MARY BEARD | Why the Classics Today are Better than Ever Before | Paideia Institute Arete Award Gala
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 พ.ค. 2024
- At the Paideia Institute's 2024 Arete Award Gala, Dame Mary Beard, OBE reflects on the transformative wonder of seeing antiquity up close, and how the field of Classics today is made more interesting and promising than ever before by "different questions from different places".
Professor Beard and Dr. Thomas P. Sculco, Surgeon-in-Chief Emeritus at the Hospital for Special Surgery, are the 2024 recipients of the Arete Award, established in 2018 by the Paideia Institute and the Arete Foundation to recognize individuals who have had an outstanding impact on the field of Classics. We give the award to two honorees annually: a distinguished academic classicist, and a passionate supporter of the Classics who has gone on to success in other fields.
The Paideia Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the study of the classical humanities. Since 2010, we have pursued that mission through travel programs, outreach to expand access to the classics, publications, curriculum development and digital language learning. Each year we teach the classics to more than 2,000 students of every age group, making us one of the largest organizations in our mission area.
www.paideiainstitute.org/
Marvelous. Thanks for share this heartfelt conference.
The esteemed classicist takes the cake, one can have the cake and wonderlust to antiquity and learn more about ourselves engaging in arguments which delight the mind, knowing we are heirs too to everything that is interred.
15:32 "there is more literature written in Latin and Greek than anybody could read carefully in the course of one lifetime" I don't think this is accurate, at least as far as the ancient Latin and Greek goes that is studied in the field of classics. The Loeb Classical Library fills about two and a half book cases. I'm not sure how much classical literature (as opposed to stuff like inscriptions or papyri containing information related to accounting, etc.) is still missing from Loeb, but I'd be very surprised if it would fill more than four book cases when complete. Then take into account that half of the text in Loeb is English translation, so the Greek and Latin text only would fill two book cases of small, pocket-sized books. That's still not to be underestimated, but for a scholar who can spend a lot of time on careful reading, it should be more than doable in a lifetime, probably rather more something like 20 years (half of Mary Beard's career).
The reason why people may think otherwise is twofold. First, the current culture in academia does not allow for spending a lot of time, if any at all, on careful reading of primary sources. A broad knowledge of primary sources is no longer valued, being replaced by a strong focus on publications and participation in conferences. Second, I think the following of what Beard says has something to do with it: 16:29 "look, we all read translations, I read translations; you know, if I'm going to look up a passage of Dio Cassius I don't instantly go to the Greek; I don't, sorry; I might go later to the Greek, but that's not my first port of call". Reading a translation is not careful reading. There's a reason we learn Latin and Greek: a comprehensive understanding only comes from reading -and re-reading- the original. If we need to work from translations, if we also can't experience the joy of fluently reading the original, it's normal that we will only be reading the very narrow literature (or perhaps even only the most relevant passages) we need for our individual research projects. Really acquiring the languages and getting fluent in them is an important key for developing an understanding of antiquity that is not just one 'cut above' (as Beard says at 20:53), but several cuts above the level at which we are working now. 💜🖤
So, classics is better now because we’re asking more questions. And we know that, how?
Classics is better now because it used to be dominated by white rich men. This smuggles a political assumption that has nothing to do with the discipline ITSELF getting better.
Classics is better because we now are more concerned for cultures which previously we didn’t study too much. This is the closest to an actual argument - but (a) the great developments into (say) Persian culture were made in exactly the period Beard is decrying, and (b) inter-disciplinary work is not a good in itself. Can it be shown to have benefited the question in hand? If I perform an inter-disciplinary study of (say) the Greeks and McDonald’s studies, yes something ‘new’ might have been added to my knowledge, but it doesn’t make it virtuous.