A weekday post?

Preposterous! And yet, here I am. As promised.

Well, last night I wished my two advanced Greek students a healthy and happy summer, after two years of more of less continuous instruction. In lieu of actually teaching I decided to bring a bottle of Macedonian white wine and some leftover phanouropita that my coworker here in Modern Greek brought to share with us (it's a delicious spice cake that you bake as thanks to St. Phanourios for helping you find a lost item; the only catch is that you're supposed to give it away and not eat it yourself!), and saluted my star pupils for all the hard work they've done thus far.

Talking over a bottle of wine in the classroom took me back to my first year at Boston University. One of my favorite professors of Greek - an immensely talented Hellenist who nevertheless has yet to find a tenure-track faculty position even after all of these years! - ran the upper-level undergraduate reading seminar, which consisted of three hard core students (including myself) and a couple of others who floated in and out not taking the class all that seriously. We read Book Two of Thukydides and Sophokles' Antigone that semester, and enjoyed every minute of it, even when the professor would rake us excruciatingly over the coals for missing a minor point of Attic grammar or syntax or mock us just on general principle.

He had a habit of asking point blank questions that were only tangentially related to the material at hand - once he asked me whom I would most like to meet from history; I said Thomas Jefferson, which he found very amusing, and never got tired of bringing up for the rest of the year. He was equally merciless with the rest of the class, but it was all in good humor. This was a professor who was as into the Simpsons as he was his Greek, and to his credit he wasn't afraid to show his love for pop culture in the classroom alongside his otherwise very Anthony Hopkins-like donnish persona.

Near the end of the semester we in the class were all assigned topics that we were expected to present on for the whole hour and a half of instruction that day. As such classes were a little more relaxed than the ordinary translation torture sessions, someone (I forget who) got it in his or her head to bring in a bottle of port, so that we could have ourselves a real symposium of sorts. Never mind that the class met at ten in the morning, and half of us were underage! I was still working at that bakery and coffeehouse whose named must not be mentioned, but whose pastries rocked, and so I would bring in a dozen choice treats for us to nibble on along with our wine. Those final classes in that seminar were the best classes I ever had in the Department, as we all got buzzed and talked about important things, yes, the topics at hand but the bigger picture as well, what the study of Greek was all about and why it continued to be so damned important even after all of these years.

They were great conversations we had, and true symposia, so I was glad to pass the torch in a way last night with my own students. After all, they had earned it. Too often we lose sight of why we do the things we do, especially in an increasingly esoteric field as the Classics, where we live and work in a kind of intellectual echo-chamber that we share with our colleagues. We owe it to ourselves to step out of that bubble on occasion, however, and remember the reasons that bring us to Greek and Classical Studies. Last night I reminded myself of why I had chosen to become a Hellenist, and I went home that evening more proud than ever of the choice that I had made.