The Classics on the New York Review of Books

Mary Beard sobre os clássicos na New York Review of Books.

Alexander: how great?

In 51 BC, Marcus Tullius Cicero, who had reluctantly left his desk in Rome to become military governor of the province of Cilicia in southern Turkey, scored a minor victory against some local insurgents. As we know from his surviving letters, he was conscious that he was treading in the footsteps of a famous predecessor: “For a few days,” he wrote to his friend Atticus, “we were encamped in exactly the same place that Alexander occupied when he was fighting Darius at Issus”—hastily conceding that Alexander was in fact “a rather better general that you or I.”

Artigo de Mary Beard. Continuar a ler aqui.

Latim Para Reprovados

[...] The education of a motley group of 20 young people, aged 16-18 – with nothing much in common but a failure to pick up five GSCEs at grades A*-C – is a rather more difficult assignment. But Jamie Oliver's idea in Dream School was to get his hands on these kids, however late in the day, expose them to some "inspirational teachers" and see if he could put them successfully back on the educational track – all in front of television cameras for a seven-part Channel 4 series. I [Mary Beard] was asked to take on the job of Latin teacher. This was to be the only foreign language on the Dream School curriculum. (Don't imagine that Jamie himself has a particular hankering after "amo, amas, amat"; the fact is that there is an ex-Cambridge classicist somewhere high up in the production team, with fond memories of the subject.)

ler relato da experiência aqui.

Subsídios Para Uma História dos Estudos Clássicos

I wouldn't have wanted to spend much time with her. She was far too histrionic, too satisfied with her own cleverness and even more self-obsessed than the average early 20th-century don. But Jane Ellen Harrison changed the way we think about ancient Greek culture – peeling back that calm, white marble exterior to reveal something much more violent, messy and ecstatic underneath ("bloody Jane" they called her, for more reasons than one, I suspect). And she was the first woman in England to become an academic, in the fully professional sense – an ambitious, full-time, salaried, university researcher and lecturer. She made it possible for me to do what I do.

Harrison went up to Cambridge in 1874 to read classics at Newnham College. Though she missed a first (to her life-long annoyance), she was already an academic celebrity – and a trouble-maker. As a student, she even faced down William Gladstone, by claiming that her favourite Greek writer was the sceptical playwright Euripides (not, as the old man hoped, the pious Homer). Taken aback, he stuttered and walked away.

"My Hero: Jane Ellen Harrison", de Mary Beard, no Guardian de sábado — continuar a ler aqui.

imagem: pormenor de um retrato de Jane Ellen Harrison

@ Newnham College, Cambridge

Why Learn Ancient Greek?

Classicists do have a habit of over-egging the case. There is going to be a big conference in Athens in the autumn, to celebrate the achievement of Ancient Greece (fair enough) -- but also "to explore the potential of this legacy as a source for solutions to challenges that the world faces today and to those that it will inevitably come to face in the future". Well, thinking that Greek culture is marvellously interesting is one thing; thinking that it holds the solutions to the world's problems is quite another (and it is quite hard to resist the jibe that it clearly hasn't worked on the Greek economy).

Uma pequena crónica (a ler aqui) de Mary Beard, professora de Clássicas em Cambridge, no Times Literary Supplement desta semana, ainda a propósito do projecto de ensinar grego clássico a crianças de meios sociais mais desfavorecidos nas escolas primárias inglesas.