My Classics Will Be Intersectional, Or…
By: Donna Zuckerberg
Tags: Writing, Academia, Byedolon, Reflections, Classics

Today marks the end of the publication of new content on Eidolon. I hope that its closure doesn’t diminish what we accomplished in the past five years, and that we’ve proved that there’s a need for an explicitly progressive, public-facing publication in the field of Classics. We were able to make a mark on the field not in spite of our politics, but because of them.

Eidolon was not, at its inception, a “feminist” publication. It was founded as a “modern way to write about the ancient world,” and a venue for public-facing, broadly accessible essays that had “a strong authorial voice and a unique point of view.” This is not to say that feminism was not always a part of its project — because it was, from the very beginning. I was Eidolon’s founder and Editor-in-Chief, and I was a feminist, and the article I wrote as part of the launch in April 2015 was about the challenges of reading Euripides as a feminist. But a publication run by feminists, even vocal feminists, is not the same as an explicitly feminist publication.

The difference was impressed upon me forcefully when I wrote, in a draft of a May 2017 editorial, “People often ask me whether I would publish conservative-leaning articles on Eidolon, and I always respond that we would be happy to. We may be a progressive feminist journal, but we by no means expect (or want) all of our writers to share our politics. We welcome respectful, thoughtful disagreement, and we have never rejected a pitch because we disagreed with its political viewpoint.”

I didn’t know, when I drafted those sentences, just how dramatic an effect they would have on Eidolon’s future. Within a month, my editorial board had been convened to discuss the merits and downsides of identifying as feminist; one of my board members quit; and a series of increasingly acrimonious arguments led to my making the decision to part ways with our parent organization, the Paideia Institute. A few months later we relaunched with a new mission statement, vowing to make the Classics “political and personal, feminist and fun.”

Ironically, the sentences that set off this chain of events didn’t even make it into the published editorial. The final reads: “People often ask me whether I would be willing to publish conservative-leaning articles on Eidolon, and I always respond that we would. We do not expect every single one of our writers to share our editors’ politics.” I left implicit what, exactly, those politics were. And I’ve come to see that it was the right choice to not yet openly claim that Eidolon was feminist, because it forced my editorial team and I to radically reimagine what it would mean to claim a feminist politics and a mission explicitly focused on social justice.

When my editorial board was convened, several of its members were not, well, on board with the idea of openly identifying as feminist, because they were concerned that it would limit the kind of articles that we published and who was willing to publish with us, as well as possibly decreasing our readership. From my perspective now, I can confidently say that this outcome was not realized. Eidolon continued to grow in every way after its relaunch, crossing over 2 million total views, with an average over 10,000 views per week. We published more than 500 articles by writers ranging from high school students to full professors. We were able to signal-boost or be part of the launch of several exciting initiatives in Classics, including the Sportula, the Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus, and the Pharos project at Vassar.

Eidolon was a feminist publication, although we’ve come to see that a dedication to social justice is often less about identity that it is about action. Bringing social justice to Classics is asymptotic: something that one is always approaching but that it seems you may never quite intersect with. Much of the discipline is inherently resistant to change, especially progressive change, and I lost count of how many times people told me that Eidolon’s increasing radicalization was ruining both the publication and the discipline.

So I’m going to share with you the story of Eidolon, as seen through the evolution in my monthly editorials. I’m going to look back into the hopes and anxieties that have molded and fueled the publication — from the early days of trying to convince our colleagues to take us seriously without peer review, to our shift into thinking about the politics of Classics as a discipline. And I hope that my story of this journey will inspire people to dream about what kind of change they want to make in Classics from here on.

I received my PhD from Princeton in May 2014, and at first I believed that my career in Classics was likely over. My partner had a good job at a tech company, and we had a one-year-old child. My parents lived only twenty minutes away. And so I didn’t even try to go on the academic job market, because I couldn’t imagine uprooting my family when the best-case scenario was probably a series of short-term contingent faculty positions in God-knows-where. I toyed with the idea of going back to work with the Paideia Institute, a nonprofit that I had founded with some other graduate students a few years earlier, but there wasn’t an obvious role for me in the company. I decided to stay home with my child and focus on childcare, maybe do some writing. A month later, my Princeton email address was deactivated and my access to JSTOR was cut off. I was, as a friend later termed it, “academically dead.”

Six months later, a funny thing happened: I began to write short essays about Classics and the modern world. They were almost like blog posts, except that I didn’t feel that I had the commitment to start and keep a blog. I realized that there was no platform for people who wanted to write an essay about Classics for a general audience. So I decided to start one.

I brought the idea back to my Paideia Institute colleagues, and they loved it. For a hectic two months, we planned and fundraised and reached out to potential writers. The idea to name the nascent publication Eidolon came from my coworker, who argued, “It has the virtue of also being an English word that means either ‘Phantom’ or ‘Ideal’. it also contains a verbal pun on the sound ‘I’, which stresses the personal experience element we’re going for. And only classicists will hear the tricksy, crafty nature of ‘dolon’, which could point to its subversive potential to countermand positivist scholarship.”

We’d set up about six weeks’ worth of material in advance, and the night before our launch I privately told myself that it would be absolutely fine if nobody read our articles, nobody sent us any pitches, and the publication quietly petered out of existence that summer. No matter what, I’d learned something and gotten to work with some good writers. It would be a failed experiment, not a failure.

But it didn’t fail. It flourished. We easily reached 100,000 views by the end of 2015, and published some of the articles that are still among our most popular and influential. The task of fielding pitches, editing articles, and promoting our content, along with the logistics of putting together artwork, handling licensing, and paying our writers, became too big for me to handle alone. So we put out a job listing and hired two more editors, Tara Mulder and Yung In Chae.

Looking back on my editorials from the early period, it is clear that our biggest concern was how to convince classicists that writing for the public was worth their time. Our primary strategy was to try and lower the barrier for entry and attempt to remove what I thought would be common arguments against doing this kind of work.

Early editorials tried to demystify the process of writing for the public by giving advice on how to write engaging beginnings and avoid common mistakes. In one editorial, I argued that a compelling point of view was more valuable to an Eidolon article than a completely original argument. In another, I encouraged writers to “remix” their published, peer-reviewed work into public-facing essays in an attempt to promote themselves and boost the visibility of their core academic production. The other major anxiety revealed by those early editorials was a concern about how to position ourselves with respect to peer-reviewed scholarship. In a sense, this concern was connected with our desire to downplay the challenges of writing for Eidolon — after all, the main reason why it would not be worth someone’s time to write Eidolon articles if they were interested in doing so is the tremendous pressure put on most academics to publish peer-reviewed scholarship at a rapid pace.

Inherent in these calculations is, of course, a hierarchy of value, and we understood that a publications like ours wasn’t high up in that food chain. We had to articulate a separate value for us, rather than a lesser one. By this point, Tara had left the editorial team, and I had brought on two new team members, Sarah Scullin and Tori Lee. We were dreaming big for what Eidolon could accomplish. Editorials from the summer of 2016, a little over a year after our launch, are about using public scholarship as a place to write about something you’re not the absolute expert in and about why we use an internet-native, hyperlink-based citation structure.

We were trying to emphasize that Eidolon filled a different but necessary niche in the world of para-academic writing, and was a place where scholars could experiment, take risks, and have fun while doing so. One of the editorials from this period asserts the radical value of fun, and in the fall of 2016 we launched our companion blog, idle musings, when we needed a place to publish a satirical poem written by Associate Editor Yung In Chae about the fact that our inbox was full of two kinds of pitches: artistic musings on Classics by people who had become carpenters, and comparisons between Donald Trump and various Roman emperors.

Almost absent from my editorials at the time, however, was my growing unease about what it meant to do Classics in an increasingly politically charged landscape. I addressed this issue in one March 2016 editorial, with the title “Who Owns the Classics?” in which I discussed a petition to Harvard University Press to replace the (white) chair of the Murty Classical Library of India with an Indian scholar. But in that editorial, rather than taking any kind of firm stance, I resisted any pressure to take a side and made this rather unobjectionable claim: “Nobody owns the classics. But the question of whose interpretations are granted the most influence is a question with deep cultural and political ramifications.” I acknowledged the presence of these questions, but made no attempt to assert any kind of opinion on them.

Questions about politics and Classics were, of course, very much on our minds. I was writing a book about Classics and far-right online communities at the time, and on Eidolon we published a substantial amount of content about the presidential election. There was a good reason why writers thought we might be interested in all of those Donald Trump/Caligula comparisons. But I kept politics resolutely out of my editorials, even as our publication shifted to the left and the Republican party swung increasingly to the right into nativist populism. The politics of Classics and of Eidolon seem to have been the two topics we didn’t want to talk about. We were willing to opine ad nauseam on the question of why Classics should have a publication like ours, and why scholars should write for it. But we weren’t really willing yet to put pressure on the arguments classicists made for what studying Classics meant.

After the 2016 Presidential election, everything changed — big things, like our cultural norms, and also small things, like our little Classics publication. In mid-November we published an article I had written with the title “How to Be a Good Classicist Under a Bad Emperor.” The article was born out of the research I’d been doing in the previous year into classical reception in far-right internet communities. Exactly ten days after Donald Trump was elected, I gave a lecture at UC Santa Barbara about my research, and I left the Q&A with an overwhelming feeling that many people had been profoundly shaken in their sense of what it meant to be a classicist. So over the course of two and a half days, my fellow editors and I wrote, re-wrote, commissioned art, debated titles, and then woke up Monday and published what is still Eidolon’s most-read article, with almost 75,000 views.

“How to Be a Good Classicist” was intended primarily as a warning to my U.S. colleagues about the kind of fascist-inflected uses of ancient Greece and Rome that I expected to see more and more of in online communities that were empowered and energized by the election of Donald Trump. It was also meant as a spur to action, to convince the field that we needed to start thinking very seriously and carefully about how we wanted to respond to this kind of appropriation. I wrote, “Obviously, the ideological battle over Classics pales in comparison to the many, many more important battles we will spend the next few years fighting — over immigration, healthcare, the environment, reproductive rights. We need to do what we can in those battles as well. Give some of your time and your money. Use your expertise as a writer and a teacher. Resist however you can. But classicists are uniquely positioned to fight back against the self-mythologizing of the Alt-Right. When we see Classics used to support a hateful politics, we must push back — unless we want to live through a second wave of fascist classical reception.”

“How to Be a Good Classicist” had three outcomes, all of which were more forceful than I anticipated. First: it worked. Many classicists were scared, and worried, and appreciated the work that I was trying to do. Second, we unwittingly exacerbated an existing divide in the field between people who are interested in bringing Classics and social justice together and people who think that the Classics should be free of politicized interventions. These scholars tended to frame me and Eidolon as hysterical and immature and potentially disastrous for the future of the field. The third result was an onslaught of harassment by far-right trolls who bombarded me with Holocaust memes and violent language on Twitter and by email. I responded by making my personal email harder to find, but this just meant that the harassment was sent to my entire editorial team, because there was no way for us to hide the email address to which we wanted people to send pitches, and our social media channels were easily discoverable.

In the aftermath of “How to Be a Good Classicist,” my editorials focused on the harassment. We published several pieces urging scholars to think more about what kind of policies individual departments and scholarly organizations should put in place to support and protect scholars who found themselves the targets of harassment campaigns. We argued for the need for institutional support, both practical and in the form of formal statements, and also set forth some suggestions for how to personally support colleagues who were being harassed — including, first of all, by not treating their harassment as the most interesting thing about them, and making a point to talk to them about their scholarship.

Although I don’t regret doing this work — it was very important, and cathartic, at the time — I’m struck now by how much we tried to depoliticize it. There is, of course, a political aspect to the argument that one should care about the pain and fear of one’s colleagues, and particularly junior, female colleagues. But our overriding message seemed to be that denouncing harassment and verbal violence should know no political affiliation — that the one thing members of the field should all be able to agree on, regardless of who any of us voted for, was that we all agree in the importance of free academic discourse, and that free academic discourse is impossible in an environment where regular interventions by trolls lead to scholars being terrified into silence.

And so Eidolon continued to try to walk a fine line: although it was obvious to everyone that we were shifting increasingly to the left, especially after the election, we worked hard to maintain the fiction that we would publish conservatives, if only they would pitch to us more (or would stop ghosting on us after we had accepted their pitches, a process that happened repeatedly). This was the argument of that fateful May 2017 editorial. This was the fiction that we dispensed with in our August 2017 relaunch, when we committed to make Eidolon “a space for unapologetic progressive and inclusive approaches to Classics” and “to model a Classics that is ethical, diverse, intersectional, and especially feminist.” In our relaunch announcement, I wrote, “Eidolon isn’t going to publish articles arguing that identity politics are ruining Classics. I don’t feel any obligation to represent that view here. I don’t believe that political neutrality is either achievable or desirable. Classics as a discipline has deep roots in fascism and reactionary politics and white supremacy, and those ideologies exert a powerful gravitational pull on the discipline’s practitioners. If we want to fight those forces, we need to actively work against them.”

One month before that fateful May 2017 editorial, we published an editorial celebrating our two-year anniversary. The title was “Why Study Classics?” And that question, once we spoke it aloud, became the guiding question for Eidolon’s mission moving forward.

And, in fact, it always had been, in a way. “It didn’t exist, so I decided to start it” — the explanation I gave earlier in this essay for why I founded Eidolon — doesn’t feel like an adequate explanation for the amount of effort I’ve ultimately put into this publication, which has amounted to a nearly full-time job for no pay for more than five years. A better explanation is that I was trying to figure out why, exactly, I wanted to study Classics. (Much later, I published a list of answers to this question with varying degrees of truth and nobility.) But ultimately I decided to try to outsource it and find out why others wanted to study Classics. And what my team discovered, almost immediately, was that this is a very political question for many people.

This is especially, blatantly true for the alt-right, as I argued in my book Not All Dead White Men. The Far Right studies Classics because it loves to look back to an idealized past where there was patriarchy and white supremacy (allegedly) and also tremendous cultural flourishing. This idealized past then serves as an argument for reinstating that kind of society in the present day. This is a political, identity politics-based argument for studying the Classics.

Eidolon published a large number of articles studying and unpacking far-right Classics, mostly with the goal of denaturalizing it. We believe that this was important work, because some people — although fewer than in previous years, fortunately — have tended to assume that arguments such as “Classics should be studied because it is the foundation of Western Civilization” are fairly self-evident, and require little in the way of unpacking about their underlying assumptions regarding what work “Western Civilization” does as a conceptual category and why it is important that it had its foundations in Classics. It’s not an accident that Quillette, a so-called “intellectual dark web” publication that is deeply critical of Eidolon, published last year a four-part series on Classics that included essays with the titles “Is Western Civilization a Thing?”, “Is Western Civilization Uniquely Bad?”, and “Are the Classics Complicit in White Supremacy?” (If you’re keeping score, the answers are, of course, yes, no, and no.)

The writer actually first pitched me that series for Eidolon, but I don’t think that it’s an accident that it found a home on a site that regularly publishes justifications for scientific racism, particularly racist IQ science. Similarly, it isn’t an accident that Mary Frances Williams published a self-defense on Quillette after the events of the 2019 “The Future of the Classics” panel at the SCS. But our writers’ personal reasons for studying Classics were also political (although differently so). This was particularly true for our writers who came from historically marginalized communities.

So we rethought what questions we should be asking. At first, the question had been “Why study Classics?” Although implied, I think the subtle emphasis in that question is on the final word — why study Classics specifically, as opposed to any other discipline? Hearing some other scholars’ answers changed the shape of this question. For many people, it is not “Why are you studying Classics” but rather “Why are you studying Classics?” And this formulation may also be inadequate. In one of our most important and influential articles, “White People Explain Classics to Us,” Editor-at-Large Yung In Chae argued that people of color in Classics experience a kind of epistemic injustice whereby they are automatically, implicitly understood to be less knowledgeable about Classics and less deserving of a place at the table than white classicists. In this article, Jackie Murray suggests that the right questions to ask about the trajectories that bring people to Classics are “What was trying to push you out, and what made you stay?” and “What am I doing that is driving people away from Classics?”

We thought about this question at Eidolon quite a bit, because we were told all the time by colleagues and on the anonymous Famae Volent message board that our writers were driving people away from Classics by always obsessing over how bad things are, how much prejudice and cruelty there was in classical antiquity and still is in the discipline today. We make people feel bad about Classics, the argument goes, or portraying Classics as inherently evil, and doing so will drive away people who just love ancient Greece and really want to come into our classes to read some Plato.

Of course, the unexamined assumption here is that the people we’d be driving away with our “self-hating Classics” are people who would be instinctively drawn to studying ancient Greece and Rome without ever having to interrogate the racial and sexual politics of doing so — which is a really long way to say ‘white men.’ Few others have that luxury.

But I understand the fears that underlie these protestations. These critics believe that we’re failing to see the forest for the trees — that in our single-minded focus on white supremacist appropriation of Classics and the lack of diversity within Classics (which, counting generously, topped out at about 8% of our total content, but I’ll let that slide for the moment), we lost sight of what they see as a bigger and more pressing issue, which is that humanities enrollments are declining precipitously. Tenure lines, and in some cases even entire departments, are disappearing. In this anxious climate, some believe that we should embrace all students who are interested in Classics, for whatever reason. Even if we personally disagree with the politics behind their reasons, we should make them feel welcomed anyway and then hope that we can use our classrooms as a space to open their minds to other viewpoints.

If you think in this way, then I understand why it might feel like progressive Classics is causing the death of the discipline, although I also believe that this point of view is completely wrongheaded. It assumes that it is possible to welcome all views equally, and that welcoming the idea that Classics is the foundation of an inherently good and noble Western Civilization is not an idea that already excludes large swaths of the student population.

I’m not going to downplay the extent of the problems we’re facing. In addition to the concerns facing Classics specifically and the humanities more widely, there are also enormous and terrifying problems facing higher education in general. Even before the massive disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, these problems already looked insurmountable: on one side the student debt crisis, which has financially crippled an entire generation, and on the other side the increasing precarity of the academic workforce has made teaching Classics (and every other discipline in academia, really) a terrible professional prospect. This is not to mention academia’s endemic problems with classism and sexual harassment.

Yet, in spite of all of that, people do keep studying Classics. They find ways to find value and meaning and fun and joy in that study. And that is exactly what Eidolon tried to make space to talk about. That is why we chose to be, as our mission statement has it, “personal and political, feminist and fun.” The Classics we want has all of these elements — perhaps not all at the same time, but all in balance.

The problems I’ve alluded to here may seem insoluble. Can we save the soul and future of a discipline that has historically been implicated in fascism and colonialism — one that continues to be enmeshed in white supremacy and misogyny — in the face of declining enrollments, the student debt crisis, and the unstable academic job market? And, even if we do somehow figure out how to save it, will we be studying Classics over Zoom in socially-distanced boats because all of our coastal cities are underwater? There’s ample reason to despair.

The atmosphere in Classics right now is undeniably fraught. On the one hand, there are promising signs of progress and growth. The smallest and least consequential of these is the increased attention being paid to white supremacist appropriation of the Classics. I’m much more excited about the increasing visibility and platform being given to the Sportula collective, the EOS Africana society, the Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus, and the Classics and Social Justice Group. The people involved in these projects are keen to articulate a vision for studying Classics that is vital and necessary and radical.

This pandemic has taken an enormous toll on us all, but it’s been heartening for me to see that the Classics community, especially on Classics Twitter, has remained a place where people support each other and care about each other. This may seem obvious, but: caring is vital. When I look back on the past five years of Eidolon and what we accomplished, it looks to me like we did it by caring. Caring about each other (seriously, my teammates are the best). About the future of a discipline that we didn’t always even feel welcome in. About students. About our readers. About good writing. About the criticisms leveled our way, which we always listened to and carried, even when it hurt.

When Eidolon began to identify as explicitly feminist and progressive, we definitely saw an increase in the volume of criticism we received. Most of this came from the Right, and while much of it was founded in bad-faith readings and unexamined assumptions about the whiteness of both classical antiquity and the kinds of students who care about classical antiquity, we still listened. The harder criticism came from the Left: that much as we wanted to provide a platform for marginalized voices in our field, in doing so I was undeniably benefiting my own career. That there’s a limit to how radical a wealthy Ivy League-educated white woman can be. I’ve always known this was a valid concern, and for a long time I felt that as long as I was doing more good by amplifying voices than I was sucking up oxygen, I should keep doing this work, and when I stopped being sure then I should step back. And now that time has come.

There’s a public misconception about classicists that we’re conservative, tweedy, stodgy, and boring. To the contrary, classicists are some of the most exciting, generous, radical, creative, and, yes, caring people I know. Eidolon was founded on the belief that Classics is for everyone. The work of making the field accessible and welcoming to all — regardless of gender, race, class, sexuality, and disability — will be far from easy. But I believe that classicists are up to the challenge, and although the struggle has barely begun, it was an honor to provide it with a platform for the past five years.

Donna Zuckerberg is the Editor-in-Chief of Eidolon and author of Not All Dead White Men (Harvard University Press 2018). She has a second book under contract on feminist reception of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.