Book name: TALKING CLASSICS: THE SHOCK OF THE OLD
Author: Mary Beard
Published by: Profile, Price: Rs 699
To talk of classics at a time when Artificial Intelligence is the order of the day may appear to be quixotic, if not downright irrelevant. And, yet, it is to the credit of Mary Beard, one of our best-known classicists, that she writes about the classics with humour, elegance and erudition, pointing both to the fun and the continued salience of understanding and inhabiting the world of the ancients as moderns. The purpose of the book is not to come up with a starchy defence of cultivating the classics or the humanities for that matter, but simply to share the author’s excitement and enthusiasm for her chosen passion that began with an unexpected first-hand, tactile encounter with a piece of 4,000-year-old Egyptian bread. That sense of wonder — what the Greeks would call ‘thauma’ — stayed with her as she carefully and systematically cultivated the skills necessary to understand the world of the ancients and to reflect on larger questions of the nature of the past and on ways of accessing and apprehending it. Her reflections yield fascinating insights into human nature and social order, about the impossibility of reading all the codes and getting them right, and about the joys of discovering both the familiar and the bewilderingly unfamiliar. As she puts it, “the classical world is both wonderfully familiar and tantalizingly inaccessible”, a challenge that she could not resist taking up.
One strategy that Beard adopts to make the classical accessible is the juxtaposition of modern interpretations with existing fragmentary artefacts. Tony Harrison’s play, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, which recreated the comedy of Sophocles, is a case in point wherein she draws attention to the challenges of papyri reconstruction and to the distinct priorities of modern researchers for whom the study and the understanding of the past never hold just one set of meanings. The same strategy gives us a glimpse of everyday life in the reconstruction of a restored painting of a bar at Pompeii that seems superficially familiar but is actually not, given that we have no idea of the social codes that regulated relations among the figures present. It is this uncertainty of knowledge that makes Beard’s work so important for it is a powerful reminder that a conversation with the classical past has to be on the terms of humility, uncertainty and wonder, not a simple appropriation to facilitate the weaponisation of the past that leaders in the past, like Benito Mussolini, did and leaders in the present do.
For Beard, the classics possess, paradoxically enough, the ability to disturb and unsettle the modern condition. There is much that we simply cannot fathom even if there is the tendency to reduce it to a digestible paradigm. She cites the example of Odysseus brutally gouging the single eye of a giant whose home he had invaded. Here, as readers, who do we stand with: the barbarian or the hero-interloper? These are awkward questions that force a degree of self-introspection which cannot be a bad thing. Responding to these questions involves not just a degree of literacy but a measure of curiosity and the capability to interrogate, to think afresh, that go beyond predictable content consumption. Not that Beard suggests classics and education in classics as an antidote to the trauma that AI has generated but that the field offers valuable insights into politics and contestation. She points out how the classics were used for unsavoury political gain and propaganda while forcefully demonstrating the openness of the classical world that cannot actually be corralled to support any modern ideology.
Reading Beard is deeply illuminating. She gives us fascinating pointers in a light and relaxed vein to understand the enigma that the classical world was — a world that was neither straightforward nor possessed of all the answers that we look to the past for as moderns. One wishes that we had scholars who took a similar approach to our own classical traditions and examined the rich corpus of classical poetry, philology, philosophy and history without either reflexive celebration or condemnation. That would yield not just fascinating insights into society and its transformation but also help us value ambiguity and uncertainty about the past and its inhabitants.