Demystifying the classics
Edith Hall is a far cry from your average classics professor. As we meet her at the Cinnamon Lakeside, she is glamorous and suave, and we discover, on a mission to move the ‘classics’ away from the ‘classy’ (the two words come from the same Latin root). She was also one of the first classical scholars to broach the subject of racism in the classical world.
Edith, a classics professor at Durham University, was a Somerville (Oxford) fellow and has written nearly forty books on the Greek and Roman realms.
‘The happiest version of herself’: Edith Hall. Pic by Akila Jayawardena
Edith was exposed to the ancient world at the Birmingham vicarage of her father, a home littered with copies of the Greek New Testament. She persuaded her father to teach her the curious script at a very young age. Also, at six, her father, the vicar brought in a television set so his parish could watch the 1966 cricket World Cup. Edith would watch on sleepy Sunday afternoons, films like Ben-Hur, Jason and the Argonauts and Spartacus in technicolour with giants and Cyclops and Poseidon and imbibe all the splendour of the classical world.
Edith is the first person to admit that the classical world has bequeathed so much to us. It was as an undergraduate that she discovered Aristotle’s Ethics. Just then she had left the Christian faith, and was questioning why we should lead a good life if (as the capitalists said) “nice guys finish last”…
Aristotle’s Ethics taught her logically that being the best version of yourself will make you happy, and she admits that for all the forty years that followed she has been “the happiest version” of herself.
And then there are the legacies of medicine, art, architecture and culture.
However, classics has historically been the reserve of the elite, and this Edith proposes to change. Mastering Greek and Latin needs lots of leisure and even today’s Britain Latin and Greek are not easily acquired.
Edith criticises this and points out how, even in the top rungs of Indian civil service, those who knew the classical languages were favoured even though those tongues had no use whatsoever in that country.
Some of Edith’s most seminal research was done on racism in the classical world and how it coloured the modern European psyche. In fact she did her doctorate on ancient racism.
She brought out how the Greeks constructed an image of the ‘Other’ – of races like the Persians, Egyptians, Libyans, North Africans, those who live Balkans and Syrians. It was not biological racism but cultural racism – where they characterized these other races as cowardly, lazy, ignorant, or simply not having the same kind of learning.
When it came to the Persians, Edith says they could not apply the same accusation of being ‘uncultured’ (if anything they were more cultured than the Greeks) so they branded them as Islamic.
Unfortunately the Europeans of the Renaissance came across these texts and asserted those opinions over other non-Europeans, as Columbus did when he discovered the New World and famously said that Herodotus was right about the inferiority of non-Europeans.
Another aspect of Edith’s research is about how the working classes, though they had no access to the classics and the classical languages had always been immersed in classical studies. Edith’s own father came from a working class background (though her mother was very ‘bourgeois’) and it was through scholarships that her father was able to be a churchman.
Edith, in a project called The People’s History of Classics, documented how the hoi polloi read up their classics in English translations. Miners would set up libraries and would read Plato, Aristotle and Homer.
They were more interested in the classical heroes like Hercules and Prometheus, and Edith talks about how they used such classical motifs in their banners – showing images, for example of Hercules strangling the ‘snakes of Capitalism’ or ‘of prostitution’.
Despite all this the classical world still has a lot to teach us and that is why, for the past 18 months, Edith has been taking classical philosophy to British prisons, propounding especially Aristotle to show why humans should lead a good life, with no religion coming into it, which, says Edith, is especially beneficial to young inmates.
One of Edith’s best known books is Facing the Furies: Suicide, the Ancient Greeks, and Me, written after four of her close relatives including her grandmother died by suicide. It distils wisdom from the Greek tragedies to help understand the damage caused by suicide and to help those contemplating suicide.
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