Classics, Speaking Skills & the Dawn of Hope

 

One of Keir Starmer’s first statements as PM has been that he wants to reduce the number of people going to prison through renewed efforts to cut reoffending. He has appointed the admirable James Timpson, whose ubiquitous shoe repair chain has a policy of recruiting ex-offenders, to help achieve this goal. This is music to my ears: tomorrow the Durham-based campaign Advocating Classics Education (ACE) that I lead with Professor Arlene Holmes-Henderson MBE embarks on its new initiative to explore life skills through classical materials in His Majesty’s Prisons.

Along with appreciating beauty, art, architecture, and encouraging our participants to enact ancient plays about suffering, revenge and violence, we’ll be using Aristotle: his Ethics to ask how being a good person and taking decisions carefully will make you happier, and his Rhetoric to hone communication skills both in writing and orally. Especially but not exclusively in the case of young offenders, we are convinced that the ancient world can help stop people reoffending.

This election mattered for me personally and professionally as never before. My brilliant and witty young Durham colleague Dr Peter Swallow, who has been active on the ACE project, overturned a massive Tory majority in his home constituency of Bracknell to become its first ever Labour MP. His job until Friday was as Research Fellow on my Leverhulme-funded project Aristotle beyond the Academy, and he will be sorely missed. Previously, before teaching in schools, he had done his PhD under my supervision on—guess what—the world’s first political satirist and comic dramatist, Aristophanes! The thesis is now an excellent book.

Peter took holiday leave to run his campaign, which meant that he had to pull out of a philosophy conference in Coimbra the week before last. I had intended to lead a six-strong panel, including also the wonderful colleagues on my other research project The Writing Styles of Aristotle,* talking about how Aristotle’s Rhetoric was written in and for a democracy where ‘ordinary’ people needed strong rhetorical skills for civic debate and in lawcourts, and why these are still important today. Peter’s absence meant that the six-strong panel turned into five, but we found a fresco and statue of Aristotle in slight compensation.

I am filled with cautious optimism by the election, partly as a lifelong advocate of prison reform, a socialist and ardent fan of the NHS, which recently saved my life. But it is also as an advocate of the teaching of speaking skills, to which Starmer is committed, to lower the class ceiling. I am also a proud member of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles; Starmer is on record as saying that he is ‘open’ to returning these magnificent sculptures to their rightful home alongside the rest of the total artwork that is the Athenians’ temple of their Maiden Goddess.

An expert on Aristophanes in parliament and a PM whose enlightened views on prisons, rhetoric and the Parthenon align with mine (not to mention the brilliance of Jude Bellingham and Bukayo Saka, whose Yoruba first name means ‘Adds to Happiness’, which of course pleases this Aristotelian)! Things feel better than for years. I’m off to the first prison tomorrow, then to Cyprus for a theatre production directed by another former PhD student, Dr Magdalena Zira, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Turkish invasion. Expect another blog next week.

*Total team: Prof. Phil Horky, Drs. Alessandro Vatri & Rosie Wyles, Profs. Holmes-Henderson and Hall