This article is taken from the April 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
At the end of Book Six of the Aeneid, Virgil tells us that there are two gates of sleep. One is of horn, through which “an easy way is given to true shades”. The other is of ivory, which gleams beautifully, but through it “the gods of the dead send false dreams to the world above”.
I was put in mind of these ivory gates when I surveyed the rather surprising portals of Curtis Dozier’s The White Pedestal. At the beginning of his book, in the acknowledgements, Dozier makes the customary apology for errors of fact. However, he goes further than this, and also apologises for all “errors” that he might make of “politics”. He then lays out an equally surprising approach towards citing the works of the authors he is going to survey:
White nationalist intellectuals seek academic legitimacy by imitating the conventions of scholarly discourse in their publications. To cite these publications in the same manner that I would cite other scholarship would confer such legitimacy, as well as visibility. Therefore I do not cite publications from white nationalist websites in my notes. Interested researchers will be able to locate them from my descriptions.
Dozier thus immediately liberates himself from the usual safeguards which would assure a reader that he is engaged in reasonable and fair academic debate: the quotation of source material, in context, so that it, instead of some straw man of the author’s own imagining, is the real and verifiable subject of critique. But, if the ivory portals of Dozier’s work leave us in any doubt that his book is more an exercise in ideology than a search for the truth, it is spelled out very clearly in the conclusion:
The present moment does not demand that scholars raise their voices in support of historical accuracy. It demands that we do so in support of moral clarity about the history and present conditions of our discipline, and about how our work can contribute to the formation of a more just and equitable world.
The initial purpose of Dozier’s book is to explain “just how suitable models from Greco-Roman antiquity are … for those who wish to promote abhorrently racist ideas”. Such a proposition is scarcely contentious. In a vast literature which embodies the life of the Mediterranean, Europe, North Africa and West Asia for at least a thousand years, it is hardly difficult to find models which promote racism.
Similarly, one can also easily find in classical literature models that promote the universal brotherhood of man, strict religious piety, atheism, vegetarianism, wild debauchery, contentment with one’s lot or (like Virgil) a peculiar obsession with bees.
Dozier’s claims, however, range much further. His designation of “White Nationalism” applies not just to the fringe of blood-and-soil extremists, but pretty much everyone who is not blessed to be a part of his immediate academic circle. The “white nationalist ideas in the Greco-Roman world” have been used “for the maintenance of white supremacy in our society as a whole”, to “justify violence and oppression”.
“Famous and influential historians and intellectuals,” Dozier tells us, “people few of us are accustomed to think of as white supremacists — have used the ancient world to normalize racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia” in the same way as “hate groups”.
From Greek mythical characters to contemporary mild-mannered scholars, few escape Dozier’s whipping. Prometheus “might himself be recognized as a sanitizing symbol of European violence and alleged superiority”. Peter Jones, a founder of the charity Classics for All, who has worked tirelessly to ensure that children of all backgrounds have access to the Classics, is “attractive to white nationalists” because he wrote an article entitled “It was Tribalism That Finished Rome, and It Will Finish Brussels Too” — thus committing the sin of invoking “ancient Rome to predict contemporary decline”.
Professor Peter Heather, a scholar of profound learning who is the proponent of what might be called the “cock-up theory” of the fall of Rome, sins by “his use of the term ‘barbarian’ without critical reflection on its connotations”. UNESCO is in trouble for using the Parthenon as its logo, because some neo-Nazi organisations use it too. Even Winnie-the-Pooh gets caught in the crossfire, since the publisher of his story, Methuen, also brought out the work of the eugenicist Hans F.K. Günther in the 1920s.
The problem with Classics, argues Dozier, is that we are all conditioned to find the products of the classical world — its architecture, literature, philosophy, historical tales — uncritically inspiring, profound, exciting and beautiful. We are also encouraged to see a false racial continuity between the ancient world and the modern West.
As a result, the beauty and inspiration of the classical legacy is used to give credibility and cover to violent racist ideas drawn from the classical world with a view to creating modern systems of oppression. We are all the more drawn to defend these because of the contrived sense of racial connection with Greece and Rome. As a consequence, we should denude the discipline of Classics of its traditional prestige, no longer seeing it as a repository of inherited wisdom or identity.
It is not difficult to spot the flaws in Dozier’s thesis. For example, he does not conceive that people might be independent-minded enough to make personal judgements on beauty and merit, and that there might be much more to the legacy of the Classical world — fundamental conceptions of logic, philosophy, literature, language, theology, human nature — than simply the building blocks for an imagined oppressive society.
Indeed, he makes the unfortunately racist assumption that “people of colour” are going to support his critique and suggests that those “people of colour” who do disagree are unfortunately prone to insidious ideas.
Dozier’s argument is based on a conception that much of what is common human experience across cultures — for example, judgements based on merit, ideas of hierarchy, the virtues of self-sacrifice, honour, and dedication to duty when attached to military valour — are drawn from the classical world and applied to an otherwise innocent civilisation to corrupt it.
In reality, of course, societies around the world all possess these ideas intrinsically and rely on them to function. One is naturally going to find antecedents of them in the Classical world, but they have existed and will continue to exist independently of its support.
If anything, Dozier (comfortably ensconced in his liberal arts college in New York state) seems to be daintily unnerved by the brutish reality of the human condition, and his book is a veiled critique of non-eutopian existence, with the Classics suffering as a proxy target. The idea that the discipline of Classics should be dismantled because some people use elements of it wickedly is like arguing that we should ban all knives because a few are used for stabbings.
Facts are not allowed to get in the way of Dozier’s arguments when they obtrude. For example, Dozier repeats a claim that Cato’s famous call “Carthage must be destroyed” (Karthago delenda est) is “the first recorded incitement to genocide” — but you just have to look at earlier Mesopotamian literature to see that this isn’t true. He also makes light of the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, even repeating with apparently approving arguments that it was “the best thing ever to happen to Europe”, whilst quite ignoring the well-documented cataclysmic decline in population and material living standards that resulted from the strife of its collapse.
In the modern age, Dozier argues that generations of British colonial administrators had been primed by racist interpretations of the Classics, particularly Herodotus, to find Asiatic culture “childlike” and inferior, quite ignoring the huge contributions, motivated by profound respect, made by generations of such administrators from Sir William Jones to Lord Curzon, to documenting and preserving vast swathes of Asiatic languages, literature, laws and material culture.
Whilst trying to create contrived genealogies of undesirable contemporary attitudes to Classical education, he misses, wilfully or otherwise, their more likely origins in present-day discourse. The spike in antisemitism, for example, is fed, to a very great extent, by the Islamist propaganda which has so influenced Western left-wing media and university campuses.
Indeed, in this respect Dozier is content to operate with a conspicuous double standard. He complains that the imposition of classical architecture, whether in the ancient or modern world, smacks of colonialism and imperialism, but then he complains about the removal of Ottoman Islamic graves and monuments (imposed by an imperialist occupying power) from the Acropolis.
In a discussion of modern slavery, he claims that, along with neo-liberal capitalism, “restrictive immigration and border-control policies” and the “Happy Slave” narratives in Latin textbooks are responsible for playing a role in “minimizing the dehumanizing violence of slavery”. Yet he makes no mention of officially sanctioned slavery in Islamic polities until the 20th century, and the use of such a tradition to legitimise slavery by contemporary groups such as Islamic State and Boko Haram.
It is also absurd for Dozier to argue that Classics has been presented uncritically in classrooms and by historians until now. This is not how teachers have taught the Aeneid or the Odyssey over the last half-century in schools, and it is not the tenor of popular biographies of Alexander the Great or the Roman Emperors, nor many of the popular television programmes such as I, Claudius.
These works, ancient and modern, are perfectly capable of being read critically as well as being exciting and inspiring. Unfortunately, Dozier’s work cannot be read with pleasure. This is intentional: “if the investigation this book offers seems grim, joyless, and exhausting … bear in mind that that’s what the white nationalist movement expects you to do … because they need the Greco-Roman world to retain the prestige they seek to harness in support of their hateful politics”.
Or perhaps the book is joyless and exhausting because it is a sustained and tiresome piece of self-flagellatory virtue signalling masquerading as scholarship. At least Virgil’s ivory portals were attractive: this book doesn’t even pretend to be so.
