A Week in Classics: Progress, Celebration and Grief

What a week that was. Forgetting that my surgeon told me last year I had to slow down, on Tuesday we wound up our pilot course, attached to both the Durham-based campaign Advocating Classics Education and the Durham Leverhulme-funded research project Aristotle beyond the Academy, bringing ancient civilizations and especially ethics to students in prisons. It has been an extraordinarily fulfilling activity for me and we hope to expand it nationally. 

The men’s favourite sessions were all related to Aristotle: they lapped up Arlene Holmes-Henderson’s advice on effective communication via his Rhetoric, and with George Gazis’ help debated Neoptolemus’ decision to change his mind and help the suffering Philoctetes in Sophocles’ tragedy—a mind-change of which Aristotle approves—after performing the play with enormous verve. Philoctetes’ vocalisations were thrilling and we gave him the Best Actor trophy. 

But the favourite session was Professor Phil Horky on the Nicomachean Ethics. What is happiness and will you be happier if you try to be the best version of your moral self? Questions for the ages. There will be a podcast on this whole course soon, with the students themselves talking, made by our wonderful colleagues at Against the Lore. Everyone enjoyed my home-made vanilla and chocolate chip cookies (contained in festive tin, below), I’m pleased to report. 

With Rory McInnes-Gibbons, Zenia and Meg from Against the Lore, Arlene

Wednesday saw three back-to-back events in Durham: first up, Alessandro Vatri’s excellent paper on Margaret Doody’s Aristotle Detective novels; Arlene Homes-Henderson then launched her essential new Centre for Classics Education Research and Engagements (CERES), which will transform how we understand the history and practice of classical-subject pedagogy. I had made a cake for her, which wasn’t as good as the cookies but served its purpose. Last up was Nebojša Todorović’s superb Durham Prize in Classical Reception lecture on Greek literature and its performance reception in relation to the Balkan War of the 1990s. 

Thursday was much sadder, as we held a valedictory retrospective event for our department’s beloved emeritus professor Christopher Rowe, who is mortally ill. He spoke with such mirth and sometimes trenchant barbs about his life in philosophy that my tears, at least, turned from those of grief to near-convulsive laughter. He has changed Platonic and Aristotelian Studies, but he also transformed the Department when I was first there in the early 2000s. More on this titan of virtue and friendship anon. People were relieved that I had done no baking and had offered shop-bought mince pies instead.