Edith Hall (King's College London) has campaigned to promote the study of classical civilization in UK state schools, where it is now rarely taught, even in translation. Henry Stead (University of St. Andrews) has created the Brave New Classics project to research the classical roots of Communist ideology. Their joint mission in this volume is to uncover the diffusion and study of the classics among the British and Irish working classes. It is a fascinating archaeological dig, full of important discoveries.

Class and classics—the words are etymologically related, and they evolved in tandem. In Britain (indeed, throughout Europe) fluency in Greek and Latin was the mark of a gentleman. True, many gentlemen had forgotten or never really learned those languages, but at least they kept the hoi polloi out of the universities. When Edmund Burke warned that “learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude,” he meant classical learning (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790). And yet Robert Porson, a weaver's son, became an accomplished classicist, attained a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and (as a supporter of the French Revolution) published a stinging response to Burke, A New Catechism for the Use of the Swinish Multitude, Necessary to be Had in all Sties (1792). And as, Hall and Stead recount in A People's History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939, George Dyer, born to a Thames boatman, won scholarships and edited classical literature. He despised the British class system and found more egalitarian models in “the ancient Spartans, the Athenians, the Romans, and our warlike ancestors the Saxons!” (170) Militant tinplater Richard Carlile saturated his radical polemics with classical allusions that were designed to terrify the authorities. His newspapers were titled The Gracchus, The Gorgon, and The Medusa, and he tried to organize the Philanthropic Hercules, a proto-syndicalist association of trade unions.

Compared to other European countries, museum admission policies in Britain were relatively open: foreign visitors snootily complained about the riffraff who crowded into the Ashmolean and the British Museum. The Elgin Marbles may have been stolen from Greece, but the theft spurred municipal museums to acquire their own antiquities, and that in turn disseminated knowledge of ancient art to the British masses. Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) was a bestseller and frequently reprinted, and then was popularized still more widely through stage spectaculars and (in 1913) a silent movie.

Brian Friel's 1980 play Translations rightly celebrated Ireland's hedge schools, which taught Greek and Latin along with Gaelic. The “adventure schools” of Scotland served a similar mission, and even if the egalitarianism of the Scottish education has been exaggerated, the fact remains that in the 1860s more than twenty percent of Scottish university students had working-class backgrounds.

Accounts of their running ideological battle over the aims of adult education often portray the Workers’ Educational Association as a proponent of the classics and their rival, the Plebs League, as narrowly Marxist. But it was not quite that simple. Though the WEA upheld Arnoldian ideals and often included Plato's Republic in its syllabi, it offered few classics courses as such. However, Hall and Stead note the classical allusion in the very title of the Plebs League, whose journal published articles on Ovid's Metamorphoses, Sumerian tablets, and economic interpretations of ancient history. The Plebs drew inspiration from Daniel De Leon, whose Marxism was grounded in the study of class conflicts in ancient societies.

Proletarian novelist Robert Tressall knew Latin and (very likely) Greek. Hall and Stead note that “he organised an informal reading list/personal lending library for his workmates, which included Plutarch's Lives, Aristotle's Poetics, Pliny, Gibbon and of course Plato” (226). His satire of working-class false consciousness, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, owed a great deal to Plato's Allegory of the Cave. And the story of Spartacus was a natural for Marxist novelists like Lewis Grassic Gibbon (not to mention Howard Fast).

Hall and Stead uncover a considerable number of Communist classicists. Some (like Christopher Caudwell) were hardly working class, but Ewan MacColl definitely was. He found agitprop theatre too heavy-handed, so he staged Lysistrata to send an antiwar message that was also artisically effective. Some leftist critics have accused classically educated D. H. Lawrence of being a kind of fascist, but in the original draft of Lady Chatterley's Lover, gameskeeper Mellors was a Communist Party member. Once we know that, it suddenly becomes a rather different novel.

Amidst the detritus of lowbrow culture, Hall and Stead find classical influences where other scholars would not think to look. In the criminal jargon of eighteenth-century London, constables’ lieutenants were “Myrmidons,” whores were “Drury Lane Vestals,” and given that the Athanasian Creed began with the words “Whosoever wants . . .” a woman who freely conferred sexual favors was inevitably an “Athanasian wench” (327). The 1728 ballad opera Penelope was a ribald lampoon of Alexander Pope's recent translation of The Odyssey, reset in a low London tavern, and recentered on a female character, who was transformed into an unabashed slattern. The Siege of Troy was a spectacular eighteenth-century burlesque performed at Bartholomew Fair before riotous plebeian audiences. It was a mishmash of various Greek myths, where the baddies were Trojan royalty and the heroes were delightfully coarse Trojan cockneys. Of course Aristotle's Masterpiece was a hugely popular sex manual (and of course Aristotle had nothing to do with it).

A still more intriguing example is Vulcana, born Miriam Katherine Williams, a music-hall strongwoman from the era of Eugen Sandow. (Note the classical gender bending in her stage name.) The daughter of a Welsh tinplate worker, she made her impressive physique acceptable to Edwardian audiences by posing as Greek statuary, such as the “Dying Gaul.” In all of this campy classicism one can detect the cultural origins of Wonder Woman and those hilariously awful Steve Reeves Hercules movies.

Today, when classical education is associated with the political right, one can only welcome this robust defense coming from the left. And when students are told they must prepare for careers and cannot afford a liberal education, it is heartening to read of Victorian workers who indulged in the classics on company time. Samuel Bamford found that his duties as a warehouse keeper left him plenty of time for study, and Joseph Keating was able to read Greek philosophy while tending a pumping engine at a coal mine. That would not be possible today in an Amazon fulfillment center.