The Elasticity and Capaciousness of Classics

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• The Elasticity and Capaciousness of Classics
• Barbara K. Gold (bio)

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Classics/Classical Studies/Greek and Roman Studies (whatever we want to call it—the jury is still out) is its elasticity; its ability—indeed its urgency—to reach out temporally, spatially, materially, semantically, theoretically; its inability to be confined to one theory, one subdiscipline, one approach; and its desire to constantly evolve and to become something else. Classicists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would barely recognize what Classics has become, and I suspect that the same will be true of classicists after us in the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth centuries.

Every one of us has our own version of what Classics is, or ought to be. But as confirmed as we might be in our beliefs, those versions change along with our embeddedness in the culture. Classics used to mean philology and the study of Latin and Greek. It was heavily based in textual work, and any analysis of those texts was historical or philological. The American Philological Association was the major North American Classics organization for many years until it changed its name in 2014 to the Society for Classical Studies, a nod to the effort to broaden the scope and appeal of Classical Studies.

I am going to engage in a brief autobiography here to show how much Classics has changed for me at least since I started studying it back in the 1960s and 1970s. I read my way through all the major (and some minor) Greek and Roman authors with little sense of asking any of the questions I would start with today (or of being allowed to ask such questions. One friend told me that when she tried to bring up a possible reference to rape in Greek tragedy, she was shut down). I realized after graduate school that I had taken courses in Greek tragedy without anyone highlighting the role of women. How is that possible? I read Roman satire without really thinking much about sexuality in satire. I read the elegists without thinking about the role of desire and the erotic in Propertius and Ovid. I did not read any literature from late antiquity, medieval times, or Christianity. While I got what was, I suppose, a good education in the basics, I realized later that what interests me [End Page 33] most now about these authors, texts, and cultural moments was almost entirely left out of my early connection with the classical world.

Things began to change in the 1970s (at least for me), largely because of the founding of the Women's Classical Caucus in 1972 (fifty years ago) and the increased presence of bright, powerful women who paved the way for the exciting feminist scholarship that began to see the light. Journals like Helios and Arethusa were publishing nontraditional articles that tended toward the feminist and theoretical; now Eugesta is doing much of that work internationally. And in 1992 the triennial Feminism and Classics conferences began (the eighth was held in 2022). My research went from books and articles on patronage (sociohistorical but not feminist or theoretical) to publications on feminist theory, women as patrons, books and articles on female figures and writers, sex and gender, and most recently work on transgender saints and enslaved martyrs in medieval and Byzantine times.

This is just one person's evolution. But to see how much Classics has really changed and how expansive its canopy has become, one need only look at the emails that arrive every day with notices of conferences, talks, and volumes with and for people all over the world (COVID-19 and the advent of Zooming has had a lot to do with the inclusion of so many different people able to be present at these events). Here is a snapshot in the winter of 2022 of what Classics has become, is now, and could be. A leading university has advertised its PhD program to potential applicants. Their offerings and specialties include (in addition to languages, literature, culture, history, art, and archaeology) the ancient scientific imagination, neo-Latin and reception studies, queer theory and the history of sexuality, race and racialization in...