intro to humanities

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The subject of this colloquium is "Ancient texts... Modern Relevance?" Question mark. I want to begin the colloquium by saying something strange. Speaking seriously now, the question of the relevance of ancient texts to our modern lives can be pretty much blown off. Of course ancient texts are relevant. Do we care about justice? Then Plato's Republic is relevant. Do we care about anger, and friendship, and love, and heroism? Then the Iliad is relevant. Do we care about living good lives? Of course we do. Then Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is relevant. Really, anyone who reads these books with any sort of seriousness knows that they are relevant. Case closed.

On the other hand, it is difficult to escape the sense that these works, though profoundly moving, are really parts of some other world. In Greek especially, reading these works is like breathing different air. Even the tortured Lattimore translation of the Iliad is only able to open the window for us a little. In reading Lattimore, you would never feel the way in which Homer's hexameter lines rise, linger, and fall. You would never feel ho

If my friends were totally different than I, we wouldn't have much to say to each other. But if my friends were completely the same as I, then we also wouldn't have much to say to each other. I talk to and listen to and learn from my friends because they're very much like me and also very different from me, and they're also (I think) very good. I believe that we can relate to the very best ancient books in the same way. I also think that the papers being presented today are all examples of this kind of exchange between reader and text.

An attempt to recover ancient texts honestly means not just harvesting them for their relevance. In a really fine encounter with a really fine book, the book reads us as much as we read it. This is why, I think, NBC will never have an Iliad mini-series; why the Iliad will never sell out the Goodman Theater. The Iliad is cold. It looks at you with foreign eyes; it refuses to blink. But on the other hand, on the cover of a recent translation of the Iliad is a picture of American soldiers landing on Normandy Beach-and that seems right, too. The Iliad is strange and r

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Approximate Word count = 748
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

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