H UMANITAS Vol. 34 Fall 2010 Issue 1 A Message from the President Table of Contents Dear Ohio Classicists: I am eagerly looking forward to the OCC Resources Available from the CAMWS meeting in Columbus on October 15-16, and I hope Committee for the Promotion of Latin 2 to see many of you there! Our Banquet Lecturer is S. Georgia Nugent, President of Kenyon College. Classics: Out of Date or Out of Step? As many of you know, Dr. Nugent is a Professor of Bruce Heiden, Ohio State University 3 Classics, author of a book on Ovid, and a sensational speaker. Her topic will be “A Counter- Quid Novi, Ohio? 7 Insurgency Strategy for Classicists.” Are you ready to roll? The Vergilian Society Luncheon Speaker is 7th Annual City Dionysia my Ohio State colleague, Professor William Case Western Reserve University 9 Batstone, whose excellent talk on the Latin hexameter at last year’s meeting many of you 2010 OCC Program 10 remember. His topic will be “Mute Speech and the Unconscious in the Aeneid.” After lunch on the OCC Officers/Council 12 second day some institutional issues affecting the future of Latin teaching will be discussed by a panel 2010 OCC Registration 13 provocatively titled (I confess: by me) “Is Latin a Hazardous Material?” Not to mention many outstanding papers by Ohio classicists and other contributors that you will find listed on the program. Please note that because of the Ohio State football schedule the OCC meeting is scheduled one week earlier in October than has been usual the last few years. Therefore members have a slightly shorter window in which to make reservations. If you plan to stay at the Blackwell Inn the deadline for registration is September 14. I urge you all to check the registration form and mark the dates on your calendars. This will be good! Vol. 34 Fall 2010 Issue 1 Resources Available from the CAMWS Committee for the Promotion of Latin Want to do more with your Latin classes but don’t have the funds? Fear that your program is in danger of elimination? Looking for some recognition of your students’ accomplishments? One valuable source of funds and materials is the Classical Association of the Middle West and South’s Committee for the Promotion of Latin (CPL). Resources available on the CPL website (http://www.camws.org/cpl/index.html): Caristia Grants for field trips, speakers, or convention travel Freely downloadable promotional materials suitable for distribution to administrators, parents, and students (fliers, posters on the value of Latin; statistics on SAT scores; even a promotional video!) Emergency resources for programs in crisis: contact information for letter-writing campaigns, strategies for dealing with potential program closure, etc. Translation contests for your students Awards for best promotional activities Award for Secondary School Teaching (through CAMWS proper, not CPL) Link to Teaching Classical Languages, a new online journal for teachers of classics Consider applying for any of these, or nominate a colleague! For further information, contact any of the CAMWS officers for this region: Gwen Compton-Engle (John Carroll University), Regional Vice President, Ohio Valley Zara Torlone (Miami University), State Vice President, Ohio E. Del Chrol (Marshall University), State Vice President, West Virginia Jarrod Lux (Conner High School), State Vice President, Kentucky New Editor of Humanitas It gives me great pleasure to announce that the present issue of Humanitas is the first to come from the hands of its new editor, Jay Arns of Bishop Fenwick High School in Middletown. Jay is a graduate of Xavier University and he holds an MA in Classics from the University of Florida. We are very lucky to have a person of Jay’s ability serving the OCC as the editor of Humanitas. (Look for Jay’s paper on Pindar on the conference program!) The OCC owes a great debt of appreciation to the outgoing editor of Humanitas, Professor Gwendolyn Compton-Engle of John Carroll University, who took the helm on an interim basis when the previous editor, Professor Neil Bernstein of Ohio University, had to step down unexpectedly because of other obligations. Thanks, Gwen, for your dedicated service to the OCC and Ohio classics! H U M A N I T A S | 2 Vol. 34 Fall 2010 Issue 1 Classics: Out of Date or Out of Step? [Prof. Bruce Heiden of The Ohio State University discusses the relevance of classical liberal arts education in the 21st century in the following essay based on remarks delivered at The Future of the Ancient: Making Classics Relevant, a symposium held at Ohio State in May, 2009.] The field of Classics may very well be people was built intimately into the classical school. unique among modern academic disciplines in the (It was not a “child-centered” school like the extent to which, as it adapts new methods and modern “progressive” school.) What was important objects of study, it has retained remnants of the old about all these books was their transmission from ones, like a snail adding new chambers to its shell. older people to younger, to educate them, just as the And so the diversity of this field consists not simply schooling in the classroom was being transmitted in the synchronic diversity of various equally from the older teacher to the younger pupils, who modern methods differentiated by their specific were expected to make it part of themselves as they materials and goals, like the diverse specialties of a grew up. In other words, the whole pedagogy was medical school, but in a diachronic span of kindred conceptualized as a transgenerational cooperation, disciplines that arose in different periods and and the books were also transgenerational, some different academic and social environments. Some more than others; a book whose composition was of the classical disciplines arrived as rivals to their ascribed by an annotator to a point chronologically predecessors and announced themselves as earlier than another book’s, was less a book from a scientific or ideological improvements; but by some more distant time, than one that had been miracle the older disciplines usually survived the transmitted through more generations, by teachers sentence of obsolescence, and they may now still be like this teacher, to pupils like these pupils, for practiced, in a certain form, by colleagues in one’s purposes like the purposes of this school. Most of own department. If we retrace the diachronic the literary works that survived from classical evolution of the field, we see that the sense of the antiquity survived because of their deliberate “pastness” of classics, while never unknown, transmission in this setting, either because they crossed a certain transitional threshold in the were used in classrooms, or because they were Enlightenment. A symptom is the addition of useful to people who made schooling their life’s archeology, which hardly existed before the 18th work. This transmission therefore was not merely century. The ambition to excavate the past preservative, or an incidental byproduct of materially from the ground distinguished this schooling; it fulfilled the future projection of the research enterprise quite dramatically from the books themselves, which were meant by their philological or literature-loving discipline that by authors to transmit an education, and still continued the 18th century already had more than two to do it. thousand years behind it. The philological This picture has some exaggeration to it; the discipline was intimately linked to schooling in the past as such was not unknown, but its importance liberal arts. The fundamental element of liberal arts was much less than it later became. By the 18th schooling was a kind of character formation, in century naturalist thinkers were disseminating a which older people put younger people through conceptualization of historical time as a linear exercises aimed at developing each young person succession of mechanical causes and effects, and into a wise and articulate adult. Much of the this conceptualization of historical time fostered a exercise consisted of reading books, and not just reframing of Greece and Rome as objects of study. any books but books designed by their authors for To the Enlightenment the transmitted books ceased some aspect of ethical pedagogy, and thought good to be classics that had educated one generation after for achieving it. At any given time not all the books another, and instead became relics of specific were old, but those that were were not anomalies, bygone ages whose distance from the modern era since the distinction between older and younger could be traced but not traversed, not because their H U M A N I T A S | 3 Vol. 34 Fall 2010 Issue 1 relevance had somehow slipped from view, but other pedagogies. Socrates’ speeches at his trial, as because any relevance they once were thought to transmitted by Plato, became part of classics as have was now understood as illusory. Time had soon as Plato decided to transform his friend moved on, and the lesson of historiography was, Socrates from a teacher into the representative of a above all, that time had moved on and would transmissible pedagogy by giving Socrates’ trial a continue to move on in the same direction, with the durable literary form and putting it into circulation. same inevitability, and for the same reasons. So The charges made against Socrates and his replies when “modern” classical scholarship announced display an aspect of the classics already subjected to itself in the 18th century, it distinguished itself deadly animosity and accused of both serious polemically from the humanist philology of the practical harm and the triviality of irrelevance. And transmission. The goal of recovering the past was we hear Socrates make a defense that, while it has not to repair breaches in the transmission—for profound implications, convinced neither the jury example by finding lost manuscripts in libraries— nor most people since the pedagogy he represented but to prove precisely that the past was history, the actually was relevant to the concerns of life.