Gli Studi Classici E Il Precario Raggiungimento Della Rilevanza

This talk addresses how the concept of \u27relevance\u27 has tended to be used and abused in our time, and how it has affected public attitudes towards the place of Classics in the academy. As the modern world has become increasingly pluralistic and internationalised, Classics has lost not so much its ability to appear an, indeed, be, relevant to our times, but rather its status as a cultural marker of class, sophistication, or even virtue. Over the next decades, a major challenge facing the Classics will be to discover ways in which it can reconstruct itself as a discipline so as to integrate itself meaningfully and usefully into contemporary society. After exploring some of the reasons that have brought us to the current state of affairs, I suggest a few simple ways in which a Classics department might reconfigure its activity and organisation so as to begin the process of conveying persuasively its role in modern educational system, and, in fact, its \u27relevance\u27 for the modern world

Grand Allusions: Vergil In Phaedrus

This article focuses on two allusions to Vergil in the opening of the third book of Phaedrus’ Aesopic fables (3.Prol.) and suggests that Vergilian poetry plays a surprisingly central role in Phaedrus’ reflections on the nature and purpose of his poetic project. By linking his own avowedly humble poetry to the Aeneid and Eclogues, Phaedrus draws attention to some unexpected points of contact with Vergil; but he also quite clearly presents himself as a relatively unimportant poet who has had a particularly difficult time finding acceptance in Rome. The engagements with Vergil thus provide contexts for Phaedrus to highlight a crucial dimension of his poetic identity: the Roman fabulist expressed grand ambition but insisted that his inventiveness and sophistication would ultimately do nothing to improve his position on the margins of Roman literary culture