dux femina facti

EXPERTS from Huelva University have discovered 71 unknown manuscripts of Roman poet Ovid (43BC-17AD). The manuscripts, most of them codices and fragments which were not known to even exist, have been found in different libraries around the world and most of them belong to Ovid’s greatest work, The Metamorphoses.

Looks like it’s time to get interested in Ovid! And/or move to Spain.

“I don’t think people know what they mean when they dismiss Latin as a dead language,” said Paul Harvey, associate professor of classics at Penn State. “Of course it is not spoken in many places, save for the Vatican and a few classics departments. But whether a language is currently spoken is irrelevant to the continuing value of learning it and to the value of literature written in that language”

Contrary to its image, Harvey adds, not all works in the classical canon are somber tomes. “Most folks don’t realize that Greek and Latin literature includes an extraordinary range of works in different genres, including risqué and very funny love poetry.”

Of course, risqué and funny may not be everyone’s taste either. But as the Romans said, “De gustibus non est disputandum.” One must not argue over matters of taste.

It is 2012, and the world has ended. There is one life raft prepared to take a select group to safety, and there is only one vacant seat. First featured on NPR’s This American Life, the Life Raft Debate asked a professor or department chair from each respective major to justify why their discipline would be the most vital in post-apocalyptic rebuilding.

Grand Valley State University’s Ola Nwabara and Ralf Hugger from Liberal Studies brought together eight disciplines at 6 p.m. Monday night under Cook DeWitt’s roof to duke it out for the final spot on the hypothetical life raft in GVSU’s very own Life Raft Debate 2011. In the end, the Classics department ended up winning the final seat on the raft.

This comes as no surprise to classicists everywhere.

“For a superpower, dealing with the fast rise of a rich, brash competitor has always been an iffy thing,” The Times’s David E. Sanger wrote, adding, “Just ask the British”:

Or ask Thucydides, the Athenian historian whose tome on the Peloponnesian War has ruined many a college freshman’s weekend. The line they had to remember for the test was his conclusion: “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”

So while no official would dare say so publicly as President Hu Jintao bounced from the White House to meetings with business leaders to factories in Chicago last week, his visit, from both sides’ points of view, was all about managing China’s rise and defusing the fears that it triggers. Both Mr. Hu and President Obama seemed desperate to avoid what Graham Allison of Harvard University has labeled “the Thucydides Trap” – that deadly combination of calculation and emotion that, over the years, can turn healthy rivalry into antagonism or worse.

The students who labored through Thucydides’ History in the 2008 Greek Historians class are now all feeling very vindicated, I’m sure.