About Classics
The story of classical scholarship goes back to the Library of Alexandria in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE. The project that the scholars of the library undertook was to collect, copy and edit as many texts of Greek literature as they could find. Their goal was to preserve these texts for future generations by researching obscure references and adding notes to the manuscripts, by correcting texts which had been corrupted by centuries of copying, by devising a system of notation that would preserve the sound of the language, and by extracting the principles of grammar for a language that had already changed radically from its earliest manifestations in the manuscripts of the Homeric poems. The study of classics still has at its core this act of preservation. But, like the Alexandrian scholars and perhaps more self-consciously, we acknowledge that we are also involved in an act of reinterpretation. Our goal is both to preserve the knowledge of ancient cultures but also to interpret that knowledge in the context of contemporary culture.
We bring to this project many different skills and many different methods. Again, at the heart of the enterprise is the philological skills that the Alexandrian scholars developed: the ability to look back at a "dead" language and imagine it in its living form, in order to be able to read the written remains as richly as possible. An ancient historian adds to this skill the ability to gather disparate kinds of fragmentary evidence, both literary and material, to reconstruct both the major national and international events that shaped these cultures and the texture of the lives of their peoples from day to day. In this they rely heavily on archaeologists who uncover the physical traces of the past and attempt to establish a chronology and a function for these remains. Literary scholars find in works of literature not only evidence for the aesthetic principles that govern the creation of literary works of art but also apply modern theoretical approaches that allow us to see literature as a reflection of social, political and religious assumptions. In this they are helped by the insights of both art historians and philosophers.
But in the end every classicist is using insights about the ancient world to enrich his or her understanding of our modern world. In the end what classicists develop is an intense self-consciousness about the nature of their own assumptions, fashioned by the world in which they live--assumptions which the study of antiquity allows us to question and assumptions which we must question in order to be able to focus our attention on the strange "otherness" of different cultures that have much to teach us.
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