Tushar, thanks for the feedback. I certainly don’t claim that Padilla is personally nasty, I don’t know the guy, and I wouldn’t assume that sort of thing. But I am a bit less charitable than you in terms of his political agenda.

First off, classicists have been doing exactly what Padilla advocates, in terms of reforming the field, just not fast enough for him, apparently. So he has to up the game and go more provocative, or he wouldn’t be heard.

Second, while I am certainly in favor of broadening the voices we hear from the past, the fact is that — as you say — we don’t have much evidence to go by. Which means that such attempts are prone to a presentist interpretation, driven by political ideology or modern ethical concerns more than by what people actually thought and felt at the time.

Which is why I’m also very skeptical of exercises in “re-enactment.” Padilla’s students cannot possibly have a sense of what it meant to live in ancient Greece or Rome (especially if they reject or underestimate the texts), so that the whole things becomes a way to display their own notions, not of investigating the historical setting.

As for rebranding the classics “Greco-Roman studies,” I’m all in favor of that!