MARY LEFKOWITZ
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their relation to objective reality differently from Europeans.
In
some
respects, as Asante argues, this "African" notion that mankind is con–
nected with the world, rather than set apart from it, will be advanta–
geous; it could, for example, suggest that Africans instinctively had a
greater respect for the environment than Europeans, and closer bonds to
their immediate communities. But it also could be used to imply that
Africans were unlikely to practice or instinctively uninterested in
"classifying," that is, uninterested in scientific thought - a premise which
is demonstrably untrue.
Rather than examine the premise on which such arguments are
based, those of us who find ourselves on the defensive side of the multi–
cultural debate too often respond to our opponents' arguments simply
by denying that we are doing what we have been accused of. For exam–
ple, when Asante stated that I had built a career on pointing out the su–
periority of the Greeks, I replied that I was not trying to say that those
civilizations were superior but rather interesting and significant, and that
it would be hard for any modern person to applaud certain of their
practices, such as the Athenian treatment of women and of slaves.
In
calling attention to some of the flaws in the civilization I have
spent my life studying, I was doing nothing unusual. Since the early sev–
enties classical scholars have become increasingly interested in the "non–
canonical" texts that were not on our graduate school reading lists:
fourth-century speeches about contested wills and the lives of prostitutes,
letters of ordinary people describing domestic crises, and the like. More
work has been done on the history of women in the last twenty years
than in all the centuries preceding. As a result, classicists can now present
a picture of the ancient world that is at once more complete and
therefore more honest than any that were presented in the past. Classical
scholars readily acknowledge that many qualities nineteenth-century
European scholars admired in the Greeks were basically reflections of the
values of their own society and had little or no basis in ancient reality.
In
recent years, for example, it has been shown that even the Greek aristo–
crats did not compete in the games simply for the joy of amateur com–
petition, as had long been supposed. The prizes offered even in the mi–
nor games made victory worthwhile in financial terms.
But to admit, or rather to advertise, that the Greeks shared the faults
of other peoples, had a low as well as a high culture, and criminals as
well as statesmen, is not a reason for removing the study of Greek civi–
lization from the curriculum. Such limitations as they had are not unique
or peculiar to Europeans: as we have seen, certain African peoples also
practice nlisogyny. Yet in the process of cutting the Greeks down to
size, it has become possible and even natural to lose sight of the qualities
for which their civilization has justifiably been prized by later European
