The Classics - I'm Half Iranian and Half Swedish

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i'm half iranian and half swedish. One of my first languages was, in fact, farcy. I ended up doing an undergraduate classics major. The faculty oll said, oh, go to grab school. At that point you're stuck. You have to become a classics professor. And i think that made me very aware of the fact that most political parties, most ideologies, most governments use very similar rhetoric to represent utterly different situations. Butth because there's basically an agreed on rhetoric of what it's good to claim you stand for. Everybody wants to stand for progress, goodness, fairness, or if not fairness, at least correct hierarchies,. et cetera

A self-professed nerd, the young Shadi Bartsch could be found awake late at night, reading Latin under the covers of her bed by flashlight. Now a professor of Classics at the University of Chicago, Dr. Bartsch is one of the best-known classicists in America and recently published her own translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Widely regarded for her writing on Seneca, Lucan, and Persius, her next book focuses on Chinese interpretations of classic literature and their influence on political thought in China.

Shadi joined Tyler to discuss reading the classics as someone who is half-Persian, the difference between Homer and Virgil’s underworlds, the reasons so many women are redefining Virgil’s Aeneid, the best way to learn Latin, why you must be in a room with a native speaker to learn Mandarin, the question of Seneca’s hypocrisy, what it means to “wave the wand of Hermes”, why Lucan begins his epic The Civil War with “fake news”, the line from Henry Purcell’s aria that moves her to tears, her biggest takeaway from being the daughter of an accomplished UN economist, the ancient text she’s most hopeful that new technology will help us discover, the appeal of Strauss to some contemporary Chinese intellectuals, the reasons some consider the history of Athens a better allegory for America than that of Rome, the Thucydides Trap, the magical “presentness” of ancient history she’s found in Italy and Jerusalem, her forthcoming book Plato Goes to China, and more.

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Recorded March 16th, 2022 Other ways to connect

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