I was speaking with one of the Classicists at our Latin-immersion workshop. “Cape Latin,” as it is called – the Latin texts relating to the Cape of Good Hope since the founding of the colony there – has been one of his topics, but he has looked more widely into the history of the Classics in South Africa. He said he had spent some time looking at dissertations in South African Classics departments, and including the 1930s and 40s, when the country was going through its Fascist period (whatever one might want to call it; you can see the artistic elements of this period in American post offices from the 30s, though we might call it a “nationalist Art Deco”). He reports that there was a fair amount of enthusiasm for Roman agricultural works at the time: people were writing dissertations on Vergil, Cato, and Varro. Vergil in particular plays a role in the history of South African Classics, though I don’t quite have the details – someone translated the Georgics into Afrikaans or some such thing. But the comments on Cato I thought particularly interesting: he said they loved Cato, and found him a perfect model.
The Classics really are a mirror, I thought. I just recently penned a piece about how disappointing I found Cato – he was more of a slavedriver than a farmer, I thought. Here they were, apparently lauding him as a model. To be a slavedriver, and to force others do your work for you in the name of civilization and progress – or at least your own advancement – was not, to the South Africans of that time, an objection.
Academics still speak of things as being “influential,” but I think that word has very little use. In almost all instances, what I see is people going back into texts and taking what they want from them. Most people in the external world find only a mirror where they themselves appear. Classicists go back into the Classics, and depending on who they are, they exalt Caesar or Cicero or Scipio or Ovid or Cato or Brutus or Plato or Diogenes or Heraclitus as the model, and the reason to read the Classics. It is mostly disguised self-promotion and self-justification. The past is always a tool for the motives of the present.
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