[Classic] In The Future, Everyone Will Be Famous To Fifteen People

[Epistemic status: not very serious] [Content note: May make you feel overly scrutinized]

Sometimes I hear people talking about how nobody notices them or cares about anything they do. And I want to say…well…

Okay. The Survey of Earned Doctorates tells us that the United States awards about a hundred classics PhDs per year. I get the impression classics is more popular in Europe, so let’s say a world total of five hundred. If the average classicist has a fifty year career, that’s 25,000 classicists at any given time. Some classicists work on Rome, so let’s say there are 10,000 classicists who focus solely on ancient Greece.

Estimates of the population of classical Greece center around a million people, but classical Greece lasted for several generations, so let’s say there were ten million classical Greeks total. That gives us a classicist-to-Greek ratio of 1:1000.