The classicist Curtis Dozier has been documenting white nationalists’ strange obsession with Graeco-Roman antiquity on the website Pharos since 2017. There is an abundance of evidence. During the first Trump administration, a man dubbed ‘Based Spartan’ would attend rallies in a plumed helmet and brawl with counter-protesters. Far-right publications Counter-Currents and American Renaissance publish essays with titles such as ‘What Socrates Knew’ and ‘Homer: The European Bible’. The white supremacist website Stormfront combines an image of the Parthenon with the words ‘Every month is White history month’. 

Whence this obsession? Using classical antiquity to support a violently racist ideology might appear almost comically incongruous. It simply doesn’t seem compatible with a view of the classical world as the birthplace of democracy and liberal enlightenment values.

Except, as Dozier argues in The White Pedestal, it is. White nationalist ideology presents masculine heroism, strong leadership and homogeneous, hierarchical social structures as the means of defending racial purity, establishing a white ethnostate and mitigating cultural decline; Graeco-Roman antiquity provides the intellectual foundation for many of these principles. Instead