Leaving Athens: Classics for a New Century?

Xage duBois' new collection of essays raises question of what classics as a discipline might become in twenty-first century (if, that is, it is to remain a separate dis cipline and not simply allow its objects of study to be ab sorbed into other disciplines, for example, comparative literature).* One way of putting her answer would be to say that classicists should desert for multi-ethnic, hybrid Alexandria, which represents, in words of Daniel Seiden, institutionalized heterogeneity at every level of social order (92) and which is subject of one of essays. A second would be that classics should become another branch of cultural studies as now practiced widely across hu manities (duBois' own version of this stresses in particular subaltern and gender studies). The clever title (suggested to her by James Porter, one of most innovative among to day's classicists) is no doubt designed to be ambiguous, but in its primary signification, it encapsulates book's argu ment that high classical Athens should no longer be un thinkingly subject's automatic center: I argue for a new definition of classical studies no longer confined to Athens, Rome, and their later 'reception' (1-2). Above all, in troduction urges, classics should embrace the political and emphasize hybridity, fusion, contact, and diaspora, in interest of resistance to conventional or hegemonic ideas and in a manner best suited to a globalized world (23, 3).