{"id":188242,"date":"2025-11-02T17:42:42","date_gmt":"2025-11-02T23:42:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/?p=188242"},"modified":"2025-11-02T17:42:42","modified_gmt":"2025-11-02T23:42:42","slug":"todays-quote-classical-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/todays-quote-classical-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Today’s quote: classical edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Victor Davis Hanson<\/a>:<\/p>\n

What Padilla further fails to understand is that classical scholarship\u2019s fascination with the Greco-Roman world rests upon that subject\u2019s singular self-criticism of its own standards and values. The tools of mockery that Padilla employs\u2014caricature, cynicism, parody, sarcasm, and satire\u2014all derive from classical roots, which is to say that they were invented by the very Greeks and Romans he dismisses. Many of the Western pathologies that Padilla cites\u2014class privilege, the \u201cestablishment,\u201d male dominance\u2014were long ago objects of criticism more virulent and yet more sophisticated than Padilla\u2019s adolescent rants.<\/p>\n

Misogyny? Read the Antigone, Medea,<\/i> and Lysistrata<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Slavery? \u201cNo man is born a slave,\u201d wrote the fourth-century polymath Alcidamas. Aristotle\u2019s argument for natural slavery acknowledges a host of critics who felt otherwise. Slaves in drama from Aristophanes to Plautus often appear smarter than their masters.<\/p>\n

The poor and the oppressed? From Solon to the Gracchi, there is plenty of classical admiration for the efforts of the underclass to get even with their exploiters.<\/p>\n

Rather problematically for Padilla, the whitest people whom the Mediterranean Greeks and Romans met were often the most negatively stereotyped\u2014whether the savage, milk-drinking, tree-worshiping Germani; the wild, tattooed, and red-haired Britons; the supposedly pathologically lying white-skinned Gauls; or the purportedly innately savage Thracians. In contrast, Homer names as the noblest of foreign peoples the black Ethiopians\u2014a race Herodotus thought the tallest and handsomest.<\/p>\n

Settler-colonialism? Recall what Tacitus had his Scottish leader Calgacus say about how the historian\u2019s fellow Romans make a desert and call it peace. For all the \u201csettler colonialism\u201d of Alexander the Great, his ideas of race might be better described as \u201cassimilationist\u201d or as a sort of proto\u2013melting pot, accomplished by forced Persian\u2013Macedonian mass marriages to pave the way for his dream of a brotherhood of mankind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Victor Davis Hanson: What Padilla further fails to understand is that classical scholarship\u2019s fascination with the Greco-Roman world rests upon that subject\u2019s singular self-criticism of its own standards and values. The tools of mockery that Padilla employs\u2014caricature, cynicism, parody, sarcasm, and satire\u2014all derive from classical roots, which is to say that they were invented by … Continue reading “Today’s quote: classical edition”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-decline-and-fall","category-words"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xam3-MYa","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188242"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":188243,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188242\/revisions\/188243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}