ABSTRACT
The author describes the digital project Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, a site devoted to documenting and responding to appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity in support of racist, xenophobic, misogynist and anti-Semitic ideologies. The articles collected have been published in the past ten years (many of them in the last ten months) and so form an up-to-the-minute corpus of hateful appropriations of ancient Greco-Roman history. This chapter presents the opportunity to synthesise the main arguments made by these sites and to compare approaches taken by different ideologies, as well as to outline the primary distortions and omissions of historical fact that underlie these appropriations. Reclaiming and defending this past is thus not as simple as proving the hate groups wrong, but requires a reconsideration of how this past can and should be used, sometimes as a negative example, other times as a source of scepticism about the naturalness of hierarchical claims, and occasionally, by examining a more diverse set of sources and critical perspectives than the hate groups employ, as one component in an argument for inclusive and progressive politics.
