Without the Classics, Our History Is Incomprehensible

O n July 14, 1832, the United States Congress commissioned a marble statue of George Washington to be sculpted in celebration of the centennial of his birth. The sculptor Horatio Greenough completed the work in 1840, and his Enthroned Washington is still on display today at the National Museum of American History.

From a strict historical perspective, the sculpture is something of an anachronism. The bare-chested Washington is draped in a Roman toga and clad in Roman sandals. Seated on an ornately carved chair (again, crafted according to the regnant style of Greco-Roman antiquity), he points the index finger of his right hand upward toward Heaven and in his left holds out a sheathed sword, offering the hilt of the blade to his onlookers. We can be certain that at no point during his earthly sojourn did the great general ever don such garments as these. Moreover, Greenough could easily have chiseled America’s indispensable man arrayed in an 18th-century military uniform without sacrificing a great deal of grandeur in his portrayal. Why the classical garb?

The literature and culture of ancient Greece and classical Rome have, until very recently, played a much more central role in the historical consciousness of our civilization than we often realize. In the Western world up until the middle of the last century, to be literate was to have been steeped in these texts during the course of one’s education. As the theologian and historian of late antiquity John Behr notes, in the classics our ancestors found “a ‘symbolic world,’ in terms of which one understood oneself and the events of one’s life.” In this respect it played a role similar to that of the Bible. Current events were constantly interpreted and reinterpreted according to the received record of human events that had been passed down from the twin pillars of Athens and Jerusalem.

A few of my colleagues have written about the recent troubling assault on the classics by certain cultural Jacobins of the far Left — seen most recently in Princeton University’s decision to drop the requirement that classics majors must learn Greek or Latin — who evidently view classical culture as both an example and an instrument of white supremacy. There are many ways of defending the cultural patrimony of antiquity against this charge, but perhaps the most important point to make in defense of the classical canon is that its “cancellation” would render the history of our civilization incomprehensible to us.

As far as political questions were concerned, the pagan classics often played a more important role in the thinking of our ancestors than that of even the Jewish and Christian scriptures. The Bible does not, after all, conceive of man primarily as a “political animal” in quite the same way as the Greeks and Romans did, and so less thought is given by biblical writers to the specific merits of particular forms of government or to political life more broadly. The “symbolic world” that constituted the political grammar of Western man was therefore by and large the classical world, and each significant political event was understood by way of analogy with something out of Herodotus or Thucydides.

For most of Western history (and especially since the Renaissance), the relationship between learned individuals and the world around them has been mediated, oriented, and organized by symbolic figures and narratives inherited from the classical world. It was the intellectual and imaginative air that the educated classes breathed. Once we understand this, Greenough’s sculpture becomes entirely comprehensible. He could rely on viewers of the sculpture to recognize instantly his statue’s allusion to Phidias’s statue of Zeus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. More importantly, he could trust his audience to grasp the analogy being drawn in stone between General Washington and the legendary Roman general Cincinnatus, who famously returned power to the Roman people after ruling at their request as a military dictator for the duration of a war with invaders. Washington’s decision not to seek reelection in 1796 was understood symbolically by his classically literate peers as an act of comparable republican virtue.

The richly symbolic nature of Greenough’s Enthroned Washington is just a single example of how important an acquaintance with the classics is for understanding even the most basic parts of our history. Our discussion of Greenough’s sculpture has already shown us the extent to which the classics formed the basic symbolic grammar of our forebears. If we deprive ourselves and our children of this grammar we will be adrift on a sea of references — tossed about by the Cato of Cato’s Letters, the Publius of The Federalist Papers — without a clue as to the self-understanding of ages past.

One needn’t pore over arcane political tracts to find this basic grammar that was everywhere assumed by our forebears. The popular 1948 memoir Cheaper by the Dozen, for instance, begins with the line “My father, like Gaul, was divided into three parts.” Readers in the ’40s would have understood this sentence for what it is — an allusion to the opening line of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars, which they would have studied in school. Many readers who pick up the book today, just 70 years later, are likely to pass over the line with casual incomprehension. They might not even know what or where Gaul is.

Nevertheless, there is a particular salience to classical literacy when it comes to politics. The governing elite of virtually every Western polity of the last millennium and a half have, at one time or another, fretted and pored over the decline and fall of Rome, always keeping their eyes peeled for similar signs of impending catastrophe in their own context. The American hegemon is no exception in this respect. As early as 1725, Berkeley pondered such a fate for the colonies of the New World in his Verses on the Prospect of the Arts and Learning in America:

Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The first four acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.

Given the United States’ republican DNA, it’s unsurprising that the classical narrative that most preoccupied early Americans was not the fall of the Roman Empire but the fall of the Roman Republic. The specter of Caesar loomed large in the imaginations of the statesmen of the 18th and 19th centuries. They saw his laurel wreath encircling the temples of almost every ambitious politician who could boast of popular support. Of Andrew Jackson, for instance, Arthur Schlesinger writes that

while the newly enfranchised and chauvinistic masses regarded the military hero with wild enthusiasm, to the old aristocracy, raised on classical analogies, no figure could seem more dangerous to the republic. The warnings of Cicero and the example of Caesar supplied ample documentation for their worst misgivings.

A similar Caesarian typology can be seen in the diary entry written by John Wilkes Booth after he assassinated President Lincoln:

After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods, and last night being chased by gunboats till I was forced to return wet, cold, and starving, with every man’s hand against me, I am here in despair. And why? For doing what Brutus was honored for. What made Tell a hero? And yet I, for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew, am looked upon as a common cutthroat. My action was purer than either of theirs. One hoped to be great himself. The other had not only his country’s but his own, wrongs to avenge.

Booth clearly viewed his own act through the symbolic prism of Brutus’s assassination of Caesar.

Thankfully, the story of the Roman Republic’s fall has been preserved in the minds of some Americans by Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which is still being taught in the schools; but most of the other classical referents that made up the mental furniture of our ancestors have been removed from our curricula. What’s more, our national supply of publicly shared analogical referents is already dangerously low even beyond the classics. The Second World War is virtually the only geopolitical analogy that everyone can be counted on to understand, which is one of the reasons that it’s so overused. If anything, we need to expand the scope of classical education that kids receive, not further curtail it. Otherwise, we’re deliberately withholding from American children the conceptual tools necessary for contemplating our ancestors with sympathy and understanding.

The Jacobins are pushing for the cancellation of the classics because their project — a revolutionary impulse toward resetting the clock of history to Year Zero — has little to gain from mature historical understanding. But if it’s the position of some of our friends on the left that ignorance of history — including classical history — makes us less likely to repeat the crimes and mistakes of the past, they really ought to reexamine their premises.