In this Quick Hits, Mark McClay talks classics, dinner, and vacation.
What’s your favorite class to teach?
Any Greek or Latin language class. Particularly Greek since that’s my specialty, particularly Homeric Greek.
Why did you become a classics professor?
It’s just an enthusiasm I developed when I was in undergrad, and I just kind of kept pursuing it. I’m fortunate that it worked out. It’s a great deal to be paid to read books and talk about books with your students.
Why should students take a class in the classics department?
I think all of our classes are different ways to open yourself up to so many things other than just what the course is about. If you study Latin or Greek, you’ll find the world of Greek or Roman antiquity, which is interesting in itself. But you’ll also find all sorts of connections with words you’re familiar with in the English language, with concepts we’ve inherited. They’re both valuable subject matters in themselves and they’re also tangled up with all sorts of other things that are very close to the big questions you can deal with on a day-to-day basis.
What’s your take on audiobooks?
It depends. There are some audiobooks that I really like. There are some books that work well for audiobooks and others that don’t. I actually like audio books especially for plays and some poetry because it brings out the performance element that’s appropriate to the text. But other types of books I find hard to follow in audio books. Just a couple of years ago, I was listening to an audiobook, “Paradise Lost,” which is fantastic, but I found other plays like Shakespeare which don’t work as well in an audiobook. Its reasoning is too intricate and it’s difficult to follow.
If you could have dinner with any three people, living or dead, who would they be?
Assuming they would agree to have dinner with me, I think Socrates. I don’t think there would be any problem keeping the conversation going if he was at the table. I would say Nietzsche, but I think he would fight with Socrates too much. But I’ll go with that. And maybe Roger Scruton. He died a few years ago. I never got to meet him, but he’s a great philosopher. So I think he would probably be a good peacemaker.
What’s your dream vacation?
It’s always good when you can spend a length of time in a place and kind of get to know it. I’m a classicist, so I like to see old stuff. I’d love to visit the antiquities in Egypt. I’ve never been to Egypt. Really anytime I have an excuse to travel back to Greece or Italy, I’ll take it.
