Our Honorary President for 2024-25, Professor Stephen Halliwell, shares his thoughts on why Classics is important and reveals his own journey to discover the ancient world, as part of our #CelebratingClassics campaign. Become a Member to listen to Stephen’s Presidential Address.
“This is the unfinished story of Classics itself, and the vital mission of the Classical Association is to enable as many people as possible to contribute to the story by making it part of their own lives.”
There is a passage in Plato’s Laches (a dialogue which develops from the idea that no subject is more important than education) where the Athenian general Nicias, now most familiar to us from Thucydides’ harrowing account of the disastrous failure of Athens’ Sicilian expedition in 413 BCE, tells one of the other characters that he clearly does not know Socrates very well: if he did, he would realise that whatever you start discussing with him, he always ends up forcing you to confront questions about yourself and your own life.
There is a sense in which that image of Socrates could be adapted to make a useful symbol for Classics itself. Anyone who becomes drawn to the world of Greco-Roman antiquity (whether its literature, politics, mythology, archaeology, philosophy, religion, visual art, social history …: Classics is not, after all, one subject but a whole ‘family’ of interlocking studies) will find themselves constantly required to move backwards and forwards, in their minds and imaginations, between the distant past and their starting-point in the present. While the study of classical reception, i.e. of all the ways in which Greek and Roman texts and ideas have been interpreted in later periods, is rightly treated as a rich area of study in its own right, we might also say that everything in Classics is a kind of ‘reception’: we ourselves, in what we make of it, are always implicated in the whole process, perhaps stimulated and challenged in equal measure, like the interlocutors of the Platonic Socrates.
And once the process is underway, the fascination of Classics is inexhaustible. The traces of Greek and Roman antiquity are ubiquitous, sometimes surprisingly so. Let me illustrate this with a somewhat quirky personal anecdote. During a bout of insomnia one night in 2011, I was switching stations on my radio when I heard a song by a Scottish rock band whose lyrics struck me as strangely familiar: they sounded, weirdly but irresistibly, like a poem of Sappho’s (about music and the pathos of old age) which had been identified on a piece of mummy cartonnage and published by two German papyrologists as recently as 2004. I was not hallucinating. The song-text, as I established the following morning, was in fact part of a translation of Sappho made by the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan, who had meanwhile died in 2010. I didn’t, as it happened, especially like the music … But I’ve always remembered the startling experience of finding echoes of Sappho in Scotland in the middle of a winter’s night.
I’m pretty sure that when I started secondary school, in 1960s Liverpool, I had never heard of Sappho. Nor, for that matter, did I know anything at all of ancient Greece or Rome. I came from a home with few if any books. Both my parents had left school – this was before World War II – without any educational qualifications; and none of my four older siblings had been to university (though one would do so later as a mature student). I was simply very lucky, at what was then a grammar school, to have teachers who slowly but surely engaged my intellect and imagination with Greek literary and philosophical texts, and with both the excitement and the difficulty of making sense of them in relation to life in the present. There was, of course, Homer – at that stage primarily the Odyssey, which immediately appealed by the intricate way in which Odysseus’s years of wanderings become a sort of journey of discovery in the mind of the poem’s audiences. There was both Greek tragedy and comedy, including some bowdlerised Aristophanes (my own later translations of the playwright would compensate for that): reading these two paradigmatic forms of theatre side by side, which is akin to how they were originally performed in the Athenian theatre, forced one to wrestle with their starkly opposed perspectives on life. There was also Thucydides, who particularly gripped me by the shocking way he chose to juxtapose Pericles’ vaunting idealisation of Athens with a remorseless account of the plague in which dead bodies were left lying even in the city’s temples. And last but not least, there was Plato, who in many respects made his philosophical writing into a sort of endless rivalry of values with Homer (‘Plato versus Homer: complete and perfect antagonism’, as the German philosopher Nietzsche put it) but in doing so made philosophy itself a form of supremely creative writing. I could never have guessed at the time that all these authors, and the fundamental questions they pose in their different forms, would obsess me for the rest of my life.
Classics – both as an academic discipline and as a larger cultural force – is the history of a perpetually evolving engagement with the Greco-Roman past. The multiple threads which connect past and present are constantly being unpicked and rewoven into new patterns. A striking illustration of this is provided by a work with which I have been much preoccupied during my career, Aristotle’s Poetics. It has undoubtedly become one of the most famous texts of Greek antiquity yet it is scrappy and incomplete, having lost its second ‘book’ on comedy (see Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose for a fictional version of this event). It also seems to have been known to only a handful of people in antiquity itself, and that paradox is the first of the numerous twists and turns of its fortunes over the centuries. Even many professional classicists are surprised to learn that the first language into which the Poetics was translated was Syriac, probably in the 9th century. In the following century it was translated from Syriac into Arabic as part of the great wave of interest in Aristotle on the part of Islamic philosophers and scholars; later still, the Arabic was translated into medieval Latin. That was all before the Renaissance made the Poetics a key reference-point, invoked both pro and contra, in debates about not only ancient poetry but also new genres of literature, including even the novel. While it remained a sort of bible for neoclassicists, the book was repudiated by those who thought modern literature should not be tied to ancient standards. Yet even in the twenty-first century the Poetics is cited with reverence on screenwriting courses in Hollywood and elsewhere for its supposedly fundamental insights into how to construct plots and tell a story to maximum effect.
From Aristotle’s ‘seminar room’ to Hollywood is quite a journey! But the point of this little fable is not to recommend you to consult the Poetics next time you watch a film, but to underline the complicated ways in which the Greco-Roman past has been repeatedly reinterpreted, and argued with, by later ages. This is the unfinished story of Classics itself, and the vital mission of the Classical Association is to enable as many people as possible to contribute to the story by making it part of their own lives.
©StephenHalliwell
Professor Stephen Halliwell, a world-leading scholar of ancient literature and thought, is an Emeritus Professor at the University of St Andrews, where he was Professor of Greek (1995-2014) and later Wardlaw Professor of Classics (2014-2020). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2011 and of the British Academy in 2014. His twelve books range widely across texts and topics in Greek literature and philosophy from Homer to late antiquity, and also include a complete translation of Aristophanes for Oxford World’s Classics, whilst his own work has been translated into nine languages. A frequent contributor to broadcast media, he is an outstanding ambassador for the study and reception of classical languages.
