Anchoring Innovation: a classical research agenda

How do classicists determine their research questions? Some questions in the Humanities are themselves traditional and keep attracting new approaches and eliciting new answers, questions such as the workings of Athenian democracy, the interpretation of the poems by Homer, the Greek tragedians, Virgil or Horace, or establishing the correct text of various classical authors on the basis of a detailed study of the manuscript tradition and our still expanding knowledge of the morphology and syntax of Greek and Latin. However, while classicists study a historical period (the Mediterranean world from 800 BCE to about the fifth cent. CE), they are themselves inevitably children of their time, and pressing new questions circulating in contemporary society have always inspired new ways of looking at ancient texts and times. This is how the emancipation movements of the last century provoked revolutionary new studies on women in Antiquity, Greek homosexuality, or the relationship between ‘European’ and ‘African’ culture. 1,