The idea of the classical in classical antiquity 
13 March 2012
6pm
Venue: Old Government House Lecture Theatre, The University of Auckland
Department of Classics and Ancient History seminar by Professor Richard Hunter, Regius Professor of Greek, University of Cambridge, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
This lecture considers how the idea of the classical, in both antiquity and modern times, has been connected to beliefs in the supremacy of reason over emotion and of stability and certainty over change and circumstance. The lecture draws examples from Homer and later Greek and Latin literature and from the scholarship of the last 150 years to illustrate the powerful hold that this idea has over us and our predecessors and how that idea can help us to understand some of the literary and cultural history of antiquity.
Professor Richard Hunter is Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and of the Academy of Athens, and is one of the world’s most distinguished scholars of Greek and Latin literature and Classical Antiquity.
He has written and edited some 18 books, and is the author of over 80 articles and book chapters concerned with the whole range of Greek literature and its reception at Rome. His most recent book, Plato and the Traditions of Ancient Literature: the Silent Stream, has just appeared.
Professor Hunter has held visiting appointments at the University of Virginia, Stanford, and Princeton, has edited The Journal of Hellenic Studies, and served as Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at Cambridge. He is an editor of Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics and Cambridge Classical Studies.
For other talks to be given by Professor Hunter during his visit, please contact the Department of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Auckland.
Professor Hunter is a Seelye Charitable Trust Fellow.
