Curtis Dozier’s The White Pedestal is a godsend to white nationalists. If ever they needed a book to encourage the false impression that “white nationalism” simply means defending basic virtues and acknowledging obvious facts, this is it. Actual racists, who are indeed gaining alarming traction these days, like to portray their detractors as morally entitled fanatics with nothing but sloppy epithets to offer in lieu of argument. The White Pedestal will help their case. It will do no good for anybody else.
Dozier’s subtitle is How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate. He considers this as much an indictment of Greece and Rome as of white nationalists. “The ancient world was anything but a paradise of tolerance,” he writes in his introduction, which is why evildoers don’t have to misquote or misinterpret classical sources to mine them for retrograde ideas: They are already there.
This is a slight change of strategy from the one Dozier adopted in 2017 when he launched his website Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics with the support of Vassar College, where he is an associate professor of Greek and Roman studies. Pharos invites contributors to write in if they “learn of a hate group appropriating antiquity,” suggesting that anyone using classical literature to support bad politics must be somehow misusing it. Early posts tried using scholarly rebuttal to respond to alt-right protesters in Spartan helmets and seedy pickup artists quoting Aristotle.
Gradually, though, Dozier became aware of the uncomfortable fact that not every classics expert agrees with him politically, and not everyone who disagrees with him politically is a drooling simpleton. So where he couldn’t fault right-wingers for misunderstanding ancient sources, he instead started blaming ancient sources for being incipiently right-wing. This is the approach he takes in The White Pedestal. “Any surprise that white nationalists take an interest in Greco-Roman antiquity,” he writes, “may give way to surprise at just how frequently ancient sources articulate ideas congruent with white nationalist thought.”
Unfortunately, Dozier believes “white nationalist thought” includes not just patently bigoted notions—e.g., “The white race is superior to all others”—but also completely defensible views—e.g., “Hierarchy is natural and desirable.” Each chapter argues that seemingly innocent admirers of Greece and Rome are trafficking in a mode of logic that “the far Right” also uses. The remit broadens steadily, until it starts to feel as if anyone who so much as mentions the name Polybius runs the risk of inadvertently emboldening skinheads. So you, too, might be complicit if you have ever fretted about civilizational decline or referred to canonical authors as “wise old friends.”
Dozier rises almost to the level of parody when he criticizes two essays, one by columnist Steve Sailer on the website VDARE and another by historian Niall Ferguson in Vanity Fair, for comparing 21st-century America to late imperial Rome. Both authors refer to British historian Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “What is striking,” writes Dozier, “is the similarity between Sailer’s method of using Gibbon at VDARE and that of Ferguson in the popular journal Vanity Fair. Both of them alternated between quoting Gibbon and offering their own analysis of contemporary parallels.” If citing one of the greatest works in the English language is all it takes to fall in line with neo-Nazis, it’s going to be a short march to the Fourth Reich.
It will surely delight actual white supremacists to learn from Dozier that they are on the same side as absolutely anyone who tends to admire, or wants to learn from, the foundational cultures of Europe. “Self-sacrifice, honor, dedication to duty,” writes Dozier: “These are virtues most people would not want to cede to white nationalists.” But then he goes ahead and cedes them anyway, writing that “the idealization of these virtues, especially when they are connected to military valor, sanctions and even glorifies violence.”
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The arguments in support of his wild over-generalization are unbelievably thin. Men who enjoy video games like Rome: Total War are placed on a spectrum with the racist killer James Harris Jackson, because Jackson took Latin in high school and bought a mock Roman sword from Amazon. Anyone who likes Zack Snyder’s movie 300 is similarly guilty of yearning to charge into glorious battle as the 300 Spartans did at Thermopylae. To the extent such battles appear glorious, Dozier tells us, they were fictions. To the extent they were real, they weren’t glorious.
Only the enlightened leftists of the present, then, can be trusted to think properly about the benighted past. Not only is “nearly everything written three centuries ago” unfit for “those who study Roman history critically”; even more recent scholars, such as the decorated Hellenist Bernard Knox, are found guilty of lionizing mythical heroes like Odysseus. It wasn’t until 2017, when Emily Wilson became the first woman to translate Homer’s Odyssey into English, that the masses were finally blessed with a nuanced view of things: “Only recently has Emily Wilson’s best-selling translation of the Odyssey brought public attention to the poem’s ambivalence toward its hero. In her translation, Odysseus is ‘a complicated man.’”
Really? I seem to recall that Dante put Odysseus in hell. That sounds pretty complicated to me. In his introduction to Robert Fagles’s translation of the Odyssey, Knox himself meditates at length on the painful tension between the warrior Achilles, who favors straight-talking honesty, and the canny operator Odysseus, who lies almost as easily as he breathes. But that was way back in 1996, and Knox was male. It is now almost 2026, and Wilson is female. Progress! Philip Larkin joked that “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / … / Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.” Dozier seems to feel that good scholarship began around 2017, when a woman first translated the Odyssey.
Now, thanks to Emily Wilson, we can finally see that Odysseus isn’t anyone to admire. When he comes home at last, he executes the suitors who have overrun his house and the slave girls who abetted them. Dozier thinks Odysseus ends his life punished for these and other sins: “Odysseus himself must leave Ithaca again to atone for his crime against Poseidon. From that journey he will never return.” His evidence is a vision of the prophet Tiresias. But in that same prophecy, Tiresias tells Odysseus, “You’ll go back home” to die an old man, “and your lucky subjects will be all around you.” If Dozier believes the prophecy that Odysseus will have to make a final trip to appease Poseidon is true, what reason can he have to doubt the same prophecy when it foretells that Odysseus will come back home for good? Say what you will about Edward Gibbon, he never read his sources as illogically or contradicted them as baselessly as Dozier has here. But of course, Gibbon was merely a product of his time. Whereas Dozier is a privileged arbiter of timeless moral truth.
You might think the absurdity of this position would eventually force itself upon Dozier. Lucky for him, though, he is capable of writing without blushing that “the present moment does not demand that scholars raise their voices in support of historical accuracy. It demands that we do so in support of moral clarity.” Well that’s all right, then. Why bother with details when you’re focused on “how our work can contribute to the formation of a more just and equitable world”? Taken with his career-long pivot from debunking right-wingers to condemning classics itself, this reads like an admission that if he can’t refute his opponents, he’s content simply to denounce them. One is reminded of House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s complaint that “there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.” Dozier does not have that problem.
It is actually possible for educated people to know a lot about ancient Greece and Rome, to see even their heroes as flawed and their geniuses as limited, and still to wonder at their invaluable gifts to posterity. Most people naturally hope to preserve and cherish what’s best about the civilization they inherit. Curtis Dozier wants to convince them that they must either join him and his fellow travelers in “resisting and subverting the process that established ‘classics’ as a discipline in the first place,” or else abet the triumph of “white supremacy.” I can think of no better way to swell the ranks of actual, self-avowed racists than to force a choice between those two options. If Dozier really wants to know who’s burnishing the appeal of white nationalism, he should look within.
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