G.E.M. de Sainte-Croix, in his massive text The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, makes a crucial point about the avoidance of the term class in the work of historians of Greek and Roman antiquity: “Whereas descriptions of ancient society in terms of some category other than class—status, for instance—are perfectly innocuous, in the sense that they have no direct relevance to the modern world...an analysis of Greek and Roman society in terms of class, in the specifically Marxist sense, is indeed...something threatening, something that speaks directly to every one of us today and insistently demands to be applied to the contemporary world, of the second half of the twentieth century” (The Class Struggle, p. 45). The original first edition of this book contained a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters, an image of the poverty and desolation of the exploited and wretched of the earth. What I am concerned with in this lecture is the threat that de Sainte Croix sees, and the attempt to thwart it, in the hostility to Marxist theory, to anarchism, socialism, communalism and communism, that characterize the history of the United States of America, and the consequences for immigrants, people of color, women, queers, for university education, the humanities, and the discipline of classical studies in particular. In this moment, when the US is being wracked by new leadership’s descent into neofascism and return to unbridled imperialism, it’s time to enrich critique with the legacy of Marxist critical theory. This lecture derives from work in progress on the progressive voices in classical studies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I consider some examples of US responses to Marxism in classics, including the cases of Moses Finley and Jean-Pierre Vernant, then ask briefly: Could we use the theory of Antonio Gramsci to read Euripidean tragedy differently?

“Where’s your spine?” we often say to those who seem to lack moral ‘backbone.’ How do such vertical metaphors limit and drive our imagination of refusal? Drawing on Adriana Cavarero’s work, Inclination, this lecture develops a postural analysis of refusal in the Antigone, the Bacchae, Thoreau’s “Walking", and Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Madonna. Cavarero promotes inclination (the leaning in posture of maternal care) as the preferred posture for her ethics and politics. This lecture pluralizes the feminist subject position of inclination to include sorority as well, and argues that the refusals we find in maternal and sororal care express not only love but rage and promise not only the holding of community but also the dismemberment of revolution/new beginning.