Who’s afraid of the Ancient Greeks?
The Ancient Greeks long anchored Western civilisation. Yet today, classics students are likelier to be warned about Athens’s racism, cruelty, or ‘toxic masculinity’ than encouraged to celebrate its democratic and artistic innovations. Homer now comes with trigger warnings. Athens is recast not as early radical democracy but as a proto-fascist slave society. Some recent books claim that rooting Western civilisation in Greece is Eurocentric – even white supremacist – because it sidelines non-Europeans. Even the Hellenic character of the Athenian polis is disputed, with claims of substantial ethnic mixing.
Is this a peculiarly Western embarrassment about our origins – a compulsion to reinterpret the past through the lenses of race and sex? This civilisation incubated participatory democracy; historical and scientific inquiry; ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics. Without those bedrocks, our societies would be unthinkable.
Why the contemporary hostility to Ancient Greece? One answer points to a wider crisis of Western confidence, in which cultural elites have lost faith in – or turned against – the hallmarks of our tradition. The Greeks, as origins, are made to bear the whole charge-sheet of racism, genocide, and slavery. Another answer is temperamental: Ancient Greece jars with today’s aversion to risk-taking, unconstrained speech, robust democracy, and daring art. The Greek valorisation of masculinity, war, beauty, and the civilised–barbarian distinction – are now treated as historical burdens. That some Right-wing movements’ adopt a mischievous Greek cosplay further contributes to a sense that Ancient Greece is too dangerous and masculine for the present era.
But the Greeks cannot be cancelled so easily. The great accomplishments in drama, sculpture, architecture, philosophy, poetry and democracy still thrill the public imagination. What does our elites’ loss of faith in classical Greece say about our loss of confidence in ourselves today? With leaders running scared of their voters as populism rises, is it time to recover the wild, free, adventurous spirit of the ancients?
Speakers:
Dr. Benedict Beckeld, writer, philosopher, internationally known public debator, author, Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations
Dr. Alexander Meert, teacher of History, Archeology, Arts, Philosophy and Ethics at the Vrije University Brussels, member of the Roman Society Research Center, Ghent University
