What is driving this abiding interest? As strange as it sounds, the Classics may be profiting from a societal wariness, or weariness, of identity politics. For classical literature radiates a universal humanity, whose truths and troubles cannot be cordoned off for a particular group: there’s no community or characteristic — born or acquired — that can lay claim to these cultures ahead of any other. No group exists with the right to assert their privileged access or to debar others from the pleasures of profound immersion. Despite recurrent claims from political grandees around the Mediterranean basin, the complexity of cultures that thrived in the Greco-Roman world do not live on in any one nation state. Their vestiges lurk everywhere and nowhere, colouring all aspects of Western civilisation but transcending any specific identity. True, no European nation would be quite as it is without the Classics, whose spirit underpins the principles of Western democracy, political criticism, artistic taste and literary form. But that rich tradition has long since become impossibly implicated in the threads of lofty Christian morality, intertwined with an earthy pagan pragmatism.

That citizens of western society are living and breathing embodiments of such cultural appropriation — willy-nilly — should be a source of collective pride, not feet-shuffling embarrassment. Perhaps, then, for curious and ambitious undergraduates, the unpoliced resources afforded by the Classics offer a thrilling liberation from some of the intractable impasses of 21st-century cultural politics.

Contemporary promoters and defenders of the Classics should not be seen as a privileged and partisan party. They are simply those who have become interested, and thereby invested, in that astoundingly broad and diverse world. There should be little surprise at the recent growth in the study of the Classics in China and Japan: the subject is there for anyone’s taking, and can fascinate and inspire in myriad ways. But the question of to what degree the world, rather than a particular subset of global cultures, should formally engage with the Classics is complex. Since the intellectual energy and artistic prowess of classical antiquity transcend any particular national, ethnic or geographical category, it is natural to hope that the subject will garner interest from any community exposed to it. But if it fails to do so, is that per se a problem? Or is disparity of engagement with one particular set of cultures to be expected and accepted cross-culturally? If it does indeed reflect a problem, is such a situation to be resolved by projecting classical antiquity with greater zeal into such communities? If so, that is more easily said than done. It is a sad fact of 21st-century politics that one person’s globally-minded educational zeal is another critic’s “cultural imperialism”. Do Classicists have a responsibility to engender engagement with classical antiquity from those communities which have participated less in the past, culturally or educationally? Or is there a conflicting responsibility to respect the independence of such communities to prioritise certain cultures over others? These questions inevitably tie into debates about the diversity of academic staff in the subject throughout the world: when one talks about ensuring that Classical academia is “representative”, it is unclear who or what requires representation.