Why the Greco-Romans?

The ultimate answer to the question: why do we care about people from over two millennia ago?

Life in Ancient Rome, image from pedro-mundodebabel.blogspot.com, under CC license.

Why on earth did I end up devoting so much time of my life to the ancient Greco-Romans? Some would say that this was the predictable endpoint of a trend. After all, my first academic career was in science (evolutionary biology), which is “obviously” useful. Then I moved to philosophy, the equally obvious epitome of a useless field, they say. But at least I was doing philosophy of science, which didn’t remove me too much from what the truly important stuff. Then I discovered Stoicism and now not only my academic job, but also my outreach efforts and even my personal life are devoted to utterly useless things put forth by dead white men who lived two millennia ago or thereabout.

Well, to begin with, though the Greco-Romans are all definitely dead, and most of them were men (with several remarkable exceptions), they were definitely not “white.” But that’s a story for another day. What I want to explore here is why, exactly, do I and so many others think that it is not a waste of time to reflect on the Greco-Romans. On the contrary, it is one of the most useful things we could be doing.

First, let’s get clear on where the Greco-Romans are useful and were they are not. If your interest is in physics, say, I do not recommend you pick up the homonymous book by Aristotle. You won’t find anything useful there except in terms of the history of ideas.

The same goes for all the other sciences, from astronomy to biology. You will also not learn how to conduct a military campaign by studying the tactics of Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. And you will definitely not gain any insight into divination, astrology, and the like by reading ancient sources, because there is no such thing as divination and astrology is a pseudoscience.

You will, however, definitely learn a lot if you pay attention to ancient philosophy, especially moral and political philosophy, and of course history. Regarding the latter, George Santayana famously said:

“Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it.” (The Life of Reason, 1905)

Though a classic New Yorker cartoon wisely added: “But those who do remember history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.” Oh well.

I should also immediately add that the following considerations do not, of course, hold only for Greco-Roman history and philosophy. That just happens to be what I am (barely) competent to write about and teach, in great part simply as a result of the personal historical accident of having been raised in Rome. What I’m about to say would go for Buddhism, Confucianism, or Daoism, if you happen to be born in India, China, or Japan. As well as for a number of other wisdom traditions across the world.

(This doesn’t mean that I think all wisdom traditions are equally worthwhile. There are differences, and some of these differences are pretty important and consequential. But that also is a topic for another time.)

So here is the first reason why the Greco-Romans are so important: they were human beings just like us. Duh, you may be inclined to say. But hear me out. Our modern societies are superficially very different from theirs: we have science and technology. We have (mostly) abolished slavery. We treat women a bit better. Nevertheless, human nature hasn’t changed. At all.

We, like them, still want the same things and are worried by or afraid of the same things. We want peace and yet constantly engage in war. We want safety and yet may be the target of violence, random or organized. We want to love our partners and children, and we want friends. We’d like health and financial security. We wish to do something meaningful with our lives. So did Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and all the others.

Ancient philosophy will keep being relevant so long as human nature will remain about the same. Should we, at some point in the future, truly start messing around with our genetic inheritance, or engage in the creation of human-AI hybrids, then and only then we will need new philosophies. Maybe, depending on just how much we will be able or willing to change the fundamentals of human psychology. But we are not there yet, and despite continuous predictions to the contrary, I don’t think we are even close.

Second, over the past several millennia we preserved the best of the best, la creme de la creme, and thrown away (and often lost) the rest. Think of it this way: why do we still read Shakespeare, or Dante? Don’t we have good contemporary writers? We do. But Shakespeare and Dante didn’t just have an immeasurably large impact on those who followed them, they are still, very much, good in themselves, a pleasure to read and ponder.

The same goes with Plato & co.. Have you read the Symposium? It’s fun and deeply moving. Still today. Cicero’s On Friendship is arguably the best book ever written on that topic. Seneca’s On Anger has nothing to envy to the American Psychological Association page on anger management. Lucan’s Civil War is still one of the most poignant poems ever written about the horrors of war. And so forth. But weren’t there countless mediocre and completely forgettable philosophers in antiquity? You bet. Just like the overwhelming majority of writers doesn’t hold a candle to Shakespeare and Dante. And so we promptly forgot them.

Third, we learn from the Greco-Romans not when we idealize them, but when we take them seriously for what they were. Were ancient Greece and Rome the cradle of western civilization? Absolutely. But they were also violent, war-mongering societies based on slavery and the subjugation of women.

In other words, they were, in fundamental respects, not in the details, just like our societies. We think we don’t have slavery, and that horrible institution is certainly no longer as widespread as it used to be. But the estimated number of enslaved people in the world today ranges from 38 to 49.6 millions. And that’s without taking into account a far larger number of people who are deeply exploited or have very little control over their lives but do not meet the formal definition of slaves.

The same goes, to pick another example, for the condition of women. Yes, much progress has been made (though ridiculously recently, in historical terms), but much remains to be done. Not to mention that there are other gender-defined minorities that are still struggling to obtain similar rights or protection from discrimination and abuse.

And then there are wars, political corruption, and massive wealth inequality, three staples of the ancient world that are still very much with us today. In fact, our modern science and technology—though they have improved our quality of life in a number of respects—have also made possible to contemplate the very real possibility of the destruction of humankind via nuclear war or environmental collapse. Which means that in some respects things actually got much worse.

(Yes, I’m aware of science- and techno-optimists like Steven Pinker. An in-depth discussion of his work is way outside the scope of this article, but he seems to be right that things have improved according to a number of quantitative measures. Very few, in my experience, deny that. Just ask yourself honestly whether you’d rather live now in most places in the world or pretty much anywhere at any other time. But progress isn’t the same as rooting out problems. And progress can be, and at times has been, reversed. Moreover, absolutely no pre-industrial society has ever faced the very real possibility of near-total human annihilation. We do.)

Fourth, it’s easier to learn from deep history than from contemporary debates. That’s because history allows us the luxury of perspective and, especially, because we are not so emotionally and ideologically committed to people and social mores of the distant past.

If I were to start a discussion here at Figs in Winter on whether the next US Presidential elections carry a risk of a descent into fascism my readers would immediately and irreparably split into factions and would argue passionately as opposed to dis-passionately, rationally, and on the base of evidence. We would never get anywhere and would keep talking past each other until rage or exhaustion would put an end of the exchange.

But, hopefully, very few people feel that strongly about Julius Caesar and Brutus, or Sparta and Athens, or the century-long debates between the optimates and the populares in Republican Rome. And yet, we can easily glean the similarities between those personalities and debates and ours, thus, perhaps, learning something useful in order to improve our predicament.

Think of it like the strategy for social criticism deployed by Gene Roddenberry in the original Star Trek. Captain Kirk, Spock, Dr. McCoy and the others would visit a planet in which one or another of our own societal idiosyncrasies was magnified and made to characterize the entirety of an alien civilization, thus rendering such idiosyncrasies and the absurdities they entail all the more evident. Examples include “Bread and Circuses” (season 2, episode 25); “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (season 3, episode 15); and “The Mark of Gideon” (season 3, episode 16).

Many other sci-fi authors have used the same trick: to nudge us to consider our own society and its limitations by way of painting a larger-than-life canvas about (allegedly) a different, either alien or future society that is easier for us to grasp, deconstruct, and criticize. Some of my favorite examples include Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report” and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (the basis for the movie Blade Runner).

One danger in studying ancient history and philosophy is to incur in the epistemic vice of presentism, the perhaps natural tendency we all have to project our current values back thousands of years, instead of adjusting our moral telescope to the time and place.

We thus risk dismissing out of hand what we can learn from Marcus Aurelius, say, because, you know, he didn’t abolish slavery. As if that were a live possibility for a Roman emperor, and as if we had done it long ago and with minimal effort (remember that Thomas Jefferson had slaves, and that the bloody American Civil War ended only in 1865).

It’s easy to get cocky with Cicero and Seneca when they use the word “effeminate” to indicate unvirtuous behavior, conveniently forgetting both that the Stoics explicitly taught that women are just as rational as men and that women finally obtained their right to vote in the US as recently as 1920. (In Saudi Arabia, in 2015. In Eritrea, they still can’t, as of this writing.)

So these are the reasons I have come to devoid much of my professional and personal time to the study and popularization of the Greco-Romans. Besides, it’s more than a bit of fun!