What do you picture when you think about ancient Greece or ancient Rome? White marble columns, gleaming under a deep blue Mediterranean sky? A Roman military legion, battle standards flapping in the breeze? Or do you see something more like Raphael’s painting The School of Athens, in which men in robes—many of them bearded, several of them bald—gather to discuss philosophy? Or maybe you see Greece and Rome as they are portrayed in film: Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), Disney’s animated Hercules (1997), or Brad Pitt as Achilles in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004). Video games like Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey or Rome: Total War show us the ancient world too. Millions of people have read the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. In the Iliad, Homer says that there were so many warriors in the Trojan War that he could never name them all. He would fare no better in attempting to list all the representations of Greece and Rome in books, television, film, and other media. There are just too many.
Whatever you are imagining, ask yourself how you feel about ancient Greece and Rome. Fascination? Excitement? A sense of grandeur and beauty? Do you have a sense that ancient Greece and Rome are important, perhaps even foundational, to understanding the modern world? That they have exerted a special and beneficial influence on modern literature, politics, law, religion, even science? If you do, you are not alone. In 2024 the market research firm YouGov published survey data showing that more than half of Americans viewed ancient Athens favorably, and that about half of Americans who said they knew something about the Roman Empire believed it had a positive impact on the world.
Large numbers of Americans feel this way because the idea that the ancient Greco-Roman world is important, admirable, and foundational is omnipresent in American culture. For one thing, public intellectuals are always telling us that this is the case. Nicholas Kristof illustrates the “lesson[s] of history” in the New York Times by quoting the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus. Cornel West has called the literature and philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome the “crème de la crème of our civilization.” For another, museums devote entire rooms to classical art, even though it was produced during a relatively short period of time in a relatively small region of Europe, alongside other rooms that attempt to present the complete artistic history of entire continents in a similar-sized space. The most important buildings in our nation’s capital, on many university campuses, and in countless cities and towns, feature architecture that evokes the Greco-Roman world. We use Roman numerals to count Super Bowls in order to indicate the cultural importance of this annual game. Once you begin to notice how pervasive this admiring attitude toward Greco-Roman antiquity is, it is hard not to keep seeing it.
What may be less visible is that this admiration is especially widespread among American white supremacists. Online, social media accounts hiding fascist sympathies behind the promotion of what they term “traditional” values frequently feature Greek sculptures as profile pictures. A channel on the social media platform Telegram devoted to encouraging its eleven thousand subscribers to harass Jewish people used a bust of the Roman orator Cicero as its avatar. In the discussion forums on Stormfront.org, the oldest neo-Nazi website in the world, contributors frequently invoke the civilizations of Greece and Rome as proof of the superiority of white people. Offline, too, this obsession with the ancient world informs real-world activism. The group known as the Proud Boys, whose leaders have been convicted of multiple felonies in connection with the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, uses the laurel wreath—an ancient Greek symbol of victory—as its logo. When members of the Proud Boys engaged in what a judge later described as “hateful and overtly racist conduct” outside a predominantly African American church in Washington, DC, they were joined by a man who had earned himself the nickname “Based Spartan” because he wore a Spartan-style helmet when he attended white supremacist rallies and beat up counter-protestors. For those of us accustomed to associate Greco-Roman antiquity with sophisticated philosophy and artistic beauty, violent and hateful actors taking inspiration from the ancient world strikes a deeply incongruous note that might be laughable—if the consequences of that admiration were not so disturbing.
It is tempting to dismiss such appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups as nothing more than “the products of twisted minds,” as one journalist put it. Brawlers in polo shirts decorated with laurel wreaths or wearing a replica Spartan helmet, alienated loners in neo-Nazi Web forums or on social media . . . what, it seems reasonable to ask, could such people really know about history? The high-minded philosophy and artistic achievement for which ancient Greece and Rome are celebrated seem incompatible with anything so repulsive as racism. Ancient Rome stands as an example of a cosmopolitan, multicultural empire. Ancient Greece is known as a society in which narrow and repressive attitudes toward sexuality had not yet taken hold. This hardly seems like a world that could provide suitable models for the hateful politics of white supremacists.
This is a book about just how suitable models from Greco-
Roman antiquity are, in fact, for those who wish to promote abhorrently racist ideas. Greco-Roman antiquity’s reputation as a high point in European history has eclipsed the fact that some of the most widely admired figures in ancient literature and philosophy endorsed ideas that modern white supremacists share, and that the social and political realities of the ancient world provide models for political systems that contemporary white supremacists would like to establish in our communities. Hate groups’ appropriations of ancient history throw these aspects of ancient culture into stark relief. They do the same for the way that history has been studied and described by later generations, revealing that famous and influential historians and intellectuals—people few of us are accustomed to think of as white supremacists—have used the ancient world to normalize racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia. And most important, this material compels us to recognize that the uncritical admiration so many of us are taught to feel toward ancient Greece and Rome—by popular films and television shows, yes, but also in some cases by our teachers—provides fuel not only for the racist activism that is described above and throughout these pages, but also for the maintenance of white supremacy in our society as a whole.
Some precision in terminology is necessary, since my discussion treats phenomena ranging from overtly racist activism to assumptions about human difference that many Americans harbor without realizing it. Many examples of racist admiration for Greco-Roman antiquity that I will discuss are associated with individuals who either used the term “Alt-Right” to describe themselves or had that term applied to them by journalists. However, in what follows, I avoid the term, which is now recognized as a euphemism that obscures how those who used it had merely repackaged older racist and antisemitic ideas in forms that promoted white supremacy to a potential global audience of millions of people by capitalizing upon the growth of unmoderated online communities within which reactionary ideologies flourished. Instead
I have adopted the term “white nationalist” to describe both the movement and the ideas I discuss, recognizing that all terminological choices require trade-offs.
“White nationalist,” like “Alt-Right,” was originally adopted
by members of the movement in a play for respectability. For this reason, the historians of racism Kathleen Belew and Ramón Gutiérrez recommend against its use, preferring “White Power.” But for the particular subset of white supremacists that I consider here, namely, the authors of historical essays appearing in publications notorious for their promotion of white supremacist thought, I believe “white nationalist” is best because it conveys that their objectives are not only racial but political: not simply the assertion of white superiority but the development and implementation of customs, social practices, policies, and laws necessary to create a white supremacist society. The most utopian of these thinkers even envision the creation of a racially pure nation: the white ethnostate. In my view, “white nationalism” best captures the full extent of this movement’s aims.
But racism in America festers far beyond the white nationalist organizations I profile here. I understand “white supremacy” to be an umbrella term that describes the pervasiveness in contemporary American thought of ideologies that not only posit the superiority of white people but also promote and maintain political and social hierarchies in which white people wield more power and enjoy greater access to wealth, healthcare, food, employment, safety, housing, education, information, and comfort than others. Those supporting white supremacy may do so online or in the “real world,” violently or behind a genteel veneer, and explicitly and openly or implicitly and unknowingly, as members of racist organizations or as people who simply ignore the inequality that such systems produce. The
individuals, organizations, and publications that are the focus of my study fall squarely into the former category, but a careful study of their methods, and in particular of their engagement with Greco-Roman antiquity, reveals much more about the insidious pervasiveness of racist ideologies in the United States than the size of these organizations, or the apparent narrowness of the subject, might at first glance suggest.
To be fair, the examples of white nationalist fascination with Greco-Roman antiquity that I have cited thus far reflect only superficial engagement with it. The man known as Based Spartan probably doesn’t know much more about the history of Sparta than what he learned by watching the 2006 film 300, which recounts the battle of Thermopylae in the style of a comic book. The images of classical sculpture used as avatars on social media can be found by a simple Google image search. What, it seems reasonable to ask, do these claims of racial continuity have to do with the actual history of the Greco-Roman world?
For many years, conventional scholarly wisdom has held that the answer to this question is “Not much.” The ancient Greeks and Romans did not primarily define themselves, or other people, by the color of their skin. Sources show that they noticed differences in
appearance between people but did not assign the same meanings to these differences that modern pseudoscientific concepts of race do. Whereas modern racial theories associate whiteness with civilized superiority, in antiquity white skin was often associated with weakness and effeminacy or, because the Greeks and Romans living in what we now call southern Europe regarded people from farther north as uncivilized, with ferocity and barbarism. And whereas modern racism promotes an association between Blackness and ugliness, in antiquity black skin was often associated with beauty, as ancient descriptions of the Ethiopians attest. In Homer’s Odyssey, when Athena restores the disguised and bedraggled Odysseus to a form that will be most recognizable to his son, she gives his skin a color that is described with the same Greek word used elsewhere to describe night, darkness, soil, and ink. The stark differences between ancient and modern attitudes toward skin color reveal that all such judgments about skin color are arbitrary, changing over time as a society’s assumptions about human difference change.
White nationalist interpretations of history ignore this because it undermines their insistence that racial identities reflect natural biological realities. An ancient Greek sculpture as a profile picture for a white nationalist social media account makes an implicit claim that modern white people are the racial descendants of the ancient Greeks and that the alleged superiority of the ancient Greeks as sculptors (in this case) proves the superiority of modern white people. But the very category of whiteness and the meanings assigned to white skin were invented in the seventeenth century in order to justify the enslavement of black Africans by designating them as fundamentally different from, and inferior to, the people enslaving them. Nearly all white nationalist interpretations of ancient history, by contrast, depend on making the invented category of whiteness seem natural and eternal. One method for claiming this is to retroject anachronistic racist ideas about whiteness onto the ancient Greeks and Romans, none of whom would even have understood the significance modern racial theories grant to skin color, let alone shared those assumptions about it.
But that doesn’t mean we should simply ignore the white nationalist application of modern racial theories to Greco-Roman antiquity. The ancient world was anything but a paradise of tolerance and acceptance of difference. Ancient Greek and Roman thinkers articulated many theories of human difference that ranked groups of people as inferior, using different criteria from those employed by modern racism but applying them to the same ends: the marginalization of those deemed different and the justification of violence against them.
For example, assumptions about the inferiority of women justified granting them fewer political and civic rights than men; women who defied these restrictions could be prosecuted and penalized. Citizenship, especially in classical Greece, was generally determined by birth, with little or no opportunity for the naturalization of those born elsewhere. Athens even imposed special taxes on foreign-born residents and made them liable to special penalties if they attempted to participate in the civic life of the city-state. Greek hostility toward the “barbarian” marks the beginning of twenty-five hundred years of European dismissiveness and suspicion of Asia. And ancient Greece and Rome were slave societies, with no abolitionist thought to speak of. Even though ancient practice differed from American slavery in important ways—any prisoner of war could be reduced to slavery, with the result that enslaved people came from all over the Mediterranean world and did not share any physical characteristics, whereas in the United States slavery was predicated on and justified by anti-Blackness—ancient enslavers adopted beliefs about the alleged laziness, rebelliousness, and sexual promiscuity of enslaved people quite similar to those that American slaveholders adopted to justify their dehumanization and exploitation. Whether or not a person who wears a Spartan helmet to a rally or uses a Greek sculpture as their profile picture knows this history, the ancient world provides plenty of fodder for those who want to claim that modern racism is justified because celebrated ancient societies recognized the fundamental superiority and inferiority of different types of people.
More than a few classical scholars have dismissed the significance of these aspects of Greco-Roman society, arguing that Greece and Rome should not be judged harshly for committing what one describes as “the sins of humanity, discoverable in all times and places.” Those who make this argument are likely unaware that it is the same argument found in the preening celebrations of white history and culture in white nationalist publications. The editor in chief of one of these, for example, has written that “if slavery is somebody’s ‘original sin,’ it’s sure not ours,” citing the example of Arab slave-trading in Africa dating back to late antiquity. Certainly the history of world slavery is one of staggering brutality and violence that transcends any one place or time period. But the defensive stance described above ignores that the violence and the oppression practiced in the ancient world have exerted an incalculably greater influence than those of other “times and places.” No one in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century America cited Arab slavery to justify the enslavement of Africans. They invoked Greco-Roman antiquity as proof that slavery was compatible with the
aspirations of any sophisticated, enlightened, and powerful civilization, whether classical Athens, the Roman Empire, or America itself.13 In this they made the same assumption about their audiences’ attitudes toward Greco-Roman antiquity as modern white supremacists do—that such analogies are persuasive.
It is no coincidence that the same historians who dismiss ancient Greco-Roman slavery as a product of its time tend to be most invested in the idea that Greco-Roman antiquity provides the foundation for the set of admirable and beneficial values that have conventionally been grouped under the heading of “Western civilization.” As historians such as Naoíse Mac Sweeney and Josephine Quinn have so amply demonstrated, this narrative of history leaves out much more than it explains. It minimizes both the contributions of diverse cultures to those aspects of modernity that we find most worthy of celebration and the violence by which the regions conventionally (and arbitrarily) designated as “the West” ensured that they enjoyed the fruits of modernity more fully than people living outside those regions.15 The violence of slavery is just one aspect of that history that the prestige of Greco-Roman antiquity has been used to justify. If we are going to claim that the ancient world is foundational for aspects of modernity that we wish to celebrate, we must acknowledge its foundational influence as a source of legitimacy for violence, colonialism, oppression, and exploitation, too. We must do this not in order to feel guilty, as some critics claim, but in order to fuel the moral outrage that should inspire us to create a better world than the one the influence of the ancient world helped build.
For this reason, alongside this book’s exploration of the underrecognized presence of racist ideas in ancient thought, I present historical examples of political figures and professional historians using the ancient world in much the same way that contemporary white supremacists do: to justify violence and oppression. In this I draw on the work of many scholars who have detailed this intellectual history, finding Greco-Roman antiquity implicated not only in the defenses of slavery noted above but also in the racial nationalism that attended the creation of modern nation-states and European imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My more selective history focuses on the points of similarity between the arguments made in these historical sources and those made by contemporary white supremacists.
The most well known of these critical studies of the historical entanglement of scholarship on Greco-Roman antiquity and white supremacy is the first volume of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987). Bernal argued that European historians from the seventeenth century onward promoted the same baseless claim of continuous racial identity between ancient Greece and modern Europeans that the contemporary white nationalists profiled in this book make. The public controversy and academic backlash that Bernal’s work provoked continues to obscure the fact that Black intellectuals and historians such as Charles W. Chesnutt, Anna Julia Cooper, and W.E.B. Du Bois had been challenging the white supremacy inherent in these dominant idealized views of Greco- Roman antiquity since at least the nineteenth century. It also prevented classical scholars from grappling with the fact that although those who invoke the ancient world in support of racism may be misrepresenting history, theirs is a misrepresentation that has also been promoted by prominent and influential individuals working in the political mainstream and wielding considerable influence both on public policy and on popular perceptions of history. To label contemporary white nationalists “extremists,” as many observers do, ignores how popular and influential their understanding of history has been.
Since my primary objective is to expose the similarities between the attitudes toward Greco-Roman antiquity held by modern white supremacists and mainstream intellectuals, each chapter is organized around an idea that informs violent white nationalist activism in the contemporary world. My first chapter introduces the major white nationalist intellectuals whose treatment of ancient evidence best illustrates this similarity, taking the antisemitic and xenophobic conspiracy theory of the “Great Replacement” as an illustrative case of the degree to which contemporary white nationalist thought finds support in both ancient evidence and influential mainstream interpretations of it. I then turn to the less obvious but equally
pernicious—and, I argue, more widely accepted—ideas upon which the white nationalist worldview is based, making this book as much an exposé of how history can be made to support hateful political ideologies as an introduction to white nationalist thought itself. These component ideas and their associated assumptions are:
White men have a duty to defend whiteness against the forces that threaten it. Masculine heroism will be essential to this defense, and violence may be justified and necessary.
Such heroism is necessary because the contemporary world has degenerated from a past golden age. Only white nationalist politics can repair and regenerate the contemporary world.
Race is a biological reality. Since whiteness constitutes a real and meaningful identity, it is worth fighting for.The white race is superior to all others. This is the most familiar aspect of white supremacist thought (it’s right there in the name), but it has meaning only in relation to the others. Decline is a serious problem only if it threatens something of special value.
The white race is worth fighting for not merely because it is real but because it possesses that special value.
Hierarchy is natural and desirable. The superiority of white people means that white people should rule over others, and inferior people should accept this.Difference leads to violence and conflict. Inferior people are unable to coexist peacefully with white people, either because they resent white superiority or because violence is inherent to their natures. This last belief brings my discussion full circle to insistence on the supposed decline of the contemporary world, which nationalists attribute in large part to faith in egalitarian ideals and multiculturalism. Hence the fantasy of the ethnostate: a racially pure nation in which white people can live in harmony with each other, insulated from the violence of all others.
Beginning with white nationalist articulations of these ideas, each of the following chapters surveys the aspects of Greco-Roman antiquity that white nationalist intellectuals turn to as respectable models for these ideas, documents the ways that influential historians and politicians have promoted similar understandings of those sources, and invites reflection on the persistence of those ideas in contemporary American thought. Any surprise that white nationalists take an interest in Greco-Roman antiquity may give way to surprise at just how frequently ancient sources articulate ideas congruent with white nationalist thought. And an encounter with the long history of respected intellectuals promoting identical or similar understandings of ancient evidence should, in turn, prompt a recognition that the investment of contemporary white nationalist intellectuals in Greco-Roman antiquity is not so much surprising as it is inevitable, given the pervasiveness of the ideas that structure this book both in the scholarship of past ages and in the dominant, but often unspoken, attitudes of the present.
There is a danger, in a book like this, that such attention could minimize the abhorrence of those ideas by “taking them seriously,” by implying that they are worthy of detailed consideration or that the inspiration white nationalists take from ancient history is nothing more than an interesting dimension of extremist thought. Let me leave no doubt. I condemn the ideas surveyed in this book, and I mourn the untold human suffering and violence that these ideas have sanctioned, and continue to sanction. The patent injustice of this history demands, however, more than condemnation and grief from those who have benefited from it. It demands reflection upon how and why this history of violence unfolded as it did. This study of racist ideas seeks to explain how these ideas are perpetuated, how they are given respectability, and how they retain it. The prestige of Greco-Roman antiquity does not, on its own, explain this history. But it has played a role in that history, a role that dominant perspectives on the significance of the ancient world either ignore or actively suppress.
Confronting the ugly realities of the ancient world through the work of white nationalist intellectuals also requires confronting some ugly realities about the contemporary world. The ideas that structure this book enjoy currency far beyond the white nationalist communities in which they are openly stated and embraced. One has only to look at the inequities that racism continues to produce in twenty-first-century America to realize that the congruences between white nationalist and mainstream thought are not limited to the interpretation of Greco-Roman antiquity.17 We are surrounded by institutions and systems shaped by white nationalist ideas as surely as we are surrounded by references to, and representations of, the Greco-Roman world. Perhaps the study of white nationalist engagement with the latter can help us recognize the pervasiveness of the former.
So if the investigation this book offers seems grim, joyless, and exhausting, and if you find yourself yearning for one of the countless books about how exciting, impressive, or inspiring the ancient world is, bear in mind that that’s what the white nationalist movement expects you to do. In fact, it’s what they need you to do, because they need the Greco-Roman world to retain the prestige they seek to harness in support of their hateful politics.
Inevitably our identities shape our view of history, the world, and ourselves. From this point of view, I am not a promising candidate as an investigator of the pervasiveness of white nationalist ideas in classical studies and American society at large. As a white, straight, Christian man I am not so much the target of racism as the target audience of white nationalist rhetoric. Those who have experienced racism, as I never have, may find some aspects of my analysis frustratingly obvious, and the rehearsal of the details of all-too-familiar white supremacist ideologies traumatic.18 They do not need to have the racist ideas that underpin the violence they have experienced explained to them. This book represents my own journey from ignorance to a still-evolving understanding of the role that race and racism have played in the formation of my identities, both as a classical scholar and as a white American.
Much has been written about “white privilege” in the last decade, but the most basic form of that privilege is the freedom to live without thinking about race. This extends to the privilege of not thinking about the racial politics of the study of Greco-Roman antiquity. I never did until I started conducting research for this book. Just as I have always felt at home in the United States, confident that the ideals of American democracy apply to me and, until I began researching this topic, ignorant of the myriad ways the benefits of those ideals are inequitably distributed, I have always felt at home in the study of the Greco-Roman world because I had no reason to question (and even benefited from) the subject’s prestige. As this book shows, this prestige has lent legitimacy to all manner of violence and oppression. Unaffected by that legacy, I could derive a feeling of self-worth from my expertise in the study of a culture widely considered “the most significant starting point of Western Civilization,” as the influential Yale University historian and classical scholar Donald Kagan puts it in a lecture.
It took the study of white supremacist appropriations of history, and the disgust I felt when encountering them, to shake me out of my complacency. I began researching this material in 2017 when, inspired by colleagues in classical studies who began raising awareness in public venues about the ways that misogynists, xenophobes, and white supremacists were invoking Greco-Roman antiquity, I launched a website, Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, to document and respond to appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups online. When I announced the project, I promised to “detail the inaccuracies, omissions, and distortions” I found. I believed (then) that my job as an expert was to show that the historical reality of antiquity had to be distorted in order to support racism. With hindsight, however, I have come to understand that this impulse served more to protect myself from the charge of racism than to promote racial justice. Such defensive scholarship constitutes what Mathura Umachandran and Marchella Ward, following postcolonial theory, have identified as a “settler move to innocence,” by which the beneficiaries of white supremacy attempt to distance themselves from it.
The more research I conducted, however, the harder it became to distinguish white nationalist perspectives on antiquity from my own. When I came across a website claiming that the Roman emperor Augustus subscribed to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory because he once said that “it is neither pleasing to heaven nor creditable that our race should cease . . . and the city be given up to foreigners,” I assumed that white nationalists had put these words into his mouth. They turned out to come from a speech that the historian Cassius Dio claims Augustus delivered in support of his legislation promoting marriage and childbirth in Rome. When I learned about an antisemitic book from 1910 that claimed Jewish people were a “Negro” sub-race, I initially mocked how far racists would go to systematize their hatreds. My scoffing turned to chagrin when I learned that its author, Arthur Talmage Abernethy, was a professor of Latin. And as I read an essay in a white nationalist magazine describing how studying ancient Greek society could reveal the timeless and unique qualities of white people, my skin crawled when I found the essayist making an argument I had heard in a course I had taken: that the Homeric epics deserve special study because they possess a greater emotional range and narrative sophistication than what the essayist described as the “thin tales of Egypt and Babylonia.” I do not know what my professor in that course—an award-winning scholar—had intended me to learn from this comparison, but I know that I reached a conclusion similar to the one the magazine was pushing. Again and again, what I had at first found outrageous and offensive turned out to be familiar from my own education. As I read that article, I reflected that I had never even taken the time to read The Epic of Gilgamesh to see if I agreed with my teacher’s dismissive claim about it.
It was uncomfortable for me to come to the realization that the version of history that I studied and admired concealed a racist and violent history. Such a realization, however, should prompt not shame but clarity about what attitudes—whether toward antiquity or toward our fellow human beings—we wish to cultivate in the future. When I refer to individuals whose scholarship reproduces conceptions of the ancient world that resemble those of white nationalists, I do so not to “call them out” as racists. I have believed, and taught, many of those perspectives myself. I do so, rather, to illustrate how common it is to learn and reproduce the modes of thinking that white nationalists depend on to make their arguments persuasive. Indeed, as Andrew Garrett’s study of the work and legacy of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber shows, too much focus on individuals can blind us to the larger systems of thought and practice that nourish and maintain white supremacy. Few of us who live in a racist society are innocent, but all of us can be agents of change.
Ibram Kendi has written that “the heartbeat of racism is denial.” This book is my attempt to counter the denial of any relationship between white supremacy and the study of Greco-Roman antiquity. It was the patent racism of white nationalist treatments of Greco-Roman antiquity, combined with the learning and sophistication evident within them, that forced me to recognize the extent to which I had absorbed and maintained racist understandings not just of the ancient world but of my own. Each chapter of this book is an invitation to experience a similar process, beginning with disgust or mockery, leading to surprise at both the extent and depth of the history that white nationalists can draw on, and finally to a recognition of the familiarity of the ideas that white nationalists use history to support. There is no shame in recognizing these ideas within ourselves. It is what we do next that matters.
From The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate Used with permission of Yale University Press. Copyright © 2026 by Curtis Dozier.
