Strange Light from a Distant Time: Antiquity in the Grip of Identity Politics

Antiquity found itself caught in a dilemma of identity.

On the one hand there is the identity-political censorship, which measures past epochs and their remnants in art and literature primarily against the moral standard of the present.

On the other hand, there are claims of a cultural identity that thinks it has its foundations in Greco-Roman antiquity.

Both approaches are based on an insight into the contemporary relevance of past texts and artefacts, but both push this insight in opposite directions so far that an enlightening discussion of antiquity becomes difficult, if not impossible.

In both cases, the concept of identity turns out to be an intellectual dead end.

Perhaps more than other cultures, antiquity suffers from the moralism of identity politics.

While their radical representatives demand strict censorship of the literary canon at schools and universities, more cautious voices are satisfied with the demand that potentially disturbing content be flagged as a warning and that deviations from current moral concepts be discussed.

Ancient literature offers a powerful target here: many Greek and Latin texts revel in depictions of violence, are misogynistic and justify various forms of oppression.

Now it is certainly important to view the campaigns against the Gauls, as described by Caesar, less as a strategic feat than as a brutal subjugation of indigenous tribes.

But when reading the Bellum Gallicum is limited to denouncing colonial practices, much is lost.

Incomparably more interesting, if less easy to answer, are questions such as the relationship between Caesar the narrator and Caesar the actor, the means by which Caesar creates the appearance of objectivity, the style, the narrative gripping, the descriptions vivid power.

There aren't many ancient texts that can be read without a trigger warning.

The strangeness that offends identity-political reading recedes into the background when one invokes antiquity as the origin of our cultural identity.

One reads again and again that Rome and Athens formed the roots of European identity together with Jerusalem.

We owed law to the Roman Empire, philosophy, democracy and freedom to the Greek poleis.

In the current crisis in particular, one must reflect on these cultural foundations, because – Odo Marquard is sometimes quoted here – “the future needs a past”.

Questionable forms of appropriation

In an essay rich in material and perspectives, Dag Nikolaus Hasse recently deconstructed the colonial and romantic character of such a European identity and found that it suppressed the non-European part of antiquity and the achievements of other cultures.

Talking about cultural roots suggests an organic development that contradicts the historical breaks and appropriations.

For example, unlike in Baghdad and Byzantium, Greek literature was absent for centuries in the Latin Middle Ages.

The appropriations of ancient ideas also often say more about the recipients than the ancient authors.

Even within a culture, different antiquities can collide: while feminists today are enthusiastic about the deconstruction of gender in Ovid's Metamorphoses, right-wing extremists on the other hand quote Herodotus to prove the superiority of the white race.

Not only since the recent debate about the decolonization of classical studies has it been known that slavery was legitimized with the testimony of Aristotle in modern times.