What is 'Classics' Anyway?

Episode Transcript:

So a new show, I'm your host, Alexandra Sills, and I have created this podcast for you.

 My first decision was picking a theme.

 Now I studied ancient Greece and Rome, so it was a natural choice to pick one of the two, but I

 can't choose. You might as well ask me which is my favorite ear. So both then was keeping my

 options open to expand as time goes on. After all, I would be a total fraud if I tried to

 familiar with, but I'm giving myself the opportunity to broaden my horizons as we continue and

 develop. My second decision was what to call the show, and who knew that would be the hardest job

 of all. Anyone who studies Greece and Rome at university will know their degree and their

 department as Classics, but it's not the term that anyone else knows very well, if at all.

 Classics is an entirely separate space. It's fenced off from the rest of history and other

 foreign languages. Classics is Greece and Rome during very specific periods, and history is

 everything else. And to be honest, even archaeologists still sometimes feel left out

 of Classics, which is weird and uncomfortable. Why does Classics get its own name, its own

 department? Why does the name make me cringe a little? Why is Greece and Rome kept segregated

 away from the empires that it interacted with? And why, frankly, does Classics have this

 deeply embedded reputation for being really elitist, isolationist, and I'm going to say it,

 problematic? Now there are some classicists who do want to de-center Greece and Rome,

 widen the scope to integrate with history departments. But from the academic pushback,

 you'd be forgiven for thinking that these pioneers are advocating for legalising murder.

 Some classicists really like Classics being separate and seen as more exclusive and

 consequential because it makes them feel more exclusive and consequential. But I'm a

 working-class girl from Portsmouth, and I have no interest in maintaining some illusion

 invented by rich posh white men to make themselves feel important centuries ago.

 Classics is, in many ways, an academic antique itself, but change is slow, and an

 indie podcast isn't going to help speed up the process. So if I call the show

 Classics 101, it wouldn't just confine me to an area and a period, it also comes with

 negative connotations that I don't want. But the classical Mediterranean, with a focus on

 Greece and Rome, but also venturing into Egypt, Persia, Carthage, Mesopotamia, Pardia,

 Bactria, Northern Europe, Phoenicia, because they matter too 101, it doesn't exactly roll

 off the tongue, does it? And I can't fit it onto a logo. One proposed new name in

 academia is Critical Ancient World Studies, a very convoluted name that, whilst an

 improvement on Classics, is proving to be very controversial in academic circles,

 but more relevant here is less than likely to appeal and less than likely to be immediately

 understood by the kind of person that I created this show for. So Classics 101 is out,

 but the history of Classics and the efforts of classicists in Europe and America for

 centuries have ensured that ancient history means Greece and Rome, they're synonymous.

 For better or worse, whether you like it or not, that's what most people picture when they

 hear ancient history, if they're European or American. And for those of us who don't spend

 our days embroiled in highfalutin academic debates, that's what ancient history is.

 So the term ancient history isn't perfect either, but it does provide me with a

 springboard to start with Greeks and Romans, to include their neighbours as much as I can,

 and eventually start to explore as far beyond the centres of Athens and Rome as I can,

 the possibilities are endless and I'm just getting started.

 I used to get really frustrated that my degrees didn't cover every region or every period,

 I didn't get to study every figure that I wanted to or every concept, every event,

 and I didn't understand why Greece and Rome were centred and siloed and why I wasn't able

 to have those adventures beyond their borders unless Greeks and Romans were at war with

 I realised a couple of things. One, we do remain obsessed with ancient Greece and Rome more than

 any other empires because they have had a huge impact on European and American societies ever

 since. And I'm European, I'm speaking in English, talking to other Europeans and to other

 English speakers. Now all of us, we can see the impact of ancient Greece and Rome on our

 political structures, our justice systems, our architecture. So to understand that enduring

 impact we do need to go back to the source first. Historically it is absolutely true

 that historians have presented Greece and Rome as better or more important than their neighbours.

 I can't change why all of that happened but I can help explain why it happened. Why have we

 civilisations to affect us and influence us to the expense of all the others?

 Second then is can we understand why we as 21st century historians and societies

 elevate Greece and Rome without understanding why Greeks and Romans elevated themselves?

 So yeah, we have inherited a love of literature, art, architecture, philosophy,

 sure, but did we also inherit xenophobia and racism towards Western Asia for instance?

 From them? We need to re-examine Greece and Rome again, critically, to see if we can trace

 that line and others. And when we're doing this we'll also be learning about those neighbours

 that they interacted with. That means venturing outside the borders of classics to see if other

 civilisations really were the barbarians that Greeks and Romans assumed and accused them of

 being. We'll be learning why they were also fascinating people and places and what we can

 learn from them today. On a personal note, some of my academic research recently has been in how

 modern political extremist groups and even billionaires and leaders of world nations

 have deliberately used imagery and language from their own idealised,

 warped view of ancient Greece and Rome to justify their modern hatred, their violence,

 to cement their authority, to present themselves as superior. They've been doing

 it for centuries and they're still doing it now. In order for us to be able to spot that

 happening, to refute it, to call them out on their bull, we need to arm ourselves with

 knowledge. So yes, even as we start to venture further, we will still keep some focus on

 Greece and Rome and we need to do it with clear eyes. It is such an odd feeling as a

 historian of Greece and Rome to feel uncomfortable, unwelcome, confined and restricted by the term

 and scope of classics. On the one hand, it's what I studied. It's what I'm actually qualified to

 talk about. And it is fascinating, absolutely still worth learning about in its own right.

 So just because I want us to look further occasionally doesn't mean that learning about

 Greeks and Romans isn't important or interesting. The impact is huge and to understand it,

 we need to understand them. On the other hand, I don't agree with how classics is defined,

 delineated and presented as superior. So here's what I propose.

 This podcast will tackle Greece and Rome with a fresh perspective. We learn about their worlds

 from the get-go by tackling those old assumptions that Greece and Rome were superior, the golden

 age of the West, that their neighbours were somehow less than and not worth our time and

 attention. We won't just learn about great men and their great deeds. We will re-examine

 those men and the events without idealising and idolising them. We will venture beyond

 borders, shedding those old preconceived notions that once we leave civilisation,

 we will only find barbarians. All of these are old conclusions that need re-evaluating.

 Now, all of this is a tiny glimpse into the massive debates raging in universities today.

 Even as the humanities are being attacked and departments being culled,

 what counts as important, worthy of study, what counts as ancient even, is a hot button topic

 and one that I'm never sure will be solved. I'm certainly not the person to fix the external

 problems plaguing the humanities, let alone the fights they're having amongst themselves.

 But I couldn't allow myself to create this show without acknowledging from the beginning

 that classics, ancient history, ancient Mediterranean studies, whatever you want to call it,

 none of these names are ideal. None of the boxes historians have put different places and

 periods in are perfect. And with so many arguments between academics, no podcast will

 ever satisfy all of them. All I can do is make a show that attempts to find a middle ground

 which satisfies you, the listener, because you are who this show is for. So I told you,

 picking a name for the show was a nightmare. And for this reason, for our first ever interview

 with Ancient History 101, I called upon someone to explain to us exactly what classics is,

 to walk us through its history and to explain some of its problems from an academic perspective.

 Whether or not you know a little or a lot about ancient Greece and Rome, I think this

 is a really important discussion to have. Not just so that you can understand my perspective,

 but so that you can understand the history of ancient history as well.

 So for our first interview, I have a wonderful expert guest. Would you like to introduce

 yourself please?

Yeah, thanks. I'm Dan Stewart. I'm associate professor in ancient history

 at the University of Leicester.

Fun fact, I went to the University of Leicester because Dan

 is so cool and then got there and he didn't teach me anything because he wasn't in charge

 of any of the courses that I took. Fantastic. So I'm bringing him here now so that I do actually

 get a chance to talk to him without paying tuition. And we're going to be discussing

 a kind of history of classics in particular UK universities over the last couple of hundred

 years to try and work out what kind of field classics is. So when we say classics,

 who came up with the word classics as the name for this field? Why do we call it classics?

That's a good question. Just like everything else in the field, we can blame kind of dead

 white guys for a lot of the problems, a lot of the issues. The term classics is

 really one of the oldest parts of the discipline since it essentially originates

 with the Romans themselves who used the word classicus to talk about high education

 basically. So what we're seeing as being the preeminent works of literature and where did

 they originate? And a big part of that was in relation to Greek culture. And so they took

 then the study of kind of high literature, primarily Greek but laterally also Latin authors

 as being kind of the preeminent mode of learning. And so that's where the term classics

 essentially comes from. It originates out of that. And that was essentially

 that notion survived, like the introduction of Christianity and the fall of the Western

 Roman Empire and the fragmentation of Europe into various kind of Christian kingdoms.

 Classics remained kind of at the heart of an elite education until we kind of get to

 the 19th century when it becomes defined as a proper discipline with the name classics.

 So they've chosen the name classics. And when people hear the word classic, you know,

 classic cars, classic cinema, it kind of means to me anyway, slightly old, but really good,

 like the best of the best. So what does classics cover geographically, historically,

 you know, chronologically? What does classics cover and why would that be the best part of

 history?

I mean, well, so what does it cover is a different question. And why is that the best

 part of history? I think like the word classics is a definite value judgment. And so it is a

 specific discipline that essentially has this value judgment built into its name.

 So that's already kind of a barrier to entry for a lot of people in that sense.

 But it, I mean, it essentially covers in its original meaning the high literature of the

 Greeks and the Romans. And for centuries, it was thought that the basis of any good formal

 education was a knowledge of Greek and Latin texts. And all the kind of the messy stuff

 around the texts, like, you know, culture, factionalism, difference, women, slaves,

 non-elites. You don't really need to bother too much with that stuff, because we had these words

 from the kind of the elite intellectuals of the Greek and the Roman worlds. That's basically,

 you know, why these things were held up. And in our kind of the rhetoric around the

 formulation of Western history, especially within Western Europe,

 Greece and Rome were seen as the forerunners of everything.

 You know, so Athenian democracy is the first democracy. The Greeks invented history

 under Herodotus. We have philosophy, we've got science, we've got art, we've got all of these

 things that kind of later post-Roman people traced back to the Greeks and the Romans.

 And so that is essentially became the kind of the foundation of the classics. Now,

 the reason I suppose why that is like, quote unquote, what did you say, the best type of

 history? Obviously it's not, right? So one of the problems that the discipline has had

 in the last few decades is essentially struggling with its traditional boundary definitions as

 being concerned primarily with just Greeks and Romans. And there's loads of people who are

 now pushing at that. But the reason why people thought the Greeks and Romans was the kind of

 the most history you needed to know in Western Europe is in large part because of both like

 the military and institutional inheritance of both of those things. So, you know,

 the Greeks saved the West by defeating the Persians. Alexander pushes the bounds of kind

 of, quote unquote, the Greek empire into the Middle East and as far as Afghanistan and

 Pakistan. And the Romans created this massive empire spanning the countries that later came

 to study classics, including into Britain. And so it was basically the success of ancient

 imperialism and the institutions that kind of arose from that, like coinage and slavery and

 kind of bureaucratic empire. It's one of the reasons why elite intellectuals in Europe kind

 of turn to those places as worthy of study and as kind of thinking about it as being

 worthy of emulation in some respects. Like Britain in the 19th century, part of the civil

 service exam was essentially just reading Xenophon so that you could know how to manage an empire

 when you're sent out to India, right? And it's, you know, I don't think that Xenophon is great

 training for that, to be honest, but that's what they did.

So at universities, it's, I think,

 fair to say that it wasn't a course that would be open to everybody in the country. And they're

 looking at, you said primarily texts, I'm assuming that they're reading in Greek and

 Latin. Yeah. So if they're reading texts in a different language, why wasn't classics part

 of language departments? And if they're reading about the history, why isn't classics part of a

 history department? Why is it its own thing that gets to be on its own isolated from history and

 languages in universities?

Ooh, that's a good question. I think, I mean, certainly there's

 different developmental trajectories in different countries. So we need to be careful about making

 kind of broad brush, kind of monolithic narratives that applies to everywhere.

 But having said that, basically, the modern Western university, which we can trace back

 about a thousand years in Europe, began as the study only of Greece and Rome, and religion,

 bit of music, that kind of stuff. So classic stands at the heart of the modern university,

 certainly the old established universities across Europe. So every other subject that you mentioned,

 like modern languages or history as its own proper form of study or any of those other

 things, they all came later. So they're all additions to kind of a classical curriculum.

 So that's a big part of why people just study classics. But they also thought,

 for a very long time, that the information that was contained within the texts of the

 Romans spoke to deeper human fundamental truths that resonated with their contemporary worlds.

 And so that was what you needed in order to know about the world. If you're interested

 in the natural sciences, well, Aristotle has got there before us. And so if we just read

 Aristotle, then we can apply some of those ideas to the new studies of the natural sciences

 that are going on. Or if in the age of European colonialism, when we're interacting,

 to put it perhaps too blandly, with cultures in Africa and the New World,

 if you're trying to understand how to put these people within your standard scheme of

 understanding humanity, well, you can look at Herodotus and you can look at Pliny the Elder

 and you can see how they kind of schematized people and talked about environment and different

 sorts of people, or even like biblical texts. That's a kind of a separate podcast perhaps, but

 study of like Hebrew and New Testament Greek is kind of always developing alongside classics.

 So it was possible to find answers to these things, the thought in these texts.

 But that's part of why in the 19th century, it kind of shifts. As universities become more

 formalized, as education opens up a little bit to a wider range of elite white guys,

 then different disciplines kind of spring up to help account for the post-Enlightenment

 world and the things that they're seeing. And so classics has to kind of redefine itself

 slightly at that time.

Did it do a good job of redefining itself?

 I suppose it would depend who you asked. So I think probably at the time,

 and for the people who did classics at the time, they would think that they were massively

 successful in what it was that they were doing. They're kind of pushing at the

 boundaries of knowledge. They're incorporating new modes of study. So they're beginning to

 look beyond the texts for the study of the ancient world. So we get, you know,

 looking at Greek art and talking about art outside of texts, which is relatively new.

 We have kind of antiquarians influencing the development of archaeology. And so people

 are looking at kind of material culture as a form of engagement with the ancient world.

 And so they would think that they were doing a great job. But looking back now,

 I think we can see there's all sorts of kind of built-in biases and prejudices

 that kind of accrued to the field at that time. They aren't necessarily unique to classics,

 but classics has had a hard time shaking. And a harder time, I think, than other disciplines

 as well, in large part because it has this, I think it has a reputation for being old,

 traditional, small-C conservative, large-C conservative.

 Yes, well, yes. So I think, as you know, I started uni when I was really old,

 as a mature student. And in my twenties, when I was telling people, you know,

 I wish I had been able to go and study classics properly, everyone said to me,

 do you like reading Jane Austen then? You must be a huge fan of Dickens.

 I think it's fair to say that the name classics isn't really understood

 by the wider public simply because it's not exactly something that the wider public have

 really been invited to. And would you say that that's been a problem

 since pretty much the inception of classics as a field?

 I mean, yes. And the short answer is yes. It has always been a problem because it

 was always framed as the basis of an elite education. And so in that sense,

 it was available only to elites. So you needed money to get into it.

 And, you know, in Oxford and Cambridge, which is the two grand old institutions of classics in

 the UK, basically, you needed to have Greek and Latin just to get into them in the first place.

 And, you know, in Cambridge, I think it was, Cambridge had a Latin requirement for any degree

 up until the early 1960s. So you wanted to go in and do music or something, you had to show that you had basic Latin. So that means that in those places where classics was offered as a degree

 at university level, it is already selecting from people who have had the privilege of

 a private education because they already have a smattering of the languages.

 And that is, you know, part of the problem with the reputation for the discipline.

 And it's also true that, you know, large members of the governing class within the UK

 basically used classics as a common language between themselves, right? So it was a

 shorthand for politics and for power amongst a relatively closed group of people. And as

 people's experiences of like British imperialism or the First World War or the Second World War

 kind of showed the problems in that old kind of aristocratic model of governance.

 And people turned away from seeing Greece and Rome as being relevant to their

 contemporary worlds, you know. I always find it striking that like in the First World War,

 Britain as part of a larger propaganda campaign, so the propaganda in the First World War

 wasn't only about classics, but there was classical elements in the propaganda,

 including Britain framing itself as Athens fighting Sparta, right? So Britain was a,

 you know, a mercantile democracy fighting a militaristic authoritarian power. And the

 Germans on the other side were like, yeah, okay, we're cool with that. We'll be Sparta,

 you'll be Athens. So the German propaganda also framed it as a fight between Sparta and

 Athens with themselves as the Spartans. And so that is like, that's shocking.

 But also in Britain, you know, there was a, I can't remember the name of it, but there was

 basically a department for propaganda that was established relatively early on in the war. And

 several of the members of that department, the senior members, were classicists. And so

 they then put on the side of London buses and posters on the tube an excerpt from

 Pericles' funerary oration, which is a part of the ancient historian Thucydides, who's

 writing about the Peloponnesian War. The reader of Athens at the time is a guy called Pericles.

 He gives this quite famous speech about what it means to be a citizen of a democratic

 city. And so in World War I, they just took an excerpt from that and slapped it

 on the sides of buses and on the tube. And I can't imagine anybody now

 reading a 75-word extract from Thucydides on the side of a bus and thinking that it was relevant

 to themselves.

Although I would say, I mean, during the pandemic, Boris Johnson had a bust of

 Pericles in his office at number 10, which made me laugh because they were both politicians

 who were mishandling a plague. But Jacob Rees-Mogg speaks a lot of Latin in the House

 of Commons even now. So we are still seeing in 2025, we're still seeing classics kind of being

 used by elites to mark them as, I mean, what does it give them? An air of authority, of

 I'm better than you because I have this smart education that I paid thousands of pounds more?

 Do we see a kind of any pushback as universities kind of opened up to a wider

 range of students in the 20th century? Do we see a kind of change in the field?

 Are we seeing a change in what's being studied and what people are interested in?

 Absolutely. It is a massively vibrant and dynamic discipline now. And certainly the classics

 that you, classics broadly defined, encompasses all sorts of really exciting things, right? So

 traditional classics is usually just the study of the texts in Greek and Latin, but we will have

 ancient history or modern classics as a kind of distinct kind of field of its own at the moment.

 And loads of universities in the UK now offer some aspect of classics as a degree,

 either on its own or as a joint degree with other subjects. And there's been loads of people

 who have put a ton of effort into trying to open the field up to a wider range of people

 recognizing that it has this hard to shake reputation of being about boring old dead

 white guys. And unfortunately that is still the case in lots of places. That is still

 the focus, right? There's new stuff on Cicero coming out every year. And I don't have

 anything against Cicero per se, except it's like, do we really need yet another thing about

 this one dude? We're kind of, it's a bit of a poison chalice. So the thing that attracts people,

 like the wider public to classics, would be things like Gladiator or 300, hopefully not

 Gladiator 2. And like Sparta gets blood in the sand or whatever, right? It's those kinds of

 quite traditional sword and sandal stories of adventure and sex and blood.

 Lots of adrenaline.

 Exactly. But it also means it's the same figures that keep cropping up. So

 Caesar, Cicero, Augustus, Alexander the Great, Athens and Sparta, just two of a thousand

 Greek city-states in the classical period. One of the challenges that we have is that people

 are like, well, I'm really interested in myth and I want to come to ancient history. And so

 they come to university and we're like, yeah, we're just not going to tell you the myth. You

 can go read that on your own. We're going to try and complicate these societies for you.

 So it is always a challenge, number one, to try and show people that classics

 is a broad church and that there's room for loads of different sorts of people in there.

 It's also a challenge to try and get people to think beyond the old standard tropes about

 what the discipline is or what it can show us. And sometimes that is pushing at an open door

 because people are like, well, I had no idea. This is so exciting. And sometimes people are

 like, I just want to know about Roman military tactics. It's tricky in that sense. And then

 there's an increasing anxiety within the discipline about arguing for its relevance

 within the modern educational system. But that is an anxiety that is shared more widely

 in the humanities, I think. I think classics got there first, maybe, about being almost a

 certain type of classicist, I would say. There's some people who have never doubted

 the relevance of classics or its place in the world or why they should be doing it or why it

 should be taught in exactly the same way that it's been taught for decades. But I think if

 you're outside of those kind of old established institutions in the UK, there's a lot more

 anxiety about what the discipline is, what it means, where the students are coming from,

 what their backgrounds are like, what are the sorts of stories that we should be telling

 about the past and how we do it. So it's very reflective, I think, as a discipline.

OK. So, I mean, when I was coming out of A-levels, my school, my college didn't offer

 ancient history, classics, Latin, Greek, none of it. So I didn't have anything that was seen as

 relevant. None of the members of staff knew how to get me onto a course that would be

 studying anything to do with ancient Greece or Rome. And I didn't have any of the languages.

 People who kind of knew a little bit about what classics was, in that it wasn't Jane

 Austen, all pretty much said, it's too late because you didn't start learning languages

 when you were seven. It's too late for you to start now as a teenager in a certain amount

 of years ago. So I obviously did manage to get into university decades later. So is there

 what we can say a shift towards welcoming people who don't have a prior background

 so that they can start learning from scratch, even if they haven't been able to learn it

 at school? Is that something that universities in the UK and beyond are really trying to do?

 Lots of them, yes. But not all of them, no. So I think that the educational environment that

 we're operating in at the moment in the UK, but also in North America, is one where

 there's essentially a weird kind of semi-controlled marketplace where we're

 fighting for students and that the metrics that universities are using to judge the success or

 failure of degree programs is largely about number of students versus number of staff.

 And so if you're not Oxford or Cambridge or Durham or St. Andrews or Edinburgh,

 then you can't just coast on a reputation. You can't turn people away necessarily.

 And so you need to find ways to make your programs attractive

 to the students that exist. And so we need to teach the students that we have and not the

 students that we imagine they should be 40 years ago. So I think that there are more

 opportunities for students with an interest in the Greek and Roman worlds to explore that at

 university. And I know that at Leicester, we don't have any requirements for anybody to do

 languages. We don't care what you come in with so long as you have some qualifications. I mean,

 there's minimum tariffs that you have to meet in order to get into the university.

 Once you've done that, we'll bend over backwards to try and make sure that you have

 the best experience possible. And that's not unique to Leicester. That will be every non-

 sort of classics program because we're all small programs relatively, and we're all acutely aware

 of the dangers from university management in a time of funding crisis that are looking to pick

 off small programs and shut them down. So we are fighting for those things. And that's why

 things like the Open University or like distance learning programs or like Birkbeck's evening

 are so vital because they provide non-traditional routes into university for people who have,

 you know, taken different paths or have been told that university wasn't for them

 and then realized that that was bullshit later on. I think the thing that differentiates

 kind of the Oxbridge classics departments from the, especially the non-Russell group

 universities. So there's an elite, a self-selected elite group of 30 odd

 universities called the Russell group in the UK that think that they're kind of the

 arbiters of knowledge. Leicester didn't make it in, not that I'm bitter. And you know,

 amongst those places that offer classics, there is an attempt to kind of not give it a special

 status compared to other humanities degrees. Like the value of humanities education is it

 should make you think, it should give you the tools to be a good critical citizen in an

 complicated world. It should teach you the basics of like media literacy through particular

 case studies. And what differentiates classics from like history or politics or any of those

 other kind of broad humanities fields is the nature of the case studies. So if you're

 interested in Greece and Rome and the cultures of the Mediterranean, then those are the case

 studies that you should pick because they're great. They're great for that. They're great

 training for all sorts of different things. But if you're interested in like the Cold War

 or Nazis or like the Tudors, then do history. And if you're interested in, I don't know,

 to move away from the gold standard in the 1970s and do politics and international relations.

 Obviously showing I don't know much about politics and international relations.

 I think that is the ultimate value of all these disciplines is those broader umbrella

 terms, right? Like the key life skills. And I do think that they're key that they provide,

 that being a critical citizen who is questioning the information that they're being told,

 but not in a like crazy right wing, I'm just asking questions or vaccines are going to kill

 us kind of a way, but rather why are these people saying this? How do we know what we

 think we know? To what extent can we rely on expertise? Like those are really vital

 questions for the modern world and the humanities helps provide you the skills that

 in order to to deal with that situation.

 So I know that when I finally did get to university for the decades before it,

 I was relying on watching every documentary on TV that I could find, whichever books

 that I could find in high street bookshops. And they were all, you know, they're always

 biographies of Julius Caesar talking about Pompeii and maybe the Peloponnesian War or

 Augustus, if you're lucky. So there's not a lot of I'd say what we'd call public engagement

 in a wide variety of ancient subjects. It's always the same couple of things over and

 over again. And quite a lot of the time, I thought that what I was reading was great,

 wonderful. And then I got to university and realized, wow, I've got a lot of

 unlearning to do, because a lot of this is clearly repeating a load of stuff that's

 really out of date. So for people who can't get to university to work out how to do this

 study, how on earth are they expected to be able to work out the things that they find

 on a bookshelf, the things that they see on a BBC documentary? How are they supposed to

 be able to understand that this isn't necessarily current scholarship or even good

 scholarship?

That's a very difficult question to answer. I mean, they're not, is the short

 answer. They're not meant to be able to distinguish between those things. And I think

 the commercial market for ancient history or classics content is such that book publishers

 and production companies are not interested in taking risks in doing something new or novel

 when they know that there is an existing market for the sex lives of the emperors

 or Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. And that's the gap that they want to fill,

 because they see that there's kind of, there's a demand and they can provide the supply.

 And that doesn't mean that there aren't loads of people out there doing good work.

 But it is, I think, impossible for the person who's a non-expert to

 distinguish between those. Yeah, which makes it really hard.

 I don't think there's anything wrong necessarily with there being a distinction

 between public history and what we might think of as academic history. Disciplines

 exist for a reason and disciplinary expertise exists for a reason. And it's not possible to

 make disciplinary expertise available to everybody, because in order to do that,

 they need to go to university. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't make an effort

 to show people why the discipline is interesting and not the standard story that they think it

 is. And I think that there is a market, I think there's an appetite for those kind of

 yet. But I think it is very difficult to kind of police. I mean, it's impossible to police

 academia. So how the hell are we supposed to be policing public history as well? It's just not

 going to happen. And it's like, if we think about, even if we think about Hollywood movies

 and the sorts of bits of the ancient world that they touch on, which is like 99%, it's

 something Roman, because they don't care about the Greek world. In large part, because Roman

 is more familiar to audiences already just through wider culture. And it's the same

 alphabet, so it's not scary. In the same way that Greek stuff is, names are shorter.

 And they tell the same crap stories. Those Hollywood blockbusters, they always hire

 historical consultants. So they always make a pretense of like, we want to make sure that

 we're getting this right. And then they usually just ignore those historical consultants.

 So, you know, Catherine Coleman was the historical consultant on Gladiator. Gladiator happens to be

 a movie that I love. She hated it so much that she had her name taken off as historical

 consultant, and then wrote a series of articles about all the things that she got wrong.

 Like Robin Lane Fox was the historical consultant on Oliver Stone's Alexander

 film, which is one of the worst movies I think I've ever seen, let alone to deal

 with the ancient world. Though his whole thing was like, I'm going to be the historical

 consultant. They're going to either take my advice or not take my advice, but I'm going

 to use this opportunity to get in the film and ride a horse. And so he, on his historical

 consultancy contract, he basically said, anytime there's a calorie charge, I want to be

 in it. And so watching that movie, somewhere in there is Robin Lane Fox on a horse dressed

 as a Macedonian doing a calorie charge. And I think that's phenomenal. Because that's what

 I would do if somebody ever asked me to be a historical consultant. I'd be like,

 you're either going to take my advice or not.

 Moving back to public history. When we see TV shows and we see the books on the shelves,

 again, a lot of it is to do with name recognition. But what I've noticed is that

 a lot of the people that are producing this content for the general public, they're not

 in university teaching positions, or at least they're at the stage of a university career

 where they're not having to teach undergrad seminars that they've got time to spare.

 Would it be fair to say that universities do not incentivise their staff to produce

 things that the public have access to on TV, in books? Is that something that you're

 encouraged to do or something that isn't really seen as a priority?

 Yeah, it's definitely not encouraged. I mean, there's a ridiculous amount of pressure on

 academics and universities to do all of the different bits of our jobs.

 The universities are very happy to leverage public engagement if you've done it,

 but they're not willing to give you support in order to do it. So I don't want to pick

 on individuals necessarily, but like Michael Scott at work, he's done a lot of public

 engagement and he has straddled the line between being an academic writing published

 works and a public historian producing documentaries, usually outlining aspects of

 the Greek world, which have long been neglected. But he basically, I think, had to fight an uphill

 battle in order to manage those two sides of his career. And it was only after he'd

 produced the content that his university was willing to promote it and use it to its own

 benefit. And now, because he's an established figure, they will give him support to do

 those things. But prior to being an established figure, that's just not the sort of support

 that universities are going to provide. The universities love metrics for judging

 academics. And so, they also quite like to change the metrics that they're using

 to judge academics. So student numbers, I already talked about, that's a metric that

 use to judge the success of our programs. Our grant income is something that they also use

 to judge our success. Usually what happens at university is if a department, say we get two

 million pounds worth of grants in a year, they'll say, you did great, next year your

 target is three. And so there's a constant pressure to do more, to get more. And the

 third kind of plank is our research, our published research that they assess us on. There's

 something that occurs every eight or nine years called the REF, which distributes government

 funding to universities on the basis of the quality of the research. And so there's a lot

 of pressure on us to produce academic peer-reviewed research because that's the only stuff that

 counts. The public history is not REFable. We can't submit it for this research exercise.

 And so while everybody would acknowledge this, an important part of what it is that we do,

 it's not the thing that is going to allow us to keep our jobs. Because we can't all be Michael

 Scott and we can't all be Mary Beard. So if you're doing public history, there's a good

 chance that you're just writing a book and it just sits on, they print, I don't know,

 700 copies and it sits in the Waterstones warehouse somewhere and you still have to have

 a job. That's the nature of it, unfortunately. So I think that most people would, if you

 get five academics in a room, you're going to get seven opinions at the end of it.

 But I think most people would agree that public history is a good thing to do. Outreach is a

 good thing to do. Getting people interested in the quote-unquote real stories of the

 classical world was a good thing to do. But ultimately, there's only so many hours in a day.

 Yeah. And it's not what your bosses are pushing you towards.

 No. But if I was good at it, if I was successful at that, for example,

 they would be very happy to push it forward and to leverage it as a lesser success,

 but it wouldn't be because they had given me any specific resource or support in order to do it.

 So I think what I'm seeing is people throw the word gatekeeping around a lot

 and it's not necessarily the fault of the academics themselves and it's not the fault of

 universities necessarily. But what we're seeing is kind of a huge gap in between the stories

 and the information and the level of scholarship that is available on the high street and on TV.

 And then a huge leap, all of a sudden, when you finally get to university,

 if you haven't been able to study at school or college. Huge, huge gap. And all of a sudden,

 anyone who hasn't gone to one of those posh schools has a lot of extra work to do to

 catch up, but also to kind of shed misconceptions that they've picked up through no fault of their

 own. Is this something that is seen in other fields or is Classics just a particularly

 egregious example of it?

 That's a tough question. I mean, obviously I don't know other fields. It would be unfair

 of me to cast judgment on them, but I'll do it anyway. I'd say probably it's an issue that

 occurs to a greater or lesser extent in every field. I think probably things like the sciences

 or pure mathematics probably exist in a different way than it does in... I don't know. I don't

 know how math degrees work. Why would you even choose that? I'm sure if you show up with a

 certain amount of kind of hard, hard practical skills that you would need in order to get into

 those programs in the first place. And so the weeding out is happening at a different stage.

 Where like for us at kind of red brick universities in the UK, like if you apply

 to study ancient history with us, you do need to have some prior qualifications,

 but they don't need to be in history or anything like that, which means that we're

 dealing with a wide range of different backgrounds when students show up. And so then it's our job

 as academics and teachers to make sure that everybody by the end of their first year is

 at the same level. And that's the function of the first year at most universities is to

 provide that broad foundation so that everybody's at the same level. And that's part of why most

 ancient history and classics degrees look the same in the first year. There'll be a Greek history

 course, a Roman history course. There'll be big survey modules basically that are introducing you

 to the fundamentals of the discipline and they're usually narrative and they're usually

 chronological with a little bit of thematic stuff in there to keep it spicy. And then the

 second and the third year, it's all about tearing that down. So now that we're all on

 the same field, we all got the same frame of reference, let's talk about why it's all wrong.

 And that's what we're doing in the second and the third year. How do you translate that to

 the public without the benefit of that broad foundation? I don't know. I suppose if I knew

 how to do that, I'd be a successful public historian.

Now, while I don't want to tell

 people do a classics degree without noting that it's going to be a big investment in time and

 money and one that probably isn't going to give you an ancient history job at the end of

 it, it is really comforting to know that for those who do want to take the plunge,

 it's easier now than it ever has been for them to study this properly at university.

 But for everyone else, perhaps a new place to come and find educational ancient history

 content from experts is needed. So, Dan, do you think that there is a place in the world

 for this podcast and is it worth me creating this show to talk about what we can learn from

 antiquity?

Yeah. Good question. I mean, so the first part to kind of talk about the place

 of the podcast, I think academics are going to love coming on here because we love the

 sound of our own voices, as you could probably tell. So any opportunity to have a chance to

 talk, I think most people will be very grateful for that. Good. I hope so. Also,

 especially within kind of humanities disciplines, you don't get to the position of being an

 academic without having some sort of a passion and a love for the topic. And so we're basically

 all just a bunch of nerds. And so having an opportunity to geek out about the nerd stuff

 that we like, absolutely. Love to do it. In terms of like the, what does it take away

 from the ancient world? You know, despite the challenging situation that there is in universities

 at the moment, I just, I do think that there is real value in looking at the ancient world.

 My own answer to that question has changed over the course of my career.

 As I've explored more aspects of the ancient world and just gotten older and significantly

 greyer, I think, you know, the thing that I find most compelling about the ancient world

 is the ways in which people thought so carefully about what it meant to be a

 critical citizen. And I think one of the fundamental challenges of our time at the

 moment relates to notions of citizenship and power. So when we look at kind of political rhetoric,

 changes of government, kind of the rise of the far right, the kind of the factionalism within the

 left, the kind of catering to the worst impulses of a vocal minority in society

 when it comes to notions about like anti-immigration rhetoric and all that kind of stuff,

 nativism. These are like real challenges of our time. It's scary. But we can see

 in Greece and Rome, people struggling with the same issues. And we can see them

 thinking critically about what it means to be a citizen and to be a responsible part of a

 society. We can see them talking about the value and the dangers of rhetoric.

 We can see them wrestling with extending political power to people who don't have

 the same educational opportunities as the governing elite. We can see all of these

 lessons. When I said at the beginning that ancient history provides a really fascinating

 case studies, this is what I mean. We don't have to just wing it now and hope for the best and

 roll the dice and hope that Elon Musk doesn't doge us all into oblivion. We can actually

 look at the past and see other similar experiments and kind of come up with

 smart and clever responses to the challenges that especially the far right poses to

 contemporary society. Because the far right also turns to the class X as a point of inspiration

 and they're going to use it wrong. We can do the opposite. We need to do the opposite.

Well, good news is that I'm hoping that future episodes will cover all of this and

 more so that everyone is able to spot when the ancient world is being misused for

 various purposes as well as just the cool stories that we all know and love. Thank you so much for

 being the first expert guest on Ancient History 101.

It's a pleasure.

And I'm sure, well, I'm hoping that we will see you again talking about something maybe closer to your heart than Ref. Maybe.

What could be? If the university is listening, there's nothing closer to my heart.

Right. So there we have it. Classics seems exclusive and exclusionary because it was

 designed to be that way. Picking and choosing its scope and its students as narrowly as possible

 and why this has had and why there still often is little incentive for scholars to talk to

 people from the wider world outside of universities and what this means for what we

 have access to. I hope this discussion has gone some way to explain why I'm fascinated with

 ancient history but feel a little hemmed in by it, limited by it, and faintly repulsed

 by the history and ethos of the discipline. I also hope this conversation with Dan demonstrates

 that changes are happening inside academia and that this might change for us outside how we

 about what the ancient world is, what that includes, what we consider important.

 I'm choosing to be the change I want to see and I hope you'll join me as I do so.

 Ancient History 101 is hosted and produced by me, Alexandra Sills. We're part of the

 Monotomy Memory Collective, creators and educators devoted to opening up the ancient

 Mediterranean world and beyond to anyone who wants to know more and also to addressing

 and contextualising the issues surrounding the study of history.

 Ancient History 101 has new episodes every Wednesday.

 Find us on social media or learn more at ancienthistory101.org.