A few months ago, I read an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the state of the field of classics, and the need for change in that field. Johanna Hanink claimed that “classics is probably second only to American history for the size of its nonacademic fanbase.” People like to read about antiquity and make wide sweeping comparisons between the ancient world and our contemporary situation. I can see this illustrated in the popularity of books on Roman history (e.g. Mary Beard’s SPQR). Recently there have been books on classical issues and figures, but that take a very contemporary approach, specifically those that take a subversive look at myth and ancient authors like Helen Morales’ Antigone Rising, Donna Zuckerberg’s Not All Dead White Men. Then there are “how to” guides that provide translations of ancient authors, with a contemporary title, like How to Win an Argument: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Persuasion. The title alone tries to push for the relevance of the ancient ideas in our contemporary world – of course we want to win arguments (especially on social media). All of these details show some of the ways that writers make classics relevant for our everyday world. Writers address these pieces to wide audiences, providing explanations and details, translations and timelines, so that even those who don’t know ancient languages can be engaged, can see the importance of the messages. I find these moves to be relatable, because they help explain how the field of classics is still relevant and as important as ever.
In ancient Rome, Roman men wrote and spoke for audiences of other Roman men. To be a Roman citizen was to be a man, women and slaves didn’t count as people. The question of audience was not really something to mull over then – the audience was men, men who were literally standing in front of you. Even with poetry, the Homeric poems contain many markers of audience in the way that they repeat phrases and use epithets: the poems were long, they were not only easier to remember that way, but also easier for the listener to follow because they provided specific descriptors. Athena is always grey-eyed, Achilles, swift-footed.
Ovid starts his Metamorphoses by identifying the audience of his poem as people who are part of his own time by writing that the stories he tells in his poem reach his own time. This gets changed a bit in translations like Mandelbaum’s, who changes the “mea… tempora” in Latin (my time), to “our time,” which makes anyone reading today think that perhaps the stories have some relevance now afterall. In the first poem of his book of poetry, Catullus dedicates his “libellum” (little book) to Cornelius Nepos, a historian. Catullus and Cornelius Nepos ran in the same literary circles. And Catullus was concerned with his preservation, wanting to be remembered, wanting to be remembered by someone who thought something of his writing (as he claims Nepos does). A dedication, perhaps, was an assumption that the person would read the poems, a very narrow audience.
Like with other characteristics of ancient writing, the repetitive nature of Homeric poems to help with memory, or epithets to help with meter and identification, which I mentioned earlier, these characteristics no longer represent the ethos of the writer today or they are not considered positive characteristics because our writing styles have changed and are no longer oral, but instead, our culture has a great deal of literacy and ability to read. Now, we identify audiences with certain rhetorical moves, moves that seem slippery, and often seem to have to do with subject matter, or they require us writers to imagine an audience, imagine a piece of writing as part of a situation. But I am still learning. I am learning to trade in my fiction writing habits and skills, and learning instead the moves of academia, the dry but very clear ways of articulating who I’m writing for. And I am also trying to use those familiar habits to help me become a better academic writer. As Walter Ong puts it, and because of the increase in literacy and written language, the audience is a fiction, a more amorphous and imaginary mass, something the writer should articulate for herself, and write for always, but which is also imagined.
When I think about who I write for, I often think about my students, specifically my Latin students, who need to know about the ways that the stories they wade through and read and translate have some kind of wider impact outside of the classroom, that they matter. They need to know that Latin and the stories we have read aren’t just about doing the challenging and painstaking work of translation. They need to know that the stories are relevant, that they have their own kairotic moments, but that they also have meaning in our world today. Providing my students with examples of writing that aren’t just scholarly articles or books, but rather are for wider audiences of people who might not even know the language, but might be familiar with the stories. It is important to show them that they can write for these audiences, too.
Hanink, Johanna. “A New Path for Classics. The Chronicle of Higher Education. 11 February 2021. https://www.chronicle.com/article/if-classics-doesnt-change-let-it-burn?cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in. Accessed 27 August 2021.
Alexandra Sladky 