As a work of Classical Reception, Donna Tartt’s 1992 book The Secret History depicts Classics as a way of life. Far from portraying Classics as a topic over which undergraduate students can merely gather over drinks to talk about, the experience of the book’s six young protagonists is much more devastating. Under the influence of the charismatic but manipulative professor Julian Morrow, Classics infiltrates fundamental behavioral and ethical systems of these characters and results in debauchery and murder. Richard Papen, the main protagonist and narrator, says of his decision to study Greek that “It was an entirely random decision which, as you will see, turned out to be quite fateful” (Tartt 7). The decision to study Greek correlates with real life tragedy. These students do not only study Classics, Classics changes who they are, even if for just a moment. Tartt’s reception of Classics assumes that there is something so profound about what writers like Plato or Euripides had to say, that students can become what they read, as well as be influenced by the tutelage (Morrow) under which they read it. Much like the hit 1989 movie Dead Poets Society, Tartt’s book participates in a sort of “academy idealism”. In other words, the students learn the material and become attached to it, taking it to heart. Even if they do not admit it, it is evident in their out-of-classroom life that they idolize the creators of the material. But in Tartt’s book, like Dead Poets, idealism is turned into tragedy. Though Tartt’s book exaggerates what studying Classics does to students, her book probes a void in Classical scholarship: what influence Classics has on students when outside of the classroom, and why. This paper is not so much intended to proclaim definitive answers to these questions, but rather explore the experience of the students in Tartt’s book and identify those aspects of Classics which most resonate with students of the subject, especially in the twenty-first century, especially in America. Tartt shows us a different kind of Classics. She shows us one that is youthful and contrary to the study’s old-fashioned reliance on rationality and order.
 

Classics is portrayed in many ways in Tartt’s book, none of which is clearly endorsed by the author. At its most basic level, Classics is depicted as both (1) elitist/classist and (2) Dionysian, free, and resonating with students. The former is the first impression we receive of Classics in the book, and is present throughout. Classics’ elitism is the most obvious depiction, and something we will discuss soon. But the first characterization of Classics, specifically Greek, in the book, is what it has been for so long to students: boring refinement. Boring to Richard at first, but intellectual refinement related to other subjects such as classical music and comparative literature. Greek is first mentioned by Richard Papen insignificantly. He immediately undercuts the importance of Greek to the canon in typical teen fashion. He says, “During my first two years [at Hampden], I studied Greek. This was due to no love for the language, but because I was majoring in pre-med...I took Greek so I could sleep late on Mondays. It was an entirely random decision...” (Tartt 7). Greek is a sleepy subject, literally, for Richard. This first impression is important because it tell us what an outsider with no experience thinks of Classics, or at least what Tartt thinks they think.
 

But Classics is also, according to Morrow, an anti-Romantic study. When he first meets with Richard, he is surprised at Richard’s lazy California existence: “‘And what does a person with such a romantic temperament seek in the study of classics?’” (Tartt 29). Although Richard retorts with, “‘The great romantics are frequently the best classicists’”, Morrow laughs and says, “‘The great romantics are often failed classicists.’” We can see Romanticism as the nineteenth-century movement of valuing individualism, imagination, contemplation of the self, emotions, and all the sublime, effusive, sometimes dithyrambic, ideas of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats (etc.). And in fact Romanticism was, in large part, a reaction against the Classical ideas of symmetry, order, and restraint in poets of the late eighteenth-century, Alexander Pope in particular. But what we find when we posit this idea of Classics as anti-Romantic (symmetry vs. disorder) with how Classics is actuallyreceived by the students, the old-fashioned idea does not win out.
 

The Dionysian ritual of the students sounds more like an opium trip by Coleridge than anything traditionally Classical. Moreover, the students’ reception of the Classical world is interactive and vital, rather than academic. And this they realize, except for Richard, who is not invited. When describing the ceremony, Henry says that they tried “everything” to propel themselves into a state of frenzy: “Drinks, drugs, prayer, even small doses of poison” (Tartt 183). Classical restraint and discipline, so prized in the early incentives of American Classics curricula, are not elements of Classical Reception in this case (Howe 31). But more importantly, Henry and the other participants see the Bacchanal not as some aimless foolhardy debauchery, but as a way into Classics. The way, in fact. He says, “Do you know...what Julian says about the Divine Comedy?... That it’s incomprehensible to someone who isn’t a Christian? That if one is to read Dante and understand him, one must become a Christian if only for a few hours?... We didn’t believe. And belief was the one condition which was absolutely necessary. Belief, and absolute surrender” (Tartt 183-184). The entire quote is needed because Henry’s statement is loaded. Influenced by Morrow, Henry found that to really understand the Classical world, one must belief what the Greeks believe. A suspension of disbelief is necessary to find meaning not just in text or Classical art, but in ancient culture. Not to put too much weight on the amazement of an undergraduate, but Henry’s statement is almost a rebuke of academic study of Classics. He advocates, and experiences, an experiential, anti-analytical study of Classics. This is the type of Classics that needs to be lived. Greek’s boring, anti-Romantic, restrained nature is compounded, in the first pages of the novel, by its exclusivity. More than the visceral sensation of boredom with which students approach Classics (as we saw above, though not how students could potentially experience Classics), the subject’s air of elitism is constantly criticized in scholarship, especially in recent Classical Reception (see Budelmann and Haubold 14). At first, this exclusivity is merely hierarchical within the school. When meeting with his advisor to discuss his interest in taking Greek again, Richard is met with a problem. His advisor, a French professor, says that Morrow “accepts only a limited number of students. A very limited number” (Tartt 13). And moreover, “to study with him one must have read the right things, hold similar views” (Italics mine). But even Richard notices this exclusivity subconsciously. When he first meets the group, he helps them with the right case for a translation and scrolls through an index. He notices in particular the words: “Segregation. Self. Self-concept.” Classics is both reserved for the right people, as well as demands conformation. This conformation is also not just conforming to Morrow’s views about literature and philosophy, but a total diminution of individualism in the face of conforming to the established, conservative Western Canon. Not to mention, Classics is predominantly male: “I began to watch for [Morrow] and his little group of pupils around campus. Four boys and a girl...” (Tartt 17).

Part of the students’ Bacchic ritual is an escape from conformity, a journey into the self. And Morrow, though old-fashioned on the surface, can be credited with much of this. Returning to those words Richard came across in his perusal of the index, namely “Segregation. Self. Self-concept”, we find a summation of the book’s relationship with Classics. Segregation we have already covered. But “self” and “self-concept” are two ideas that are integral to the extreme Bacchanal which results in murder, and is related to the Romantic, dithyrambic idea of Classics. Keeping in mind the two ways which Tartt depicts Classics (one, as elitist, the other, more integral to the students’ lives, more youthful and crazy), we can see that the students’ desire to lose the self is also an exercise in finding the self, and has many similarities, as we will see, with rituals in real life on college campuses that are in the mode of experimentation. The students are spurned onto the idea of losing the self by Morrow. In Richard’s first class with the professor and the others, he tells us that “the discussion of the day was about loss of self, about Plato’s four divine madnesses, about madness of all sort; he began by talking about the burden of the self, and why people want to lose the self in the first place” (Tartt 38). And in explaining why the students wanted to have the Bacchanal in the first place, Henry says, “The appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great...To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one’s moment of being” (Tartt 182). Here, we see quite a new way that we experience Classics. The Classics can be, in a word, crazy. What these students take from learning about the dithyramb, “pneuma enthusiastikon”, “Euphemia”, Dante, and the Bacchae, is that they can act how the Greeks acted (Tartt 183-184, 204). And not only can they live like the Greeks, but the mode in which they live like the Greeks seems to be contrary to everything Classical education stands for: order, rationality, dignity, and conservativeness. This is a new type of Classics.

As soon as we start to see this alternative, Bacchic ways of looking at the Classics, more connections in this vein pop out of the text. Take LGBT identity as an example. In the history of Classical scholarship, academics and other members of the Classics community have shied away from the subject. Apart from an obvious, systemic heteronormativity in Western history, a reason in America is perhaps university curricula’s ties with conservative Christian models. For example, Harvard and Yale’s curricula were highly influenced by the Puritan sensibility. But starting in the 1980s, scholarship realized the predominance of homosexuality in the Classical World. Tartt realizes as well. In another textual rebuke to Sophie Mills’ short-sighted review of the book, we are told that Professor Morrow “had a polite but implacable contempt for Judeo-Christian tradition in virtually all its forms. He would deny this if confronted, citing evasively his affection for Dante and Giotto...” (Tartt 272). An old-fashioned, Christian pedagogy, then, is not the term for what Morrow is doing. And Richard tells us outright, after he learns of the intimate relationship between Francis and Charles: “While I don’t suppose that anyone who has devoted much energy to the study of Classics can be very much disturbed by homosexuality, neither am I  particularly comfortable with it as it concerns me directly” (Tartt 244). Here, there is a denial by Classicists (as well as by Tartt, herself a student of Classics) on Judeo-Christian tradition and its repulsion to homosexuality. In fact, homosexuality is integral to understanding the Classical World.
 

The relationship that the students in Tartt’s book have with Classics is contrary to the ideals of traditional Classical education in America. Their reception of Classics is not how students are stereotypically supposed to receive Classics, nor, as we will see, is it totally a fiction. Sophie Mills’ condemnation of Morrow’s financial elitism and Mahoney’s proclamation that the novel is “resoundingly a work of entertainment, not a work of art” are so short sighted because they do not consider the conversation surrounding student behavior which the novel opens up (Mills 15, Mahoney 120). American Classical education, says Walker, was historically regarded “as a tool to teach young people self-discipline” through conjugating verbs, memorizing noun cases, and reciting Ciceronian orations (Howe 31). Knowing Classics was the “hallmark of gentility” (Howe 36). Greek and Latin produced exemplars of “illustrative human conduct--mental discipline, logical thought...moral maxims...” (Briggs 281). And in 1805, Samuel Miller said knowing Latin and Greek “has a tendency to form in the student a capacity to discern, and a solicitude to attain, the purity, the precision, and the graces, of speech” (Miller 223). Henry cannot even remember his name during the Bacchic ritual (Tartt 187). Classical education and commentators valued a Classics that was Judeo-Christian and later heavily informed by Victorian restraint. But Tartt is concerned with a different type of Classics. And students are, and perhaps always have been, too.

The Bacchic, substance-induced Classics we see in The Secret History is what students respond to. This response, this reception, manifests itself extra-curricularly. And it has since the eighteenth century, when in the United States, literary societies were formed. James McLachlan has deemed their importance as “in some ways more significant” than classroom experience and assignments in the “internalization of the classical tradition” at the time (MacLachlan 87). Members would give drunken speeches at gatherings on scandalous subjects such as dancing or the passions, and if they showed too much “Firmness of Character,” the house assigned them a formal essay on a chosen subject (MacLachlan 91). Traditions such as these, though not necessarily carried on by Classics students, still carry on at top liberal arts colleges like Hamilton. One of its secret societies has a tradition of making a drunken speech on the eve of officer elections. They also chant a Greek phrase which means “the most precious things remain unseen” (Clement). McLachlan is correct in saying that “the mature self is in some measure the sum of the experiential identifications made in youth...That mature sense of the self rest[s] on youthful internalizations of the classical tradition” (MacLachlan 04-95). How we experience Classics as a student matters. And not just how people tell us to experience Classics. Studies in teaching methodologies abound, but studies of the students themselves is a bare field. Why has no one, for example, written a history of the toga party? Why is there no introduction to “Greek Life: The Classics in Fraternities”? Why are American high schools so obsessed with “Certamen” competitions? And certainly, with the advent of LSD, ecstasy, and other hallucinogenics, if Tartt’s fictional characters ended up murdering someone in their induced state, what are Classics students doing or talking about at parties (when they are talking about something related to Classics)? Of course, this type of reception can be extended to any humanities discipline, but this is in no way objectionable for those studies either. If “the formal curriculum” still acts “more as a negative than a positive intellectual stimulus” and since how we experience Classics in youth influences how we perceive it as an adult, Classicists must reflect on their own pasts as Classics students, conduct systematic research on college campuses about how their students are using Classics in their free time, to see what exactly about Classics is resonating with students in the moment (MacLachlan 469). From Tartt’s book, and from the history of extra-curricular activities involving Classics, their reception might not be as innocent as we may think.
 

Tartt’s book is not mere entertainment. It is first an entry point for Classics. The novel shows the faults of old-fashioned, elitist/classist pedagogy, as well as possibilities for Classical Reception in students. The novel’s focus on the Dionysian not only illuminates a part of Classical culture that scholarship did not want to acknowledge for years (what with the loss of the self, irrationality, and homosexuality), but it connects with how students in the real world receive Classics. Ultimately, we find that Classics shows up extra-curricularly for the student in areas we would, and have, never imagined. The Secret History starts to fill this gap in scholarship, even though it is not scholarship, and provokes a conversation about the fundamentals of Classics. It is outside the bubble of the classroom, essays, and publications, where we see how Classics are truly received. Socrates conducted his method on the streets, but never on paper. Classics today can learn something from the method of its first philosopher. A better reunion with student life is a next step for Classical Receptions studies.