What makes somebody a classicist? A graduate degree awarded after intensive study of classical languages, literature, and civilization? A deep and sustained intellectual interest in Mediterranean antiquity, regardless of professional credentials? Or is it, as Friedrich Nietzsche might have agreed, the actual embodiment of Greek or Roman identity and ideals in one’s manner of living, as opposed to “we philologists” who merely examine these cultures with cold detachment? Perhaps these three criteria are not mutually exclusive, and the title ‘classicist’ is not as important as what one actually does with interest in and knowledge of the ancient world. The epigraph of the introduction to Quentin J. Broughall’s Gore Vidal and Antiquity, “I am a Stoic, a Roman, a classicist,” is unequivocal that Vidal (1925–2012) opted for a variant of the third definition. The biographical sketch that immediately follows makes clear that Vidal also meets the second, although not the first: his profound interest in classical literature and civilization extended neither to the advanced study of Greek or Latin language, nor to enthusiasm for education or academia as either a student or potential scholar. Broughall’s monograph validates those who, like Vidal, claim the classicist label despite a lack of either language training or university diplomas, and demonstrates what a wide influence and cultural force, for good or ill, can be exerted by a non-academic, or alt-academic, classicist.
I, for one, although perhaps the type of academic classicist Vidal might have resented, owe much to his Julian (1962) for inspiring my own career-defining fascination with its eponymous emperor. That novel had been, admittedly, my only experience with Vidal’s works—and my reputation as a Julian specialist was evidently enough for me to be tapped for this review! With this disclaimer, therefore, I read Gore Vidal and Antiquity largely as an introduction for classicists (of whichever definition) to this best-selling author’s fascinating life and works in terms most of interest to this audience. It had upon me at least one of its desired effects, an impulse to devour many more servings of Vidal’s half-century-spanning oeuvre.
The book’s introductory chapter traces the influences of antiquity that permeated Vidal’s early life, born into the privilege of a politically powerful family surrounded by the classicizing architecture of Washington DC, growing up well poised to style himself a republican Roman patrician, and in his maturity discoursing on his nation’s steady slide into imperial decadence from his comfortable retreat on the Amalfi Coast. Despite these conditions conducive to conservatism, Broughall emphasizes Vidal’s transcendence of political categories and binaries of elitism and populism, reactionism and radicalism, and iconodulism and iconoclasm. He accounts for this idiosyncrasy by citing Vidal’s spiritual habitation in the ancient Mediterranean, which was not so much a blueprint for Vidal’s thought, as a thought world in which he independently worked out his ideas. He constructed this world by imbibing not only the traditional ancient “classics” such as Thucydides, Plato, Lucretius, and Tacitus, but also modern historiographical giants such as Edward Gibbon and J. B. Bury, and even some contemporary classical scholarship. The introduction concludes with a clear summation of the book’s main points, namely that, as its subtitle suggests, antiquity exercised a crucial influence in Vidal’s approach to matters of sexuality, politics, and religion as expressed in his fiction, essays, and interviews.
Methodologically, Broughall commits not only to taking Vidal at his word, but also to assessing his classicism through his critics, biographers, and other secondary sources. This endeavor requires commanding a rich bibliography well beyond Vidal’s prolific output; yet Broughall impressively distilled all that research into under 150 pages of dense but lucid and engaging reading. While not using footnotes, the choice of placing endnotes at the end of each chapter is more helpful than putting them at the end of the whole book. Broughall’s end product is, like the title of Vidal’s 1995 memoir, a palimpsest, where direct evidence of the man’s classicism is layered over with the observations both of others and of Broughall himself.
Though this study is more thematic than chronological, Chapter 1 (“Sex”) plants us squarely in Vidal’s youth, especially the teenage romance he conducted with his “other half,” Jimmie Trimble. He died in the Pacific theater of World War II, and Vidal was left never feeling quite whole again. This formative experience, Broughall argues, factored into Vidal’s attraction to ancient Greco-Roman conceptualizations of sexuality as reflected in Aristophanes’ anthropogony in Plato’s Symposium. As Vidal proceeded aromantically through a life of bisexual and polyamorous encounters, he grounded his emotionally detached views of sex as a matter purely of power and pleasure in the sexual mores of antiquity, without modern constructions of love and sexual identity. These attitudes are present in several of the novelist’s characters, both modern (e.g. Myra in Myra Breckinridge) and premodern (e.g. Blondel and Karl resembling Achilles and Patroclus in A Search for the King). Among the latter is eponymous protagonist of Julian, whose numerous youthful liaisons before an affectionless arranged marriage are among the most scandalous and ahistorical elements of that novel. In his classicizing sexuality, Vidal’s uncompromising masculinity affirmed a biologically essentialist gender binary, as showcased in his antagonism to both effeminate homosexuality and other forms of gender-nonconformity. In Julian, for instance, the courtly eunuchs are by far the most vile and villainous characters. Creation, moreover, relates the emasculating rituals of Cybele in Sardis through orientalizing eyes. The protagonist and namesake of Myra Breckinridge, on the other hand, would be in today’s terms a transgender individual, but in Vidal’s hands transcends gender by violently wielding phallic power over men and women alike. Broughall is seemingly reluctant to use the current vocabulary ‘transgender’, and misses an opportunity to confront Vidal’s simplistic assumptions about ancient sexuality with the nuances of contemporary research. Nevertheless, the argument is clear that appeals to antiquity could lead to views on sexuality, such as Vidal’s, that are simultaneously progressive, transgressive, and regressive.
It was Vidal’s queerness and non-normative sexuality that stymied his own bids for political office, as he is said to have alleged in Chapter 2 (“Politics”) mentions. Despite lofty political ambitions, Vidal acquiesced in playing the role of a “frustrated philosopher-king,” advocating his idiosyncratic views truthfully through his various writings rather than adopting what he came to see as the mendacities required of being an electe politician. His authoritarian and elitist fantasies of radically redesigning society in the manner of Plato’s Republic. This program included the abolition of the nuclear family and regulation of the birthrate. Unlike Plato, however, Vidal reconciled this top-down social reengineering with his libertarian and libertine tendencies that placed sovereignty on the people rather than any privileged group. His Julian, at once a humble civilis princeps and a frustrated utopian mastermind, is one such Vidalian projection. Unlike Julian, however, Vidal was by no means committed to empire. His Narratives of Empire series of novels (1973-2000) showcases a Thucydidean analysis of the United States’ ascent, or rather decline, into an imperial power on the patterns of ancient Athens, and especially Rome. A recurring theme in these novels is the nation’s executive branch succumbing to Caesarism. Lincoln (1984), for instance, parallels the fourteenth president with Caesar the deified dictator. Rather than celebrate the Pax Americana, Vidal himself styled his role first as an Aristophanes then a Juvenal satirizing his own nation’s follies.
Vidal positioned himself as an heir to Gibbon in his obsession with America’s Roman-style decadence, and likewise in his Enlightenment hostility to Abrahamic faiths. Chapter 3 (“Religion”) adds nuance to the outspoken atheism that made Christopher Hitchens a fan and paints Vidal as an agnostic “pagan” nostalgic for a tolerant, pluralistic era of religions that affirm rather than reject life and the world, upholding reason and aesthetics rather than superstition and sentimentality. Of the many Hellenistic schools that competed in this world, Vidal opted for the ethics and physics of Epicureanism, reflected, for instance, in the character Philip Warren in The Judgment of Paris (1952). Vidal was also perennially drawn, nevertheless, to the Stoic doctrine of ekpyrōsis and apocalyptic visions of ephemeral civilization obliterated by primordial, Heraclitean fire. Such cosmic meditations are first expressed at the end of the novel Messiah (1954), itself a satire on millennial religion. This is not to deny he had an earnest openness to traditions further east, as the Persian protagonist of Creation, well traveled in India and China, fancies himself an anti-Herodotus and finds plenty of faults with Greeks of the classical age. Among these, Vidal condemns the gods, heroes, and monsters of classical mythology through his virtual silence on the subject. Moreover, he consistently shows contempt for Jewish and Christian morality, superstition, and intolerance that he blames for the death of what he did admire about the classical world. While briefly acknowledging that Vidal fails to account for the positive contributions of such religions, Broughall avoids discussing the allegations of antisemitism Vidal has received in response to his expressions on religion.
Furthermore, It is not always clear what elements from antiquity are explicitly drawn by Vidal or are otherwise imposed upon him. For example, did Vidal himself think of his beloved Jimmie Trimble (who had died in 1945) “haunting his oeuvre, as Lesbia does the poems of Catullus” (p. 25)? Was it James Tatum who conceived of Vidal as modeling himself on Ovid rather than Vergil in his choice to write from exile (p. 72), or was it Vidal’s idea? Would Vidal have consciously understood the real meaning of apokalypsis if he barely knew any Greek (p. 140)? Perhaps, perhaps not. Direct influence and adaptation, on the one hand, and unintential but instructive parallels, on the other, are two equally valid, but different dimensions of classical reception that should be more clearly distinguished, and even the endnotes are not always helpful in this.
The above synopses are only a taste, and not at all exhaustive of the luxuriant treasury of classical allusions, themes, and motifs that Broughall excavates from the full scope of Vidal’s works, even his sci-fi. While Vidal’s historico-fictional “reflections” set in fifth-century BCE Athens and the fourth-century CE Roman Empire are as elemental as they were popular among his works, they hardly comprise the lion’s share of Broughall’s evidence, so as to encourage even hardcore classicists to crack open his novels set in America’s past, present, or dystopian future. In illuminating the manifold emanations of Vidal’s personal classicism into his works, Broughall leaves it to the readers of those works to judge them aesthetically; but judging the art is not the same as judging the artist. Though reaffirming in his conclusion that Vidal was a man of many faults and blindspots owing to his privilege as a white male born into wealth, Broughall briefly mentions of Vidal’s negative sides only sporadically throughout the book, and he quickly follows and undermines them with buts and yets that, while not necessarily apologetic, betray a reluctance to sufficiently reckon with the darker legacies of American classicism, such as its complicity in white supremacy, in which Vidal is implicated.
In sum, I believe Gore Vidal and Antiquity is a book that needed to be written, if anything as an invitation to classicists (and by that I mean anyone with a special interest in Mediterranean antiquity) to join in critically assessing a behemoth of classical reception in modern American culture. Beyond that, those with any degree of familiarity with the corpus Vidalianum may find this a gratifying read, if they can afford or access it. Despite its immaculate typography elegantly packaged in a colorful hardcover, a less expensive paperback edition would be welcome and marketable to audiences outside academia, assuming any of Vidal’s works become ktēmata es aei.