At this year’s Society for Classical Studies Annual Meeting in Washington D.C., Pharos Director Curtis Dozier will moderate a roundtable discussion entitled “White Supremacy and the History and Future of Classics” from 12:15 to 1:45PM on Saturday, January 3rd in the Marquis Ballroom Salon 1–6. All who are interested in learning more or in sharing their expertise are welcome.
In the year since we announced our “Onomasticon of Classical Pseudonyms and Avatars,” it has become one of the most visited pages on Pharos. In this update to the database, we’ve added four new pseudonyms from some of the largest hate sites that Pharos has documented:
Our full discussion of each, along with all the other classicizing names and images we’ve documented so far, can be found in the Onomasticon itself.
Joseph Sobran was a prominent American journalist and anti-Semite who, according to one obituary, “shared many of the ideas of the European far right from the early 20th century, in particular the belief that Jews are an alien, nearly monolithic and subversive force whose main goal is to destroy Western Civilization.” He came to the attention of Pharos because a meme featuring one of his quotes has been posted several times in a Facebook group for Latin teachers, where it received many “likes” and some approving comments. The quote says: “In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching Remedial English in college.” This nostalgia for an (imagined) time when the study of Classics enjoyed a central and respected position in American education may be superficially attractive to those of us devoted to that study. But Sobran’s hateful political views should make us think twice about our assumptions about the value and purpose of Classical education. We may discover that our self-image, and even self-respect, as educators rests on implicit arguments dear to those with abhorrent political views.
Two years ago I launched Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics in order to raise awareness about how hate groups are using Greco-Roman antiquity to legitimize their politics. Within a year it became clear that specialists in the field of Classical Studies and the public at large were interested in learning about these appropriations, and I was honored to be recognized at the beginning of 2019 by the Women’s Classical Caucus, which awarded Pharos the “Public Scholarship” award for work “geared toward non-specialist audiences” that “address[es] feminist concerns or any other concerns related to marginalized groups.” The site continued to receive coverage in the press, including Undark Magazine and The Chronicle of Higher Education. For the first time it was noticed by a major right-wing site, when Campus Reform published the response from a homophobic hate group to our documentation of their invocation of the persecution of Christians in ancient Rome in their fundraising materials.
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