Back in 1989, amid the first flush of what was then known as “political correctness,” a troupe of ardent feminists had famously infiltrated the roof of Columbia University’s Butler Library the night of commencement to hang a homespun painted banner of more diverse and ostensibly relevant female writers above the maler, staler, and slightly paler names inscribed upon the building’s front facade: Sappho, Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Bronte, Dickinson, and Woolf over the boring and apparently chauvinistic names of Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, and Virgil chiseled into the stonework. Those attendees who’d spent their college years chanting, “Hey ho, Western Civ has got to go!” were thrilled, traditionalists either seethed or rolled their eyes, and most of the celebrants were probably more bemused than anything. Over time, the stunt became fondly remembered, and a ritual photo-op Columbia would periodically reenact with ever more diversified rosters, but notably without ever quite bothering to resurface the offending limestone.
Over the decade that I later covered graduations at Columbia as a reporter and PR flack working for the university, the contradiction grew all the more glaring. The timeless affectations the institution leaned on to wheedle misty-eyed parents into opening up their checkbooks — the pageantry, the neoclassical architecture, and the strains of Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” — were totems of age-old and increasingly unfashionable conceptions of Western civilization the university more typically seemed determined to disparage.
As someone who grew up immersed in old books and periodicals my father couldn’t resist bringing home by the armful, thumbing through back issues of the vintage hardcover Horizon magazine and the coffee table book of Kenneth Clark’s venerable TV show Civilisation with that glorious golden Charlemagne on the dust jacket, extensive grounding in the best of the West always struck me as indispensable to learned erudition. I liked it when Captain Kirk quoted Milton, and when Frasier and Niles namedropped the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. After six years of Latin, I expected to find endless more vistas of that sort of thing when I went off to college, managing to land in the outer reaches of the Ivy League, at Brown.
But while I did luck into a charmingly antiquated course on Alexander the Great with an elbow-patched professor who might as well have been Marcus Brody, such options were growing ever fewer and further between. As opposed to traditional 101 surveys introducing the classic essentials, curricula were increasingly dominated by various idiosyncratic preoccupations and esoteric schools of critique that skipped much in the way of orientation to the traditions being attacked and superseded. My English major friends were far likelier to be reading graphic novels than Chaucer or Spenser.
To its credit, even today, Columbia isn’t quite as far gone in that respect as some of its peers, thanks to the lingering influence of its hallowed old Core Curriculum for undergraduates, which has steadily eroded for decades but has yet to be completely hollowed out. Across the Ivies, away from the embarrassing headlines and histrionic protests, veins of substantive scholarship and serious teaching of the traditional humanities still endure, even if one might often have to dig to find them.
So I was intrigued but not surprised to hear about the forthcoming two-volume set of quasi-textbooks The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, from eminent historians Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins of Princeton and Harvard, respectively. In disappointed alienation from the accelerating marginalization of Western history in contemporary curricula, the professors toiled for what must have been years during their summers and off hours to produce a fresh survey reviving and to some degree redeeming a rich tradition that, while not without its share of sins and shortcomings, has been excessively maligned.
“We retell the story of the West without apology and, indeed, with a certain sense of urgency. We authors are both professors at Ivy League universities, and we are fully aware that our volumes go against the general trend of the historical profession for the last three decades,” they write. “As academe has increasingly been colonized by political activists, Western history has been positively disfavored. There has been a highly successful campaign to portray Western civilization as uniquely evil — uniquely disfigured by slavery, racism, genocide, militarism, economic exploitation, environmental devastation, monstrous levels of income inequality, and male oppression of women. … The globus intellectualis has become hostile to the study of Western civilization, and its hostility represents a danger to the health of Western societies.”
Nota bene: As of press time, this reader had access only to Vol. 1, primarily penned by Hankins, as slated for publication in August before Guelzo’s Vol. 2 in October. But from the 1,100-plus lavishly illustrated pages I’ve had the privilege of perusing thus far, the endeavor seems just about half the way there to providing precisely the sort of comprehensive old-school yet contemporary overview I was seeking as an undergraduate (and since) to fill in the blanks of what I’d previously mostly learned in fits and starts. Many specialists will no doubt quibble with some of Hankins’s summations, but he’s the furthest thing from radical by the long-standing standards of a few decades ago. And he’s done a monumental job of laying down the essential groundwork while leaving room for further study and debate.
Starting with the valiant vigor of roughly 10,000 mostly Athenian soldiers’ courage at the Battle of Marathon, defiantly taking the initiative against far more numerous expeditionary forces from the Persian empire of King Darius I, the text situates the big bang of Western civilization in 490 B.C., shortly after the unlikely birth of Athenian democracy. Various Greeks, most notably the Mycenaeans, had been kicking around for at least a thousand years by that time, and the Homeric epics had already been written down. But Hankins suggests it was that victory against all odds that unleashed the emergence of a flinty yet increasingly sophisticated Western civilization, capable of just enough scrappy innovation and maneuverability to outfox far longer-standing civilizations from out east, and sparked a certain flickering candle of entrepreneurial individualism.
Speaking as a former aspiring classics major, I found Hankins’s approach more than a little refreshing and, dare I say, cathartic. When he quotes the opening lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey in a sidebar, he draws upon the gold standard Robert Fagles translations rather than the subtly irreverent revisionism of more recent and fashionable translators such as the much-ballyhooed Emily Wilson. When he discusses the decline of Athenian ideals into brute coercion of many fellow city-states, Hankins’s point is evergreen: “If an empire is to last, its basis cannot be forcible exploitation of subject peoples for the sake of a metropolitan elite.” And his descriptions of the root causes of the disastrous Peloponnesian War are equally timeless and applicable in endless different settings: irrepressibly mercantile seaborne Athenians clashing against a landed Spartan aristocracy instinctively “suspicious of clever thinkers and glib speakers.”
Most edifying for me was his discussion of those eastern-inflected Hellenistic centuries bridging the dwindling of the Hellenic era to the rise and primacy of Rome. The stodgy old prejudice was to cast that period as essentially a tawdry time of snake cults and imperial decadence, while modern classicists seeking grants and tenure have too often been prone to excessive glorification of the epoch as exemplifying the ancient multicultural equivalent of today’s globalization. Hankins strikes a nuanced balance between acknowledging definite declines from some of the peaks of Grecian civilization, especially as far as democracy was concerned, and noting impressive advances in the arts, medicine, the sciences, and, perhaps most significantly for historical memory, the birth of philology at institutions such as the great Libraries of Alexandria and Pergamon.
“The legitimacy of Hellenistic kingdoms was bound up with the prestige of Classical culture and the claim of their kings to be spreading civilization,” he writes. “Thus it was thanks to monarchical cultural institutions that the West was able to remember the key teaching of Athenian democracy: that average citizens can govern themselves. … Above all the Greeks were the first peoples known to history to break with the default setting of the human race in favor of absolute monarchy. That break introduced a dynamic element into Western political life that it has never lost.”
Out west, on the long-peripheral Italian peninsula, the young Roman Republic was distinguishing itself from most of its competitors by sheer military prowess, unusual capacity to absorb those peoples compelled to join their imperium, and relatively representative governance, at least for Roman citizens. In truth, the ideals of the avowed res publica had already pretty well rotted out decades before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon to all but topple it, and the formal ascension of Caesar Augustus was more recognition of imperial reality than a dramatic break from the existing trajectory. As with the Greeks beforehand, the reality of government anywhere in the range of “by the people and for the people” didn’t endure very long, displaced by ambitious men’s grasping will to power and the realities of administering a sprawling empire. But, as with the Hellenistic kingdoms, the quality and prestige of classical Hellenic culture helped sustain the old democratic ideals even through a time of tyrants, and many cities far from the imperial seat were more democratic in managing their local affairs than Rome itself.
The hypocrisy was a tribute that imperial vice paid to democratic virtue, as it were, and tribute enough to somehow keep the tradition alive through the traumas of Rome’s decline and fall and the so-called “dark ages” that beset Western Europe for centuries even as Byzantium soldiered on. “It was the hybrid classical culture created by Christian Rome that preserved, often by the most tenuous of threads, the priceless heritage of Greco-Roman civilization,” Hankins writes.
Here in the 21st century, the Western tradition has too often been under siege, caricatured by faddish ideologues with little substantive understanding of what they vilify. At times, most dramatically during the hysterical woke iconoclasm following the death of George Floyd, that “Golden Thread” going back thousands of years seemed to be under mortal threat. But such ignorant assaults on the underpinnings of Western civilization have also fueled a revival of classical liberal education among scholars and students more interested in understanding the past than condemning it. Much of the academic establishment has been content to sit on the sidelines, peddling whatever’s politically convenient, so it’s encouraging to see Hankins and Guelzo apply their Ivy League imprimaturs to help keep that revival chugging along.
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“Most of all, we want our readers to understand just how fragile our tradition is,” they write. “And how many times in the three-thousand-year-long history of the West the Golden Thread that ties us to our past and enriches us beyond measure came close to snapping.”
One could find worse beach reading than to take a summer sabbatical with The Golden Thread. The story of how our culture got here is a page-turner of a sort, and it is hard to think of anything that would be more rewarding. Though to get through it unscathed may require some serious SPF.
Jesse Adams is the writer, editor, and consultant behind The Ivy Exile on Substack.