author

Plague and the comforts of history

By Tom Holland

Boris Johnson, lying in intensive care three weeks ago and feeling the spider touch of the virus darkening and tightening through his body, would have experienced in the most personal and abject manner possible the threat that it presents to the body politic. Its workings are mysterious. There is still no clear picture of how it speads. Even in countries that cannot be accused of fiddling their figures there remains no certainty as to how many people are dying of it, let alone how many have contracted it. To fashion a policy to combat the virus, then, is not simply a matter of following ‘the science’. Even the world’s most brilliant epidemiologists know themselves to be groping after solutions in fog. There is no self-evident path to defeating SARS-Cov-2.

Which said, it is hard to believe that the Prime Minister, during the fortnight he has spent at Chequers recuperating from his brush with death, will not have been reflecting on whether, in the weeks before he was rushed to St Thomas’, he might possibly have done things differently.

The Government’s campaign against Covid-19 has not, it is fair to say, developed necessarily to Britain’s advantage. Far more people, relative to the size of the population, have died in this country than in Germany, let alone than in poorer countries such as Slovakia or Greece. Johnson’s initial attempt to square the competing demands of public health and the economy seems to have ended up inflicting avoidable damage on both. The gung-ho swagger that helped him to win the Brexit referendum and the last election proved altogether less successful against Covid-19. Today, as he returns to Downing Street, his own lungs bear the scars that prove it.

Suggested reading

How long will lockdown last?

By Freddie Sayers

“Back to his normal, ebullient self.” So Matt Hancock described the Prime Minister on Friday. This may be true — and yet there were hints in the speech that he gave after being discharged from hospital that his personal experience of Covid-19 has served to recalibrate his take both on the virus and on those who are daily risking their own lives to fight it. His salute to healthcare workers seemed rawer, more personal, more emotional than his tributes to them had been before he went into intensive care. “It is thanks to that courage, that devotion, that duty and that love that our NHS has been unbeatable.”

Prior to falling sick, the only ideal that ever seemed to stir Johnson to matching flourishes of emotion was what he has always lauded as Britain’s “ancient and basic freedoms” — but this morning, standing outside No 10 on his return to Downing Street, he insisted once again that these had to remain prorogued, that the need to save the NHS from being overwhelmed had to come first. Before he fell ill, he had spoken in martial terms of sending coronavirus packing, as though it might have been General Galtieri or Jeremy Corbyn. Now he speaks of a victory that will be won by the NHS’s power of love.

Whether language like this will pacify the growing number of Tory MPs fretting that the economy as well as civil liberties are being sacrificed on the altar of saving lives the next few weeks will tell. So also will they be the test of just how far Johnson himself is prepared to go in maintaining the lockdown. History does not suggest that catching and surviving a disease during a time of pandemic necessarily precipitates any great process of conversion among political leaders. Instead, from the Byzantine emperor Justinian, who in 542 almost died of the plague to which he would give his name, to David Lloyd-George, who in the final month of the First World War went down with the Spanish Flu, and only just survived it, most seem to have carried on in much as they had ever done.

Suggested reading

What the AI doomsters get wrong

By Tom Chivers

The celebrated example of a leader supposedly undergoing a dramatic change of character after an illness — one of which the classically educated Prime Minister will be more than aware — is not a model that he will be looking to emulate. In AD 37, a few months after becoming emperor, Gaius Caesar — ‘Caligula’ — fell dangerously ill. The Roman people, distraught at the prospect of losing their young and charismatic ruler, were thrown into paroxysms of anxiety. One of them, a wealthy businessman named Atanius Secundus, swore a particularly extravagant oath. Only restore Caligula to health, he promised the gods, and he would fight as a gladiator.

Naturally, he had not expected to be taken up on this vow. His aim had been merely to stand out from the other sycophants. Once back up on his feet, however, the Emperor took Atanius at his word. With a perfectly straight fact, Caligula ordered the wretched flatterer into the arena, there to fight for the amusement of the crowds. Predictably enough, paired against a trained killer, Atanius did not last long. The spectacle of his body being dragged away across the sands of the arena on a hook served notice to the Roman people that their young emperor had risen from his sickbed a dramatically altered person: no longer a man but a monster.

Such, at any rate, was the story. In truth, like so much told about Caligula, it was a myth. Almost certainly, the emperor was no more a lunatic after his illness than he had been before, and the readiness of the Romans to believe it reflected a more general understanding of disease as one of the many expressions of a capricious and repeatedly brutal cosmos. This might express itself in a variety of ways: as a feeling of impotence before “Fortune’s rapid wheel, which is always interchanging adversity and prosperity” or, in its more sophisticated form, as a philosophy of retreat before the world, an insistence that the only true wisdom is to ignore the sufferings of others, to immure oneself within a pleasant garden, and to cultivate ataraxia, the absence of worry.

Suggested reading

Why the English sacrificed liberty for lockdown

By James Kirkup

There was no place, in this understanding of the universe, for the kind of sickbed conversion that would become such a staple of Christian hagiography: the knight so mortified by an attack of acne that he gave away all his possessions; the invalided merchant’s son who was brought to devote his life to the sick. Certainly, there was no place in the world of classical antiquity for any conception of a national health service — let alone one powered by love.

“Salus populi suprema lex esto,” the Prime Minister is supposed to have declared at a summit of ministers and health officials on Friday — and then, for the benefit of those in attendance not familiar with Cicero, to have offered his own translation: “the health of the people should be the supreme law”. In fact, as Johnson would well have known, the Latin word ‘salus,’ which he translated as ‘health’, had a much broader range of meanings: ‘safety’, ‘welfare’, ‘soundness’.

Here, then, it may be, is as clear an indication of the Prime Minister’s new state of mind as we are likely to get: one in which admiration for the martial values of classical antiquity, rather than being subordinated to a new found passion for the NHS, has instead been seamlessly fused with it. What is the Latin for “Having one’s cake and eating it?”

The Iron Age queen Boudica looms large in myth. She is revered as an awesome figure of female rage, a military leader raising an army against the occupying power of the Roman Empire, an avenger of men’s sexual violence and patriarchal entitlement, a bringer of justice fuelled by pain and anger, a native subject who refused to be ruled by a foreign invader. She is a symbol of resistance against colonialism and slavery.

At the time of Boudica’s rebellion, Britannia had been occupied by the Romans for less than 20 years. King Prasutagus, ruler of the Iceni tribe, had acquiesced to Roman rule after the previous Emperor Claudius’s invasion in AD43 and a failed local rebellion four years later. Prasutagus accepted and adopted Roman ways and gave the Empire duties, loans, tithes and taxes from his people – including fees the Iceni had to pay to bury their own dead.

Then, in AD 60, Prasutagus died and left only half his estate to the new emperor, the notoriously cruel Nero, giving the other half to his daughters. In retaliation, the Romans plundered the household of his widow Queen Boudica’s household; she was flogged, her relatives enslaved and her daughters gang-raped. She and her tribe erupted in rebellion, and the Romans soon found themselves facing a general uprising.

Suggested reading

How 'The Favourite' failed Queen Anne

By Polly Mackenzie

Yet there is scant evidence that Boudica definitely existed, as I discovered when I was commissioned by a publisher to write a fictionalisation of her rebellion. I grew up on Manda Scott’s thrilling series of novels and on the television series starring Alex Kingston as the red-haired heroine. But looking at the actual (meagre) evidence presented by historians such as Richard Hingley, Christina Unwin, Marguerite Johnson, Nic Fields and Vanessa Collingridge opened my eyes.

There is almost no contemporaneous evidence from 60-61AD, the time of Boudica’s rebellion, identifying her as the revolutionary leader. The story of the Iceni tribe can be pieced together from some archaeological evidence, including fragments submerged in the molten matter produced by the scalding, decimating heat of the rebels’ fires in the Roman towns of Camulodunum (Colchester), Verulamium (St Albans) and Londinium (at that time a small, emergent outpost). There then followed a final battle against the Romans, led by general Suetonius Paulinus, but the exact location of this remains a mystery.

We don’t even know if Boudica — which simply means “Victory” — was her given name or a symbolic epithet, although there were certainly other Iron Age women leaders, such as Cartimandua of the northern Brigantes. The mythologising accounts we have of Boudica come from two later classical commentators, Tacitus (whose father-in-law had been an imperial governor in Britain) and Cassius Dio.

Suggested reading

How our first Asian MP shaped the Brexit debate

By Ian Birrell

It is these men — stalwarts of the Roman Empire themselves — who contributed unwittingly to the powerful image we have of her today, although they were written with quite the opposite intention. Boudica’s muscular frame, weaponry, mane of reddish-gold hair, glinting jewellery, flowing clothes and rousing speeches, delivered standing on her war chariot, are their inventions. These classical men tried to depict Boudica as an unnatural and uncouth barbarian she-devil but actually made her impressive to later readers, although their accounts were not rediscovered until the Renaissance humanist period.

Boudica’s achievement had been to unite a number of tribes, assembling a great horde of fighters that included the neighbouring Trinovantes, considered the most powerful in Britain. Together, they poured down through Camulodunum, Verulamium and Londinium, sacking and burning as they went. Some of the classical accounts of their massacres — such as those of women mutilated and impaled lengthways on stakes — are outlandish and cannot be proven either way. But there is no doubt about the level of physical destruction. The fires were thought to have reached 1,000 degrees centigrade. And Boudica’s army was so fierce that the Roman administrator, Catus Decianus, fled rather than face her.

The three towns Boudica’s army struck had symbolic power as imperial administrative centres, settlements for former Roman soldiers built on co-opted lands, as well as Romanised natives who had adopted the dress and habits of their colonisers. Although they might have been enjoyed by retired soldiers, they were not actively defended by the military, with the exception of a small retinue of troops slaughtered inside Claudius’s temple in Camulodunum.

Suggested reading

The first Englishman to change the world

By Robert Tombs

Although there are no contemporary verifications, the practicalities of moving an army of hundreds of thousands of fighters – and their families — across such distances suggests that Boudica’s campaign lasted several months, rather than weeks. By now, Emperor Nero would have known about it, and Suetonius Paulinus was under pressure to act against the barbarian upstarts.

Suetonius had been in Wales and now travelled to meet Boudica’s forces, with the full might of the Roman army behind him. The Romans were practiced technical fighters, excellent at strategy, calm, well-horsed and well-armoured, with expertly-built weaponry including arrows and spears, daggers and swords, as well as rounded full-body shields. Despite being outnumbered by Boudica’s fighters, they were simply a better war machine. They took up a position uphill of Boudica’s army, which was now squashed between the Romans and their own carts, laden with plunder, possessions and relatives.

That Boudica killed herself with poison cannot be verified, although it once again corroborates the myth of this warrior queen preferring death to ignominy and dishonour. The Romans took their revenge, seizing the rebel tribes’ valuable horses and plunder, torching the settlements and slaying the Iceni and those who had fought with them. They re-militarised the occupation, building and populating forts across their territory.

Suggested reading

Why our troubled times are perfect for poetry

By Bidisha

In the decades to come, the Romans would continue to bed in their occupation, and it wasn’t until nearly 400 years later that the land was finally rid of the empire and the colonisers left. Boudica’s rebellion in the early days was singular in its ferocity. It is its gendered aspect, I believe, which compels and fascinates many women who identify with her raw rage — as I do. The uprising failed, but it was indicative of the fact that the Romans’ presence in Britannia was never really easy, no matter how many towns they developed (among them Gloucester, Bath and York). They failed to take Caledonia — Scotland — and had to keep constant military vigilance against the tribes – tribes just like those that Boudica led.

Boudica occupies a unique place in the tale of early Britain: she is the native warrior who fought back against foreign invaders, the once obedient vassal who decided death was better than more dishonour, the anti-imperial, anti-slavery activist who got radical the moment things got personal. Of course the idolisation of Boudica, especially strong in the Victorian era, has usually glossed over Britain’s global infamy as slavers and colonisers running an empire that dwarfed Rome in size.

She has also been interpreted as a testament to a wronged woman’s zeal and a symbolic warning that a formerly compliant wife and mother is capable of any feat in defence of her family. The implication is that this is a nation that cannot be subjugated, co-opted or annexed by occupying forces and would never submit to the humiliation and violation of imperialism; that this island may be small, but has the guts to defend itself against anyone who dares to subdue it.

Suggested reading

Why I like my politicians to be hypocrites

By Giles Fraser

Boudica’s war gave the Roman empire a hard jolt and served — I have no doubt — as an inspiration to the countless other tribes, settlements and occupied people that resistance, protest and fighting back were righteous and valuable. Without her, Britannia would be seen as just more territory to be easily conquered by the Roman war machine. Yet after her rebellion, Britannia was seen as a troublesome outpost of the Roman empire, one which required constant vigilance due to repeated acts of rebellion.

It cemented a national image that is both double-edged and enduring: the Brits as hard-drinking, easy-fighting hooligans, self-righteous, proud, eccentric, patriotic and defiant. That can be interpreted in any number of ways. Indeed Boudica has since the Victorian period been taken up very strongly by Britons of all politican and cultural persuasions: by suffragettes, abolitionists, imperialists, freedom fighters, feminists, pagans and others. Because so little is truly known about her, she has retained her mystique and stands as a universal and timeless symbol of the wronged woman lost to history.

It is this obscurity and mystery that drive people to endlessly rediscover her. She inspires me as a woman who refused to take abuse, internalise her anger or accept the perpetrations and humiliations of those in power. Her anger was her expression and her fuel. She required that she and her daughters be revenged and their rapists punished. Thousands of years later, I want the same thing.