To the Future of the Past: a Gingerly Toast

History's flux aside, the Cambridge Classics faculty must have always fancied itself at the rear, van and centre of ancient world study. If its position has largely remained constant, what has changed is the aptness of that opening metaphor in the articulation of what classics is about, what classics does. As 'classics' has precipitated into a field like all the others - one tightly regulated range of Dewey numbers in the sum of human knowledge - it has also, simultaneously, turned into a battlefield. Fighting off attacks on all fronts, classics has become an exercise in self-defence as much as anything else; the anxiety of relevance has been so deeply internalised in the discipline that even the greatest practitioners of the thing, the beacons in an intellectual twilight, are wont to be asked repeatedly, and ask themselves repeatedly: 'why?' To some extent, the existential pangs are common ground among all the humanities at the historical moment: sweep the soft carpet of public money out from under anyone and they'll feel those raw floorboards splintering their back and puncturing their self-worth. The murmurs of the classicist are bound up with the nail-biting of the philosopher and the goosebumps of the historian. The hunched back and atrophied muscles of the professor are finally being called up to fight for survival - and, surprise of millennia, it's not going that well at all.

Those tidbits of gloom-mongering were a dime a dozen at a gigantic classics conference held in the Cambridge faculty last week. Recognising full well that you can't do classics without picking up a heightened sense of irony along the way, the brain behind the meeting chose to call it 'Cambridge Triennial 2011: a Celebration of Classics'. Pre-colon was solid enough: this Oxbridge effort happens every three years (alternating between Oxford and Cambridge), one of the best (well, quality if not quantity) conferences on the calendar for our fair subject. Post-colon on the other hand was, in the course of the proceedings, unveiled as a cruel joke. 'Celebration' turned out to have the lugubrious resonance of a 'celebration' of someone's life at their funeral; half-hearted smiles and fond memories vainly claiming to compensate for the grim fact that the person is DEAD. And all the while uncle Tom sat in the corner getting drunk, screaming that he never liked the fucker anyway.

I predictably exaggerate; but the question 'whither a whimpering Classics?' was certainly a refrain of the conference whose frequency made it difficult to ignore. The tone was perhaps set by the timely announcement that the teaching of classical languages at Royal Holloway (one of the colleges of the University of London) was about to be scrapped, with sizeable staff cutbacks to match. Everyone knows that UK humanities, and tertiary education in general, are gurgling down the plughole thanks to those brave Oxonians in government; but the Royal Holloway news had such talismanic force for many classicists precisely because it seemed so safe there. Like Oxford and Cambridge, the University of London is one of those dusty places the classicist would always retreat to in her weaker moments, one of those few institutions with synecdochic importance for the discipline, containing the message blazoned across its chest in Carolingian Minuscule: 'Classics: If Not Here, Then Nowhere'. The number of British classicists that googled 'civil service jobs' on the day the Royal Holloway music died must have been astronomical. I certainly started dreaming of a kind of paradisiacal bank that would need my sensitivity to poetic ambivalence in order to turn a profit: 'You tell me to buy or sell as if they were disjunctive phenomena; but are they not - I submit to you, Mr. Goldman Sachs - two sides of the same coin?' I was promptly fired and forced to sell my sensitivity to poetic ambivalence for hits of crack diluted with cornflour.

My own personal nightmares were what they were; but needless to say the general mood was severely affected by the fog over Royal Holloway. And of course it didn't help that the first plenary address of the three-day ancientfest was given by none other than a great scholar from...Royal Holloway. Edith Hall had written a famous book called 'Inventing the Barbarian', so the obligatory reference to the barbarians at the gate of classics was already knocking in the chair's introduction. Her speech itself was about deliberation and democracy in the Athens of Sophocles, and the processes of such that filtered into his tragedies. Her last powerpoint slide drew the barbed point that everyone knew was coming even if they couldn't quite see how (a bit like tragedy itself): no deliberation, consultation or democracy to be seen in the university administration that ravaged one of its departments at the drop of a hat. People loved this conclusion, and allotted a good measure of applause accordingly; I myself lapped up the energy and politicisation of a crowd which, in the long light of history, is not quite famed for broad social conscience. But I still (as ever) felt tremours of guilt and reservation vibrate between the vigorous claps. Was this not the very definition of middle-class activism - only devoting yourself to a cause when your immediate interests are threatened? It's certainly difficult to make a clean case for the indispensability of classics to humanity from the position of someone who gets paid to do it. To a (cynical) outside observer surveying speaker and captive audience, it would have looked like a wholly consistent collection of self-reinforcing 'you would say that's and 'you would clap there's.

A central bind, as I see it, is that those who are best qualified to expatiate on the value of classics in terms of knowledge (the people that do it, that is) are least qualified to preach in terms of moral position; and yet, self-evaluations delivered by someone whose neck is in the noose are neither innocent nor trustworthy, but they are still more accurate than the executioner's own valuations, the person that looks and sees only a job to do and a nuisance to get rid of. The classicist is made into a precarious mix of advocate and defendant, the one that isn't necessarily, but could well be, saying anything to save their own skin. One of the grand arguments deployed in the humanities tends to monopolise humanity itself, claiming something like 'the humanities make us more human' or 'humans are no longer human without the humanities'. I've always been sympathetic to this warm and fuzzy sentiment, especially when fleshed out convincingly in a book such as Martha Nussbaum's recent 'Not For Profit'. But as I drank in the programmatically and ambitiously titled first conference paper 'Reception: A New Humanism?', I found myself bristling a little over the implicit hubris. There was talk of classical reception (a recent growth-area of classics, in simplified version a charting of the classical world's influence on and afterlife in the history of art, literature, philosophy etc) stepping up to become the 'saviour' of classics - as if the subject had messianic value not just for classics itself, but for humanity in general. There was talk of ten year plans and setting the agenda, controversy over the pedagogical worth of the canon or a canon...as if we were determining the future of humanity that very day, in that very cramped lecture room. Again, I couldn't help positing the outside observer, perhaps the cleaner who would come in the evening, to whom these debates would be so many half-empty plastic bottles and a couple of scrunched-up handouts. Even if we were to let stand the very circumscribed and elite definition of humanity that 'humanism' throws at humans, even if we were to agree that the human would be irrevocably impoverished without the humanities, the jungle would merely thicken the further we hacked; for the question would have to be begged: 'Humanities, ok - but why Classics?'

And yet I couldn't even beat the first hurdle. Does the study of the humanities really create more sympathetic human beings, equipped to flit fleetly into the lives of others, tolerant, compassionate, generous? Or does it create shrivelled husks of humanity that prefer their books to their fellow beings, rendering them misanthropic carriers of some kind of torch - but a torch that would only illuminate the 'cultured' half of humanity as they worked at their desks, and happily incinerate the rest? Classics, second perhaps only to mathematics in the high-level autism it generates/attracts, doesn't exactly specialise in positive exempla of humanity. Plenty of people I've met in this discipline wouldn't quite fit the open, calm, smiley prescription of humanity that you might want to put in photographs for a 'Welcome to Planet Earth' brochure. Nor is this wholly their fault; the pressure of the academic climate is not the best at producing collaborative and patient members of the species. As with all segments of modern capitalism, the free market education system needs a lesser version of humanity to thrive: a jostling crew of selves competitively defending their intellectual property. So if humanism were all it's cracked up to be, I felt, then it should be the antidote to this shrunken homunculusness, not another victim of it. But nothing around me told me so; it was all ill-fitting suits, publishers' stands, intellectual tussling, taut minds, contracted bodies.

Until, that is, our own Messiah came: in the guise of Tony Grafton. Feeling shrunken and guilty myself over taking a few days off 'urgent' work time, I very nearly missed this gem of a plenary address; the title piqued my interest, but no more than the usual vague titular titillation ('How Classical was the Classical Revival? Jews and Judaism in the Renaissance Vision of Antiquity'). The speaker was unfamiliar, and my excursions into the history of classical scholarship had never made it past the corner store. All signs were pointing to an escape to the library; but slowly I wrestled myself out of the desire with some familiar self-guilt-tripping: 'How often do you get a chance to learn from people rather than books in this game? When did reading that shitty article become more important than learning something new? Your failure to attend this lecture is an indirect capitulation to the iron grip of RELEVANCE. Sit your ass down home slice.' Bowing to the commands of my internal monologue was, in this case, one of the best decisions of my life.

The talk was, as (I think) the Germans say, balm for the soul. It featured wit and sparkle, but these can always be later additives; what was really unique was the combination of good humour with the solid research nugget you simply can't invent from nothing. Its humbly-put claim was really quite revolutionary (bear with me): that for at least two of the great renaissance classical scholars, Isaac Casaubon and Joseph Scaliger, the study of Hebrew and the traditions of Judaism was a fundamental comparative pivot for their more famous work on Latin and Greek. This may not sound like much to most; but for a young classicist trained in the idea of the renaissance as a reflowering of the Classical world, confined to the hermetic corpus of Greek and Roman, it was a beautiful moment of seeing history afresh. Avid, prolific readers both of them, the Greek manuscripts that passed through the hands of Casaubon and Scaliger are littered with comments in Hebrew; indeed, one of them (Casaubon?) spent so much time in autodidaxis that he could translate bits of complex Greek into Hebrew like it was going out of fashion (which it probably was). Bent double over a desk in the Bodleian, this scholar-figure made our own conception of classics, however broad, seem sickeningly narrow. The best talks, I find, make you want to learn everything merely by adumbrating the boundaries of your own knowledge and gesturing to a perimeter outside - and once the perimeter has moved once, there is no necessity that it remain in place there either. If Hebrew, why not Aramaic? Why not Akkadian? Why not classical Chinese? Classics became, in a rare moment, not an intimidating collection of German monographs on Juvenal's use of rhetoric, but an open field of ever-receding borders. Wonderful and humbling, yes; but the question was: humanising?

The talk answered this too. One of its other distinctive marks was the amusing snatch of biography surfacing from time to time; Casaubon and Scaliger were not just marginal comments on a manuscript, but letter-writers too, full participants in their unique historical moment. Grafton had mentioned, half-way through the talk, a young Jew in Oxford who sat with Casaubon and gave him one-on-one Hebrew lessons. This important character made another appearance in the final anecdote. The university had gotten wind of the man's linguistic expertise and wanted to appoint him a professor of Hebrew; but given the strict intertwining of institution and religion, that couldn't happen without the man's conversion to Christianity. Happily Jewish, the man had no interest in converting, and so, as the pressure mounted, he fled Oxford. The university authorities tracked him and hauled him back, imprisoning him as punishment for the affront, and assurance that it wouldn't happen again. Casaubon heard the news and intervened immediately, doing everything in his power to free his former tutor; eventually he went right to the top, writing the archbishop with a special plea for the man's freedom. It was granted, and our man walked: still himself, still Jewish.

The message fell short of rocket science and tumbled towards triteness, but was powerful for its clear intelligibility: in an atmosphere of normalised suspicion and hostility, where anti-semitism was the absolute default, the understanding gained from a deep relationship with another culture chiefly through text, was directly transmitted into appreciation, tolerance, friendship. One of the most basic operations of the humanities - our equivalent of addition or multiplication - is comparison. We compare things that seem different to show they are the same, at least as much as we compare things that seem the same to show they are different. The constant acts of connection and comparison performed daily by Casaubon settled in his mind until the commonalities between 'his' culture and another were habitual and obvious. This was the grand tradition of sympathetic humanism at its basic best: training by text to appreciate another human being, activating this training into a political intervention. As the story washed over me, I felt a lump in my throat.

The tears were already forming as the applause rolled on for many, many seconds; but it took Malcolm Schofield's dignified response for the real wells to start flowing. He took Grafton's words and put them side by side with the Norwegian killing spree, one final act of time-straddling comparison to close. But this comparison showed differences, opposites: on the one hand, a humanism that created a bond between two full-fledged humans; on the other, a narcissistic extremism that denied to others what it granted in full measure to the self. If we can claim anything as classicists, we can claim that our efforts to familiarise the past are parallel to, and fortify, our efforts to know our fellow humans; and our efforts to distance it can't do much else other than increase our enabling sense of relativism, make us aware that if humanity was different in the past, there is no reason that it can't be different (better) today, tomorrow. The practice of classics is just one (particularly good) way to dissolve stony extremism into harmless, silly-looking sherds. Anthropology will do it, philosophy will do it, literature will do it; the humanities will do it. If classics jumps in as an important player, it would do well to drop its rhetoric of 'foundational importance', as if it owned the humanities by spawning all of them. Rather - there being no I in team - it should take its place alongside every arbitrarily divided realm of human knowledge and stand or fall as all or nothing. Humanity doesn't depend on it; but a better humanity does.