The Center for Hellenic Studies

education
Hellenic Studies Series

A Monument More Lasting than Bronze: Classics in the University of Malawi, 1982–2019 

Formed in 1964, the year of independence, the University of Malawi promised more than the distant University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland—founded 1952—ever could. A decade and a half later, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, by then Life President of the Republic of Malawi, let it be known to the University that a Department of Classics was to be established—teaching the history and languages of the ancient Mediterranean world at Zomba, on… Read more

Curated Articles

Great Expectations: The Expected and the Unexpected in Thucydides and in Liberal Education

[[The following text is adapted from a lecture given at the 9th Arthur and Mary Platsis Symposium, which was held on November 7, 2010 at the University of Michigan on the occasion of the retirement of H. Don Cameron. Portions of the text may be quoted without permission provided credit is given. The text is still a work in progress.]] Wars—all wars, I believe—are extreme cases of a much wider… Read more

Curated Articles

The Pygmies in the Cage: The Function of the Sublime in Longinus

[[This essay was originally published in Literary Study, Measurement, and the Sublime: Disciplinary Assessment (eds. D. Heiland and L. J. Rosenthal).]] In memory of Robert F. Goheen The editors of the volume have posed powerful questions, ones that go to the heart of the experience of reading and teaching literature. Are those experiences so “sublime” that they are beyond systematic analysis? Are they “ineffable?” The author of the ancient… Read more

Curated Articles

We Must Call the Classics before a Court of Shipwrecked Men

[[This essay was originally published in Classical World 104.4 (2011) 483–493.]] [1] ABSTRACT: What if we put to our texts the injunction of the Spanish intellectual Jose Ortega y Gasset—“We must call the classics before a court of shipwrecked men to answer certain peremptory questions with reference to real life”? The answer that emerges from an investigation of several literary works depicting a shipwrecked person… Read more