Abusing Antiquity?

The first ever collection of essays to explore the contemporary far right’s fascination with the classical past, Abusing Antiquity? sheds new light on the ways in which ancient Greece and Rome are being used to legitimise present-day political agendas. Bringing together a diverse range of authors and case studies, the volume highlights the ways in which ideas about the classical past have been appropriated to support extremist ideologies, especially in conversations about race, gender, and immigration.

The individual chapters within the volume analyse a wide variety of national and political settings, and examine diverse forms of evidence, including memes and online media, literature, music, and modern visual and material culture, cumulatively illuminating the forms and power of such uses of antiquity. The book addresses questions of best practice, methodology and ethics when engaging with extremist material, interrogates the ways in which disciplinary structures within classical studies have at times been complicit in the production and perpetuation of politicised narratives, and considers a range of national and transnational case studies, focusing on the US and Europe. Whilst also elucidating the context behind their seductive appeal, in part by demonstrating the role of such appropriations in earlier eras, the volume in its entirety investigates the ways in which ideas about the past can be weaponised for ideological ends.

Ultimately, the volume does not seek to situate classical antiquity as “abused” or “misused” by modern extremist movements in any simplistic way, but rather offers a way to understand how such visions of antiquity have emerged and been propagated, and with what consequences.

Helen Roche is Associate Professor in Modern European Cultural History at the University of Durham, UK. Her key publications include The Third Reich’s Elite Schools (2021), Sparta’s German Children (2013), and she is co-editor of Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (2018).

Denise Eileen McCoskey is Professor of Classics and affiliate in Black World Studies at Miami University, USA. She is the author of Race: Antiquity and Its Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2012) and editor of A Cultural History of Race in Antiquity (Bloomsbury, 2022).