The Daimon Archives: Jane Harrison and the Afterlife of Dead Languages

In her book Trojan Horses: Saving Classics from the Conservatives, Page Dubois notes the recent resurgence of classical literature into popular culture. "At the beginning of the twenty-first century, people continue to be fascinated by the remnants of the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, two millenia distant in time," Dubois writes.¹ This affirmation is welcome news for a discipline that had been "in crisis" in the late 1980s, partly due to its withdrawal from public life.² The current resuscitation of dead languages owes greatly to their translation into forms appreciable by modern high-tech visual sensibilities and their orientation toward hot political issues. Troy, starring Brad Pitt as Achilles, is the most recent example of this trend. However much classicists might balk at the deaths of Menalaus and Agamemnon, or at other deviations from Homer's Iliad, the movie's impressive technological effects and its implications for current world conflicts bring ancient civilizations and literature into the public consciousness as relevant, living knowledge. If Troy in many ways breaks faith with the epic from which it draws, its narrative liberties also emphasize that classics is a field whose longevity depends on its malleability through time and within multiple arenas of discourse.

But is there a point at which manipulation of classical texts and repositioning of the ancient world vis-à-vis contemporary culture can threaten classics rather than contribute to its vibrancy? Dubois believes this point has been reached by reductive, neoconservative appropriations of the classics, "which narcissistically see . . . the ancient world as identical to [conservative goals], as fully explained by narratives of nationalism, domestication and family values, militarism, partriarchy, and elitism." Viewing this delivery of classics to the people as a deceptive "Trojan Horse" that will ultimately destroy the discipline to which it appears to do homage, Dubois fears that "classics as a field will wither like Egyptology because of its association with such reactionary ideas."³ The fear is warranted not only by Egyptology's decline but by the social history of classics itself. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, classics in Britain was firmly tied to conservative, primarily androcentric, cultural ideals. By the latter part of the century, the discipline was in danger of becoming obsolete as critics like T.H. Huxley, who endorsed a more practical, scientific education, openly criticized the elitism fostered by a "liberal education" grounded upon the literary-linguistic study of Greek and Latin.⁴ Classics did not fade into obscurity at this time because it expanded to accommodate scientific approaches to the ancient world, opening itself up to new fields such as archaeology, anthropology, and sociology. What is striking about the salvation of classics from conservative thought at the turn of the twentieth century, however, is that it did not depend on a detachment from personal, revolutionary agendas and a disinterested concern to get at the truth of an ancient civilization, a strategy Dubois proposes for the present. Rather, the modern discipline of classics⁵ was shaped by methodological and ideological conflicts between scholars with intensely personal investments in their limited and often biased perceptions of the ancient world. While it may be tempting to view the current situation in terms of a categorical opposition between conservatives and liberals, history reveals that such categories often veil textured, individual motives and interactions that inevitably complicate resolutions to the larger problem. In formulating new strategies for keeping classics alive in the twenty-first century, it is worthwhile to reflect on a similar struggle at the turn of the twentieth century over control of a discipline whose unstable borders lend it to individual appropriation and for which territorialism has become an inextricable part of its substance.

Jane Harrison's ambivalent relationship to Greek studies at Cambridge during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries exemplifies how individuals can impact scholarship more through the force of their personal convictions than...