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IN NAME A DEMOCRACY

2/25/2018

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​When I was its president the Teagle Foundation, the Foundation made a grant to Project Pericles, a consortium of several dozen liberal arts colleges committed to encouraging civic engagement among their students. I was delighted we could make the grant, in part because Project Pericles had been inspired by Eugene Lang, an entrepreneur and philanthropist who never forgot reading the Periclean Funeral Oration in the second book of Thucydides. And I had a certain weakness for Thucydides, too.  
But, there was dissonance between the idealism of those who were inspired by the Periclean Funeral Oration and a view widespread in recent scholarship, which often treats the speech as a way by which Thucydides projected his own anti-democratic views onto Pericles. In the view of these scholars far from being praise of democracy, the Funeral Oration deplored it. Pericles, they thought, was made to say that Athens was only “in name a democracy.”
        So, when I retired from the Teagle Foundation, I undertook a close reading of the Greek of the passage on which these views are based. I found that several ostensibly minor stylistic details when brought into focus showed clearly that the speech was indeed a strong, if somewhat quirky, affirmation of democracy as practiced in ancient Athens.  And more than that: it affirmed the link between participation in civic life and resilience.
I wrote a short article on what I found, hoping to persuade my classical colleagues, but also to reach friends, former students, the leaders of Project Pericles, and others inside and outside academia who realized the urgency of  thinking freshly about democracy at a time when it is often under fire, sometimes literally so. I was not just affirming an older, idealistic readimng  of the Funeral Oration, but was exploring  some new territory where participation (we’d say “civic engagement”) produces astonishing endurance e and vitality, both at the individual and the civic level.  I’m not sure the Greeks had a word for it, but we could call it “resilience.”
         We need it, now, more than ever. 
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RED HOT PENNIES - FROM THE REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK

2/24/2018

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​I finally screwed up my courage and spoke to the Regius professor of Greek. All year long I had gone to every lecture that E. R. Dodds gave at Oxford. He spoke of Classics in what was to me a fresh way, deeply grounded in the texts, of course, but passionate and full of delight.  For an American student, just beginning the study of the Classics, and far behind his well-trained British contemporaries in preparation, it was amazing to witness Dodds’ mastery of the field, and his patent love of what he taught.

    Finally, after one of his lectures, on the Agamemnon, maybe, I went up to him and stammered out just that. It would have been so easy for him to dismiss me with the scorn many Englishmen reserved for inept colonials.  Instead Dodds smiled and ask me in his gentle Irish accent which college. I was at..

“ University College, sir.”
“Ahh, that’s my old college. Do you live in college?”
“Yes, sir, now I do.”
“Where are your rooms?”
“Past the Shelby Memorial. One flight up. Overlooking the High.”
“With a window seat that juts out over the High?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Those are my old rooms.”
This was too good to be true. I could think of nothing better and nothing at all to say. Dodds seemed not to mind the silence; had he retreated into a reverie?
 
“We used to heat pennies in the fireplace until they were red hot and then drop them onto the sidewalk on the High Street, We laughed when people bent to pick them up, then dropped them because they were still hot.”
 
That was it. We both laughed and went our separate ways. 
 
It would be easy, I suppose, to make a metaphor out of those pennies, or an allegory even. Dodds; scholarship still has a bright glow to it. And the Classics? A little too hot to handle some of the time? I never tried to attach such meaning to our conversation.  What stays with me is the shared laughter, fleeting, but never forgotten. 

I
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AN ACCOLADE FOR DAN MENDELSOHN

2/7/2018

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Congratulations to Dan Mendelsohn  for  being awarded Prinnceton's Madison medal.  And take a look at his website ,  http://www.danielmendelsohn.com/  , for a  sense of his  ac complishment.
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