Edinburgh University: Prof Dame Mary Beard – Gifford Lectures – #6/6 – The Ancient World and us – Classical Civilisation

Earlier this evening Professor Dame Mary Beard gave her last lecture of the series that aimed to tie up the series by focusing  a little on her own biography with Classics in order to further reflect on “what we think we mean by the contested term of ‘Western Civilization’ and how, for good or bad, Classics relates to that.”

She started off by speaking about a poem, Autumn Journal, by the Irish-Oxford poet Louis MacNeice (who was also a professional academic classicist for 20 years) and the role that it has played in shaping her own approach to the study of Classics. These are the sections of MacNeice’s poem that she reflected on as she presented them:

Not everyone had
The privilege of learning a language
That is incontrovertibly dead.

And further,

. . . the classical student is bred to the purple, his training in syntax
Is also a training in thought
And even in morals; if called to the bar or the barracks
He always will do what he ought. MORE AT LINK