Simon Goldhill over at Antigone Journal:
In recent years, scholars of Classics have often self-lacerated about how the study of antiquity has been mobilized in the service of imperialism, social and educational exclusion, and even violent repression. It is good and right to be highly critical of such mobilisations in the past and, even more pressingly, in the present – and to act against them. But it will not do to ignore how much such mobilisations are in tension with – and often in response to – the radical potential of the study of Classical antiquity to transform the contemporary world. The history of how Classics and Christianity interact, both in complicity and in aggressive difference, is a wonderful test-case for the complexity and richness and seriousness of the battle between radical and conservative forces in understanding the past – and in how understanding the past continues to structure understanding of the present.
Etymologies 