The Trouble with Classicists

All classicists are right-wing. This is an unfortunate but incontrovertible fact. When dealing with Greeks of the ancient variety, this garish society riven with wild political, philosophical and aesthetic ideas is perenially represented as a white stone collonade through which bearded men wielding tablets of stone walk gracefully, pontificating to each other. Occasionally with 'young companions'. I wanted to be a classicist for a little while. I read the one or two books that didn't represent Athenian direct democracy as a psychotic mob rule, and tried not to think too much about the less enlightened line on slaves and women. I went to Athens itself, read lots of Apulieus, Lucian, Aristophanes and other of the less ah, Platonic Greek writers and hung around the agora looking wan. Eventually this ended when I was nearly failed for an essay on the political theory of Plato and Cicero and since then have seldom looked back. But reading Lewis Mumford's The City in History reminded what a fascinating, contradictory society this was, pioneering everything from Fascism to Anarcho-Syndicalism before they'd established a system of drainage.



So yesterday I went to the Greek rooms in the British Museum for the first time in years. This 18th century work of delibidinisation occasionally produces some interesting juxtapositions, especially with respect to the gallery housing the 'Elgin Marbles' filched from the Parthenon. Ignore the tedious frieze and go straight up to the fragments of the pediments and the metopes. Francis Bacon used to come here obsessively, and you can see why. The chaotic state of the sculptures- headless, dismembered, ragged, the marble covered with rot that evokes veined flesh- works against their recuperation, instead they feel horribly alive. There's something shocking about the huge gaps and scars, the way the face of a centaur, contorted into a snarl, will be obliterated on one side where the stone has broken. Likewise, the rooms nearby with their collections of Hellenistic tat reveal the birth of kitsch (contra-Greenbergites who would posit it as a 20th century invention): endless figurines, household gods and tokens of the semi-deified imperialist and proto-matinee idol smoulderer, Alexander the Great- and especially when you can still see traces of the paint, the very crassest of pinks and blues.