In July 1914, a cartoon called ‘Fool’s Paradise!’ appeared in Plebs Magazine. It features two pairs of contrasting male figures. In the foreground a top-hatted, round-bellied ‘Capitalist’ shakes his fist at a rugged, flat-capped worker representing the ‘Central Labour College’. The worker, his arms folded firmly against his chest, returns his...
A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939 by Edith Hall and Henry Stead. The multiple meanings of Classics explain why classicists often seem to be talking at cross purposes, bewildered by voices inside and outside the discipline who say we are refusing to confront its elitism, yet embarrassed that one of its most prominent contemporary products is a 56-year-old public schoolboy who also happens to be the prime minister, his claims to intellectual prowess resting on his knowing the beginning of the Iliad off by heart along with Kipling’s ‘Mandalay’.
