ROMAN BRONZES AS SETTLERCOLONIALISM:
BY Justin Han, Amanda Brynn, Samuel Kimball, Kaleb Hood, and Abby Wells ILLUSTRATION Mara Jovanovic DESIGN Miya Lohmeier
ARCHAEOLOGISTS AND CLASSICISTS FOR MONUMENT REMOVAL
In late 2019, Brown University’s Public Art Committee proposed to relocate the University’s Caesar Augustus monument to the Quiet Green and have a new arm cast for it. It proposed that these actions be accomplished via tens of thousands of dollars from a willing donor, continuing a chain of multiple restorations that have occurred since Moses Ives Brown Goddard donated the statue in 1906 (Goddard’s brother Robert Hale Ives donated Augustus’ counterpart, Marcus Aurelius, to Brown in 1908). On the Quiet Green, Caesar Augustus would peer over the Slavery Memorial, a work Brown commissioned from Black sculptor Martin Puryear in 2014. In response, students have mounted a call to remove two Roman-style monuments on Brown’s campus, including casts of both Caesar Augustus and Marcus Aurelius. As archaeologists and classicists, it might seem that we would be those most in favor of maintaining Brown’s monuments to Caesar Augustus and Marcus Aurelius. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Rather than passive icons of Greco-Roman ideals or tools for the study of art history, these monuments are constant reminders of Brown’s violent colonial past and present, a colonialism that our disciplines were born out of and remain steeped in. We reject how the Public Art Committee has implicated classics and archaeology in their defense of memorials to settler-colonialism and institutionalized white supremacy. We write today to explain our insistence, as Departmental Undergraduate Group leaders in these subjects, that Brown remove and replace these monuments. Moreover, we call for a broader restructuring in arts administration, for donors and committees alike to set their sights on reparative investment in Black and Indigenous lives and careers.
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The field of classics has long been mobilized to glorify Western civilization. We must recognize that apologists for chattel slavery and Indigenous genocide were some of the first in our country to center ancient Greece and Rome in narratives of Western civilization. In such a repositioning, we can refute terms like the “Greek Miracle,” which refers to the idea that the ancient Greeks’ accomplishments were unprecedented across history. Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle certainly did not ‘invent’ rhetoric or logic, even if Aristotle wrote texts called Rhetoric and Logic. While it is clear that ancient Greece made contributions to many fields of study, the hyperbolic celebration of Greek ideas ignores the contributions, and even the presence, of people from non Greco-Roman cultures in antiquity. Casual readers of classical literature emphasize Homer’s epics over the Vedas, completed in India long before the Iliad and Odyssey, and over Mesopotamian texts like The Epic of Gilgamesh. The presentation of Homer or Virgil as pinnacles of literary achievement erases the literary accomplishments of other ancient civilizations, which often appear as a pretext to physical erasure. We can trace this intellectual lineage’s physical consequences from European ‘Great Power’ imperialism to American settler-colonialism, emphasizing that the priority placed on the study of Greece and Rome had more than textual or academic implications. Ancient Romans did not have the same hierarchical concept of race that we must engage with and overturn today. Roman aristocrats originated from all around the
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Mediterranean—from the Italian peninsula to Anatolia to North Africa. To deny this reality would be to erase the contributions of those peoples to Greco-Roman antiquity. However, Rome’s legacy is not divorced from race and racial prejudice as we know it today. There is a long history of Western intellectuals imposing modern racial distinctions onto the past. For example, Thomas Jefferson defended chattel slavery by discussing the contributions of ancient slaves to philosophy and literature: “Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus were slaves. But they were of the race of whites.” This anachronistic use of ancient slavery to defend a vastly different institution extends the narrative of whiteness centuries before racial distinctions were used as they are today. Beyond Jefferson’s use of classical authors to romanticize and justify the actions of the pre-Civil War South, Adolf Hitler also famously called the ancient Greeks and Romans the ancestors of his “ideal, Aryan race.” Hitler idealized the military power of GrecoRoman cultures, saying, “The subjugation of 350,000 Helots by 6,000 Spartans was only possible because of the racial superiority of the Spartans.” Hitler compared his empire to the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire (9th-19th century, neither “holy” nor “Roman”), then asserted that his empire was superior. The political and intellectual lineage between white supremacy and Greco-Roman leaders is a retrospective, largely imaginary one. It is by no means a quantifiable connection. The military legacy of ancient figures like Caesar Augustus and Marcus Aurelius does not negate their other contributions to history. But in reality, these statues, created and placed on this campus in the early 1900s, have little to do with Roman history at all. Instead, they are part of a centuries-long tradition that presented Roman emperors as ideal white men and claimed the remarkable accomplishments of GrecoRoman antiquity as proof of the superiority of Western civilization. Though these men were not discernibly labelled as “white” in antiquity, they are today because they have been immortalized as such in the American psyche. We cannot simply reject the identification of white supremacy with the Roman elite, nor can a contextualizing plaque override that choice. We agree that this equation is not grounded in historical fact or the emperors’ biographies, but this prejudiced view of antiquity is a key reason why these monuments must be removed. Brown should instead celebrate intellectual legacies that work to depict the nuances of history.
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and personality Ben Shapiro also speaks about the origins of Western Civilization: “The obvious proof is that the world is overwhelmingly Western. And, with few exceptions, those parts of the world that aren’t aspire to be. Why? Why has Western Civilization been so successful? There are many reasons, but the best place to start is with the teachings and philosophies that emerged from …Athens.” Tying ideas about Western superiority to Classical civilization clearly remains part of the cultural zeitgeist across many populations in the United States, positing Classical Athens as an origin point for Rome and beyond. These sentiments are not recent in origin— they are foundational to our country’s governing structures. When we see figures from Greco-Roman antiquity monumentalized, we must recognize the intellectual history that they celebrate. These statues do not represent a legitimate, nuanced approach to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity. Instead, they represent an intellectual history developed centuries after the fall of Greece and Rome. We must not replicate a revisionist narrative rife with historical inaccuracies, in which we heroize Roman emperors for qualities they were not monumentalized for.
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A particularly troubling argument for ‘reclaiming’ these monuments is the idea that we need them in order to hold discussions about the contextual changes they have undergone—or about colonialism at Brown more broadly. The claim that the monuments’ presence will somehow inspire critical discussion has been popular amongst critics of Decolonization at Brown’s call to remove them. Many people at Brown— particularly students, staff, and faculty of color and those whose homes are under active colonial occupation—are constantly faced with the everyday realities of colonial violence; they certainly don’t need a copy of a Roman statue to remind them that colonialism exists. The argument that we need these monuments in order to ‘remember’ prioritizes the education of students who lack experiences of colonialism, rather than speaking to the trauma of colonialism. As
Recent movements to reframe how we think about historical figures and events have been met with tremendous pushback from right-wing figures. One of the most salient cases of this pushback comes from Donald Trump himself. On several occasions, the President has portrayed Western civilization as needing defense, and himself as the man to defend it. In a 2017 speech, he said, “Today, the West is confronted by the powers that seek to test our will, undermine our confidence, and challenge our interests.” Right-wing thinker Charlie Kirk often decries emerging movements that cast doubt on national heroes, and called the President the “bodyguard of Western civilization” in his remarks at the 2020 Republican National Convention. This “defense of the West” is predicated on preserving the legacy of Greco-Roman antiquity. Conservative author
6 NOV 2020
