COLLOQUY

By SCOTT HELLER

Now, nearing the turn of a new century, classicists are putting on a brighter face, in part by allying themselves with an amorphous but clearly larger field. On several campuses, "ancient studies" has become a way to bring together scholars from many disciplines. In universities wrapped up with the recent past and present, ancient studies is a way to wield institutional clout and provide a home for conversations that have been conducted across departments only intermittently.

Classical Greek and Latin are just part of the interdisciplinary mix. Programs and centers in ancient studies encourage scholars to collaborate on thematic scholarly projects and courses ranging across region or time: Images of ethnicity in the ancient world. Death and the ancient world. Alexander the Great and the nations he conquered.

"Is there another way to study the past that isn't antiquarian?" asks Matthew S. Santirocco, dean of the college of arts and science at New York University. His question isn't rhetorical, for at N.Y.U. he has established the Center for Ancient Studies, which intends to encourage comparative study of ancient cultures.

Though it doesn't offer degrees and has no power to hire, the center is a way for professors from such departments as art history, anthropology, Judaic studies, and, of course, classics to congregate. "There are more people here covering the ancient past, per square inch, than anywhere else in the country," says Mr. Santirocco, who directs the center. Two professors each year have begun teaching a graduate seminar on historical methods and the uses of evidence in studying the ancient past. This month, the center sponsored its second annual conference -- this one on "a future for the past" -- inviting a powerhouse lineup of scholars to talk about how study of the old world is relevant to our own.

Alison Frantz Collection, courtesy American School of Classical Studies at Athens According to N.Y.U.'s Joan Breton Connelly, earlier generations of scholars have ignored the religious meanings of this frieze from the Parthenon.

To the upbeat Mr. Santirocco, classics may not be in crisis at all. It's a question of definition. Yes, high-school students aren't studying Greek and Latin, as they once did, and undergraduate enrollments in the classics suffer as a result. But look around. The classics are very much alive in contemporary culture, he says -- in the poetry of Derek Walcott, the television show Xena, and on the best-seller list, in Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, a retelling of The Odyssey in the Civil War-era South.

Scholars at the N.Y.U. conference argued that classical studies can be a pivotal part of the curriculum. In the diversity of their approaches, they embody what Mr. Santirocco argues is "usable" about the study of the past.

Not in attendance were John Heath and Victor Davis Hanson, the authors of Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom, due out this month from the Free Press. In the book, and in a recent article in the journal Arion that has kicked up a fuss, they contend that new ways of studying antiquity end up minimizing the unique contributions of the Greeks.

"Classics is by definition interdisciplinary," says Mr. Heath, an associate professor of classics at Santa Clara University. "We don't teach Greek and Latin for a living. Ninety per cent of the classicists in the world teach culture. Nothing wrong with that."

Yet studying Greek culture alongside Egyptian, Sumerian, Israelite, and other early cultures of the Mediterranean flattens out the distinctions among them, he argues. What's more, he says, contemporary politics gets in the way of appreciating Greek culture's contributions to Western democracy and the idea of "self-restraint."

"It's a reflection of the relativism of the modern academy," he says. "They've sold out Greece and Rome."

At the N.Y.U. meeting, Martha C. Nussbaum, a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, elaborated on the arguments she made in Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Harvard University Press, 1997). Insights gained from the classics are not the province of cultural conservatives, but rather could help to teach the values of good citizenship in a "complex interlocking world," she said.

The three capacities necessary for the task, she explained, are an ability to critically examine oneself and one's own traditions, an ability to see beyond group loyalties, and a "narrative imagination."

Practically speaking, she said, a two-semester philosophy requirement for undergraduates would go a long way.

K. Anthony Appiah, a professor of African-American studies and philosophy at Harvard, described how the study of classical texts puts in perspective a reigning obsession of modern life -- the process of forging an identity that is both individual and that draws on the strengths of the group.

Both scholars were critical of the excesses of identity politics, which Ms. Nussbaum described as "narcissistic" and limiting.

Later in the meeting, Marjorie Perloff, a professor of humanities at Stanford University, demonstrated the continued relevance of Aristotle's Poetics through a reading of works by the poet Susan Howe. In Secret History of the Dividing Line, Ms. Howe blurs the boundaries between fact-gathering and word-mongering. She and other writers who are grouped together as "language poets" try to get beyond poetry that is merely "about" a subject, Ms. Perloff said -- something that Aristotle's work can help explain.

Presenters who work in traditional fields described continuing debates that, in their ferocity, show that centuries-old objects and texts matter very much today. Lawrence H. Schiffman, a professor of Hebraic and Judaic studies at N.Y.U., reviewed disputes over the Dead Sea Scrolls, the excavation of Masada, and the classical origins of ancient Israel, all of which have become caught up in debates over Zionism. "Whoever said to be an antiquarian obscurantist in a modern world was easy?" he joked.

Joan Breton Connelly, an associate professor of fine arts at N.Y.U., provided an update on two widely discussed projects. Next year, she plans to publish Women and Ritual: Priestesses in Greek Art and Society, which applies gender studies and new technologies to the analysis of Greek vases and other evidence. When she began the research, she said, "priestess" wasn't even a category searchable in data bases. But the mass of evidence gathered in recent years indicates that women may have had a more active public life than previously thought. It also leads to a rethinking of the role of women in such classical dramas as Aristophanes' Lysistrata.

Her other project involves the Parthenon. Late in 1996, Ms. Connelly published an article in the American Journal of Archaeology in which she offered a provocative analysis of the sculptural frieze adorning an exterior colonnade of the structure. On the central panel were the figures of a robed man, a woman, and three girls. Earlier generations of scholars, puzzled by the sculpture, read it as a celebration of Athenian citizenship. Drawing on anthropological studies of Greek religious practices, as well as a fragment of a play by Euripides once thought lost, however, Ms. Connelly read the images through a religious lens. She argued that the scene depicts a mythological king and queen who are preparing their three daughters for sacrifice in order to save their city from attack. The frieze demonstrates that women, and family in general, were part of the common good, she said.

Current scholarship isn't overlaying present concerns on past objects, said Ms. Connelly. Rather, "we have been slow in coming to see the Parthenon through the eyes of the fifth-century Athenians -- first and foremost as a religious building deeply connected to its foundation myth." She is writing a book on the Parthenon sculptures.

The N.Y.U. meeting also featured representatives from several agencies that support scholarly research, who expressed support for interdisciplinary scholarship on the ancient world but offered no details on new programs. John H. D'Arms, president of the American Council of Learned Societies, noted with regret that fellowships financed by his organization tended to be increasingly "presentist," with classicists getting only 7 per cent of the total.

Professors from the University of Pennsylvania showed up with information about a new Center for Ancient Studies there, which draws on a world-class museum and on faculty strength in archaeology, Asia, and the Middle East. Nearly one in eight arts-and-sciences faculty members at Penn have expressed interest, said Jeremy A. Sabloff, director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Adding courses to the curriculum wasn't the point, he said, since 200 courses at Penn already deal with the ancient world, and some 125 Ph.D. students described the field as relevant to their dissertation research.

The center has begun to sponsor faculty reading groups as well as an undergraduate minor. Graduate students and professors in related disciplines will be affiliated with a particular floor of a dormitory reserved for undergraduates interested in the ancient world. This month, the center held a three-day seminar on archaeological drawing, led by a professional draftsman and open to graduate students at nearby colleges and universities. Without the training, students learn skills in the field haphazardly, says Holly Pittman, an associate professor of art history and the center's director. "We all get it however we get it," she says.

Several speakers reminded the N.Y.U. gathering that resistance was inevitable in certain scholarly enclaves. David Damrosch, chairman of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, suggested that "deeply ingrained patterns" and standards of professional proficiency would have to be relaxed to encourage interdisciplinary scholarship "We can't simply change hiring practices overnight. We can only hope that some people do some of their work collaboratively," he said.

Ms. Perloff, of Stanford, wondered aloud whether ancient studies was another example of the humanities' being spread too thin and encouraging students to dabble in a little art, a little archaeology, without the requisite language skills. "How is anybody going to learn all that, or what is anybody going to learn?" she asked.

But Mr. Sabloff, said he knew just when the Penn administration had understood the usefulness of an ancient-studies center -- when it was highlighted on the president's strategic plan for the humanities in the 21st century.

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