Episode 128: tHE White Pedestal, with Curtis Dozier
Note: this is mostly an automatic transcription, lightly edited and corrected. Punctuation and formatting are not perfect.
Episode 128 Curtis Dozier
Marcie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Endless Knot Podcast.
Aven: Where the more we know
Marcie: The more we want to find out
Aven: Tracing serendipitous connections through our lives
Marcie: And across disciplines
Aven: Hi, I'm Aven.
Marcie: And I'm Marcie.
Aven: And today we're talking about white supremacy.
Marcie: Woo-hoo, oh.
Aven: Yeah. Um, and some other fun stuff.
Marcie: Yeah.
Aven: Sort of. Uh, specifically we're gonna be talking to Curtis Dozier about his new book
Marcie: Curtis Dozier is an associate professor and chair of Greek and Roman Studies at Vassar College, where he has taught since 2008 after receiving his PhD from the University of California Berkeley.
In addition to his research on the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity by white nationalists, he has published a series of articles on Latin poetry and ancient literary criticism, [00:01:00] focusing particularly on the Roman rhetorician Quintilian.
Aven: From 2018 to 2020, he produced The Mirror of Antiquity, a podcast featuring classical scholars discussing the intersections of their research, the contemporary world, and their own lives.
So today, we're talking to him about his book, published this year by Yale University Press, entitled The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate. So here's that conversation
Marcie: hi, Curtis. Thank you so much for joining us
Curtis Dozier: Thanks for having me on the show. It's great to be here
Marcie: Welcome.
I've been wanting to get you on the show for a while 'cause, for, listeners out there, Curtis and I have been in the same classics writing group for, a while and so I've seen so many cool books being worked on and, and, you know,in progress. I'm really excited to, to have him here today to talk about this.
Aven: so speaking of cool books, let's start with that. I know it's been out a little while, but could you tell us a little bit about [00:02:00] The White Pedestal? and then, maybe we'll get into where it came from and the website behind it and things like that, but if you could just give us a little... Your potted summary.
The White Pedestal Overview
Curtis Dozier: The White Pedestal is a book about the fascination that ancient Greece and Rome has for white nationalist activists, primarily those who have risen to prominence in the last 10 or 15 years in the, and primarily in the United States. Although I, I gesture at times toward a more international context.
And m- and maybe that's the simplest way to put it, or maybe the simplest way to put it is just with the subtitle, How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate. That's, that's really what the book is about. But I think I discovered in writing it, and I think readers I've talked to have discovered, that it ends up being about a lot more than that, You come to it to find out about this slightly bizarre, what seems like a sort of niche facet [00:03:00] of white nationalist activism in the ways they use ancient Greece and Rome.
You come to it to learn about that, but I found while working on the book, and I think what I've tried to do in writing it, is invite people to go on the journey that I went on in writing it. The more I worked on it, the more I discovered that this apparently dark corner of the internet actually has a lot more to say than I expected.
It, it has something to say about the way history is conceived of and valued in the contemporary world. It has something to say about how violence and oppression are sanitized and perpetuated, not just in hate groups and, extremist movements, but in mainstream contexts. It has something to say too about the way I was trained to think about the ancient world, and I think it has something to say, I hope, about the way all of us have either been trained in our [00:04:00] professional training or sort of acculturated just by growing up in societies in which references to the classical world are pervasive, it has something to say about that as well.
So this book about a fringy extremist movement in a way ends up being as much about ourselves
Marcie: Yeah. and, as you mentioned,
US & White Supremacy
Marcie: your focus is largely American, but, I think you, you make a really good point that, American history in particular is so intertwined with the classics. explicitly so amongst the, the Founding Fathers and, framers of, of the Constitution and so forth. and so this really, seems to be an important, element to understand. and because it's, so intertwined with that, it's therefore, very intertwined with the history of racism in America. and it is a really important piece to understand what's going on and, how we, often, it's not just the, the white supremacists consciously using this, but how we all [00:05:00] kind of- unwittingly, unknowingly do some of their work for them.
Curtis Dozier: I think I would say it's not... Or something I realized in writing the book is that it's not a coincidence that my country, the United States, has both a, I would say, unique relationship with white supremacy and a unique relationship with ancient Greece and Rome. And those two things, it turns out, go together.
And the overt white nationalists and openly hateful activists that I'm writing about are really just a symptom of that entanglement in the United States
Aven: Yeah. And although as we're both saying you're focused on the US, US has been a not insignificant player on the world stage over the last 100 years, shall we say. it's, you know, only in obviously geopolitical ways, but [00:06:00] culturally- ... that cultural underpinning then, bleeds into or, spreads, let's use a less violent metaphor, everybody else's understanding, and of course grows out of it.
It's not like the UK didn't have these,
Curtis Dozier: Right
Aven: before anyone ever made it from there to the US or whatever. course, there's a, these inter- historical webs go on. But as Canadians sitting on the border watching our US TV and, American movies and all the rest of it, living with the same threads of white supremacy in our own even if it's, culturally contingent too, it's absolutely relevant to everybody else as well, and we're all, think, complicit.
I mean, I mean,think the book both does and doesn't, obviously it takes a moral stance, but like it isn't a book that's there to wag its finger at the populace. But I also think it's fair to say that you're calling [00:07:00] out, and be g- to be generous, c- unwitting complicity that we all need to think about, and I don't think that's a moral judgment on people for existing in the culture they exist in. live where we live, but there and I don't think, I think it's important for those of us who are living outside of the US Yes, it's a unique relationship and a unique version of white supremacy the US has, it is not uniquely relevant to the US. That
Curtis Dozier: I,
Aven: long-winded way of saying, I think it's really important for people outside of the US too.
Curtis Dozier: Well, I, I, and I mean, I think there's a lot I could say in response to many of the issues you brought up there. I mean, over the years, and I think we'll probably talk a little bit of, about the research I did in writing the book a little later in the conversation, but, you know, over the years,
International Examples
Curtis Dozier: I've encountered a lot of examples from other national contexts.
So just to name a couple, there w- is a, you know, nativist and white nationalist political party in Spain,
Aven: [00:08:00] Right
Curtis Dozier: which has used imagery from, classical Sparta and from the film Gladiator, for example, to promote, their politics. Or, in France, there is, this, you know, conservative billionaire, let me just make sure I get his name right, Pierre Edouard Sterin.
he's, he's trying to promote basically nativist and far-right politics in France, and he's called his project to do this, he's called it Project Pericles to sort of give it the dignity of a classical reference. And to, to name a couple Canadian examples, d- I wrote something, it's not in the book, but I wrote something with one of your colleagues in Canada, Catherine Blouin, about, a few years ago, there was this freedom convoy in Canada full of, full of, you know, xenophobes and other white nationalist activists.
And a lot of the... There was a, there was a leak of the email list of people who were participating in that, and many of them had classical, classically themed usernames and so on. We wrote about [00:09:00] that. Or, or, you know, something that's h- c- I think come into existence since the book came out. the separatist movement in Alberta, for example.
I think since the book came out, they, they started, they... Something called the Centurion Project formed as part of this Alberta separatist movement. And so there, you know, there are classical references in a lot of different places in support of, you know, nativist and, and white nationalist politics.
And I, you know, I'm fascinated by those, and I just have found that whenever I try to write about them, I don't know enough about the context that they emerge from. It's really hard for me, as an American, to comment in a, a incisive and critical way about a Alberta separatist movement,
for ex- for example.
and so I've, I kind of shied away from that. But you're exactly right. I really hope that readers of this book, wherever they are, will see something disturbingly or revelatorily familiar in what I'm [00:10:00] describing in the American context, and I think they probably will because as you say, I say the United States has a unique relationship with, white supremacy, but maybe in a sense every colonialist nation has their own unique relationship with white supremacy.
And the thing that is not unique is that very often the symbols and prestige of classical antiquity are part of the ways that those colonizing forces, justified their, their violence against indigenous people, for example, and declared their presence to be a civilizing presence.
That's, that's one of the ways that, the classical past has been used in Britain, in Canada, in the United States, many, many, many, many places. That's why all these colonial capitals, both in the former colonies and in the imperial capitals of Europe have classical architecture, for example, is, you know, as a sort of declaration of that, like, civilizing force.
So I think there'll be a lot that's familiar. Now, you use the term, [00:11:00] calling out, people, and I think that, that was something I found really challenging in writing the book, because I actually think maybe a little bit of
Calling In, Not Calling Out
Curtis Dozier: finger-wagging is in order. But but I hope I, I hope I could show that I found myself wagging my finger at myself as a professional classical scholar through so, through so much of this work.
And so I tried to write in a way that invites more like reflection than finger-wagging, and recognition, and a sort of de-familiarization of the familiar. 'Cause of course the way that fascism or White supremacy or any kind of violent movement works is by naturalizing itself and, and making itself almost banal, to use a term from,
Aven: Mhm
Curtis Dozier: there's a great book, Banal Nationalism, which is again mostly about the United States, but it's about how the sort of like nationalist symbols are so omnipresent that they become banal, almost unseeable.
And I kind of, I kind of hope my book is a, like, once you see it you can't unsee [00:12:00] it kind of experience for some people. Is to see the, the violent politics that so often have attended the deployment of the classical in really in, in mainstream contexts. And it isn't to make us feel bad about ourselves or guilty or ashamed.
or still less to identify anyone as a crypto-White nationalist or, or Neo-Nazi or anything. What I really hope to say in the book is that if you just do the normal thing in studying antiquity, if you kind of just go with the f- flow in your orientation to antiquity, whether you're studying it or enjoying it or, or watching it on TV or whatever it is, if you just do the normal thing, because of the history of the way that antiquity has been used by oppressive c- colonial governments, the way it's been used by intellectuals, mainstream intellectuals and historians to justify violence and oppression in many contexts, and I try to detail some of that in my book.
Because of that history, if you just do the normal [00:13:00] thing, you're gonna risk taking an orientation to antiquity that sanitizes and perpetuates that history. And the hope is, is that, at least a reader who approaches the book with a, with a reasonable amount of curiosity and humility, and believe me when I say I learned a lot of humility by writing this book, the reader who approaches it with, with curiosity and a little bit of humility, I hope they won't come away thinking that I am shaming them. I hope they will come away feeling empowered to see critically the, the systems that they're being kind of invited to join and participate in, or the, the orientations towards antiquity, the... I don't know, I sound like a professor. The epistemic frame that is, you know, is being, being offered to them all around them to sort of critically reflect on that and to say, "No,
Aven: I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna recognize that for what it is, and I'm going to try to figure out..."
Curtis Dozier: And this is the unfinished work of my book. I'm gonna [00:14:00] try to figure out a different orientation to Greco-Roman antiquity that does not perpetuate and tacitly endorse those politics. And that's why your idea of the unwitting collaborator is, is really key because I think so many of us living in the places we live, surrounded by classical symbols that are there to sanitize, idealize, justify all kinds of violence, it's...
The easy thing to do is to unwittingly accept and perpetuate those
Marcie: Yeah. you write about that really reminded me of a realization that I had about my own teaching. I taught a course called
Teaching & Catullus
Marcie: the Greek and Latin Roots of English, and it was all about etymology and looking at how Greek and Latin words come into, to English. But I realized I was doing this without any kind of critical, examination of, what does this mean that our scientific words come from Greek and Latin, our medical terms, our legal terms? And, the textbook that I used even at one point [00:15:00] says, that makes a comparison between the more elegant sounding Greek and Latin words versus the original Germanic ones. And that's setting up a value judgment that I was perpetuating without examining. And so after a few years, I started to add some context- and say, "Look what we're saying by doing this, and look at the ways that this kind of thing has been for racist purposes, or other bad purposes." and yeah, I think that's really important stop and think about what you're doing yourself.
Curtis Dozier: And, and just think about it, everyone who's out there listening. If, if Marcie had to c- come to realize that, it sounds like you realized it before you read my book, so by whatever process. But like, you know, if, if, if Marcie could teach that class for however long without thinking about that, s- and I, I use the example of you because here you are, you do this podcast, you're always talking to people with critical [00:16:00] orientations to the ancient world.
I, you know, I know for a fact that you are not just, like, typical classical scholar in your interests, in the, in the way you conduct yourself and s- in your identity, and so on and so forth, right? Like, if even Marcie is in danger of not noticing the implicit politics of what we're doing, then, I mean, that really just shows how, how big the need is to really call attention to it and critically consider it.
And I have to say, that's one reason I like, I like ... That's a strange way to put it, but one reason I think that the subject matter I chose, 'cause there's a lot of ways you could approach that, and a lot of people have approached it from different ways. You know, the, I'm not the first person to say this about antiquity, but one reason I think that the people I write about, that is, you know, people who are openly anti-Semitic, outrageously white supremacist in their declarations, just completely in your face about how hateful,
a human being can be, and they're completely [00:17:00] open about saying that Greco-Roman antiquity justifies violence, and, and hatred, and exclusion of outsiders, and so on.
You know, they're just completely in your face. I think those are useful because that's a provocation to us t- that it's hard to ignore.
you know, so my hope is, is that, that, that provocation that they provide sort of creates the possibility for s- for seeing a much wider phenomenon
Aven: Yeah, and I think, another... I said finger-wagging, but I think another way of is that w- what I think your book does do, and I do think your tone, that's what I was trying to say, is I do- did not feel chastised by your book, right? that is not the tone you are taking. and I think that's obviously very important because really, that's not a, that's not a position from which we learn. We do not learn when we are told we are bad people, generally.
Curtis Dozier: and even that like points to, in a way toward the like politically impoverished
orientation to the ancient world that, that we as scholars come up [00:18:00] through because, you know, I d- I mean, if it worked in the book for me to not be chastising people and to be calling in rather than calling out or whatever, you know, I had no or very few models for that within classical scholarship.
I had very few, you know, what mentorship resources within the f- within the field to guide me in that. You know, those things are just not considered skills that the historian or literary critic or whatever needs to develop.
and, you know, throughout, throughout the book, I, I more and more just felt like, "Wow, I just do not...
My professional training did not give me the tools I need to do the project I'm trying to do." It gave me the tools to, be able to evaluate their use of sources. It gave me the tools, you know, th- in, in the subfield of recep- it g- it gave me the tools to see the problems. It gave me the tools to think of...
I mean, in a sense, you know, I, I'm, I'm lucky to teach in a school that [00:19:00] has made reception theory pretty central to our curriculum.
Right me to recognize this as, like, a viable research project at all in the, in the first place and so on. But in terms of the rhetoric of it and in terms of the sort of, forward-looking political orientation and the, the cultivation of a relationship with the reader, you know, I w- I felt I was pretty, pretty on my own.
And if it worked, then I am, am I, I am grateful. But, you know, as I say, it sort of, it points to this desire, I think, which is still pretty persistent. And it, and you can see it if you look at some of the, the less generous reviews of my book that, that have come out. There's a, there's a persistent desire to say, "No, history should be s- should be separate from politics.
Why i- why is Dozier trying to make the study of the past political? i- isn't he just doing what the, the white nationalists are doing?" And, and the tru- the truth is, or what I think [00:20:00] the truth is, is that if we try to make the study of history apolitical, if we try to take politics out of it, then we are in fact making a political move, which is to leave in place the status quo of the way history has been used.
And in fact, the, the apolitical almost always supports small C conservative in the sense of keeping things the way they are,
Aven: Yep. Yeah.
Curtis Dozier: small C conservative politics. And I think if we look at the... You know, I wrote this book between 20 and 2024, which in my country was a time, I think, of at least- Cautious optimism and,
Aven: Yeah.
Curtis Dozier: you know, some amount of con- s- I know.
And, and like, I cringe at some of the things I wrote in my book. and I actually have a, I have a piece... well, let me say, I would, I would say s- a few things differently if I had known what was coming,
Aven: I, when I finished the book. I have a piece on the Yale U- Yale University Press blog. I don't know if you do show notes, but I could give you a link to it there, where [00:21:00] I
Curtis Dozier: sort sort of look back on, look back on The White Pedestal from the vantage point of 2026, a book that really was...
The manuscript was finished kind of in the early part of
Aven: right
Curtis Dozier: in the, by the end of 2023. You know, I look back on it and see, say, "Well, how has this held up?" Not well in some ways because I didn't know what was coming, but actually disturbingly well in, in other ways. But in any case, you know, I think in 2026 we can say that, just leaving things the way they are is not a orientation we wanna take.
And, you know, if that's what, if that's what doing apolitical history means, then I completely reject and,
Aven: Yeah.
Curtis Dozier: you know, reject that, that premise. And by the way, you can see from, you know, in this country at least, you can see from the current administration's approach to history, from their obsession with controlling history, with erasing history, with defining who gets to talk [00:22:00] about history and what is allowed to say, you can see that they know that history is very political and that, that history is essential to the maintenance of their power.
And so, you know, I just think, we ha- we have to recognize the political dimension of, of what we're doing even though we are really trained as scholars to try to distance ourselves from that.
Aven: Absolutely. you're preaching to the choir on this one, obviously. But I think also, I hope to our audience there's a, a, a fairly straightforward understanding that yes, all, all choices you make when discussing the past are political, not making an overt choice is a choice because
Curtis Dozier: let me just say too, in...
Aven: it.
Curtis Dozier: Yeah, sorry to interrupt you. In 2026, it's okay to preach to the choir because, because people n- people need to know they are not alone and they are not crazy
Aven: Yeah. Yeah. no, that's very true, and I think that, we find community in being open about our political concerns and our understanding of the world [00:23:00] and f- setting our framework, that epistemic framework you're talking about, of saying, "Yes, no, we all do actually see the same world."
Because we are being told the fundamental truth of the party is to reject the evidence of your own eyes, right? we are being told that what we see is not there, often enough that it takes some reassurance that no, not, you're not just living in a world. it is there.
it's right in front of you. Yeah.
Pharos Website
Marcie: let's rewind for a minute and talk about your website that preceded this, Pharos. tell us about it and why you started it.
Curtis Dozier: So in 2015 and into 2016 The phenomenon that I'm now calling white nationalist classicism, that is the fascination that white nationalist movements have for the ancient world, sort of erupted into the mainstream news in the United States. at that time, this movement was called the alt-right, a term that I think now we can recognize as a, as a euphemism created by that [00:24:00] movement to disguise its continuities with older style antisemitic and white nationalist politics.
But at that time, we called it the alt-right, and they were getting a lot of free press, from major news outlets here because of their, polished, sophisticated, and historically informed with references to Greco-Roman antiquity, commentary on US politics, and they were particularly, invested in the, campaign of Donald Trump, his first presidential campaign.
By the way, later political science research has suggested that actually Trump's campaign helped them more than they helped him. They don't seem to have contributed much to his popularity. but he certainly gave them a big platform and, and reason to attract attention. But, you know, they were in the news, talking about ancient Greece and Rome, and, and after Trump was elected for the first time...
Oh, and I should say, by the way, other classical scholars were calling attention to this, in particular Donna Zuckerberg, who, at that time ran a online journal for classics and contemporary [00:25:00] culture, Eidolon. she and, and other people there were, writing about this phenomenon.
And it was something completely unknown to me, and I think to many
Aven: Yes
Curtis Dozier: in the United States that these people would know anything about ancient Greece and Rome, or that ancient Greece and Rome would have anything to offer to their politics. And so, Trump was elected the first time, and I was kind of wondering what could I do politically.
And Donna Zuckerberg, who I had done some writing for her journal before, she wrote an essay called How to Be a Good Classicist Under a Bad Emperor, in which she called attention to this phenomenon and critically considered it from a couple dimensions. And then kind of like as a throwaway line at the end, she said, "Somebody should make a Tumblr to document examples of this."
That was in her, like, what should we do, thing. And, to be honest, I didn't know what Tumblr was, but I thought I had some resources at my institution that I could put toward a project. And like I say, I was kind of looking for something I could do politically as a classical scholar, and I had done some writing for Donna.
So I, so I reached out to [00:26:00] her, and we talked about it, and out of that conversation and some of the advice she gave me, came my website, Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, which you can, you can access at doingjusticetotheclassics.org or at pharosclassics.org, P-H-A-R-O-S. And that, I launched it in 2017, so I and a student research assistant here worked on some material for the, for the next, nine months.
And in 2017, I launched this website to document and critically respond to, appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups. And, Honestly, I had no idea what was gonna happen with this website. but over the years, it's actually gotten a lot of attention, and not just from classical scholars and their students.
we've gotten a lot of press internationally, and domestically. We've been visited by I think we've been visited by users from something like 170 countries worldwide, which is, which is almost every [00:27:00] country in the world.
Aven: and we are in the high hundreds of thousands of page views here now nine years later, which is, which is not that big a number if you're trying to run a big website, but it's a pretty niche idea, uh, appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups.
Curtis Dozier: So I'm, I'm proud of what it grew into and became. But
Aven: I will say that, you know, when I, when I launched that site, I thought my job as a classical scholar, as an expert, as a historian, was to expose the ways that these hate groups were distorting or misrepresenting Greco-Roman antiquity. And so when we wrote about, far-right rioters wearing Spartan helmets and waving flags with Spartan slogans, you know, we'd point out, "Well, notice how they misspelled the slogan on their flag, first of all.
Curtis Dozier: And don't they know that, Sparta actually collapsed kind of under its own lack of, ability to reproduce itself because of their, you know, brutal economic system and so on? You know, don't they know that the [00:28:00] homoerotic relationships were part of, Spartan military training and so on?"
Or, or when people would quote Juvenal's xenophobic, poetry, we would say, "Don't they know that, Juvenal was writing in the form of a persona and is, is making fun of that position as much as he's endorsing it," and so on. So we, you know, we would, we would do things like that, and, and there was a lot of interest in that, I have to say.
And e- especially in the early days, I, I and my research assistants, we would reach out to experts, you know, specialists who had a lot of knowledge about the material that the, that the hate groups were using, and we would ask them to comment, and we'd collect their responses and, write these essays, pointing out all the, errors and omissions and distortions and so on.
And you do find a lot of, really off-the-wall and ahistorical material in white nationalist treatments of Greco-Roman antiquity. You know, if you think about the Capitol riot on January 6th, 2021, here in this country.
Aven: Mhm.
Curtis Dozier: movie "300," threw on a [00:29:00] Spartan helmet, and tried to overthrow the government. that's what they know about history. And I think my, I think my attitude was like, "What do these people really know about history?" But as I say in the book, the more I worked on this material the harder it got for me to maintain that sort of attitude of contempt and superiority over their treatments of history.
Because I discovered that yes, there's a whole world of, people who don't know much about history, but there's actually this ecosystem - and this is really who I focus my book on, that political scientists call
The Intellectual Radical Right
Curtis Dozier: the intellectual radical right. There's this whole ecosystem of people writing about white nationalist politics, promoting neo-fascism, who know a lot about history.
And so when I started working on it, I was looking at, you know, guys with tattoos and American flag shorts with Spartan helmets on, and being like, These guys have nothing to do with what I do as a professional scholar." But as I got more interested in the intellectual radical right, you know, [00:30:00] these are men who have PhDs in political science or philosophy.
These are men who teach at accredited universities, or have taught at accredited universities that you've heard of. these are people who are fluent in foreign languages and have lived abroad and use their knowledge of European languages, for example, to translate European white nationalist thought into an American context, both translating in the sense of taking the words originally written in French or German and putting them into English, but also translating them conceptually from a European context into an American political context.
And they write, argument-driven essays that, mimic... I mean, I, I shouldn't even say mimic. That in fact embody the techniques of academic argumentation with citations of sources, with bibliographies, with engagement with other scholarship, including mainstream scholarship. And so I started to just realize that the people I was looking [00:31:00] at with the American flag shorts and the Spartan helmets, it was too easy to see them as something different from me because these, these people that I've just described, they actually look a lot like me.
I used to joke, I was working on this book during the pandemic, that I was writing a book about white men with PhDs in their basements, and I was a white man with a PhD in my basement
Aven: Yeah.
Curtis Dozier: writing about ancient Greece and Rome. And so that was a, that was like the sort of crucial shift for me in this work, was when I realized just how much these people know about antiquity.
And in fact, that in many cases they see antiquity with clearer eyes certainly than I did, and I think with clearer eyes that m- than many kind of progressively minded classical scholars do. So if you're familiar, you know, one example is if, if you're familiar with the expression Athens, the birthplace of democracy, which I think is something that
Aven: people are taught, and we might even know all the ways that Athenian democracy, does not look very much like, what we would consider a democratic system.
Curtis Dozier: We might know [00:32:00] that women were excluded from all political rights. We might know that, outsiders had almost no ability to achieve citizenship, and that in fact, as an outsider, you, if you wanna live in Athens, you have to pay a special tax just to be there. And if you wanna conduct business in Athens, you have to pay an extra tax to do that.
And just to be there, you have to have a citizen sponsor who's basically a citizen to surveil you and kind of make sure you're not trying to do anything that only citizens are allowed to do. And we, we probably even know that, under Pericles, you know, the supposedly great Athenian orator and statesman, they even made it harder to become a citizen.
As the, as the city became wealthier, Pericles was pretty much like, " let's make it harder to be a citizen so that the citizens can have a bigger share of this wealth that the, the city is accumulating." We might kind of know all of this, and yet there's still this sort of holding up of Athens as a, you know, one of the reasons to study ancient history because Athens was such a dynamic and interesting place.
Well, the [00:33:00] white nationalists see all that too. they know all that about ancient Athens, and it allows them to say, "See? The exclusion of women from political life, the relegation of outsiders to a literal second-class status by law, and the blocking off of any opportunities of obtaining citizenship, those things are completely compatible with democratic institutions."
You know, it allows them to claim that their political ideas, that the kind of politics they wanna implement in our societies, these exclusive, nativist, misogynist politics, it allows them to claim that these are time-honored ideas associated with the birthplace of, of democracy. and again, and again, and again I found that, that happening in, in my book where they would bring up something from antiquity.
Okay, the Athens stuff maybe I knew about, although I hadn't thought about it in exactly that way. But again and again, I found them bringing up things from antiquity where I thought, "No, they must be making that up."
Aven: Mm. then you look into it, and they actually had done their research. They knew their sources, [00:34:00] and they were accurately citing ancient sources that articulate violent and oppressive politics that are, that are at least similar to the ideas they wanna promote in the contemporary world, or in many cases identical.
Curtis Dozier: And, as that all sort of dawned on me, you know, I realized that this isn't a project about debunking these white nationalists who don't know anything about history. It's about actually recognizing that this subset of white nationalists, as I say, are kind of a, a symptom of or an index of the way that Greco-Roman antiquity, both the authentic remains of Greco-Roman antiquity as they are preserved contain a lot of ideas, congruent with, or in some cases identical, identical to white nationalist ideas, that the history of interpreting ancient Greece and Rome is one of mainstream intellectuals and historians who my white nationalist activists cite and refer to.
The history of interpretation is one of mainstream intellectuals using antiquity to promote slavery, [00:35:00] colonialism, antisemitism, you name it. the people I write about can point to that history of interpretation and say, "See, we're not saying anything extreme or fringy. We're just saying what historians of past centuries took to be the truth, and it's only the, like, woke agenda or modern degeneracy that makes you think history means anything else."
the more I worked on this, I just, the more I just saw how deep the entanglement goes. And so, if anybody wants to dig through the 130 articles on my website, you, you'll see the transformation over time is that it started out debunking, and it came to be about writing about the entanglements with, mainstream politics, and that's really what I, what I focus my book on.
Now, I think a lot of readers come to my book thinking it's about the first part, that it's about, okay, here's this expert who's gonna say how white nationalists don't know anything about history. But I hope most people will... They'll come for that, but they'll leave with an understanding of the much broader and [00:36:00] longstanding entanglements that I discovered in working on the material
Limits of Debunking
Aven: I would even ask if you would agree with the thought that in fact the debunking, the move to debunking which, and fact-checking and, you know, correcting which, like we're never going to get away from that completely because boy is that a feature of being an expert in any field. This is not a classicist thing.
Curtis Dozier: This is Right.
Aven: in a field you are going to go watch the movie where somebody gets something wrong and you are going to
Curtis Dozier: Yep.
Aven: it very hard not to say, "By the way, that's wrong.
Curtis Dozier: Yeah.
no." Yeah. So that old thing, technically correct is the best kind of correct.
Aven: correct. Exactly. Exactly. So we're not gonna get away from that and I like, I'm as guilty of that if it's a guilt- if it's something to be guilty of as anyone. I wonder if that move to debunking in this particular context is in fact ceding the ground that, oh, if you can find... it were true [00:37:00] you would be justified,
Curtis Dozier: Mm,
Aven: Like what it's doing is it's yielding it's ceding the much more important ground which is, oh, if Athens did do it that way, then that justifies it in the present. And the real root of the problem is who the fuck cares whether Athens did it or not? The question is,is it moral and ethical right now in this culture? That's the question, and I don't care who you can find in the ancient world who did it or didn't do it. We can talk about that on its own terms, but the move to find it in the ancient world as a justification for the modern world is the problem
Curtis Dozier: I, I would agree with that, and I thank you for formulating it in that way, 'cause I think I hadn't really gotten there quite myself. You know, y- I think where my mind goes about the, fact-checking, if you wanna call it that, is that it, One reason it feels good is that it reassures us that what's going on in the white nationalist communities has nothing to do with us.
So it creates a sort of false, feeling [00:38:00] of separation, when in fact we are all, as you say, unwitting participants in political systems that, perpetuate various kinds of, of violence. And l- as long as we, are ignorant of that, then we will continue... then we have very little chance of, of resisting them.
So that's kinda where my, my mind goes. But you're making a, related but different point, if I can just try to reflect it back to you, which is that when we fact-check, we leave in place the potential for the ancient world to be used as a, a model to determine what the best political practice should be.
We, we leave in place the status, the special status that ancient Greece and Rome enjoys, which is the root of the whole attraction of that part of the world to these white nationalists. on some level, they don't really care about history. They're interested, they're only interested in things that will make their ideas seem prestigious, [00:39:00] natural, respectable, time-honored, and in the best case, inevitable.
And so one thing I'm kind of... You know, it took me a while to realize, but you could hardly imagine something better designed than Greco-Roman antiquity as it is traditionally conceptualized. you could hardly imagine something better designed to support white nationalist politics because as I say, the texts and perspectives that have been given the most prominence in the mainstream and traditional conception of that are articulating ideas that are attractive or congruent or identical to white nationalist ideas.
The tradition of interpretation is one of the promotion of white nationalist ideas in mainstream context. And if I could add, popular representations more often than not perpetuate and, maintain those, those ways of thinking about the ancient world. So it's, it's just a, it's a
Classics as Prestige Reserve
Curtis Dozier: giant reserve of prestige for white nationalist ideas.
And so you talk about, how we need to be saying, "Who cares what Athens says?" and you're [00:40:00] exactly right, is that it's almost laughable the, logical fallacy of what they're saying is, you know, when they cite Aristotle's politics and say Aristotle has this long list of, city states where Aristotle points out that in each case when they admitted outsiders into the city state, it led to revolution, civil war, collapse of the society, and so on, and therefore we know we should not admit outsiders into our societies.
It's almost laughable what they're doing, right? They're saying because Aristotle said it, it must be true.
Aven: Yes,
exactly.
Curtis Dozier: baldly, we laugh at it. But, but it's not laughable because, that's the normal way of interpreting and valuing Greco-Roman antiquity, which has had, you know, disastrous consequences in terms of human suffering, extermination and genocide of indigenous peoples, enslavement of, of Africans, and, the whole imperial projects of the 19th century are basically founded on that idea.
Because these smart [00:41:00] ancient people said or did something, it's justified for us to do it. So it's not laughable at all
Aven: No.
Curtis Dozier: e- even though it's such a flimsy logical fallacy. But historically, that's the history of the prominence of classics. And so when we cede to that, when we say yes, classics deserves to be that as long as it's interpreted correctly,
Aven: Yes,
Curtis Dozier: haven't really s- we haven't really dislodged what needs to be dislodged.
So thank you for clarifying that for me.
Aven: Yeah. I almost think, so the fact-checking that needs to be done is the role of classical antiquity in our current, political thinking. like that's a very broad thing to say, but I mean,I think that's the, underpinnings really. Like,what you're doing is very important
, but what the underpinnings is de-centering and not de-legitimizing, but de-prestiging, it.
And we can see the ludicrousness, as you say, when we think about it, say, in terms of medicine. We don't say, "Pliny the Elder said X, Y, and Z, therefore we also should grind up, cedar and put it in [00:42:00] our drink and that will keep the bad influence of the moon off us," or whatever.
Curtis Dozier: I don't know. Yeah,
Aven: I don't think you, can
Curtis Dozier: God help you if you do some of those things
Aven: no matter how outlandish what you try to make up is, it's not as outlandish as what is in Pliny though.
Curtis Dozier: Although medicine's a good example though, right? Because there still is this idea of the Hip- the Hippocratic Oath as like the, you know, central, you
know
Aven: ju- it just depends on which text you're taking. But we
know that there's some where we don't do the appeal to authority for the ancient
Curtis Dozier: Yeah.
Aven: And it's funny, I didn't, until I was reading this and listening to you just now, I think I didn't articulate... I'm not saying that I'm not, again, guilty is not quite the right word, that I'm not, I haven't done all these things myself. Of course, I have in the past when I was growing up in classics. I think I was insulated a little bit from some of it because when my specialty subject was always, Latin love poetry.
Curtis Dozier: Mhm.
Aven: if you wanna know a field where people don't look to the subject for moral authority and have not historically done so, now it's not that simple. There's [00:43:00] elements of looking to it for modeling of love and romantic attachment and stuff. But basically,
Curtis Dozier: Right
Aven: has not been held up as a moral authority any point in the reception of Catullus. nobody has said, Catullus said you should bugger your enemies, so we should all bugger our enemies." Although, the whole sort of- pickup culture Catullus, yeah, has gone to, has gone to Ovid, yeah. Yeah. But even they haven't gone to Catullus.
The only thing people have gone to Catullus for, aesthetically, and of course this is why, and none of this is an exception really to what you're talking about because aesthetically people have gone to the, those poets and used them as models so they still have this prestige.
it's all
embedded in the same thing. the particularity of like I must admire this person in order to work on them, that specific- wasn't really I was quite aware that Horace's Epodes are terrible. I mean in the sense of like me as a woman reading them was always like, "Oh God, this is really upsetting." but that never stopped me from wanting to work on it. So I had,hadn't been pulled into [00:44:00] the I must identify with my subject, which is I think one of the that classicists have had historically, right? Is that you must identify and love your subject or if you're working on it you must identify and love your subject.
Like, how do you separate those two things? and I worked on some, fairly monstrous works, so that never really worried me. not saying other people didn't identify them, but I didn't.
Curtis Dozier: Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a good thing to bring up because I think one response to my work too is to say, "Well, these people are, these white nationalists are just cherry-picking from history. They're just choosing. They're leaving so much out." And I, I actually would agree with that. I, and in fact, the word I like to use, I think I do use in the book, is that their vision of antiquity is a curated version of antiquity,
Aven: For
sure
Curtis Dozier: which, you know, only includes the material that legitimizes the things they wanna legitimize, and ignores or suppresses the parts that, don't.
I think that's right and fair to say. But very often we find that the [00:45:00] curation they enact on Greco-Roman antiquity is the same one, or very similar to the curation that's been enacted in mainstream context. And in a sense, Catullus is a good example because I don't have this exactly at my fingertips, but one thing to say is that most of the poems of Catullus were lost for many, many centuries.
You know, he's one of the, he's one of the poets, I think, with the largest gap between his lifetime and the earliest manuscript evidence, so that, you know, even in the, like, selection of texts that get preserved, Catullus was kind of marginalized. And p- you, I mean, there's a lot of randomness in that. I don't need to expl- tell you.
But there's also an element of, like, what is considered valuable and significant.
Aven: Oh yeah, for sure.
Curtis Dozier: and so Catullus
Aven: those collections for good reasons,
Curtis Dozier: he's left out for good reason. And then once he comes into existence, I mean, even into the 20th century, he's being bowdlerized
Aven: yeah.
Curtis Dozier: and, you know, kind of the, the elements that don't conform to a kind of heteronormative [00:46:00] sexuality,
are being suppressed and so on.
And so, so yes, Catullus, I think, is a threat to white nationalist, conceptions of history, but he's been considered for most of the history of interpretation a threat to sort of mainstream hegemonic classicism as well.
Aven: yeah
Curtis Dozier: and, you know, again and again and again, we find that. And so one thing I, I like about my book, You know, anybody who's written a book will know this, is sometimes you only kind of figure out what you wanna say after it's done.
Aven: Yeah.
Curtis Dozier: I made this point as strongly as I could have, but one thing I think my book shows is that creating a broadly inclusive and diverse curriculum for studying the ancient world is not just a concession to political correctness or the presence of women in universities or whatever it is, right?
That this shows that the political stakes of having a, of a diverse curriculum in classics they go beyond those sort of trivializing ideas. It actually is a [00:47:00] way to dislodge and disrupt and ultimately demolish an orientation to the ancient world that needs to be demolished. And so that, you know, when we teach class, you know, I don't know if Catullus is exactly the best example of this, but when we teach classes that try to recover the perspectives of women from antiquity, or try to recover the perspectives of enslaved people from antiquity, or talk about the people who lived under Roman domination as, instead of the, just the people who enacted Roman domination.
When we do those, things, I think my book shows the political stakes of doing that and the necessity of doing that, unless we wanna just leave in place this curated vision of antiquity that feeds into white nationalist politics so strongly.
Aven: Yeah. No, I agree. And actually I think Catullus can be part of that if what you do is you don't you don't only show them one, two, five, seven, the, happy kiss- kisses poems.
Curtis Dozier: They're just like us
Aven: yeah. and they're just like... But also because the way that Catullus has been, it hugely influential was on the development of the notion of romantic love in [00:48:00] the West, you straight line Catullus, Ovid, the Middle Ages pop songs, Taylor Swift.
it's... I leapt over a few things in there, but you get the
Curtis Dozier: Yeah yeah. You can make that claim on the basis of a handful of poems
Aven: yeah, and you can't, you absolutely can, but only if you leave out the ones that are violent and all the rest of it. But by bringing those back in into the classroom, you denaturalize that vision of love because you say, "Yeah, he's really identifiable."
Like,my students always identify with certain poems by Catullus, so it feels just like teenage love. then you say, "Yeah, and do you identify with this one?" And they're like, "Oh, no. No, I don't." And you're like, "Great. Same person wrote both. Let's talk about how poetry works. It's not a pure expression of internal emotion.
Did you know that?" and both on an aesthetic level, here's how to read fiction, here's how to read critically, but also on a, hey, wait, this thing you think is universal, all humans react to love the same way is actually a construction, and it could've been constructed differently if they'd included these six poems as [00:49:00] well. you can do that work too. So it's not by any means to say that you can only do the work that you're talking about when we talk about history. I would strongly argue that, yes, in fact, that's what you do when you teach literature well, and you do it by including the literature that's uncomfortable, the literature that doesn't agree with your views, the literature that makes you want to squirm and say, "Actually, I don't like this bit.
Can we move on?" That's the stuff you include, and it makes you a better thinker. and it doesn't have to be classical. This is not a move to re-elevate, classics. It doesn't matter what. But, you get them in the classroom with... A- And this is part of our complicity, right? And you s- talked about this in the book for sure, a lot. Like, how do we get them in the classroom? We get them in the classroom by playing into the assumption that this is uniquely interesting material. But then we reap what we sow because then we have a, a real hard time arguing, but also you can dismiss everything that's from the ancient world because it's not uniquely [00:50:00] important. You can't have it both ways, we have to see that. We have to see that we can't do those both at the same time
Curtis Dozier: And, and I do find, you know, some, some people who I think are politically sympathetic to what I'm doing
have the reaction that I'm sort of hurting classics by calling attention to these dimensions in a period of hostility to the humanities, disinvestment in the humanities, the closure of programs, declining enrollments, all those things.
And th- and they're saying like, "Yeah, you know, like I agree with you, but like, don't you think we should kind of keep a lid on this in the current environment?" Or, aren't you, Curtis, inadvertently hastening the elimination of our programs?
And the fear is real, and I know I don't need to tell you about this. But You know, I think my feeling is that our overlords are gonna do that anyway,
Aven: Yeah.
Curtis Dozier: and
Aven: crucial to
Curtis Dozier: it's not, they're not doing it because of the historical... I mean, in a way I wish they thought about it that carefully.
you know, they're not [00:51:00] doing it 'cause of the historical entanglement. They're doing it for mercenary corporatizing, reasons. And so in the meantime, it's a question of like, do we wanna be on the right side of history? do we wanna tell the truth about history, in our teaching? And by the way, I have found, and not just in my kind of political bubble in which I admit I am privileged to teach in a political bubble that made it possible for me to do my work without, you know, swimming too hard against the tide.
But even when I speak in other places, and pretty conservative places, I find students are actually very energized by what I'm talking about. I think there are probably some who are turned off, but they're the ones we don't want anyway. Those are, those are people who, who were interested in the ancient world for the wrong reasons, f- for the reason of just trying to ratify the current global order or their own sense of white supremacy, or white superiority maybe I should say.
but, but most students I think when they learn about what I'm doing, they are energized and fascinated by it. It shows them that history matters. It shows them [00:52:00] that the study of history has political stakes and, and meaning in the contemporary world, and I think it makes them want to be better ambassadors for the ancient world than, frankly, maybe I have been for most of my career.
So I don't, I don't worry about hurting the discipline in this work
Aven: Yeah, I think the basic realization that, trying to make yourself appealing to the people who are ravaging the humanities, and I say this with a fair amount of experience, work anyway. You just end up compromised and cut
instead of just cut. And so at least if you're gonna fight for something, fight for the thing in the best version of itself.
If you're going to fight for classics, fight for the classics that is going to do good in the world, then you win or you lose, but least you're fighting for something worth fighting for,
Curtis Dozier: amen
Marcie: you know, this book is not just a perceptive and insightful analysis of these issues, though it is, it's also very much a call to [00:53:00] action. So
Call to Action
Marcie: what can we do either as professors or students or, just for the general public who interested in, ancient Greece and Rome?
Curtis Dozier: Well, Marcie, I, I actually wish the book was more of a call to action, so I wanna acknowledge that, this question is a very common question. It's kind of at the, it's kind of at the edge of my thinking right now. But, we've already referred to a few things, and it sorta depends who the we is, what can we do.
B ... Say we are teachers or researchers, on the classical world. We've already referred to the need to, teach about the ancient world in a way that refuses to ratify and perpetuate the curated version of the ancient world that gives support to white nationalist politics.
We've already talked about the need to, refuse the low-hanging fruit of marketing our classes or our discipline in ways that continue to hold up the ancient world as a [00:54:00] sophisticated society that provides models we should uncritically adopt. We've, we've, we've referred to those things that we as teachers and researchers can do.
I think another area that I hope my book gives more legitimacy to and, kind of demonstrates some of the political stakes is the, research into alternative traditions of interpreting Greco-Roman antiquity,
Aven: Mhm.
Curtis Dozier: the need to discover what- groups of people or communities who have in fact been marginalized and harmed by what I might call hegemonic classicism to discover what they have said about the ancient world.
You know, in, in the United States, probably the best example of this is the tradition of African American Long before even emancipation, there were Black people in the United States interested in Greco-Roman antiquity, talking about Greco-Roman antiquity, and immediately upon emancipation, there were calls and demands for [00:55:00] classical education for African Americans.
And there's all kinds of ways of thinking about the ancient world that were developed before emancipation and after emancipation that do not indulge in the same triumphalist,
endorsement of hegemonic politics that mainstream traditional classicism has. And if you multiply that times all the different, groups who have been harmed by dominant culture politics in the history, even if you just confine it to Europe, but also to the, so-called New World, and the ways that people there were forced to think about Greco-Roman antiquity in the Caribbean, in South and Latin America, and what they did with it after they were forced to incorporate it into their education, what they did with it.
So if you multiply it around the world to, you know, the orientations of, gay people, of colonized people, formerly colonized people, of women. Don't neglect feminist classicism.
All those, traditions [00:56:00] contain orientations or the possibility of orientations to the ancient world that critique the orientations that I'm describing in my book, critique the orientations adopted by the people I'm describing in the book, that both critique them, that expose the hypocrisy of those, those orientations of the ancient world and expose the violence that they enact.
All those traditions need to be, held up and celebrated and given equal prominence to the traditions of mainstream classicism that are, as I said, so pervasive and familiar as to almost become banal. And I think if we did have a world... 'Cause someti- sometimes people will s- you know, again, politically sympathetic people will criticize what I'm doing by saying, "Why are you only talking about the bad stuff?
what about all the, good ways," quote-unquote, "politically good that, that classics has been used?" And, and I agree. Those are very significant. But I wrote a book trying to redress the imbalance in the prominence and familiarity of those. You know, I think the familiarity and [00:57:00] prominence of hegemonic classicism is so much larger than these other traditions that I I felt it was important to kind of call attention to that and try to demolish that reputation a little bit.
And then we can start imagining a world where what would classics be? What would our orientation of the ancient world be if all these other traditions were as well-known and as familiar, and as widely circulated and prominent as the one that has endorsed imperialism, and slavery, and genocide, and, and all of those things?
That's a, that's an exciting prospect to me. What would the ancient world be in a world where those were familiar? And so I I hope my book sort of, points to the need for that work to continue, right? This, this work is underway, is, has been conducted by many people, for a long time.
But many of them are sort of marginal within the discipline, are marginalized within the discipline because of what gets sort of rewarded and taken seriously and so on. And I, and I hope my book can sort of give weight to the argument that, no, this is really significant work to recover these alternative [00:58:00] traditions of classicism.
Now, on the broader scale, I think it, it's really important to be honest about what we're up against here.
The Film 300 & Popular Representation
Curtis Dozier: the film 300, for example, which now is a kind of old film. I think it came out in 2006 or 2007, so we're right around the 20th anniversary of the film 300.
So it's a little bit of an old film, but it, it epitomizes something real, I think. That film grossed over a half a billion dollars worldwide, and it received a standing ovation the first night of the Berlin International Film Festival. This is a film which is basically a unapologetic, allegory of muscular white Europeans defending their civilization from degenerate, monstrous Easterners.
Aven: Yep
Curtis Dozier: that film sold so many t- sold so many tickets and received a standing ovation because it tells a story about the ancient world that is comfortable and familiar to very large numbers of [00:59:00] people. That is, it tells a story about the ancient world that tells us that the way things are in the current global order, with all the, all the violence and, disenfranchisement and inequality that the current global order entails, this is a story about the ancient world that tells us that all of that is the way it should be and has to be.
And it's just gonna be really hard for me teaching my , you know, course with a unit on the voices of women from antiquity and the unit on the experiences of enslaved people and so on. It's just gonna be really hard for me, and even all of us teaching our little courses, to dislodge that narrative about the global order, which is so comfortable and familiar.
so I don't wanna seem naive about what it's possible to accomplish. but I think what that points to, and in a sense, this dovetails with what Aven was saying just a moment ago about [01:00:00] how We should not try to make ourselves, attractive. It... Where if you wanna resist what's happening in the humanities within the academy is a different kind of work than just trying to do classics in a more popular way or something.
That's a kind of, you know, within the academy, I mean, you can tell me what you're imagining, but it's a kind of like organizing and coalition building and, awareness raising. You know, it's like the real work of activism and organizing, to, to denaturalize the forces that are promoting this. And so I think there's a way in which my book, outside of the discipline, tells us that maybe actually what 2026 demands, or 2025 or whatever, is not better readings of Greco-Roman antiquity, but actually a different kind of activism that strikes at, that, that attempts to strike at the heart of the assumptions about human difference, about who deserves to have good [01:01:00] conditions of employment, of life, of access to food and health and comfort and healthcare and so on.
That, that really strikes at the assumptions around those ideas that make the story about antiquity, the 300 and other, other popular representation of antiquity, that make those stories attractive in the first place. And maybe, maybe what the current moment demands, including of classical scholars, is a sort of engagement in those issues.
it demands that we work to dismantle the assumptions, the white supremacist assumptions of our society more directly than maybe we can do in classical scholarship
Aven: I mean, I can only agree really. I think, In terms of the call to action that your book presents, it's not like a manifesto, but what it does is it says, "Pay attention. Pay attention to this and what's going on and see that..." What you said right at the beginning, once you see it, you can't unsee it. [01:02:00] Don't try to unsee it. I think that really is the call that's at the end of your conclusion. It's don't try to unsee it. that it's there. Accept that these things are in the classics that you've been taught. They are both in the ancient world and they're in the history of the discipline. Don't accept that they have to be there, that is, that this is the only way to see the world, but accept that they're there, and accept that they're being used, and now deal with the world that's presenting and don't try to fight a rear guard of saying, no, but if only you understood better, you too would see the world I'd s-" I, sorry, that's a sort of another different argument.
But
Curtis Dozier: No, it's related though
Aven: the idea that, you know, if o- if only I could teach them, if only I could explain to them that they're just wrong, then they would be on my side. and of course, in a sense we're all trying to do that all the time. But I think with classics anyway, it's a move that I, I've made myself many a time and Some- sometimes that's all it [01:03:00] takes if you're working with somebody who has the same basic understanding of the world as you have, because I think it is useful to say to someone, "Oh, no, you know, That's not actually the way Athens worked," or, "Here's, this is what happened." And then they say, "Oh, good.
Okay, fine. Now I don't need to likeadd that part into my worldview because it was feeling uncomfortable anyway." Great. But when you're dealing with people who don't fundamentally share the same worldview, the work you have to do is much more fundamental work about changing society rather than checking them on whether they understand the rules around medics correctly
Curtis Dozier: it's not easy, right? It's, it's gonna ... It's like any of the, it's any of the work of activism is there's a lot of, like, self-reflection. There's a lot of self-knowledge we have to generate. There's a lot of habits we have to change. And, and like I say, I I think it, demands of us to, like, turn to the bigger picture, where I think the white nationalist ideas that I'm writing about are there in our societies, and maybe being classical scholars helps us see that.
I hope that's true. That's what I'm trying to do [01:04:00] in the book. but what we do next, there's an element that we do as classicists, but there's also an element we do as, like, human beings and citizens of our societies who want to imagine a, better world for everyone
Closing Reflections
Aven: On that either uplifting or deeply depressing note, and I'm sure that's what you felt a lot of the time when you were writing this book, I can't, decide whether I'm deeply depressed or feeling, energized. But
on
Curtis Dozier: that,
is that not 2026 in a, in a nutshell?
Aven: So true. So very true. but on that note, let me thank you again for being here and having this chat.
It's a, It's incredibly necessary work. I think it was done with... I actually think the fact that you came to it with what perhaps you might now see as a slightly naive, perspective, and then explain in the book how you worked your way through it- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm ... ... to a new place, I think that's massively valuable, actually.
That's very important, I think. Yeah. Yeah, 'cause I think that a lot of us are on that trajectory somewhere. and it's very helpful, like you say, to feel l- not alone, to see, where the [01:05:00] first steps come and then what more steps need to be taken. So thank you for that, and for doing this work, and for l- yourself in a terrible, terrible world.
Curtis Dozier: Yeah, thank you. And thanks for noticing that. I mean, I think all through the book I was conscious of a few things. I was conscious that so much of what I was saying was not new.
and I've even had people, people come up to me after talks I've given and been like, " Thanks for saying what I've been saying for years,
Aven: yeah.
Curtis Dozier: and maybe someb- maybe someone will take you seriously."
Yep. and so I do, you know... That's who, that's who my book is dedicated to, is everyone who's been trying. And, you know, I hope... So, okay, so there's that. I was conscious of, like, so much of what I'm doing is not new, although I mighta been the person who went the deepest into this world. And then the other thing is I was just so conscious that I, that in so many ways I was not the best person to do this, right?
Like, it's really a work of intellectual history, and I just do [01:06:00] not, did not have the space in my life to, like, develop the skills to do real intellectual history. It's really wide-ranging across the ancient world and, you know, like, I came up as a scholar of Quintilian and classical rhetorical theory, which is re- which is relevant, but, you know, there, there were so many thi- I, there were so many things, and, and any specialist who reads my book will see this.
There were so many places I was just so out of my league compared to, like, a real specialist. But I, but I do hope that there's something about, just how naive I was, and also how un-marginalized my identi- identity was that, you know, made it possible for me to talk about this in a way that makes a real contribution to the project that I think all of us, you know, all of, all the people I'm thinking of who've been working on this are trying to, trying to bring about.
So, so thanks for, recognizing that something about it worked and, I, you know, I often just thought there's so many people who would be better at doing this, but I, but I'm the one who, who is doing it right now, so I'm [01:07:00] just gonna keep going. And, you know, I just warmly invite, your listeners to, to check it out and, see what it's all about.
I, I, I think it is available in Canada through, Indigo. Is that the name of the site? so, it's there. And, like I say, I hope you'll, you'll come on the journey I went on and take a, take a look at it.
Aven: Definitely. Well, thank you so much and, we'll leave it there
Curtis Dozier: Thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed talking to you
Aven: For more information on this podcast, check out our website, www.alliterative.net, where you can find links to the videos, blog posts, sources, and credits, and all our contact info.
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It helps us a lot. We'll be back soon with more musings about the connections around us. Thanks for listening. Bye.