“To make the ancients speak, we must feed them with our blood.”
This quotation, attributed to the philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, seems designed to appeal to those in the trenches of graduate work: a towering 19th-century German intellectual speaking with fiery devotion and deadly seriousness of his subject. It is also, to a certain kind of person, just cool.
The line originates in a speech delivered at Oxford University on June 3, 1908, entitled On Greek Historical Writing. I have been unable to find the original German, but the translation published the same year runs as follows:
“We know that ghosts cannot speak until they have drunk blood; and the spirits which we evoke demand the blood of our hearts. We give it to them gladly; but if they then abide our question, something from us has entered into them; something alien, that must be cast out, cast out in the name of truth!”
The imagery is of Homer’s wandering hero Odysseus in the underworld, where he is surrounded by silent, thirsting ghosts who gain voice only when he allows them forward to taste the blood offering he has made. I am not the first to discover this; Hugh Lloyd-Jones titled his 1983 collection of essays in which he traced the influence of ancient Greece on 19th and 20th century intellectuals Blood for the Ghosts.
In its full context, it’s clear that this is an argument about how to do history, and a warning that we contaminate some essential element of the past at the very moment we bring it back to life by our study. Whether this is good or bad Wilamowitz himself was uncertain, and in other places he wrote that the best translator must inhabit the very soul of the ancient author through an act of metempsychosis (an act which, it must be noted, happens at the writer’s desk). The line between modern sensibility and fidelity to original context is one that many scholars must consider. That is an argument for a different day; I want to focus on the more common version of the quotation.
We often speak of what the humanities offer to students, and rightly so: enrichment, human flourishing, and critical thinking are all good things. In reflecting on my own teaching practice, however, I wonder if we talk enough about what we offer to the humanities. And so I will try to convince you that the popular incarnation of Wilamowitz is right, and that the exchange is a fair one. To make the ancients speak we must feed them with our blood, that is, risk something of ourselves in our encounters with the past.
In my field, classics, we sometimes say that Thucydides is the first modern historian. He writes at the beginning of his Peloponnesian War of a fundamental sameness to the human condition, which he says imparts lasting value to his work. The work is “a possession for all time,” a useful guide to future peoples who are human too and thus can gain in their own way from understanding the specific history he records.
But it is one thing to know that Thucydides wrote about the war between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BCE, and another to really grapple with something like his Melian Dialogue. Is it good—or even true—that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must?” Is power the only real currency in international relations? What thought should we give to the conquered?
What do you think? No, really: do you think that power is the only true currency, or should morality play a role in conflicts?
You have to give a little something of yourself to sincere deliberation, but you have the right to an opinion. Studying the humanities will make that opinion more considered.
Five hundred years before Thucydides, Homer began his epic war poem, the Iliad, with an invocation of “rage,” even before he called on the muses. Why? Should the hero Achilles have swallowed his pride for the sake of the Greek war effort? What does he owe to his fellow soldiers?
Five hundred years after Thucydides, the Roman historian Tacitus peeled back a mask of republicanism to reveal the sneering face of Roman autocracy. Can you be a good person in service of a bad regime? What’s the difference between keeping your head down and complicity?
This is all to say nothing of the countless tiny stretches of the soul that happen when we meet great literature and art, and which give us space to grow. What a shame it would be to study the humanities and choose not to let them change us, or not to think seriously about the questions they drive us to ask.
It may be, as Wilamowitz feared, that in feeding the ghosts we contaminate them with modernity and thus make inaccessible some more sterile historical truth. I am willing to pay the cost of this imperfect understanding if it means struggling earnestly with ideas. The popular form of the quote persists because it tells us in bright, iron-rich terms that the returns of humanistic study are bought with our efforts and our essence: effort in resisting shortcuts to prefer depth and engagement, and essence in recognizing other lives as equal to our own, and in ascribing our own humanity to them.
This is what we promise year after year when we advocate a liberal arts education. Society benefits from humane and educated citizens, and study of the humanities serves both purposes.
In the depths of Homer’s underworld, the ghosts swarm hungrily around Odysseus. They come forth in their turns, eager to hear news of the earth above while Odysseus needs their knowledge to return home. How much more alive our ghosts are than his, and how much more we can learn.
So please, feed the ghosts. Give them voice. If you contaminate them with your modern self, so be it; they are in you too, and you are greater for it. To make the ancients speak, we must feed them with our blood: with effort, with empathy, and with a willingness to be changed by the encounter.
That is, of course, also the reward.
*Banner Image: Edvard Munch, Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, 2023.602.
