In “The White Pedestal,” Vassar classics professor Curtis Dozier traces how the cultural prestige of Greece and Rome gets repurposed into a modern politics of hierarchy, exclusion, and “replacement.”
For a while there, the internet couldn’t stop asking a strangely specific question: Why can’t men stop thinking about the Roman Empire? The meme landed somewhere between gentle ribbing and cultural diagnosis—ancient Rome as a kind of masculine screensaver, endlessly looping in the background. Legionnaires. Marble columns. That damned handsome cleft chin of Kirk Douglas in Spartacus.
Like many men, Curtis Dozier has thought about the Roman Empire quite a bit. Except that he’s a classics professor at Vassar College. It’s his job to think about the ancient world. But as he began researching the book that would become The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate (published in January by Yale University Press), that familiar fascination started to feel less benign—and more politically charged.
“I started out thinking my job as a scholar was to correct the ways that white nationalists were abusing or fabricating history,” Dozier says. “And the more I worked on it, the more I realized there’s a subset of them who know a lot about history—and know they don’t need to fabricate any of it.
That realization didn’t arrive with a single smoking gun. It came as a creeping discomfort. Dozier found himself reading white nationalist essays about antiquity that echoed things he’d heard—or absorbed—in his own education. One moment, in particular, stuck with him. An essay in a notorious white nationalist magazine praised the emotional depth and complexity of Homer’s epics, contrasting them with what the author dismissively called the “thin tales of Babylonia,” including the Epic of Gilgamesh.
“My skin crawled,” Dozier says. Not because the comparison was unfamiliar—but because it was. As an undergraduate, he’d been taught something similar: that Homer was richer, deeper, more sophisticated than Near Eastern texts. His professor hadn’t made a racial argument. But Dozier realized that he had nonetheless absorbed something hierarchical, something implicitly civilizational.
“That’s when I started to see how easily admiration slides into ideology,” he says.
The White Pedestal is not a book about fringe extremists in Spartan helmets. It’s about ideas—ones that circulate comfortably in mainstream culture, across the political spectrum, often without being recognized as ideological at all. White nationalists, Dozier argues, didn’t invent their worldview from scratch. They draw from a much larger reservoir of assumptions about greatness, hierarchy, and civilization—many of which are subtly reinforced by how we talk about ancient Greece and Rome.
One of the book’s central moves is a distinction Dozier makes between white nationalism and white supremacy. White nationalism, as he defines it, is overt: an explicitly racist political movement seeking to preserve and expand power for people racialized as white. White supremacy, by contrast, names the broader system—structural, institutional, and often invisible—that distributes resources, prestige, and power unevenly, while allowing many of its beneficiaries to see themselves as neutral or even progressive.
“It’s comfortable to collapse those two things,” Dozier says. “Because then racism becomes something those people over there are doing. But most of us don’t have much to do with overt white nationalists. We do participate in, and benefit from, ideas that are lurking below the surface in many aspects of our society.”
Ancient history, he argues, is one of those aspects.
White nationalist thinkers regularly cite Greece and Rome to legitimize claims about hierarchy and exclusion. But what’s more unsettling, Dozier says, is how little distortion is required. Ancient political thought contains ample material justifying rule by “the best,” the exclusion of women and foreigners, and the naturalness of inequality. White nationalists curate this material aggressively—but not all that differently from how antiquity has long been curated in popular culture and, until relatively recently, in academic curricula.
“They don’t need to distort what they include,” Dozier says. “They leave out what would contradict the story they want to tell. But that kind of curation is very similar to the mainstream, idealizing version of the ancient world most of us encounter.”
Take Athens, so often celebrated as the birthplace of democracy. Popular narratives tend to gloss over the fact that most people living there—women, enslaved people, foreigners—were excluded from political participation. White nationalists don’t gloss over those exclusions. They embrace them as features, not bugs. Democracy, in this reading, is perfectly compatible with hierarchy—as long as the right people are in charge.
The danger, Dozier argues, isn’t just that these readings exist. It’s that they sound plausible because they’re built on familiar ground.
Another idea the book tracks is the rhetoric of decline. White nationalists frame the contemporary world as decadent, corrupted, in need of restoration. But Dozier points out that this language isn’t confined to the right. Comparisons between the United States and a falling Roman Empire are common across the political spectrum.
“The fundamental claim of fascism is that society is in decline and needs a strong man to arrest that decline,” he says. “Even when those metaphors come from the left, they can create fertile ground for authoritarian thinking.”
Rather than decline, Dozier suggests, we might talk about deviation, contingency, choice—ways of thinking that don’t invite the fantasy of civilizational rescue.
He’s equally wary of tying these ideas too tightly to any one political moment. The White Pedestal isn’t a Trump book, even though Trump-era politics loom in the background. Treating white supremacist ideas as a temporary aberration, Dozier says, risks missing their deep roots. “If you tie it to a single administration, it seems like something you can vote against and then move on,” he says. “But what we’ve seen is the instrumentalization of ideas that have been allowed to persist by not shining a strong enough light on them.”
That light, in Dozier’s case, turns toward the classics themselves—not to cancel them, but to read them differently. He’s adamant that abandoning ancient texts isn’t the answer. Nor is defending them on autopilot. “A responsible future for classical studies starts with telling the truth,” he says. That includes acknowledging how the prestige of Greece and Rome has been used to justify violence, empire, and inequality—historically and in the present. Only once that pedestal is dismantled can the ancient world be studied ethically, with an eye toward justice rather than admiration alone.
That approach also opens up different ways of reading familiar texts. Consider The Odyssey, a poem white nationalists often frame as a story of heroic return: a clever man survives a hostile world, comes home, kills a bunch of home invaders, and restores rightful order. Dozier doesn’t deny that this is what happens. But he questions whether the poem celebrates it uncomplicatedly.
“It’s possible to read those scenes as brutal violence,” he says, “showing how the trauma of war spreads even to people who never went to Troy.” Odysseus’s story doesn’t end with the slaughter of the suitors. He has to leave again. His homecoming is temporary. The poem looks beyond triumph toward ongoing consequence.
When Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film adaptation of The Odyssey was announced, Dozier found himself less interested in whether it would be “faithful” than in why the announcement itself generated so much buzz. There are very few stories in the broader cultural landscape—Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Odyssey—that carry that kind of automatic cultural weight.
“That speaks to the special prominence of the ancient world in our culture,” he says. And as long as that prominence goes unexamined, it remains available—inevitably—for political appropriation.
The Roman Empire meme, it turns out, wasn’t wrong. Our culture really does think about Rome all the time. Dozier’s book asks a harder question: why—and to what ends.
Curtis Dozier will be appearing at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck on March 5 at 6pm to read and sign copies of The White Pedestal.
