Hellenism on Display

Preliminaries

What I would like to do is to reflect a little more self-consciously than I normally do (a) about where I am coming from when I approach the vast topic that supplied the material for the conference on “Whither the Neohellenic?” and (b) how my own professional location(s) have informed the substance of what I think about it now.

For the past four years, I have been a visiting assistant professor in both the departments of religion and classics at Emory University. Now, the first and arguably the most significant matter for me is the fact that I have been a visiting assistant professor at Emory. “The Greeks,” we have all probably been warned, “do not sell.” That seems almost a truism in the field of religious studies, curiously enough a discipline in which nearly everything else seems to “sell” quite well. And it seems an increasingly and ironically accurate description of the situation in classics. I take it that this intellectual situation—the increasing marginalization of material that had once been the core of the curriculum—was one of the driving intuitions for the organization of “Whither the Neohellenic?” The Greeks, we all worry, do not sell quite so well today.

With that intuition before me, let me turn a little more substantively—if sketchily—to three broad areas of my personal experience, interest, and concern.

The classics: A model for the area studies curriculum

I begin with an observation (which is also admittedly an assumption) about the future of our colleges and universities in North America. These institutions have decided to go the way of area studies as a model for the future educational enterprise. (A brief lexical note is in order here: The “area” in question is strictly geographical. That is what seems curricularly novel to me. On this model, Caribbean Studies is an area studies program in a way that Women’s Studies is not.) I am struck by how many programs have been born in the past decade, especially in the past three to five years. At Emory, we have witnessed the rise of programs in African Studies, South Asian Studies, Caribbean Studies, Near Eastern Studies, Korean Studies, and the like. Such developments clearly represent what is happening similarly elsewhere. Modern Greek Studies, for its part, may be another such entity, although I for one have my doubts, and reservations, about that.

Now, on the face of it, it is hard to be against such new scholarly and institutional formations, which seem like such good and long-overdue ideas. The point is to make North American citizens more globally conscious, and that cannot be a bad thing. Cosmopolis, in the words of Stephen Toulmin, ¹ is one of the key, if partially hidden, agendas of modernity. And cosmopolitanism, however much it may resist simple definition, is indeed a coherent scholarly virtue.

Yet I worry. I worry that the rather crude instruments we have elected to use for what have proved to be highly exacting intellectual surgeries (and even transplants) may in fact do more harm than good. That we have become a more self-consciously multicultural nation is a fairly obvious civic fact. Multiculturalism, by contrast, is an as-yet somewhat fuzzy-headed attempt to deal with the philosophical implications of that fact. And that academic impasse is where we remain.

What is deeply ironic is that “Classical Studies” was precisely conceived as an area studies academic concentration fully a century or more before the idea gained its present currency. This field was once well ahead of its time. No longer—which leads to my second point.

A brief genealogy of the classics

The “area” for these would-be area students just so happened to be the Eastern Mediterranean (or Southern Mediterranean as the axis ran in the nineteenth century), spanning some 700 to 800 years: from the Homeric narrative world, through the collapse of the Bronze Age palace civilizations and into the so-called “dark” ages (dark simply because we are so very much in the dark about them), through the archaic and classical periods primarily in Attica, and on to...