 Kevin Daly was majoring in biology and expected to become a doctor when the classics fired his imagination and detoured his career plan.
Today, Daly is an assistant professor of classics at Bucknell, and he is just as intrigued reading ancient Greek and Latin literature as he is working an archeological dig in a once-thriving market in ancient Athens.
Thousands of years separate the ancient and modern times, but Daly believes there is a relevance that bridges both worlds. "Santayana has a quote that says those who don't know the past are doomed to repeat it. That, perhaps, is a little too easy, but I think there is something to learn from the ancient world," Daly says. "That something is the human experience. The highs and lows of the human condition are in many ways the same. That doesn't mean that people think the same way. That means that people live and love and die and suffer, and the way that we can think about that is transcendent."
Does history repeat itself? "Yes and no," says Daly. "Some things repeat in history. That does not mean that if you know history you can predict the future. If history only repeated itself, it would be stuck in a box and there would be no surprises. Patterns are set but one thing we know is that those patterns change and evolve and are broken. As Kurt Vonnegut said, 'The one thing that history teaches us is that it is full of surprises and all we can do is wait for the next surprise.'"
But with any analysis of history, there is a risk of what Daly calls "privileging."
"One of the things I try to get across to my students is that these are slaveholding, sexist imperialists and because they write interesting literature and because they have beautiful art does not mean they're necessarily good people," he says. "Just recognizing that makes people look deeper into culture of every era, including our own."
A concept like beauty can take on new dimensions when viewed from different perspectives. "There is this vision of beauty in the modern world that, for example, creates huge social pressure on young women in our society," says Daly. "If you go back into earlier periods, the model of beauty was not being thin or tanned. That was a mark of the working class. Beauty was self-defined by the wealthy, who were pale and heavier."
For him, the classics are full of "eureka" moments. "It's as close as you can get to discovering a new world. I, in particular, work on inscriptions. If you pull an inscription out of the ground, you have in front of you a text that was written at an exact historic moment," he says. "That's as close as you can get to shaking hands with an ancient person."
This summer, Daly will revisit an archeological dig in Athens, where a few years ago he was working with an undergraduate student who unearthed a gold coin dating from roughly 470 C.E. On another visit, he was running the trench when the largest hoard of silver coins ever found in Athens was unearthed. "That was major find. It was a concreted mass of silver and very stunning to see," he says.
This year he will put the final touches on a book about Thucydides and ancient military history. While in Greece this year, Daly, with the help of three-dimensional computer modeling, will conduct an "inter-visibility" study of Greek military forts to learn more about what may have prompted ancient Greeks to build military installations where they did.
"Do they complement each other or do they overlap?" he says. "Or are they from totally separate historical eras? You can hypothesize and ask interesting questions once you have the power of thinking in three dimensions." Teaching areas - Greek and Latin literature
- Greek and Latin languages
- Greek and Roman history
- Archeology
Research areas - Greek epigraphy
- Ancient military history
- Athenian topography
- Archeology
Recent publications "Two Inscriptions from the Athenian Agora," Hesperia 76 (2007) 539–554.
"A New Athenian Ephebic List" (Forthcoming from Hesperia)
"A Funerary Horos for Philiste" (Forthcoming from Hesperia)
The Peloponnesian War, one volume in the new series Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity. (Under contract to Cambridge University Press)
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