Classical Antiquity and the Politics of America: From George Washington to George W. Bush

Afterword

175 Afterword In 1997, Garry Wills wrote an essay for the The New York Times Sunday Magazine suggesting that classical antiquity was undergoing a revival of interest and relevance in the United States as the twentieth century drew to a close. Contemporary social and political issues—such as the nature of imperialism, the tension between dominant and minority cultures, the role of warfare in a democracy, and the growing prominence of homosexuality —are posing precisely the sort of questions that the ancients are well equipped to answer. Wills argued against a transcendent classicism that enables moderns to join themselves to a timeless antiquity. Instead, he claimed that revivals are more about turning the ancients into moderns than the other way around. “The classics are not some sort of magic wand that touches and transmutes us,” Wills wrote. “We revive them only when we rethink them as a way of rethinking ourselves.”1 Wills placed great emphasis on the role of translation in classics revivals. He claimed that the incipient revival he recognized taking place would be independent of any changes in the teaching of ancient languages . Nonetheless, he suggested that greater interest in learning ancient Greek and Latin was emerging among Americans. sMichael Meckler Meckler.ClassicalAntiquity 5/25/06 12:07 PM Page 175 176 Afterword Although accurate data are hard to come by, it appears that the study of Latin in American secondary schools has continued a steady, though not spectacular rise since falling to its nadir in the late 1970s. Enrollments have grown by more than twenty-five percent in the last quarter century to exceed 200,000 students, despite a demographic decline in the total number of Americans of high school age. The number of students taking national, standardized tests in Latin and classical mythology has skyrocketed, as has membership in the National Junior Classical League, suggesting that the connections being fashioned between American teenagers and classical antiquity are becoming stronger.2 Certainly popular culture over the past decade has reflected greater awareness of the ancient Greeks and Romans. A sidebar to Wills’s essay mentioned classically themed books, museum exhibits, and film and television programs of the mid 1990s (such as the syndicated television series Xena: Warrior Princess, and the animated Disney movie Hercules), but popular interest in antiquity has blossomed even further since, and in a wide variety of media.3 In 1998, Dark Horse Comics released a five-issue series by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley titled 300. The comic books related the story of the Battle of Thermopylae involving the Spartans and the Persians in 480 B.C., and the popularity of the comic books led to the series being reissued the following year as a graphic novel in a hardcover binding. The military exploits of the ancient Greeks have served as the inspiration for the best-selling novels of Stephen Pressfield. The motion picture Gladiator (nominally about the reign of the Roman emperor Commodus) was released in 2000 to both commercial and critical acclaim, garnering five Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actor for star Russell Crowe. Two of the most popular movies of 2004 were set in antiquity: Troy (a rather free retelling of Homer’s Iliad) and The Passion of the Christ (a retelling of the gospels). For 2005, both the broadcast television network ABC (with the program Empire) and the cable subscription channel HBO (with Rome) prepared limited-run series set in the final, tumultuous years of the Roman Republic. Even the children’s cartoon The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy (broadcast on cable television’s Cartoon Network) contains the recurring character of Eris, the Greek goddess who was the personification of conflict and strife. In the cartoon, Eris is regularly depicted wearing a chiton (modified into a sort of white tank-top and skirt) and holding an apple—an allusion to the apple that, in classical mythology, she provided as the prize for the Judgment of Paris. In the political sphere, classical antiquity has gained greater attention and interest through the well-publicized efforts of the neo-conservatives, whose devotion to the ancients verges on the fetishistic. Creators of conservative Weblogs and their visitors regularly employ classical-sounding nicknames to reveal their ideology while masking their true identities.4 Meckler.ClassicalAntiquity 5/25/06 12:07 PM Page 176 Michael Meckler 177 Furthermore, the national prominence among conservatives of the ancient historians Donald Kagan...