Q&A with John J. Peradotto

John J. Peradotto, Andrew V.V. Raymond Professor of Classics and a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor, is an internationally recognized Homeric scholar.

What piqued your interest in the ancient cultures?

One day in college, a fellow student who had gone to a Jesuit high school recited the first 10 lines of Homer's "Odyssey," which he'd been assigned to memorize in his Greek class. That did it! I was snared for life. That was a language I wanted to learn. I took as much of it as I could, for a philosophy major. Then, when the time came to choose a graduate-school concentration, classics appealed to me because it was an area study, the first and maybe the only successful one. It offered me an alternative to narrow specialization, allowing me to move freely through a range of subject areas in the two separate, but related, cultures of Greece and Rome: linguistics, literature, history, the visual arts, philosophy, archaeology. I mean, in what other field can one move, as I did last week, from a graduate class where we did a close reading of 150 lines of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, to an undergraduate honors class in Greek intellectual history where we discussed the philosopher Parmenides and Zeno's paradoxes?

How have classical studies changed since you've been involved in the field?

When I began my graduate work back in the '50s, there was a general disinclination in the profession to teach students other than those interested in language study. Since then, economic necessity has stimulated the profession to realize the educational merit in teaching a variety of general, non-language courses, such as classical mythology, literature in translation, ancient history, to mention but a few. Another, and perhaps more significant, change is the opening up of the profession to interdisciplinary perspectives in scholarship, something in which, by the way, the UB classics department played a leadership role in the founding of the journal Arethusa back in the late '60s. We published, for example, the first collection of studies on women in the ancient world. Following that were special issues on such topics as population policy in Plato and Aristotle, classical literature and contemporary modes of analysis, semiotics and classical studies, rethinking the classical canon, Roman satire and corporeal discourse, and the challenge of the controversial book "Black Athena," to mention only a few.

What can we learn today from studying classical literature, such as Homer's "Odyssey"?

That is a question for a lifetime of answers! But to concentrate on the one example you cite, it is not accidental that we use the term "odyssey" to signify an arduous intellectual or spiritual quest. Where Homer's "Iliad" brilliantly explores the heroic urge for competitive excellence, its beauty and its potential for tragic loss, the "Odyssey" seeks to define quieter social and cooperative virtues, such as wisdom, justice, courage, temperance, endurance. Besides being a darn good story, it lays the groundwork for a history of cultural reflection on the self and its relation to others, a history that we have yet to cease from.

What areas of classical study do you see as particularly relevant to today's students?

To a classicist-actually to any humanist-"relevance" is a nasty word, unless you redefine it to include the development of skills and values that have long-term, not always tangible, outcomes. One big lesson classical study teaches is alternative perspectives on the world. When you read Sophocles' powerful representation of the obscurity of fate and then go on to read the historian Thucydides, with his sense of rationality at risk to chance, you come away with two dramatically different visions of the world. But both of them, and Homer, and the Presocratic philosophers, and Euripides combined give us a picture of the world that is altogether at odds with those who have believed that somehow in this life or the next, morally if not materially, there is salvation, or if not that, at least that there is something at the world's heart that responds to our hopes and desires and makes sense of them. This is no vision for Pollyanna, but it is one today's students owe it to themselves to consider, even if they never adopt it.

How is the study of classics changing at UB, and what do these changes mean?

We have lost considerable strength in areas such as Byzantine studies, textual criticism and paleography, mainly because of retirements. In place of that we have chosen to develop archaeology into a major program that now attracts considerable numbers of graduate students. We need now to recoup the strength in language and literature that the outside world identifies us by, largely because of the journal, Arethusa.

You've got a great Web page and are obviously very computer oriented. Isn't that kind of an oxymoron for someone who's devoted his career to ancient cultures?

It is an oxymoron (see, you're speaking Greek!) only if you've bought into the stereotype (more Greek!) of the classicist as someone who cherishes cultural lag as a point of pride. It's simply not the case. Classical studies has been in the forefront of technological applications to scholarship and pedagogy. We were, I believe, the first among literary and historical disciplines to exploit the potential of CD-ROM technology in producing the "Thesaurus Linguae Graecae," a CD-ROM containing all of Greek literature from the beginning through the sixth-century C.E., together with dedicated hardware to perform lightning-fast searches. Another example is the Perseus Project, an evolving digital library of resources for studying the ancient world on CD-ROM and on the Web, including ancient texts and translations, philological tools, maps, extensively illustrated art catalogs and secondary essays on topics like vase painting. One can, for example, bring up the Greek text of Sophocles' "Antigone," together with an English translation, click on any word for a complete morphological analysis and links to a full-scale Greek-English lexicon, as well as images and detailed data of relevant archaeological sites and art objects.

What does ancient culture tell us about technology (any cautionary tales)?

Depends on which of the Greeks you read. To me, as I've said, one of the most attractive features of classical culture is its bold refusal to leave anything out. For everyone on one side of an issue, you can find someone else on the other. This is the case with their take on technology. For the eighth-century B.C.E. conservative Boeotian farmer-poet Hesiod, Prometheus, the fire-bringer and god of technology, is a villainous trickster, upsetting or circumventing what a farmer would have called the "normal," traditional relation between labor and its fruits. By contrast, for the fifth-century Athenian dramatist Aeschylus, citizen of a thriving, democratic industrial power, Prometheus is largely represented as a creative culture hero-one who needs to learn some tact, to be sure, and respect for established order, but still a hero.