On Monday, Classics students, professors and visitors crowded King 306 as the Charles Beebe Martin Classical Lecture Series began its 76th year at Oberlin. The lectures were established in 1927 to honor Charles Beebe Martin, who was Professor of Classics and Classical Archaeology from 1880 to 1925. Since 1927, the Martin Lectures have become one of the two most prestigious Classics lectureships in the country, along with the Sather Classical Lectures at the University of California at Berkeley.
This year’s lectures, entitled “Masterpieces of Classical Metonymy,” were given by Dr. Gregory Nagy, Berkeley’s Sather Classical Lecturer for the 2001-2002 academic year. Nagy serves as Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. For the past three years, he has also directed the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C.
The opening lecture, “Music at the Festival: plaiting the garland, weaving the web, forging the shield,” was followed by “Art and its Attractions: drawing the outline, painting the picture, shaping the form,” and “Beauty and its Delicate Creations: disintegration and reintegration.” The lectures conclude Friday afternoon with “Mysteries of Fusion: art to nature and back.”
Nagy demonstrated a lighthearted flexibility in the tone and delivery of his lectures. His personable style elicited laughs and knowing grins from the audience. While discussing a passage in Plutarch’s Brutus, Nagy interrupted himself with a theatrical aside.
“Here we go with the hair again,” he said. “Andromache’s hair is getting disheveled here, and you know what that does to me by now.”
The highlights of Nagy’s lectures were his connections between ancient poetry and modern culture. Drawing on modern poetry and on musical and cinematic examples, he connected metonymy and metaphor to films including Il Postino, Scent of a Woman and Hair, as well as to the Jacques Offenbach’s opera Les Contes d’Hoffman.
In “Music at the Festival,” Nagy focused on the meaning and interaction of metaphor and metonymy, creating an approachable definition of metonymy as “an expression of meaning by way of connection.”
In “Art and its Attractions,” Nagy explored the intertwining garlands of the poetry of Sappho and Homer, connecting the floral ornamentations on robes of archaic master-weavers with the olive flowers and myrtle blossoms that decorate Homer’s narration of the death of a Greek hero.
Nagy continued and completed the metonymic side of the lecture with discussions of poetic reverence for heroes and for the dead, connecting the Homeric example of the beautifully fallen hero with Sappho’s and Catullus’s love poems for seemingly unattainable heroes of their own.
Nagy’s presence and his lectures sparked thought and discussion among students and faculty alike at a Monday night reception after the first Martin lecture. The Oberlin Classics department also hosted a dinner for Nagy and other classics enthusiasts on Tuesday night, where the approachability and personable attitude of Nagy and Oberlin professors allowed students to explore intellectual questions and chat casually with fellow scholars.