Aliens of Antiquity
In hindsight, what a blessing I didn’t study the classics first! After five years immersed in Islamic culture and modern China, Greece and Rome were just another foreign culture, separated by time rather than geography. That made it easier to resist the temptation to claim the ancients as honorary versions of ourselves. The connections are real; the tidy story of Western Civilization is another matter.
Beard is convincing on classics as both a social shibboleth and a way out of provincialism. Knowing the right ancient references can establish membership in a club, but reading them carefully ought to make the club less comfortable. I kept thinking of Orientalism: how easily an encounter with another culture becomes mired by an encounter with our own picture of it. The romantic image of antiquity can be as distorting as the exotic image of the East. The interesting question is not how admirably the ancients anticipated us, but how people recognizably human could live and think so differently.
The “shock of the old” is not something that happened once during the Renaissance. It happens every time somebody picks up Plato or reads the Odyssey closely enough to discover that their own way of life is not the only one imaginable. For me, the West is at its best when an encounter with another culture unsettles it, and at its worst when it treats everything worth knowing as confirmation of its own importance. Classics earns its place through the first of those habits, not the second.
And frankly, I just like the way Beard writes. Enough humility to admit she might be wrong, enough wit to notice when others probably are. She makes her enthusiasm inviting rather than compulsory. Perhaps I should spend more time working through the oeuvres of nonfiction writers I like, rather than finding the longest science-fiction series available.