slowly...slowly...

ever so freaking slowly, the discipline known as "classics" is moving away from its crippling attachment to the 19th century. the discovery of a way to read previously unreadable papyri found in egypt is exciting, not only for the content they contain, but also because it will introduce a whole new series of texts for which there is no 19th century baggage.

this may be a pet peeve of mine. one thing that so infuriated me as a classics student was its desperate insistence on retaining the narrow-minded attitudes of the victorian scholars. while it is true that we do owe quite a lot to them, to their studies and archaeology and translation, they have also crippled the discipline by essentially being too influential. where in literature and art, for instance, critical techniques have progressed and idealogies such as feminism, post-modernism, and post-colonialism have been allowed to add their own level of interpretation, the concept of a "feminist classics scholar" (for instance) would still strike many in the field as an oxymoron (women in 19th c england weren't even allowed to learn greek). many classics scholars still have problems with the idea of "context," for example, and venerate the unfortunate gentleman whose life work was a book on greek particles, which are one-syllable words that are not even translated.

the chance to get new translations of new texts, as opposed to a new translation of oedipus rex/oidapos tyrannos is extremely exciting to me as a somewhat lapsed 21st century classics scholar. the classics offer so much knowledge on where we came from as the western civilization that their decline in popularity is nothing short of tragic. we need to shed the idealogical restrictions surrounding the discipline and make it accessable to everyone. the classics informed who knows how much of western art that followed. why study shakespeare when you can't understand the allusions he's making? no wonder people have no desire to learn these things anymore; they're seen as remote, confusing, and utterly irrelevent to modern life. the misconception of these artists as "dead white men" has more to do with the narrow-minded men who are attmepting to preserve their dominance over the art and knowledge than it actually does to the original sources themselves. classics are not all the high-minded (and boring) sentiments of aeschylus; they are the obscene poems of ovid, the fart jokes of aristophanes, the anger and passion of euripides. oedipus rex is all the fault of a 19th c theoretician named sigmund freud. euripides' bacchae is not only more interesting, with more complex characters, but it also offers us today an amazing parallel in the chorus's desperate fear of "unbridled female sexuality." in this amazing period of cultural self-discovery, it depresses me to see people turn their back on the very things that can help them see where they came from.

postscript: as an aside, it is absolutely amazing to see what egypt, of all places, has done for the study of the classical world. something like 90% of our extant sappho library is the result of papyri that had been ripped into strips and used to line a sarcophagus. these papyri came from a trash dump. when the library at alexandria burned, countless manuscripts were lost. personal idealogical considerations aside, it's exciting merely as a scholar and an academic to see these lost works come to light again.