Shadi Bartsch: preference

Transcript context

…Coming from a half Iranian background, how do you feel that leads you to read the classics differently? That’s also a great question. I’m half Iranian and half Swedish. One of my first languages was, in fact, Farsi. Then I became fascinated with the classics. I ended up doing an undergraduate classics major. The faculty all said, “Oh, go to grad school.” I went to grad school. At that point, you’re stuck. You have to become a classics professor. It was very weird because I knew a little bit about the Greeks from the Persian perspective, and now I was reading about the Persians from the Greek perspective, and they’re both treating each other as barbarians. “The barbarians are fighting us. They want to destroy our empire, which represents civilization at its peak.” It’s the same thing you hear on both sides. I think that made me very aware of the fact that most political parties, most ideologies, most governments use very similar rhetoric to represent utterly different situations. That’s because there’s basically an agreed-on rhetoric of what it’s good to claim you stand for. Everybody wants to stand for progress, goodness, fairness — or if not fairness, at least correct hierarchies, doing good for the people, etcetera. Nobody stands up and says, “Hey, I’m so and so. I’m a tyrant. I kill small children for fun, and I toss them in the Tiber River.” The sameness of those claims following very different governments became, to me, something of fascination, and it’s also something you can see in Thucydides, where, in book 3, section 82, he talks a lot about how language changes in war and how certain terms are used that sound good, but really cover up unpleasant realities. It’s a very old theme. In book 6, why is Virgil’s underworld so much busier and more bustling than Homer’s? You have a literal parade, right?…

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