Doing Justice to the Classics
On October 6th, 2021 Pharos Director Curtis Dozier joined Rebecca Futo Kennedy and Jackie Murray at Villanova University’s Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest for a roundtable discussion on the topic of “White Supremacy and Classical Athens.” The event was part of the center’s “Turning Points in History” series for 2021-22.
Read moreThis week I published a major revision of the front page of Pharos, which had remained largely unchanged since the launch of the site in 2017.
Read moreLand Acknowledgement: Pharos is researched, written, and published online at Vassar College, an institution situated in the homeland of the Munsee Lenape people, who lived here for thousands of years before the arrival of European colonists. Please read more.
On September 22nd, 2021, Pharos Director Curtis Dozier delivered a lecture entitled “Hateful Classicism: Greco-Roman Antiquity in the White Ethnonationalist Imagination” at Temple University. The lecture summarizes the ways White Ethnonationalists use Greco-Roman antiquity to give legitimacy to white supremacist politics and assesses the challenge such appropriations pose for the discipline of Classical Studies.
A video of that lecture, along with an earlier presentation on “Teaching Race in the Ancient Mediterranean” by Professor Jackie Murray, is available on the Temple University Department of Classics’ Website.
Read moreThis page collects examples of articles on prominent white supremacist websites that invoke Greek Myth in support of hateful politics. In connection with the recommendations and discussion questions on our “How to use Pharos in the Classroom” page, they are intended to spark discussion and further research about the ways that ancient history is used to legitimize hateful beliefs, and about the historical and ongoing complicity of the discipline of Classics in providing the basis for these beliefs through the promotion of an idealized and/or sanitized version of that past. We have provided links to PDFs of the articles extracted from the sites on which they appeared. Links to archived versions of these articles are available to instructors upon request at pharsoclassics@vassar.edu.
Content Warning: The links below lead to articles with explicit and harmful messages of white supremacy, homophobia, sexism, and other hateful content. Such material can be triggering, especially for those against whom this hateful rhetoric is directed. Please be advised and view at your own discretion.
Read moreThe “1st Amendment Praetorians” are a group that describes itself as “protect[ing] the Republic and anyone who is willing to stand up on her behalf to voice their opinion or bring attention to something they’ve found, like voter fraud.” This reference to a persistent and racist lie about the 2020 election signals the this group’s commitment to conspiracy theories, and indeed, The Daily Beast recently reported that the “Praetorians” provided “security” for a gathering of QAnon Conspiracy theorists. It all sounds like a joke except that one of the people who they were defending, former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, all but called for a military coup in the United States. Meanwhile the group has currently attracted donations approaching $1,000 per month on Patreon. And there’s nothing funny about their use of the name of a Roman military force to legitimize their activities.
Read moreAt the end of 2015, as the white supremacist “Alt Right” movement had begun to attract mainstream attention, one of its leaders, Richard Spencer, released a video that he wrote “expresses our fundamental values at NPI and Radix and our conception of identitarianism” (NPI is the white supremacist think tank that Spencer leads and Radix is its premier online journal). The video encourages viewers to claim and celebrate a white racial identity as a revolutionary act; a year after the release of this video Spencer summed up its message to an audience at Texas A&M University: “Have a goddamn identity…[it’s] the greatest challenge to the power structure that there is.” And the identity Spencer wants his viewers to adopt in one grounded in Classical antiquity.
Read moreThe opening months of 2021 witnessed a surge in violence against Asian Americans, most visibly the murders of Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez, Soon Chung Park, Hyun Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, and Paul Andre Michels in Atlanta in March 2021. One result has been new attention to the history of anti-Asian racism and violence, particularly against women, in the United States. The ideas that justify violence against Asian people, however, have an even longer history, stretching back to ancient Greco-Roman perceptions of “the East,” as Nandini Pandey has shown. And these ancient ideas don’t just lurk at the root of modern racism but continue to be quoted as justification for racist ideas by contemporary white supremacists.
Read moreOn April 27th, 2021, Pharos director Curtis Dozier delivered a lecture entitled “Classical Athens and Contemporary White Ethnonationalism” at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. A video of that lecture, including the extensive Question and Answer period, is now available at the Harvard Classics Department’s webpage.
Read moreEditor’s Note: In this article, Pharos welcomes Jeremy J. Swist as a guest contributor to share his expertise concerning the function of Classical themes and imagery in the work of metal bands that identify with the “National Socialist Black Metal” subgenre of heavy metal music or otherwise engage in white supremacist politics. Interested readers will find more context and analysis of this topic in a lecture that Dr. Swist delivered earlier this year.
Heavy metal music and its culture (henceforth referred to as metal or one of its many stylistic subgenres such as black metal and death metal) have long attracted controversy, even becoming the subject of moral panics, due in no small part to the genre’s traditional valorization of transgression and sensual liberation. As a medium for often incendiary rejections of the status quo, metal can also become a haven and charismatic platform for right-wing ideologies expressed with unabashed racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism, including lyrics and imagery drawn from classical antiquity.
Read moreAfter a flier announcing the formation of an “America First Caucus” in Congress was leaked, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene first confirmed her involvement before abandoning the idea a few days later. Greene is known to Pharos readers for wearing a Molon Labe mask while defending the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol and to everyone in America for her promotion of racism and conspiracy theories. Thus it came as no surprise that the Caucus’ flier was brimming with racist and xenophobic dog-whistles. Of particular note to historians was her claim that America is “strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions,” since “Anglo-Saxon” is a historically incoherent term that originates in American nativism (which was also used as the name of a major scholarly society until 2019). What has not received as much attention is that the same flier invoked the Classical world as well.
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