Campaigning for People's Classics: Interim Report

It is exactly a year since work began on ACE, the project I’ve been funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council to lead, encouraging the introduction of qualifications in Classical Civilisation and Ancient History in secondary education across the nation.  Huge strides have been made—I've visited many schools, and events to publicise the campaign have been run in Kent, Belfast, Glasgow, Bristol/Bath, Exeter and Leeds. We have identified plenty of teachers of other subjects keen to give the ancient world a go.

Cambrian Pottery Designs

This week we went to Swansea, crucial to my previous (related) project, Classics and Class in Britain. It was in the South Wales Miners Miners’ Library that colleague Dr Henry Stead and I became aware of the miners’ extensive reading in classics and ancient history. And the Swansea Museum houses several of Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn’s famous line of inexpensive ceramics imitating ancient Greek models, produced in his Cambrian Pottery, in the mid-19th century.

Swansea's Dr Stephen Harrison in action

Our tireless partners at Swansea University bused in dozens of teenagers from all over the region to think about ancient Greece and Rome for a day. Did women in Greek myth get out of the kitchen/boudoir into heroic action? Which city had the coolest foundation tradition—Athens or Rome? And is the laughably racist depiction of Xerxes in the movie 300 true to the ancient Greeks stereotype of Persians? I got to retweet my first ever text in Welsh, celebrating the idea of Classics for the Many not the Few!

With our Keynote Speaker, Prof. Chris Pelling

Best of all was the keynote speech by Christopher Pelling, retired Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, who honoured us by returning to what he always calls God's Own Country. He confided in us about growing up in Cardiff and eventually deciding to be a scholar/teacher rather than a lawyer. Fascinated by modern as well as ancient history, he gradually became aware that the ancient world could be used for good causes, like fighting tyranny (as in many productions of Antigone) or very bad ones, like fomenting hatred (Enoch Powell quoting the Aeneid in 1968).

Some of the Swansea Attendees

Next week the ACE event is at Reading, and both the project’s Research Fellow, Dr Arlene Holmes-Henderson and I are speaking at the annual conference of the Historical Association, hoping to persuade hundreds of history teachers that introducing Ancient History or Classical Civilisation can only benefit everyone in their schools and 6th-form colleges, the world, the universe and space.

Between now and early July our partners in Warwick, Nottingham and Durham are also running events. And even better is the news that Arlene will be continuing in her role, at King’s College London, until at least 2021. The campaign continues. To quote Freddie Mercury in Welsh, Peidiwch â rhoi'r gorau i mi nawr! DON’T STOP ME NOW!