Death to Classics

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

• Death to Classics
• Shane Butler (bio)

As the late August evening gave way to night, I was packing my bags to leave the next day for Rome, where, among other things, I would write the dissertation that I would defend upon my return to New York two and a half years later. The windows of my apartment were open, sending the nocturnal purr of the city in on late-summer breezes that invited sleep. In an effort to resist them, I turned on the television that I otherwise seldom used except for the evening news and planted my suitcase on a table in front of it. I do not remember what was on and doubtless didn't much care then. It was tuned to ABC, where it had been for the news a few hours before—I had a weakness for the bemused gravitas of anchor Peter Jennings—so I left it there. The clothes I packed were rather rudimentary, with the exception of an ill-fitting suit I had bought on what would turn out to be the mistaken report that such was required for dinner at the American Academy in Rome. Books, however, were what mostly went in, including the Latin dictionary that had followed me since my undergraduate days, inscribed with each new phone number, which, back then of course, used to change with every move.

As I folded, shifted, and crammed, whatever was on the television was interrupted by a "special report," the regular term when the reporting of "breaking news" was still an extraordinary event. The face behind the desk was not that of Jennings, who no doubt was home in bed, but that of a reporter I had never seen before and who himself seemed nervously surprised to be there. Princess Diana, he announced, had been in a serious car crash in Paris and had been rushed from the scene to the hospital. ABC News would of course be back as further information became available, but for now we were being returned to our regularly scheduled programming. I remember laughing, not at the news, but at the reporter, whose few words were enough to capture what struck my sympathetic ears as a voice that could only come from another gay man. The network, I said to myself, would never have allowed him in front of a camera in prime time. Indeed, had the news been about anything other than a princess, they surely would have dragged Jennings, or at least one of his regular proxies, back to the studio. [End Page 29]

As for Diana—well, to call me an anti-royalist would be to exaggerate my level of interest in the matter. It is true that, in a curious prefiguration of the story I am recalling, my mother had roused me in the predawn hours sixteen years before in order to watch her wedding to Prince Charles live on television. I must have encouraged this plan, though I cannot remember why. Were we both trying to say something about me that I myself, on the eve of my twelfth birthday, as yet saw only dimly? More likely she simply wanted company as she dreamed herself into the kind of fairy tale that her own marriage, to a dashing high school football star, had not turned out to be. My own growing contempt for my father soon would fuel a personal politics that was, at least at first, more tyrannicidal than anything else. Already at thirteen I memorized Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" speech, though the line I relished was not that one, but the one that reportedly was interrupted by a shout of "Treason!": "Tarquin and Caesar each had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell, and George III"—here, of course, came the interruption—"may profit by their example." Naturally, my penchant for Henry also revealed a budding classicism and even Ciceronianism, to invoke the ancient republican (with a lowercase r) whom Henry and the rest most closely imitated. My age had doubled by the time I stood in front of a television, packing my bag for Rome, but nothing in the increase made me any more likely...