What’s the point of studying classics? It’s useful to know a thing or two about how history happens in the middle distance, at scales between geological time and the daily news cycle. It’s useful, especially at the present moment, to know that nothing we worry about matters in the long run since the United States is bound to collapse in a century or two and get replaced by some other kind of entity with a different public to whom our concerns are totally alien. Roman pagans were probably worried about Christianization; I bet they cheered when Julian started rolling it back in 361, and I bet they totally lost it when he died a couple of years later. It would probably have comforted them to know that pretty much all the most active purveyors of Christianity would end up getting declared heretics by one or the other of the main churches, which themselves would start getting rolled back by various forms of post-Christian enlightenment: Islam starting in the seventh century, libertinism from the 15th century onward. Even if you win, there’s no such thing as winning: the throne melts out from under you.
This kind of perspective is available to us if we want it. One of my areas of specialization is how the past felt about its own past, and I feel like I can say with confidence that they didn’t have anything like it in Greece or Rome. The Islamic World did have it – at least by the time of Ibn Khaldun, if not in the Qur’an itself – but then maybe lost it at some point between the 14th century and now.
Does studying the classics help me chill out about the news? Not as much as I wish it did. On the one hand, I know that the day-to-day and even the year-to-year churn of events don’t really matter in the long run. On the other hand, though, one can’t know about ancient history and still believe in progress. One can’t even really believe in the power of norms and institutions, which is a faith that seems to keep a lot of people going. You think we’ve come too far forward to backslide? You think it can’t get worse than this, or even that there’s a point beyond which it can’t get worse? You have no idea.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Lucian, the Syro-Greek comedian who lived in some pretty interesting times. His writing combines a kind of hyperbolic outrage that reminds one of Rush Limbaugh or Celine with a calculated bloodlessness and actual wit that keeps you from taking things too seriously. Did Lucian worry a lot about the future? It’s possible – and any answer would be speculative – but I suspect not. He would have recognized a half-truth in the modern conceit that history happens twice, first as tragedy, then as farce. The real story is that it only happens as farce, every time.