 My name is Paula Newitt, I'm the Dean of Students and I would like to welcome all of you here today for the last lecture for 2014. I will begin though by acknowledging the Ngunnawal people as the traditional owners and custodians of this land on which we meet today. And we have met here on the final Thursday of the teaching year for every year, but one, since 2006. This has become an enthusiastically anticipated ANU ritual. A ritual of celebration, of thanks, of achievement acknowledged and of relieved gratitude that we've all survived yet another academic year. Some of you here today will know about the origins and intentions of this celebration, but for the first timers, here's the story. Picture, if you will, February 2006, a busload of exhausted ANU people is returning from a university retreat in Threadbow. Most of them are trying to catch up on sleep, but in the huddle down the back rows, three student leaders, Pazza President Brett Baker, Anusa President Laura Crespo and the immediate past Anusa President Aparna Rao are plotting with the Dean of Students at the time, Professor Penny Oakes. The students want a university to have a new teaching award, something organic and bottom-up and authentic and something designed and driven by students. Brett tells everyone about an event he'd enjoyed at the University of Utah where he did his first degree. It was called A Last Lecture and it was to mark the end of the academic year with the lecturer chosen by students in a campus-wide vote. Brett tells the group that this was an important ceremonial event that brought the whole university community together. Everyone had spent a lot of time at that retreat talking about the ANU community and how best to nurture it. So this authentic celebration of great teaching and a community event all in one. This idea had to be a winner and clearly it has been. For that, we can thank my right-hand support, Diana Withey, who's been fluttering around. Where are you, Diana? Wave your hand, please. Thank you at the back. For her unfailing organisational prowess and successive generations of ANU leadership teams, give us a wave, guys. Oh, little waves. For their wholehearted custodianship of this event. And, of course, all of the ANU academics who's inspiring unforgettable teaching energy energises students to nominate them for this last lecture. Vote for them in the final balance and then turn out today on the final Thursday to get one last taste of the winner's brilliance before year's end. Over the years, we've had Chris Ruth Smith, Hugh White, Alistair Gregg, Paul Kerwin, John Hutchinson, Ben Wellings, and last year, Kieran Kirk. That's our roll call for last lecturers so far. It is with great pleasure that I now hand over to Anusa President, Cam Wilson, who will add the 8th name to that list of inspirational luminaries as he introduces the academic chosen by the students to deliver the last lecture for 2014. Cam. Good afternoon, Noel. Today we join together to celebrate the ending of yet another academic year with the last lecture. I've always liked this event because I think it really captures the zeitgeist of the ANU campus life. The last lecture is intellectual and enthused, showing that after a year of lectures students are still eager to learn something that won't be in their final exam. It's democratic, allowing undergraduates and postgraduates, domestic and international, campus or off campus, people from courses, big or small, to have their say to choose the best lecturer. It's grateful. As rather than just criticising, we choose to promote those who've done a great job and to hold them up as an example for others. It's subject to the same standards as other lectures. I can assure you that this lecture will be uploaded, but maybe not to Waddle. But it's not perfect either, and it reflects the blemishes that we have. Since its inception in 2006, we've only had male identifying lecturers. I think this still reflects the structural sexism evident in our community. An issue that ANU Council earlier this year recognised, that as you go higher up in academia, there are less and less female academics at the top ranks, despite their majority at the student level. I would love to see a campaign in 2015 to recognise a great lecturer who also happens to be female. But most of all, I think it's a bit tongue-in-cheek and a reverent. It shows our ability to overturn the traditional power structures and to say to ANU that you may technically hold the power, but we're going to finish this year on our own terms. And what a year it's been for ANUSA. We've fought fee deregulation and higher education cuts. We've made massive constitutional improvements. We've had electoral reform, run an ANUSA review. We're still fighting to get our staff. We've been advocating on internal education matters, met up with thousands of students on welfare issues, supported fossil-free divestment, picked up our own internal policies and procedures, supported more than 100 clubs and societies, gone head-to-head on rogue-sensual motions, investigated post-staff apocalypse, had ongoing GAC reform, run the first ever ANUSA retreat, coordinated the biggest safety on campus campaign ever at ANU, been on the news on the TV, radio and internet, been active on 20 committees and working parties across the university, revived committees, run fantastic O-Weeks and Bush Weeks and had the best-ever handover from the amazing 2014 team who has earned the right to be proud to the new and capable 2015 team who I have no doubt will about to earn the same right. So, I can think of no better way to cap off the year with our very own last lecture. Allow me to introduce the speaker. Dr. Yannis Ziogus was born and raised in Greece, studied classics at the University of Thessaloniki and completed his PhD in Cornell in 2010. After a brief stint at University of Adelaide, which will pretend didn't happen, he settled at ANU and started teaching up a storm. He's written a book which he mentioned received good reviews and upon doing research myself, I can tell you received at least pretty good reviews. And he's finishing up a second book. Dr. Ziogus received an astonishing 85% of votes from his class, meaning that out of all of his students, 9 tenths of them went out of their way to vote for him, which is almost unheard of. I'm expecting to see the same rate of completions from sorts and all of you as well, he intends. Speaking to some of his students who decided to run a campaign for him, they're waxed lyrically about his love of teaching, his wit and perhaps his intentionally humble mantra, Latin is hard to learn but easy to forget. Chatting to him, I was curious to see what kind of letter he had for the lack of better phrasing charmed the pants of his students. From the moment I walked into his office in the depths of the 80 Hope building, I was greeted with warmth. And as we chatted, I found more and more about Yannis, who isn't just simply a great letterer, but someone who truly belongs at ANU. Yannis told me his story about his first week teaching at ANU. He came into a class, started to explain a passage to them and found that the whole class didn't really get it. In his own words, it was kind of awkward. Yannis took this away and realised that he's the people who didn't actually get it as well, it wasn't just his students. He wrote an article on it that went on to be, in his own modest word, moderately successful. In this way, I think he really embodies the idea of research-led education, a phrase that's thrown off and round at ANU. He's an individual who's able to draw from his research to teach, and from his teaching to research. As a student representative who sat in on a million stuffy meetings at the ANU Chancery, being bludgeoned to death by buzzwords, I'm happy to hear that this concept is alive and well. Yannis has an obvious respect for students, which is evident in the way that he teaches and interacts with them. When asked about his pet peeves for lecturers, he told me that he hated when lecturers said that they hadn't prepared, not because they actually hadn't prepared, but because it showed that they were trying to get the class's expectations down. So, since he's made his own bed, we're going to force him to lie in it. I ask you all to raise your expectations to hear a talk titled, titled, Can We Live Without the Classics? I present to you the last lecturer for 2014, Professor Yannis August. Well, thank you very much, Cam, especially for promoting me to a full professor. That was good. Now, I mean, you were really great. I mean, listening to you, I could barely recognize myself. But I mean, you did a fantastic job. This is what the occasion demands. So, it's customary to say nice things about the speaker so that the audience gets interested and excited about listening to the talk. So, it would be completely out of place, for instance, to talk about the failures and rejections of the speaker. And I'm glad that you silenced what I told you that I had a really hard time learning Latin at the beginning. But if I were to introduce myself, this is exactly what I would talk about. We learn much more about the character of a man or a woman by observing how they behave when they're vulnerable and defeated, when they feel helpless in doubt about everything, not when they're doing fine. Success is relatively easy to handle, but it's the way we deal with challenging situations that makes us who we are. These moments forge our characters and define our future. To quote the pre-socratic philosopher Heraclitus, a person's character is his destiny. And actually, the Greek word character derives from a verb that means to sharpen, to make, point it, or to scratch. So it's the rough edges of our lives that chisel our characters. So since Paula and Dina basically gave me free reign to talk about whatever I like, this is exactly what I'm gonna do. So I decided to spend this last lecture trying to answer a vital question. Is there life in this world without classics? Now, I'm not going to pretend that I will give you an objective answer. All you're gonna get is my entirely biased and subjective view. That's all I have to offer you. So in order to answer this question from my point of view, I'll start by talking a bit about my rough times. So I'll take you back to the time when I was finishing my doctoral studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. And as you can see, this is a place that is a bit colder than Canberra. This, as you can see here, a Galwin-Smith hall with its Greek architecture. This is where the classics department is based. And I took those pictures five years ago, and back then things were kind of hectic and it wasn't because of the cold. That was the dawn of the global financial crisis and the prospects for a career in classics looked pretty gloomy. Studying the literature of ancient Greeks and Romans sounding like a luxury our troubled times could not afford. My scholarship money was generous, but it was running out. That year I had applied for more than 80 academic jobs. I got a couple of job interviews, but no job offer. So in sum, I was broke and demoralized and could not see a way out. And besides, I had just received reports of two anonymous readers on an article I had submitted for publication, and they both rejected it. Now, needless to say, that was... All this was kind of hard to stomach. Doing a PhD in classics was a serious commitment. I had left Greece, the country where I'm from, my family, friends, the people I love, in order to go to the U.S. and devote myself to Cornell's rigorous PhD program for five years. Now, I was facing the serious possibility that all those sacrifices were for nothing. So I was stuck and seriously considering giving up classics. I was considering a life without classics. But I had made up my mind to finish my doctoral studies first. So I kept working on my dissertation, which partly dealt with the archaic epic poet Hesiod. And it was Hesiod who unexpectedly gave me courage during those trying times. But who is Hesiod? I'm sure you've all heard of Homer, the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but some may not have heard of Hesiod, who seems to have been unable to escape the role of playing second violin to Homer's first. But Hesiod deserves our attention. And he deserves our attention. One of the reasons why he deserves it is that he's the first personal voice in Western literature. In his poems, he tells us his name, his origins, he talks about his hardships and his struggle to overcome his poverty in his cold and barren fatherland. He shares with us his family problems. He recounts his miraculous encounter with the Muses and talks about his humble work as a shepherd in Rokiaskra. His voice, coming out of the depths of what is unglamorously called the Dark Ages, shed light on questions that still haunt humanity. How was this world created? What is the relationship between human beings and those powerful beings we call gods? Is the world we live in friendly, hostile, or indifferent to human life? Does the growing human population pose a threat to the environment? Can we as individuals make a difference in this world? Hesiod is also a poet whose range of vision has no parallel in the ancient world. His diverse interests range from explaining the origins of the universe to giving advice about nail clippings. Now, this extraordinarily broad worldview is why his reception in antiquity was multivalent. In the ancient imagination, Hesiod could be the father of scientific truth, the first philosopher, a religious authority, or a fanciful poet, a fraud responsible for spreading lies and deceptive tales all over Greece. A number of works were attributed to Hesiod in antiquity. The most important were the Theogony, an epic poem which is the oldest Greek source that offers a systematic explanation of how the gods, the universe, and humankind came into being. The catalogue of women, which focuses on the affairs of gods with mortal women, and is the sequel to the Theogony. The offspring of these unions, the heroes, eventually overpopulate the world, and Zeus, the supreme god, decides to relieve Mother Earth of their burden. He causes the Trojan War in order to decimate humanity and then puts an end to intercourse between gods and mortals. Hesiod's works and days deals with our world, a world that followed the separation of mortals from immortals. This is a post-Lapsarian world in which human beings struggle to survive without much divine help. Hesiod is a pessimistic point. He calls his and our race the Iron Age and introduces it with a deep sigh. I wish I were not counted among this race of men, but rather had died before or be born after, he says, in the works and days. This is an age of injustice in which family ties collapse and wrongdoing, hardship and pain rule over the world. All toiling humanity, says Hesiod, will be blighted by envy, grim and strident envy that takes its joy in the ruin of others. Well, now, frankly, this doesn't sound like a point who could cheer me up back in my days of doubt and disappointment. The world is going down the drain, says Hesiod. Labor is humanity's curse. The world is tough. It's out there to crush all of us poor, ephemeral mortals. But strangely enough, it is a passage from the works and days that really helped me get out of my rut. This passage, by the way, is the most often quoted passage of Hesiod in the ancient world. So, here it is. Let's have a look at it. Hesiod admonishes his foolish brother, Persis. You can choose to have evil and heaps of it, too, for its how lies near and the path to it is smooth. But the mortals decreed that man must sweat to attain virtue. The road to it is steep and long and rough at first. But even so, the journey gets easy when you set foot on the peak. Now, this famous passage comes down to us with a multitude of interpretations and variations which it has been accruing for centuries. Some of these readings are shameless distortions of Hesiod's text. Plato, for instance, who didn't like Hesiod, he does not quote the passage in full. He leaves out the last line which says that one can achieve virtue and argues that Hesiod ultimately encourages vice since virtue is so hard to obtain. Now, the poet Tirtius is more interesting. Tirtius manages to make this passage fit in his martial agenda. Let everyone strive now with all his heart to reach this top of manly virtue with no slackening in war. So goes Tirtius' trumpet of war. So, Tirtius emphasizes the epic associations of virtue with manliness, and this is an essentially Homeric meaning. In martial epic, heroes stand out as individuals when they do a lot of killing on the battlefield where men gain glory, as Homer puts it. But one of the most fascinating aspects of Hesiod's passage is that it denies the militaristic value system of martial epic and redefines virtue. The works and days tells us that men do not excel by waging wars in remote lands for no obvious reasons, but by working hard in peace. And what is more, behind Hesiod's attack on traditional notions of virtue lies the socially rebellious message. Virtue was closely associated with aristocracy. Only noblemen could achieve it in the archaic world. But Hesiod tells us that all we need to do to achieve excellence is work hard. Lobility seems irrelevant. This is a revolutionary voice of extraordinary power. Hesiod knows that if we want to change the world, we must start by changing the meaning of words. His faith in the power of individuals opened the way that led to the miracle of the Athenian democracy. So the message of this lesser known archaic Greek poet is part of a sociopolitical change that can make the French Revolution look like a footnote in Western history. Now, part of Hesiod's lasting appeal, part of Hesiod's lasting appeal in this passage is its educational value. Poets in antiquity were not entertainers or reclusive intellectuals. They were the educators of humanity. In order to make his point, Hesiod transfers the abstract concepts of vice and virtue to the physical landscape. The path that leads to the house of vice is smooth and easy while one needs to climb a steep slope to reach virtue. And as any good teacher knows, using visual metaphors and illustrations to represent abstract nouns greatly improves learning. Now, the Sophist Prodicus, one of the first professional educators, also knew this very well. He took Hesiod's didactic strategy a step further. First, he turned the concepts of vice and virtue into vivid personifications. And second, he employed Greek myth in order to convey his moralistic message. In Prodicus's version, the young Hercules stands at the crossroads and faces a dilemma. Two women, vice and virtue, give the young hero advice on which path to take in his life. Virtue is a fair and sober woman dressed in a modest robe. Vice is luxurious. She wears high heels. You cannot see them in the painting, but they are in the text. And she wears a gaudy makeup. She also wears a see-through gown and keeps eyeing herself and looking to see whether anyone noticed her. Now, they both try to entice or rather seduce Hercules to their lifestyles. Vice promises a life of pleasure and an easy life without sweat and hardships. Virtue directs the hero to a career that is full of hard work but leads to honors and distinctions. And in Hercules's case, the steep path of virtue led to Olympus since the hero was defied after his death. So Virtue's road to happiness is arduous and long. Vice's path to pleasure is easy and short. So it is easy to see that this is a version of Hesiod's lines. Xanophon, the author who attests the story, is clear that Prodicus's fable is an elaboration in Hesiod. And Prodicus's version has prevailed and is still the lens through which many read Hesiod. The Sophists' moral reading has become the standard interpretation of the works and days. This is certainly how Plutarch, for instance, read Hesiod or the Roman poet Ovid. In a playful twist of Prodicus's story, Ovid casts himself as a young poet uncertain about what career to follow. Should he keep writing love poetry or should he get serious and compose a tragedy? Two women appear as the young poet is pondering which way to take. The personification of love-eligy is dressed like a prostitute, while the incarnation of tragedy looks like a proper and virtuous matron. But unlike Hercules, Ovid chooses vice, at least at the beginning. So he follows love-eligy first but promises to write tragedy in the future. But Ovid can't have it both ways. In the end, he did them both. He wrote both tragedy and elegy. So thanks to Prodicus, Hesiod has commonly been read as a moralizing poet. He is often compared to the prophets of the Old Testament, if he's lucky, though more often than not, he is cast as a wise grandpa who is blothering his moralizing stuff. An arcane Greek poet who can rest in peace in the quaint libraries of classical studies. But here is the catch. Hesiod is not a poet who is preaching. He is a poet who is giving practical advice. His famous passage from the works and days can be read without resorting to moralizing interpretations. In the translation I gave you, I highlighted the words evil and virtue, evil translating cacotes, virtue translating arati. Now other translators render cacotes as wickedness and arati as goodness. And everyone used to interpret these Greek words in moral terms until Martin West in the 70s argued convincingly that cacotes and arati are not vice and virtue, but inferior and superior standing in society associated with material prosperity. Now these changes are reading radically. Hesiod is concerned with financial prosperity, not with ethical standards. He's not talking about moral fiber, he's talking about social status. He basically says, if you want to have a high quality of life, you have to climb the steep slope of hard work. There is no easy way to excellent. His message to his brother is, don't be a loser. So the point is not talking about ethics in general, but about work ethic in particular. Glenn Most translation readers cacotes as misery and arati as excellence. So let's have a look at it. Misery is there to be grabbed in abundance easily. For smooth is the road and she lives very nearby. But in front of excellence, the immortal gods have set sweat. And the path to her is long and steep and rough at first. Yet when one arrives at the top, then it becomes easy, difficult though it still is. In another translation that came out just a couple of months ago, Richard Hunter translates cacotes as wretchedness and arati as success. Hesiod's language is witty and paradoxical. He makes the abundance of misery a marker of emptiness. Easy things are plenty and readily available, but more often than not, they lack substance. I confess that I found the material reading of Hesiod more appealing than the moralistic interpretation. It was the concrete economics that moved me, not the abstract ethics. Being poor and wretched is the easy way to go, says Hesiod, while getting out of misery is a tough marathon. And as the specter of unemployment was staring at me, I found Hesiod's assertion that hard work would pay off incredibly inspiring. And I kept wondering, where on earth did Hesiod find the courage to make such a claim? He lived 25 centuries before the Enlightenment. In a world where the concepts of independence, personal progress and meritocracy were supposedly unknown. He struggled to make a living in a poor town, experiencing the injustice of the powerful on a daily basis. He was robbed of his inheritance by an irresponsible brother. Where did he find the strength to say that things would look up if we keep working hard? Well, if he could do it back then, I had a better chance in the 21st century. So as I was having all those thoughts, I realized three things. First, I would stick to my guns and keep working on what I really like. Second, giving up classics would mean giving up my life. Third, studying the ancient Greeks and Romans did not feel at all like a luxury we couldn't afford. Quite the contrary, it looked like something we desperately needed in periods of crisis. Now, I said that I preferred the financial to the ethical reading of Hesiod, but the important point is that the passage from the works and days does not make a distinction between the two. Hesiod can be integrated into an economics lecture in a free market, as well as into a philosophy class on ethics. In fact, we can easily follow the thread that leads from Hesiod to Adam Smith. That takes us to Virgil. Hesiod inspired the georgics of the great Roman poet Virgil. In this work, Virgil describes the amazing world of the beast as a model for the ideal Roman society he envisions. Now, surprisingly, Virgil's beasts are not an indistinct swarm, but are driven by personal ambitions. An inborn passion for gains spares on the Attic beasts each after its own work. Virgil's beasts are Attic, a reference to the famous Attic honey, but also an allusion to the Athenian democracy, a political system which made the individual pursuits of its citizens the building blocks of a stable society. Many centuries after Virgil, the Dutch doctor Bernard Mandeville published his fable of the beast, a satire inspired by Virgil. In this funny poem, Mandeville playfully contents that the absolute selfishness of his beast guarantees the harmony of their community. Millions endeavoring to supply each other's lust and vanity. Thus, every part was full of vice, yet the whole mass, a paradise. Now, this work is tongue in cheek. Pretty much a parody of Virgil and Hesiod. Mandeville blows out of proportion the interplay between social morality and individual ambition that we saw in Hesiod. But be that as it may, no other work influenced Adam Smith more than the fable of the beast. So the line that connects the founding father of modern economics to Hesiod is not the fanciful thinking of a classicist, but pretty much an undeniable fact. Now, all this talk about financial times may strike some as surprising given the current debates about the value and future of the humanities. Lectures from the arts are expected to criticize our money-oriented world, the corrosive obsession with wealth that has been destroying the moral basis of our society. A new genre of articles and books lamenting the decline of the humanities in our profit-driven world has been growing rapidly. The authors of this stuff refer a passionate defense of the arts and present a bleak image of the destructive greed that characterizes the current political, economic, and educational landscape. They bemoan the tyranny of the numerate over the literate. Now, I would not dispute that the humanities can very flourish in the current climate. Making a living as a classicist often feels like living exiled in a Hesiodic dystopia. But complaining about the unjust and evil system seems to me like the easy way to endless misery. In my view, the challenge is to show that the humanities are indispensable. To lament their decline is the easy way, the cliché. The steep slope that leads to excellence is to work hard in order to bring the classics back to the core of the academic curriculum, not to sink into a gloomy nostalgia of bygone glories. Now, this slope gets steeper and rougher thanks to several popular beliefs about the classics. Many think of the great works of Greek and Roman literature as obscure, impenetrable, yet strangely enough at the same time it is commonly considered that classical works are defined by their clarity, the straightforward way in which they can express eternal and universal truths. Nothing is farther from the truth than this. The reason why we still read Hesiod is not because he has a simple and straightforward message, but because his language remains mysterious in its simplicity. His concepts of Areti and Cacot is malleable and applicable to diverse contexts. His diction easily appropriated for a multitude of purposes. The magic of the classics consists in their capacity for endless transformation, not in their stability. Those seemingly fixed and monumental texts have the ability to morph into various shapes at the hands of different readers, simultaneously fashioning and changing the readers who engage with them. Metamorphosis is what makes the classics timeless. Now, that's an important point. It's important because the protein nature of classical texts educates those who study them in diversity and tolerance. The defenders of literary studies are often eager, even anxious, to argue about their continuing relevance in rapidly changing world. But in my view, we hardly need to argue about the relevance of classical literature. Those texts have been showing for centuries that they have an almost miraculous ability of adapting to an extraordinary variety of places and times. What fascinates me more is that classical literature brings us in touch with words that are radically different from ours. The works of Homer and Virgil can speak to us directly about times and societies where the beliefs and value systems look very strange from our perspective. This peculiar feeling that what we read is both strange and familiar defines the great works of classical literature. These works are like the stars, remote signs from the past that help us navigate across an ocean of time. Classical literature help us to discover where we stand in our world, but also makes us think about other worlds and opens our minds to accepting beliefs, ideas and cultures that are very different from ours. Reading the classics is like falling in love. We're attracted to a man or a woman not only because we're recognizing them a part of ourselves, but also because we see in them a world we have never encountered before. In his book The Pleasure of the Text, the French literary critic Roland Barth divides the effects of reading into two. Pleasure and Jouissance, a word that is hard to translate in English. Jouissance denotes both intellectual joy and sexual ecstasy. So the French, obviously, can bring the two together, but the English has a hard time with this. So this is a term that unites mental delight with carnal satisfaction. For Barth, there are two categories of texts. On the one hand, texts that treat readers as passive recipients, while on the other, those which compel the reader to take an active role in reading, to break out of his or her position as a subject, to negotiate and re-establish the meaning of texts. The texts that treat the reader as a passive subject are entertaining, but the texts that demand the reader's active participation are far more rewarding. Entertaining texts makes readers feel comfortable and safe with what they are reading. They are readable and readily available. By contrast, the texts of Jouissance impose a state of loss, disturb the reader's cultural assumptions, and break linguistic norms. To read these texts, we need to be inclined to climb the steep slope of haesiotic excellence. These works are challenging, even dangerous, but extremely satisfying. They shape our characters by asking us to reshape their interpretation. Classical literature is full of texts of Jouissance, works that take the readers out of their comfort zones, that invite them to re-act, to re-enact and rewrite what they are reading. One of the biggest failures of classical studies is that it has often sanitized classical literature. It removed its sting to bring Euripides and Novid into safe, sterilized classrooms. We stifle those powerful authors with political correctness and trigger warnings. But Hesiot's works, Euripides's tragedies, Proticus's lessons, and Ovid's poems are not safe texts. These works provoked, enraged and caused violent reactions. They were burned and banned. Their authors reviled, banished, sentenced to death, and destroyed pieces. And here lies the value of classical literature. It does not flatter our prejudices. It does not confirm our assumptions. It is here to turn our world upside down. The survival of the classics is not a testament to their universal acceptance. Their survival is the triumph of resistance. Bard's analysis of the erotic nature of reading is actually thoroughly explored in classical literature. The Latin word Gaudium fully captures the meaning of the French Jouissance and Latin poets constantly draw attention to the textual and sexual pleasure of reading. And no one has explored this exciting dimension of literature better than the Roman poet Ovid. In his works, he exploits the full semantic rage of the Latin word Corpus, which can describe both texts and bodies. Ovid liked to tease the intellectual and sensual desire of his readers. As we read his works, we are constantly invited to construe meaning and thus to control the text and dominate its author. But the more we control meaning, the more we desire to know more. Like the sea goddess Thetis, Ovid's texts shift, change, the tighter we grasp them, the more inevitably they elude us. Ovid empowers his readers only to expose them to the impossibility of desire, the impossibility of finality in learning. In his works, knowledge is the most irresistible temptation and the ultimate aphrodisiac. By contrast, his predecessors, Lucretius and Virgil, these are the Roman poets who followed in Hesiod's footsteps and wrote an adactic poetry, they considered passion the enemy of work. Lucretius wrote a monumental epic on the nature of the universe and from Lucretius's Dererum Natura derives the motto of our university, Natura imprimum cognoschererum. In this work, we can also read the theory of evolution many centuries before Darwin. Darwin pretty much reinvented the wheel. So, Lucretius argued that passion, amor, incapacitates reason and poisons all sources of pleasure. For Virgil, amor is a destructive madness. Against this background, Ovid composed his art of love, a didactic poem that promised to teach men and women the art of seduction. Critics often note the playful and subversive nature of Ovid's art. Instead of the serious pursuits of philosophy and agriculture, Ovid opts for the frivolities of extramarital affairs. Instead of encouraging men to work hard, he teaches them to enjoy love affairs at leisure. And instead of giving moral lessons, he teaches adultery. Now, what have received far less attention are the particularly efficient educational strategies which Ovid employs in his work. In my view, Ovid is the most deductive of all didactic points. He boosts his authority as a teacher by casting himself as a practitioner of the art he is teaching. As an experienced lover, Ovid is qualified to initiate his students into the art of love. Now, even more impressive is Ovid's strategy of teaching love by making his students fall in love with what they are learning. It is indeed an outstanding achievement for teachers to transform their classrooms into a re-enactment of the very subject they are teaching. And Ovid's art, from that perspective, constitutes the pinnacle of educational theory and practice. His teaching philosophy that passion is not incompatible with hard work and systematic work thoroughly subversed the traditional lessons of didactic points, who see amor as a force that distracts men from serious pursuits and ultimately ruins their lives. Ovid would have none of that. Giving up what you like is the easy way. Pursuing your passions and following them wherever they take you, now that's a serious job. That's a Herculean labor. Which brings us back to Prodicus. Prodicus elaborated on Hesiod's paths of misery and excellence. He cast vice as sensual and shameless, its personification a provocatively dressed woman. By contrast, Verdi was modest and abstemious. Prodicus' fable is attuned to the socio-political hierarchies of the Athenian democracy. Verdi looks like a free-born Athenian lady, while vice's gaudy makeup and revealing clothes make her look like a slave prostitute. So we can easily discern that this fable targets young Athenian men who were Prodicus' students. The students are invited to identify with a young Herculus. And the message is pretty clear. Get married to a disinathenian woman and don't party with naughty girls. Other authors such as Diodorus Iculus build on Prodicus' social profile of virtue and vice and shift the moral sense of vice and virtue to slavery and freedom. Giving into temptation makes us slaves, while abstaining from easy pleasures is the hard path to freedom. The Delphic Oracle gave a similar advice to the Spartan law-giver Lycurgus, and we can see that the dilemma between freedom and slavery appealed to the Spartans. Now, Ovidus also very interested in the politics of desire. He actually erred a one-way ticket to the Black Sea as a result of his interest in sex and politics. When the Emperor Augustus offended by the art of love relegated him to the edges of the then-known world. Ovidus always good at upsetting clear-cut moral dichotomies. His art of love boldly challenges Augustus' moral legislation and further problematic is the moralizing reception of Hesiod. Ovidus here to tell us that subjective desire cannot be divorced from scholarly or scientific pursuits. That our passion for progress is both sensual and intellectual, our motivations simultaneously mental and material. Contrary to what Prodigus, Lucretius and Diodorus believed, our passions cannot enslave us without setting us free. But it is time to conclude. Now, a sober way of summarizing my lecture is to say that I offered you a reading of six lines from Hesiod's works and days. That's a sober way but probably not the best way of advertising it. But it's fair enough we saw how this passage changes as it travels through time from archaic Greece to our age. A more attractive summary would probably be to say that it was a kind of a time travel, a trip to the past. I talked about progress, individual goals and action plans, concepts that may strike us as modern but can be found in the work of an archaic Greek poet. I realized that my focus on the past contrasts with the concepts I explored. Concepts that make plans for the future. Yet the way we think about the future would have struck the Greeks as bizarre. We think of the future as something that lies ahead in front of us while the past is behind. So progress is forward movement. In Greek, however, the word that means behind refers to the future. In Homer the human beings that are behind are those who are yet to be born. And when the historian Herodotus refers to the books behind he's not talking about the preceding books of his work. He's talking about the following books. Now this may strike us as strange, even absurd, but it is not. It is just a different perspective. The image is that the images that we have are backs to the future which is unknown and invisible and we move backwards. All we can see is the past in front of us. And in fact the idea of the future as the days behind is not exclusively Greek but it is also found in Hittite and Vedic. So while we can conceive of a dark past and a bright future, other cultures would find those concepts almost incomprehensible. We can see the past but the future lies in darkness. We're all children of the past and shedding light on it on what gave us life reveals who we really are. So let me finish by finally trying to answer the question that is the title of my lecture. Can we live without classics? Can we live without Homer? Without Hesiod? Without Virgil? Without Ovid? Well the answer is yes. We can certainly live without those guys. We can even have a very comfortable life without them. But it is also true that we can never be ourselves without them. Thank you very much. Good afternoon everyone. I am Kimberly Ashby Mitchell, Communications Officer at the Postgraduate and Research Students Association, PASA. Both our President Ben Niles and Vice President George Carter were unable to bring greetings as a result of scheduling conflicts. And since all the stars were lined in my favor I am here with you to bring greetings on behalf of PASA. Dr. Ziorgas I am certain that I speak for all present when I say thank you for delivering such an engaging lecture full of passion and appeal. I must admit that coming into this hall today I had no idea what to expect since I have no background in Greek mythology. That is the beauty of the last lecture. Others, like myself have now been exposed to new and exciting material that resonates with us. I must also admit that my PhD supervisor is probably now quite nervous that I am expressing such awe and curiosity about your field. Since in a recent Veroni news article Dr. Ziorgas is courted saying that during his time lecturing at Cornell University many students came to study economics and ended up doing PhDs in classics after sitting in one of his classes. It has certainly been a fantastic evening where we have been able to acknowledge the dedication of one of our lecturers and also acknowledge the strong support of students particularly those in the classics. To all in attendance we would like to thank you for coming out and listening to the last lecture. I take this moment to tell you that drinks will be served shortly out on the lawns. In bringing this evening's proceedings still close I will now read the ode to end the last lecture. It seems a welcome journey that we look so gratefully to the end of this academic year we still take the effort to listen to one last lecture. We have no obligation no monetary or assessment like intent to be here but still we fill this hole not afraid to learn and give. We demonstrate respect for this institution of learning and the values that it brings collegiality commitment pride responsibility freedom service prepare to put those books on their dusty shelves and dismantle the study places those nooks and cranny like retreats. Please join me now to thank Dr Ziorgas as he exits this hole and thus ends the 2014 academic year.