ABSTRACT
I have to admit I was being cute with my title. It could introduce a set of ruminations about identity, selfhood, and so forth, or it could echo my bullying censor, who wants to know how I dare talk to professional classicists about personal issues. The latter fellow, like all bullies, is driven at bottom by fear: that I will appear vulnerable, that I will be revealed as self-indulgent, solipsistic, or – worst of all for the classicist – mistaken. I bring all this up partly to deflect criticism, of course, but also because the doubleness in the title leads us to the heart of my topic: I have written and published five autobiographical responses to works of classical literature in the last eight years. These essays all take as their starting point a work of Greek or Latin literature that I have seen as representing in some way a problem or issue central to my own life: my response to Odysseus has changed markedly over the last twenty years. What does this tell me about my own journey from post-adolescence to middle age? The relationship between grief and self-knowledge in the Iliad mirror for me my own struggle to integrate my mother’s death into my “mid-life crisis.” Oedipus’ blindness to his own true nature shows me something about the operation of my own denial and my attempts to escape the consequences of a childhood lived with alcoholic parents. Roman ideas of masculine heroism fit uneasily on Aeneas, as did traditional American ones on my father. In the wake of the latter’s death, what can I learn about the paternal antecedents for my own unease with heroic masculinity? While I am teaching Thucydides’ description of the plague to three advanced Greek students, my nephew, to whom I feel powerful emotional ties, dies of cancer at the age of twenty-one. In the midst of my pain, I feel that my nephew has given me a gift. What is it and what am I to do with it? What can Greek literature tell me about the role of gifts in the life of the spirit?