ABSTRACT

I first started thinking consciously about the role of the personal voice in classical scholarship in January 1994, in response to a call for papers for a panel on this theme at the December 1994 meeting of the American Philological Association. I had one of those (what you realise afterwards were) significant conversations with my Bristol colleague Vanda Zajko, who was facing the PhD examination a few days later. As a result of that conversation, I realised that this issue touched a number of chords deep within me. In particular, it set me thinking about my own academic project, much of which to date had been concerned with the concept of the persona (“mask”) in Roman literature and had been predicated upon the ready separation of autobiography from dramatic performance, or, to put it another way, the personal from the professional. What Vanda said – and what she had written in the preface to her PhD – challenged that separation. She was attempting to elide those categories or, at least, to suggest that there might be a place for the personal within the professional. This might be a strategy familiar from some feminist thought, for example, Nancy K. Miller’s Getting Personal (1991), but it was new to me at that moment. And as I thought more deeply about it, the idea of some coincidence of the personal and professional appeared to have important implications about the shape, purpose and trajectory of our profession as classicists. On further thought again, it is clear that this idea connects with wider philosophical issues on the nature of personhood. In this brief essay, then, the fruit of thought-in-process over some twenty months and the very different reactions to two oral deliveries of earlier versions (earlier versions which were joint papers with Vanda Zajko, although in the second version the role of Vanda was taken by her Bristol colleague Charles

Martindale), I propose to explore issues relating to voices, masks and the person in relation to classical scholarship and the classical profession.