The Man, a Myth, and His Legend

Harvard was founded in 1636, but there is one professor who predates even that: Greg Nagy. That is by no means an insult to the classicist — over dinner he confirmed to me and a few of my Ancient Greek Lyric classmates that he was, in fact, a Greek god. That was one of the first times I had really questioned why studying the classics would be important. Sure, it was interesting reading The Odyssey, but what is the relation of classics to the present?

Nagy, who has been a prominent figure in campus life for over 40 years and has served in many academic departments during that time, strives daily to help students answer that very question. His impact on others has been so great that for his 70th birthday, nearly 90 of his friends, colleagues, and students contributed to a publication testifying to his remarkable ability to inspire and connect scholars through the classics.

Research in the classics is criticized for being, as Leonard Muellner said in an interview with the HPR, “stagnant and conservative.” Why, then, does Nagy have so much youthful zeal for the subject? The classics, it turns out, have guided his own life and sense of self. Nagy has internalized his scholarship, making him an impactful teacher and enabling him to continually enliven ancient narratives by highlighting their relevance in current political and academic times.

Beer for Bacchus

An avid social networker, Nagy has used his teaching platform to connect others so that they may share their interests in the classics. He founded the ‘Thursday Group’ — a group that extends an open invitation to his students to join him at a Cambridge bar on Thursdays and develop their thesis ideas. The idea was to bond through the shared suffering of thesis writing, and to take home the joys of classics.

For Nagy, there was no separation between academic work and pleasure, and by forming the Thursday Group, he passed this love for classics on to his students. Always discussing big ideas with friends, colleagues, and students, Nagy remains ever-engaged in the learning process. He still shares weekly meals with his colleague-friends and continues to write weekly contributions for his online publication Classical Inquiries, reflecting a passion that began as a way to celebrate and finish conversations with friends.

The collaboration and gathering of individuals that Nagy encouraged is a disappearing and underappreciated element of academic life.  Indeed, it was Ancient Greek culture, with its emphasis on open and free-flowing philosophical discussion, that produced many of the seminal ideas of modern civilization. For Nagy, having an open classroom embodies the value of “intellectual freedom,” with new perspectives bringing fresh ideas. His teaching style reflects the principles of the classics: morality, clarity, and objectivity of thought, as well as a willingness to take up the call to action. Ancient stories were crafted as guides, and Nagy now teaches based upon their values.

What Shaped Nagy

Nagy was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1942. The son of a well-renowned musician in a communist nation that supported the arts, Nagy had all the support he needed to pursue an education in linguistics and ancient cultures. In the professor’s words, the one good policy the “Stalinist regime did, starting in 1948, was appoint Zoltán Kodály, the second of [his] father’s three teachers,” to be in charge of music literacy programs in Budapest.

Stalin’s decision would eventually allow the Nagy family to move to Canada and then to Indiana, where the self-proclaimed ‘classics nerd’ epitomized this title and graduated from college in two and a half years. Nagy’s early exposure to many different regimes, cultures, and lifestyles gave him a “delight in the power of language.” Studying linguistics and philology at Harvard and in Indiana, Nagy demonstrated a clear passion for language’s influence on societies.

After graduating from Harvard, Nagy got his first tenured position at Johns Hopkins University and worked there from 1973 to 1975. Upon returning to Harvard, he saw that the school had changed since he had been away — he described the transition as “day and night.” Students had stopped wearing suits, security on campus had increased, and women and men had begun living in the same dorms.

There was also a shift in what the University’s students studied. “People before I left had only a vague idea of what they wanted to do … [Many students] just didn’t know what [they] wanted to be,” Nagy recounted. “The new breed of students were informal … but they started going into a lot more pre-professional careers” — and began changing Harvard’s culture. This difference did not reflect a change in the applicant pool, but rather a change in how society taught its youth. Nagy observed that even though the new generation of students was taught differently, they were still “existentially troubled in all the same ways as the generations before.”

What Nagy Brings Today

Nagy therefore used his liberal arts education and creativity to rejuvenate a field that tends to get “stuck and depressing,” according to Muellner, who was a part of the Thursday Group.

Nagy, for example, gives his students and their varied interests special attention in the way the classics could be applied in current times. In doing so, he is still finding fresh ideas or nuances in the field that generate new meaning. His constant invigoration of the discipline is evident in his class and gives him something countless students have described as “amazing energy.”

Likewise, the professor wholeheartedly values the importance of language and its role in the classics, something he emphasizes when translating Greek with his class. He is conscious of the nuances and differing translations of works, and how each idea is and should be represented. This has led him to apply new theories that people may have overlooked in the past, and to become an apostle of the importance of classics today. As Nagy wrote in Classical Inquiries: “In my earlier work, in fact, that is the way I, too, regularly translated erasthēnai in my overall analysis of the myths centering on Hippolytus. Lately, however, I have begun to question the accuracy of such a translation, as in the [online] post for 2018.06.14, where I experimented with translating this way instead: ‘conceive a passion for.’ Still, I am reluctant to give up altogether on the expression ‘fall in love with.’”

Nagy also worked toward inclusivity in the arts. His wife, Olga Davidson, or “Holly,” as he affectionately calls her, described his progressive nature towards women in classics at a time when the field was male-dominated. He never belittled her ideas, and he pushed her toward “producing a really great thesis” with his full support, she recalled in an interview with the HPR. Davidson, a scholar of Persian literature, has also had a rich career as an academic and Iran advisor to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Without diminishing any of Davidson’s achievements, one must acknowledge that Nagy’s impact in classics extends to empowering women in the field. The professor’s application of the Latin virtue of “pietate,” or piety, in his own life led him to help increase women’s footing in classics.

The Timelessness of Nagy’s Classics

Nagy’s life embodies the classical themes that are relevant and important in a highly politicized environment. He emphasizes and demonstrates the importance of storytelling in societies. He underscores the timelessness of the classics and demonstrates the constancy of their moral lessons, regardless of the trends among new generations. In these ways, and likely many more, Harvard’s very own god relates classics to a modern epoch where behavior matters, where humans meet challenges faced by ancients, and where old solutions are worth rediscovering to unearth new meaning.

Image Credit: Rose Lincoln/Harvard University News Office

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