ABSTRACT
Should classicists follow Nancy K. Miller’s example, and get personal?2 Where is the boundary between the personal and non-personal voice to be drawn, and according to what criteria? Is the distinction of heuristic value, and, if so, what might be its advantages and disadvantages? We may begin (or should that be I will begin?) with some mildly deconstructive moves. When Ben Jonson wrote (Discoveries 2515) “Language most shows a man: speak that I may see thee”, he was giving lapidary expression to a humanist conviction – humanist both in the sense of a commitment to the Renaissance’s programme of studia humanitatis and in the sense in which the term is often used today, within literary theory, to denote belief in an essential, transhistorical human nature – that it is in and through the word that we are most fully ourselves.3 When Erasmus translated the opening of St John’s Gospel “In the beginning was the Word” he substituted sermo, “discourse”, for the Vulgate’s verbum, thereby underlining the rhetorical function of the Son, the Word made flesh, in a world of disseminated meanings.
