In the 18th century, art historians’ admiration for the beauty of white-ish ancient Greek marble statuary led people to draw conclusions, on the back of their belief in classical ‘authority’, about white superiority. This, we are told, turned many classicists into racists. Today some members of the Cambridge Classics Faculty feel the white-ish plaster-cast replicas of those statues in their museum ‘entrench[es] racism’ in the same way. Their proposal is to put up a notice about it. Wow. Go, Cambridge! That’ll show those racists! And surely those still disgustingly white originals all over the world need notices as well.
Two things need to be said. This is a modern ‘problem’: no Greek or Roman believed that body type or colour in itself made the slightest difference to one’s standing in the world. Second, Greek and Latin literature — and there was no other literature in Europe for more than a thousand years from Homer (700 bc) onwards — provides any number of far more worrying examples of ancient beliefs.
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