by SPENCER McDANIEL
On August 24th, 2024, Elon Musk, who is currently one of the richest, most powerful, and most influential human beings on the planet, tweeted, “Can’t recommend The Iliad enough! Best as Penguin audiobook at 1.25 speed.” He accompanied these words with a link to the audiobook edition of E. V. Rieu’s 1946 prose translation of the Odyssey (a different poem from the Iliad), published by Penguin Classics. This tweet has created a lot of discourse in the online classics community, with many classicists criticizing Musk while others are left wondering what there is to criticize. In this post, I will explain what the problems are with Musk’s recommendation, which basically break down into two separate issues: right-wing dog whistling and bad practical advice.
Use of ancient Greek literature as a dog whistle for right-wing social politics
Classics has been a small academic field for a long time and, unfortunately, in recent years, our field has become increasingly endangered due to many colleges and universities eliminating or downsizing their classics programs and not hiring new tenure-track faculty to replace old faculty who are retiring. In most contexts, a prominent public figure with a large platform recommending that his followers read the Iliad and/or the Odyssey would be a good thing for classics.
Context, however, is extremely important. Elon Musk isn’t just any high-profile public figure and he isn’t just recommending that people read Homer in vacuum; he is a man who seeks to advance a particular sociopolitical agenda and he is recommending that people read the Iliad in the context of this agenda.
Over the past few years, Musk has increasingly embraced white male supremacist, anti-LGBTQ social politics. As the new owner of Twitter (which he has tried and largely failed to rebrand as X), he has invited right-wing figures and Neo-Nazis who were previously banned from the site for hate speech to return, he has deliberately boosted right-wing and anti-trans accounts, he has significantly relaxed enforcement of rules banning transphobic harassment on the site, and he has banned use of the words cis and cisgender as “slurs.” Most of his own recent activity on the site consists of racist, sexist, queerphobic (especially transphobic), and antisemitic dog whistling.
Moreover, under Musk’s ownership, accounts promoting hard-right ideologies centered around the glorification of “traditional” white masculinity have absolutely exploded in both number and prominence. Many of these accounts use a front of promoting “western” literature, art, and philosophy to appeal to a broad audience while also promoting their ideologies in sometimes subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle ways. Many of these accounts focus specifically on content related to ancient Greece and Rome.
Only a few days before Musk made his tweet recommending the Iliad, the prominent right-wing political operative Christopher F. Rufo, who is best known for having basically single-handedly manufactured the media hysteria over “critical race theory” back in 2020, issued a tweet celebrating that the recently right-wing-hijacked New College of Florida will be teaching Greek literature instead of “gender studies.”
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