Padilla, a leading historian of Rome who teaches at Princeton and was born in the Dominican Republic, was one of the panelists that day. Marchers in Charlottesville, Va., carried flags bearing a symbol of the Roman state online reactionaries adopted classical pseudonyms the white-supremacist website Stormfront displayed an image of the Parthenon alongside the tagline “ Every month is white history month.” Recently the effort had gained a new sense of urgency: Classics had been embraced by the far right, whose members held up the ancient Greeks and Romans as the originators of so-called white culture.
Long revered as the foundation of “Western civilization,” the field was trying to shed its self-imposed reputation as an elitist subject overwhelmingly taught and studied by white men. On top of the problems facing the humanities as a whole - vanishing class sizes caused by disinvestment, declining prominence and student debt - classics was also experiencing a crisis of identity. But that year, the conference featured a panel on “The Future of Classics,” which, the participants agreed, was far from secure.
In the world of classics, the exchange between Dan-el Padilla Peralta and Mary Frances Williams has become known simply as “the incident.” Their back-and-forth took place at a Society of Classical Studies conference in January 2019 - the sort of academic gathering at which nothing tends to happen that would seem controversial or even interesting to those outside the discipline.
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