Assistant Professor of Classics Mark McClay will discuss his scholarship on golden tablets from ancient Greece in the Heritage Room today at 4 p.m.

The talk, “Voices of Stone and Gold,” is part of Mossey Library’s lecture series supporting the ongoing research of Hillsdale College faculty. It will draw from McClay’s book, “The Bacchic Gold Tablets and Poetic Tradition: Memory and Performance,” published in May.

“As a graduate student, I took a seminar on ancient Greek music and the professor, who later became my doctoral adviser, suggested that I should write a paper on this collection of gold tablets,” McClay said.

McClay said the ancient Greek tablets he studies come from funerals of Greek mystery religions. Many of them are written in verse, and much of what they say is never explained anywhere else. Some tablets even contradict others, he said, so it is difficult to arrange the beliefs from these ancient relics into any particular religion.

“The differences in these texts were a source of interest for me,” McClay said. “The tendency is to ask, ‘What do the texts say originally?’ so I was interested in discovering how the differences were elaborated.” 

Differences may have come orally, given that the leaflets were part of a performance tradition, according to McClay. It may be that differences arose in different cities due to different rites.

“I’m interested in how different initiators might have put their own distinctive spin on these stories,” McClay said.

McClay worked on his doctoral thesis for years before finishing in 2018. He received a contract in 2020 to publish through the Cambridge University Press.

“It was just a matter of revision with a fresh set of eyes,” McClay said.

John Paul Russo, the chair of the classics department at the University of Miami, read and reviewed the manuscript for McClay’s work before it was sent to be published. McClay taught at the University of Miami before joining the Hillsdale faculty.

“This does not seem like a first book at all, but the achievement of a mature scholar,” Russo said.

McClay said the book is addressed to the small group of scholars who make their living reading and studying the tablets, but it also has something to say to those who study Greek poetry in general. Even anthropologists and researchers of religion have something to gain, according to McClay.

“That’s the beauty of classics,” junior and classics major Rachel Moeller said. “So many things collide: religion, politics, poetry, art, music. We have so much to gain from studying the roots of our culture.”