This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
It is often said that the Humanities are in crisis. If so, this new book by distinguished Roman historian Walter Scheidel should be of interest to anyone who studies or teaches the Humanities, and especially Classics and Ancient History. Scheidel’s proposal, though, is very far from these disciplines’ usual apologetical literature. He advocates for “closing Classics” — that is, the abolition of the very discipline that he and his colleagues are currently paid to teach — and its replacement with a “global” or “foundational” Ancient History.
Press, £25)
Scheidel’s critique of Classics is blunt, irreverent and consciously “disrespectful” (his term). This honesty is refreshing and gratifying. This review is a reply in the same spirit, and it is hoped that it will be taken in good part. For whilst we should be grateful to Scheidel for this contribution to the debate, his proposals are misguided and wrong.
Classics is the study of the Greek and Roman worlds and their environs, from the Bronze Age to Late Antiquity, from all possible angles (historical, literary, philosophical, material). The subject embraces Greeks, Romans and a dazzling array of characters from across Europe, North Africa and a chunk of Asia.
Yet Scheidel objects to the privileged position the Greeks and Romans have been accorded in Western education and culture. He also objects to “Eurocentrism” (though a subject that embraces the likes of Josephus or Septimius Severus stretches the definition of “Europe”). Other periods and areas of the world, he argues, have not received their equal share of attention from historians, owing principally to post-Enlightenment German obsessions with Ancient Greece.
The book opens with a quotation from Wikipedia, surprisingly, which declares that Ancient History covers the history of “all continents” from c. 3,000 BC to AD 500. This should be our subject, says Scheidel. Historians to date, he claims, have been too concerned with the best known and best evidenced periods. They are “looking for lost keys under a streetlight at night simply because that is where the light is”. Scheidel would prefer us to work in the dark.
Scheidel dislikes any notion that the Greeks and Romans were exceptional, which of course is implicit in the very disciplinary name “Classics”. Yet there is something special about the Greeks and Romans. Naturally many other things are special too. But no life spent in contemplation of Greece and Rome has yet been wasted. The content of Classics is its own defence.
Almost anyone who has read the Odyssey or stood in the Roman forum at sunset has felt that magic. Keats knew it when he first looked into Chapman’s Homer. And yet Scheidel has almost nothing to say (good, bad or indifferent) on this content: Herodotus and Polybius get just one mention; Thucydides or Tacitus none at all.
His main quarrel is with modern scholars. The chapter on Altertumswissenschaft is the most interesting in the book and provides a genuinely learned and useful introduction to modern historiography. These Victorian scholars were by no means above reproach (are we today?). Yet the techniques they pioneered greatly increased our knowledge of antiquity.
Scheidel is contemptuous of their enthusiasm for classical literature or art. It is mere Romanticism. Well, what of it? Must we cast out not just the Greek poets but Schiller and Goethe as well? Enthusiasm may at least cause less harm, and prompt more good, than cynicism.
But if Classics has so much to recommend it, Scheidel asks, why is it in “crisis”? The reasons are complex, multifarious and extended through the Humanities. There is no sign that “global classics” would be any more immune. Costs to universities continue to go up, whilst income does not. And yet Classics courses do continue to recruit.
Were student numbers the only issue, we could be confident in maintaining current levels of faculty and research. By no means are all our students “privileged”, and our classes are increasingly diverse. Classics really is for everyone, regardless of race.
What then of the alternative “foundational” ancient history? This new discipline would explain how the global foundations of modernity came to be. In essence, it is a story of how the wheel was invented (ironic in a book that sets out to reinvent the wheel). The problem with such an approach is that, as with our modern cities, everything starts to look the same.
For classicists, writers like Plato or Cicero can become like living friends
In jettisoning ancient texts, we lose the best way of making ancient history come alive. Millions of people every day turn to an ancient book, the Bible, for comfort and guidance. Similarly, for classicists, writers like Plato or Cicero can become almost like living friends. In their place, Scheidel offers the nameless, silent, undifferentiated masses that founded our world through years of unchanging toil. Of course, there is a certain heroism in that struggle. Or at least there would be, if Scheidel did not feel such horror at value judgements: he cannot admit that they made the world any better because to do so would imply a hierarchy of development, which for ideological reasons he cannot accept.
So we are left with a history of meaningless labour that resulted in something no better or more beautiful than anything else that might have happened. Why this should inspire students is far from clear.
Scheidel is right to stress the value of comparative approaches, and some of his criticisms of parochialism are just. Yet specialisation need not prevent interdisciplinarity, nor is an interdisciplinary approach always necessary. Good research is done when the right methods are selected to fit particular problems, not by imposing top-down “research priorities”.
Interdisciplinary research works best, as Scheidel observes, when subject specialists collaborate. For that you need classicists, alongside other specialists. Division of labour is mandated by limitations of the human brain; proficiency in skill (techne) is impossible without specialisation, as Socrates knew.
Scheidel’s plan for global ancient history abolishes subject-specific training, especially language learning. “Just how much language expertise do ancient historians actually need?” Minimal engagement with literary and documentary evidence in the original language “is certainly good enough”. The shallowness of his ambitions is breathtaking. Pages might be written on the interpretation of a single sentence of Thucydides, but fear not, chaps, because soon an AI bot will produce a translation that might just about do!
A certain chippiness appears to underlie Scheidel’s insouciance — a resentment of colleagues complaining in “faculty meetings” that one’s languages are “not quite up to snuff”. But whilst none of us is perfect, we have a duty to be better and for ancient historians that includes improving our language skills.
If Scheidel succeeds in “closing Classics”, where then will all those parts of Classics that are not ancient history go? Scheidel gives no answer, except to say blithely that “experts will always be with us”. But it is a fair guess that, should such learning continue, it will be within Literature or Philosophy departments. Another kind of specialisation replaces Classics, and a holistic understanding of the ancient world becomes impossible. How is this better?
Yet it is quite uncertain that there will “always be experts”. Scheidel’s plan is a gift to university administrators seeking to close departments. As students learn increasingly less about more, how will they gain the necessary expertise? The “mastery” of specialist techniques (a term Scheidel dislikes) requires investment in time and effort. By contrast, Scheidel’s plan encourages students not to worry about such “costs” and enjoy the freedom of becoming intellectual magpies.
Of course, Scheidel will claim that he intends no such thing. Classics, he retorts, cannot be “both incomparably valuable and incomparably fragile”. And yet it is in the nature of valuable things to be fragile; we fear their loss because we value them. He may argue he wants only a broader, more comparative perspective. Such a proposal would have been welcome.
But the struggle between Classics and “foundational history” is zero-sum. In the brave new world, a scholar of “say, early South Asia” would be expected “to succeed one who studied classical Athens”. And as “some budding traditionalists are turned off by change”, Scheidel’s preferred kind of students and colleagues will come in. There is no suggestion here of increasing resources, just redistribution to the right people.
The “traditionalists” amongst us may justly suspect that what we are being offered here is the prescription of Medea: I will restore you to youth, if you would just let me cut up your limbs and boil them in my cauldron.
There is something peculiarly joyless and authoritarian about “global classics”. The choice offered is to spend more time complaining about predecessors’ failings, the present structural inequalities or the reasons for our own shortcomings. Or we can get on with our work as teachers and scholars. I know which I’d rather do.
