Detoxifying the Classics
BBC Radio 4

This absorbing enquiry (22 June), fronted by the University of Reading’s Professor Katherine Harloe, began with audio from the protest marches staged in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 to “Unite the Right”. It then advanced a year or two to take in the spate of online criticism provoked by a BBC cartoon aimed at schoolchildren seeking to learn about Roman Britain which made the fatal mistake of allowing Quintus, its juvenile lead, a dark skin.

The connection, as adduced by Professor Harloe, was that the protests embodied a mainstream and an extremist version of the same thing. On the one hand most middle-aged Britons, raised on a diet of Ben Hur and the BBC’s I, Claudius, imagine classical Greece and Rome to have been almost exclusively populated by white people. On the other, the far right has always regarded the ancient world as a failsafe template for the ideal ­modern state: specialists observed that several of the insurgents who marched on Capitol Hill back in January were wearing facsimiles of Spartan helmets.