How studying the classics became racist

Watching last month’s riot at the US Capitol on TV, Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a respected Princeton University classicist, noted certain features with particular grimness.

In the crowd of Trump supporters, he saw a man wearing a T-shirt printed with a golden eagle and fasces, the bundle of rods that symbolised Roman law, below the logo 6MWE, which stands for “Six Million Wasn’t Enough,” a reference to the Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

He also saw flags embroidered with the phrase that the Spartan king Leonidas is said to have uttered when ordered by Xerxes to lay down his arms: molon labe, classical Greek for “come and take them” and the slogan of American gun rights activists.

This played into his own preoccupation, which is threatening the centuries-old world of classical studies. For he has said he hopes that the classics will die out.

As recounted in an article about Padilla in The New York Times, the professor believes that the classics have been embraced by the far right, whose members hold up the Ancient Greeks and Romans as the founders of so-called white culture. Online racists have adopted classical pseudonyms: the white-supremacist website Stormfront once displayed an image of the Parthenon in Athens alongside the tagline “Every month is white history month,”

Read the article by Melanie Phillips in The Australian (from The Times).