Embattled: A Review

In the wake of the 2016 election, a whole cottage industry of academics publishing works “against tyranny” arose. Led by Timothy D. Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century and accompanied by works such as Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, these anti-tyranny books found a ready audience in liberal book buyers and capitalized on the anxiety of the Trump moment. Snyder’s book topped the New York Times bestseller list for non-fiction in 2017. As trust in academia continues to fall and academics seem to be focusing on more and more obscure and unintelligible topics, such mainstream relevance has been a jewel in the eye of many academics. Emily Katz Anhalt’s Embattled: How Ancient Greek Myths Empower Us to Resist Tyranny seeks to find this sweet spot of popular and academic by analyzing Ancient Greek epics and plays as tales of warning against tyrannical rulers.

Her book comes at a peculiar time for both humanities broadly and Classics specifically. Humanities enrollment has continued to decline, with The Hechinger Report stating last November that enrollment was down for the eighth consecutive year and down 25% overall since 2012. Those who do stay in the humanities are often met with dwindling job options and saddled with piling student debt. This decline has led the humanities to participate in a collective depressive spiral, picking more and more esoteric research topics while also grasping onto stranger and stranger justifications of why the humanities are still “important.” Oftentimes these justifications for humanities’ importance lead down a path similar to that of Anhalt’s recent book, claiming that a well-tuned mind in English or Women’s Studies is an essential characteristic to preserving “our democracy” and preventing “tyranny.” These outlashes about how academic experts are the protectors of “our democracy” are foolish in many ways, with the most acute being that academia is in no way a democracy itself and no one really believes it should be. However, there is a true message at the core of this spiral, which is that knowledge and familiarity with past great works and our shared history is an important part of cultivating a citizenry in our great Republic.

Along with the rest of the humanities, Classics finds itself caught up in this mass depressive spiral but also finds its terrain of study a hot-spot in the culture war. Due to a worry over the far-right often appropriating classical imagery, an anxiety has set out across some in Classics, asking: “Why do most non-academic, contemporary mass interests into the ancient world come not from liberal or progressive sensibilities but from places which are antithetical to these?” The success of the pro-Trump former academic Victor Davis Hanson has exacerbated this problem, with his large audience (relative to Classicist standards) and frequent Fox News appearances being a sore spot for many Classicists. Due to the presence of this non-academic view of the Classics, a heathen at the gates mentality has been adopted by some, with fears of reactionary forces lurking in the shadows of all Classical Studies.

This anxiety and self-doubt in Classics are not only felt on the margins but also have struck at the heart of American Classics. Last year, Princeton announced that they would be removing the Greek and Latin requirements for an undergraduate degree in Classics in an attempt to open the field to students of a more diverse background. Receiving both praise and condemnation, this bold move would reignite a national discussion of Classics, placing it firmly into the arena of the national culture war. (For those who look at Dartmouth’s Classics degree requirements closely enough, you might be shocked to learn that like Princeton, you too could graduate from Dartmouth in Classical Studies with no Latin or Greek, but also, running through a classics curriculum with your ears and eyes close to those ancient languages might be just as hard as taking the leap into learning them.) A New York Times profile piece on Princeton Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta would bring this divide in Classics into the national limelight. The article, appropriately titled “He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?”, gave Padilla’s case for the existence of institutional racism behind Classics and the rest of higher education: “Classics was a discipline around which the modern Western university grew, and Padilla believes that it has sown racism through the entirety of higher education.” This peculiar position of dwindling enrollment, barbarians at the gates, and woke crusades amongst those in the highest echelon of the field is where Classics finds itself today.

This brings us to the book in question. Emily Katz Anhalt is a Dartmouth ’80, and a Professor of Classics at Sarah Lawrence College. Her most recent book, Embattled: How Ancient Greek Myths Empower Us to Resist Tyranny,is a loose sequel to her 2017 book Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths, which explored how Greek myths advocated for restraint in regards to the use of violence during challenging times. Embattled follows up this message, offering nuanced readings of Greek myths as a way of challenging tyrants and ensuring that one does not become a tyrant himself.

The book has a fairly basic structure. The book consists of an introduction section, seven chapters of myth analysis, and a conclusion section. Each of the seven chapters consists of first Anhalt retelling a Greek myth, placing it in more accessible and simpler terms, and then an analysis of this myth in relation to how it helps us resist tyranny in the modern day. The Greek myths selected in the book come from the Iliad, the Odyssey, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and Sophocles’s Antigone. This relatively simple structure ensures that the book is still accessible to a general audience. Someone who has never read a Greek myth before or even heard of Greece before could still pick up the book and jump right in. Anhalt, however, does not sacrifice this accessibility for academic rigor, with detailed footnotes in the back of the book for those who wish for more rigorous explanations. This dual structure of accessibility and academic rigor suits the book well, providing the book to be of interest for those with great experience in the field and for those without.

The problem of Anhalt’s analysis arises, however, with her frequent uses of the words “tyranny”, “despotism” and “abuses of power.” Just as many other books in this “anti-tyranny” genre, what exactly constitutes tyranny becomes a moving target. Anhalt confidently says in her introduction: “In the twenty-first century we are drifting – or, perhaps more accurately, hastening – toward despotism” (3). While this is a definite statement, she is loose on the specifics of “despotism” present in the twenty-first century. Loose concepts such as “respect for the rule of law, trust in the necessity of freedom of speech, and the willingness to protect minority interests” are no doubt essential to a “modern liberal democracy” (218); however, without proper specifics, crying tyranny at specters of fascism is not a useful endeavor. In fact, crying “tyranny” from an ivory tower without specifics is, arguably, an abuse of power, and only hastens counterproductive reactionary forces to address said tyranny.

One of Anhalt’s most astute points in her book is her discussion of rising violent conflict in Aeschylus’s Oresteia. In Chapter 6, she analyzes the Oresteia as an argument of why vengeance only necessitates further violence, causing a reciprocal cycle of violence. The solution she puts forward is that one must rise above the tide of violence and search for a non-violent form of justice, one in which words and debate replace violent revenge. In the Oresteia, Clytemnestra killing Agamemnon as revenge for the murder of their child necessitated Orestes killing Clytemnestra as revenge for the murder of his father, which then necessitated the Furies to be angered at the murder of Clytemnestra. This slowly rising violence in some way is analogous to slowly rising calls of tyranny. Some calls of tyranny entice powerful actions in response, with perhaps the most notable being the calls of misinformation and then a subsequent censorship cycle. These cries of tyranny can rise to a fever pitch and subsume an entire political discourse, and “fascist,” “nazi,” and “communist” become the only discernable words left.

While these strange cries of tyranny are plentiful throughout the book, Anhalt’s analysis of Greek myths is where the book shines. She takes these ancient tales and through careful examination makes them both accessible and impactful to a modern audience. Through these methods, she deduces some excellent lessons, even stumbling on some more bold ideas. In Chapter 2, she discusses the first four books of the Odyssey, the story of Telemachus leaving Ithaca and visiting Nestor and Menelaus. At one point of this analysis, Anhalt concludes that “Although the Odyssey depicts mortal and immortal societies consisting of kings and their subjects, it begins, surprisingly, by introducing an essential prerequisite for broad political participation: the recognition that tour own decisions and actions largely determine the quality of our lives” (57). This insight (let’s call it “self-responsibility”) should be taken to heart by all audiences and is an oft-forgotten ideal in today’s society and academia. While more firmly discussing contemporary questions of tyranny, Anhalt confidently states another important principle: “The answer to unpopular, even hateful, speech is not less speech but more speech” (220).

Altogether Embattled succeeds in many of its established goals. It properly walks the line between accessibility and academic rigor, providing a nice gateway into a field that many might not have broached before. The writing is clear and simple, opting thankfully to forgo the academic jargon that has sheltered academics in prisons of their own making. While if one did wish to explore the Greek myths in question, one would probably be much better suited to read them directly. (I highly recommend Emily Wilson’s recent translation of the Odyssey, which maintains a fine balance between faithfulness to the Greek and approachability for modern audiences). However, to retell Greek myths is not the central point of Anhalt’s book, so do not expect it to be a retelling when reading it. Embattled demonstrates a concerted effort for Classics to argue for its own relevance in contemporary politics, a feat which should be championed by any Classicist or similar academic, and while, as mentioned previously, Classics does find itself at a strange position today, Embattled avoids the pitfalls of navigating those debates, favoring a more prudent strategy of not giving any time outright to a “culture war” in Classics.

As an “anti-tyranny” book Embattled hits on many of the key points that have come to define the genre. Her unique spin does add some flavor to this formula that can at times be repetitive, and the book progresses steadily and develops from topic to topic, not falling until dull or page-filling gaps that leave the reader board. Advocating for ideals such as “self-restraint,” “empiricism,” “creative solutions,” and “fact-based discussion and debate,” Anhalt does not stray too far from the path of ideals that have come to define the genre, but undeniably, her method of deducing these ideals from Greek myths gives extra credence to those which she advocates. While this genre definitely has its limits (and for those of you who might not enjoy this type of book, I would shy away from approaching it), Anhalt does not let the book fall into a chasm of irrelevance or unreadability at any point.

As one reads the Embattled, the presence of the “anti-tyranny” narrative begins to consume all others, as everything is placed into relation against “despotism” and “abuses of power.” Now, as this is the stated goal of the book, the abundance of this reference should not be a surprise, but to the reader, the contents of Anhalt’s book clearly do not simply advocate against something but advocate for something as well. What specifically Embattled is advocating for begins to be the question that overrides the book. As Embattled progresses and Anhalt continues to roll out her “anti-tyranny” ideals, it becomes clear through her specific calls for “self-restraint,” “creative solutions together,” “empiricism”, and “fact-based discussion” that what she is advocating for is, in fact, modern liberalism. Once one notices this bug it begins to be a phantom haunting the entire book, and for some reason, Anhalt refuses to confidently state it as so. Perhaps she wishes to maintain an air of neutrality, perhaps the idea that Greek myths are immediately compatible with liberalism might even be too absurd for her, or perhaps like many modern academics, liberalism is like water as they are like fish, swimming through it without even realizing it is surrounding them. I will not come down in favor of any one of these readings, but just note that this inclination is present.

By re-reading Embattled from an “anti-tyranny” to a “pro-liberal” tale, what is missing from the book and why it is missing becomes clear. By refusing to clearly state that the modern cries of “despotism” refer to the Trump administration, Embattled can maintain a firm air of neutrality and universality. By never discussing unelected experts as a form of modern tyranny, Embattled can completely ignore the cries of tyranny that surround the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, when this “pro-liberal” slant is taken into account, Anhalt’s book comes forward not as a radical critique of some despotic power structure, but a basic common critique that has come to dominate much of mainstream political discourse. In all, Anhalt succeeds in delivering a widely accessible analysis of Greek myths to advocate for a path of ideals that either resists tyranny or promotes liberalism, and in doing so, she does not depart from the common mainstream status quo political analysis.