In defense of Western civilization
BarcelonaPerhaps some of you have read the monumental SPQR by Mary Beard, the work of a lifetime of research on ancient Rome. In her new book, the author places us inside the intimate core of that research, with a piece of advice: "The underlying message is that you get much more out of the classics if you revere them less". A phrase that we can apply to all our inclinations: hobbies, habits, beliefs, politics, sport... It is not a bad thing to take a bit of distance, a therapeutic dose of skepticism towards what we consider "ours". It is about doing so, however, without losing the passion, for example the one Mary Beard has dedicated to ancient history, and which she now serves us with amenity in the autobiographical text Unfiltered Classics (Columna, in translation by Joan Solé).
Summer is over. We have said goodbye to the months of July (named after Julius Caesar) and August (dedicated to his nephew Augustus, the first emperor). There are so many details of our daily life that come from the Romans! But cultures are always hybrid. Now that the European far-right brandishes the scarecrow of the Muslim threat over "Christian Western civilization", Beard warns us that our background is a fabulous mixture, a labyrinthine complexity.
The misogyny and violence of the classical world
Beard says: "Western civilization (however we define it) is not well understood if we disregard Judaism, Islam, medieval Christianity and all the other elements, and limit ourselves to trying to jump directly to classical Athens and Rome". Of course, she also puts Islam into the Western sack. It is one of the three great monotheistic religions with common roots born in the Mediterranean. It does not come from Asia or the Far East. And the culture and science of Ancient Greece were largely recovered through the Arab world. But neither Meloni nor Le Pen nor Weidel nor Orriols, nor the males of their ilk, must have read Mary Beard, right? Or perhaps I am mistaken, because the classical world was also full of misogyny, violence and, of course, slavery. Undoubtedly, the fascism and imperialism of the 20th century found part of their inspiration in the Roman world, a civilization, by the way, that for centuries massacred Christians. So, where do we stand? Christian Western civilization?
The danger is reducing the past to our narrow convenience, from a schematic, monolithic, sectarian presentism. As Beard says, what counts is not so much the past as "the debate between us and antiquity". A debate without fear, with freedom. Not for nothing, Greco-Roman antiquity has many faces, from the great Homeric literature –now we have at hand the spectacular film version of Homer's Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan– to genocides, for example, the one that the conquest of Gaul entailed. The Romans themselves could be very critical of their world. Tacitus, a historian, at the end of the 1st century, wrote: "They make a desert and call it peace".
Beard uses her dialogue with the ancient world to make us think and doubt, to help us question what we are and where we want to head. She invites us to be surprised and to learn. Any excuse is a good one to start. Her magical "wow effect" arrived quite early, one day in 1960 while visiting the British Museum with her mother, when a museum curator opened a display case for her so she could admire a piece of bread from Ancient Egypt up close. Who knows what specific curiosities awakened the thirst for knowledge in Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle, the philosophers who have inspired, and still inspire, Western wisdom.
In Beard's case, thirteen years after that piece of bread, she was at Cambridge studying classics. Since then, she has not stopped admiring and reflecting herself in them: "The ancients are more wonderful and more moving when we can recognize something of ourselves in them." Like discovering that in Pompeii there were more than a hundred bars, cafes, and fast-food (or takeaway) establishments. Or the diverse humanity projected by this poem written by the Irishman Louis MacNeice, himself a classicist: "And when I should be remembering the exemplary models of Hellas / I think instead / Of the bandits, the adventurers, the opportunists, / The carefree athletes and the conceited youths, / The sophists, the pedants, the hardened skeptics, / And of the Agora and the noise / Of the demagogues and the charlatans; and of the women who / pour / Libations over the graves / And of the temporizers of Delphi and the fools / of Sparta, and finally / I think of the slaves". Greeks and Romans, at once so distant and so close. Thank you, Mary Beard.