Meis mortuis digitis algentibus licet tibi narrationes nostrum avorum rapere.
In Rome of old, it is said, there once nearly befell a great catastrophe. A great chasm opened up in the Forum and grew ever wider day by day, threatening to engulf the entire city. The Romans tried to fill up the pit with earth, but this did not even slow its expansion. In despair they consulted an oracle, who said that the Romans must cast into the pit that which made their city great, and so they gathered up gold and silver, swords and armor, horses and oxen, anything and everything they could think of. Still the chasm grew.
As was so often the case with oracles, the true meaning was obscure, but one man, Marcus Curtius by name, perceived it. When the Romans were preparing to abandon the city, Curtius armed himself for battle and put on all his decorations for valor. He mounted his old warhorse one last time and with a great cry rode forth into the pit. Behind him the chasm closed up, and the city was saved. Only then did the people of Roman understand the oracle. For it was not her wealth nor her swords nor her beasts nor anything else that made Rome great but her men, ready and willing to die for the state.
Not a word of the above tale is true, though one much like it does appear in Book VII of Livy’s history. The Romans were far from unique in telling stories of this type, but thanks to Livy and others we have a great many more from Rome than from, say, Illyria or the Eurasian steppes. The point of the storytelling was education for the young, inspiring them to live up to the example of their ancestors. When an illustrious Roman man died, someone close to him, perhaps his son or a family friend, would deliver an oration describing the glorious deeds not only of the late man himself but also of his ancestors reaching as far back as memory could go. Every young man in Rome grew up with the aspiration to win glory in service to the state so that his name would be added to the roster of great men.
By now the story of the Columbia snowflakes who couldn’t withstand Ovid (of all people, Ovid!) has spread throughout the interwebs and received the thorough mocking it well deserves. In his own day, Ovid was also a controversial author: one of his best known works is the Ars Amatoria, or The Art of Love. In this book, Ovid explains how men can effectively woo women and how women can effectively woo men. If there was another section dealing with homosexual relationships, scholars have not yet discovered it. The book was wildly popular with everyone except the emperor, and Augustus banished Ovid to the Black Sea region where the poet spent the rest of his life pining for his beloved Rome.
May our precious children never read the story of Lucretia, lest they come to think that adultery is bad! Perhaps Boudicca’s tale would be more appropriate—it certainly has a strong female protagonist—but she lost and brought ruin and destruction to her people, so maybe that’s not the best way to inspire the next generation of SJWs. Medea is okay—she even kills her own children, huzzah!—but everything else probably belongs on the ash heap of history.
Consider, for instance, the Odyssey. When people think of the Odyssey, they usually have in mind the great sea voyage of the eponymous character and the many adventures he had while striving to return home. In actual fact, this takes up about one-sixth of Homer’s tale. The true plot is the return of the king to Ithaca and the restoration of the orderly life that his absence had destroyed. Odysseus must overcome the Suitors by displaying quintessentially masculine virtues: courage, prowess, and especially self-control. In the end, he is united with his wife Penelope, but more importantly with his son Telemachus and his father Laertes. This is certainly not an appropriate story to tell young boys, girls, genderqueers, or otherkin.
Ahem. Sorry; I, uh, got carried away there.
Every now and again you’ll hear Leftists trying to square the circle between their ideology and reverent study of the Classics. According to their customary argument, the great Greek and Roman authors are still worth reading because these people were the ultimate originators of Progressive ideas. Well, at least a few of them were; for Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, and a few others a plausible argument can be constructed, but the counterexamples are too numerous to list. In fact, Classics is the deadest, whitest, European-ist, male-ist discipline imaginable.
Aristotle, Polybius, Horace, and Sallust were neither Progressives nor Reactionaries—those concepts simply did not exist in their day. They responded to their own issues in their own ways, informed and shaped by the cultures into which they were born. No matter how much certain Leftists might wish things were otherwise, to study Classics is to immerse oneself in a world that did not care for their ideals. This fact has helped to insulate Classics from the worst insanities of Leftist scholarship. That becoming a classicist involves mastering two ancient languages, as well as at least two modern ones, has also helped in making Classics a relatively conservative discipline.
Greek and Latin literature are especially valuable for precisely the same reason that Leftists find it uncongenial: it is not Progressive. The Classics preserve values and perspectives that boggle the Leftist’s mind, but to us they make perfect sense. We must defend the Classics from those who would twist and pervert them, and there is no better way to do so than read the stories and pass them on as they were meant to be told: without trigger warnings.
As the left moves further and further away from human origins and intent, all of these things once considered unquestionably good reading material start to become irritant to them, though they may seem benign to normal people. In some cases, even ideological standard-bearers who they once adored have now become toxic due to their antiquated values. Take Nietzsche, someone who I’m no great fan of. The Nietzsche club was recently banned at a college in England because he was racist, classist, and of all hilarious crimes ‘anti-Marxist’.
http://www.critical-theory.com/nietzsche-club-banned/
The trigger warnings on classics is just another event in this long line of degradation where we can see the left escape any orbit of good thinking and zoom off into outer space. The college is at the forefront. If you want to see where the entire culture will be in 10 years or less, just look to the colleges. Not a pretty sight for sure.
Thanks for this witty piece.
Even Marx would be deemed too racist (genocidal, actually), sexist, patriarchal, androcentric, imperialist and classist according to their own tastes and standards, if they even bothered to read his writings, including his letters.
Perhaps there was a time when the classics were held clean of the filth of the left, but that time has passed. I sat today in a university classroom as the fat female mythology instructor ranted on about the misogyny of the greeks and their gods. Scanning the classroom showed shit eating grins on each of those young faces; their smug satisfaction in their moral superiority to the ancients was palpable.
“were neither Progressives nor Reactionaries” this is really the benefit of the classical works and mythology. They are works already filtered for extreme quality that allow the discussion of ideas that are inherently outside of the Overton window. I wish I could impress how risky and unrewarding it is to signal as a reactionary (from the stand point of foundations of your thought) since it is defined as opposition to progs. The classics are all examples of creative development born of conflict that don’t rely on negative identity. If you choose what to talk about you’ve already won half the conversation.