Classics

King’s College Cambridge has lost (according to the papers) a ‘famous’ classicist, who resigned because he slobbered wet kisses all over an unimpressed woman. But everyone knows there is only one famous classicist, and she is not at King’s. The classicist at issue surely cannot have been paying too much attention to the literature which one assumes he has studied, because Eros was seen as a sickness, a madness, a god who robs us of our wits, creating a strong and obsessive desire (‘desire doubled’ as an ancient puts it). Plato saw sexual incontinence as a ‘disease of the soul’. Sophocles thought of sex as a ‘mad and savage master’.

“Where are all my favorite parts?” Arnold Schoenberg asked, on being presented with a severe academic analysis of the Eroica symphony. “Oh, there they are. In the tiny notes.” The tendency of many people, presented with the overwhelming abundance of an art form, is to exclude as much as possible. Reduce the wonderful life of incidental invention to the tiny notes; erect walls excluding the fascinating curiosity, the eccentric, the madly idiosyncratic. Produce a list of the 100 Best Books, sticking to declared Greatness. People have been producing lists of the Best Books for a hell of a long time. When copyright law was reformed in 1774, it enabled publishers to produce collections of novels for the first time.

‘Where are all my favourite parts?’ Arnold Schoenberg asked, on being presented with a severe academic analysis of the Eroica symphony. ‘Oh, there they are. In the tiny notes.’ The tendency of many people, presented with the overwhelming abundance of an art form, is to exclude as much as possible. Reduce the wonderful life of incidental invention to the tiny notes; erect walls excluding the fascinating curiosity, the eccentric, the madly idiosyncratic. Produce a list of the 100 Best Books, sticking to declared Greatness. People have been producing lists of the Best Books for a hell of a long time. When copyright law was reformed in 1774, it enabled publishers to produce collections of novels for the first time.

Leave the US to it Sir: I was struck by the dichotomy of your 21 March issue. Christopher Caldwell describes President Donald Trump’s world-affecting miscalculation in attacking Iran (‘The end of Trumpism’), while the editorial exhorts us to climb aboard this runaway train to ‘finish the job’. The conflux of multinational involvement in this fiasco is already reminiscent of the tumbling dominoes of August 1914. Underlined by three colliding religions, the scale is now much larger and touches the entire planet. The Americans, for whom the ‘special relationship’ is skin-deep, made this bed and should lie in it, not us. J.B.

What a lot of friends Jeffrey Epstein appears to have had! But what did friendship mean to him? Was it simply a matter of reciprocal benefits and obligations? In the ancient world, such interactions were a matter of life and death for the poor (there was no such thing as the welfare state), and of political success or failure for the wealthy and ambitious. But many thought there was far more to real friendship than such purely practical considerations. For Aristotle, having a friend was ‘one of the greatest goods, because there is an unbreakable connection between friendship and virtue, since friends do not wrong one another: justice and friendship are either identical or very close to each other’.

A lawyer who wished to serve on a jury but was no Christian was given permission to swear his oath in the name of a local river. He saw it as ‘his god’, as people did in the past, when the association between nature and divinity was widely taken for granted. Consider, for example, the ancient Greek understanding of the natural world. The farmer poet Hesiod (c. 700 bc), often drawing on Hittite and Babylonian myths, provided the West with its first account of how the world was made. First there was khaos, he said (that meant, ‘emptiness, void’, cf. ‘chasm’). Then there appeared Earth, Underworld and Eros (without which nothing could be generated), Night and Day.

This year, in its annual Supreme Court moot trial of a famous ancient figure, the charity Classics for All charged the consul Cicero with illegally ordering the execution of five traitors working with the failed politician Catiline to bring revolution to Rome (63 bc). In his history of that crisis, Sallust composed speeches for Julius Caesar in defence of the conspirators, and for Cato the Younger for their execution, followed by a character assessment. This package may prompt reflections on our times. Caesar argued that men facing difficult questions ‘should clear their minds of hatred, amity, anger and compassion… success is achieved by applying judgment; but your passions will rule you, if you let them, and your judgment will go out of the window’.

We classicists peering into the past can sometimes be blindsided by the present. 2020 brings the charge that our discipline promotes racism. Last month, America’s Society for Classical Studies announced ‘the complicity of Classics as a field in constructing and participating in racist and anti-black educational structures and attitudes’. A pre-doctoral fellow at Princeton has enjoined ‘white classicists’ to ‘unlearn white supremacy in themselves’. And, closer to home, Oxford’s Faculty of Classics is being petitioned by many of its students to ‘acknowledge explicitly its own role in the proliferation of racist, colonialist, and white supremacist attitudes’. Have I really chosen the career of racism-pedlar?