Gregson Davis
Eos interviewed Dr. Davis in March 2022.
Please tell us about your work.
I have finally retired after over five decades of teaching and research at four major universities: Stanford (22 years—my first job), Cornell (5 years), Duke (26 years) and NYU (2 years). As of the “Covid year” 2020, when I reached the ripe age of 80, I bear the somewhat sonorous title: Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Humanities. Quite a mouthful!
I grew up on the small Caribbean island of Antigua at a time when it was still part of the British Colony of the Leeward Islands. I left the island at the age of 15 to take up a tuition scholarship at Harvard, where I “concentrated” in Classics and delivered the Latin Oration at the Commencement ceremonies in 1960 on the theme of world peace (“De Concordia Hominum”). The Ciceronian echo in the title (specifically, that orator’s well known mantra, concordia ordinum) reflects the euphoria of that era in regard to the promise of the United Nations. Recent events in Ukraine have given us all a nasty jolt and have brought to my mind the famous quip of Charles De Gaulle who was fond of referring to the UN as “Les Nations Désunies.”
Throughout my teaching career in higher education I have consistently held joint appointments in Classics and Comparative Literature, and I continue in “retirement” to publish books and articles in both fields with equal enthusiasm. My work as teacher and researcher has focused exclusively on poetry and poetics. Regarding the Classical literary tradition, I have published monographs on three major Augustan poets: Ovid, Horace and Vergil – in that order. I have always paid heed to the dictum, “mega biblion, mega kakon,” on the grounds that quality and originality should trump quantity and bulk in the sphere of literary scholarship. I have always tried to transcend the narrow boundaries of received philological opinion in my study of poetics, whether my subject of investigation falls within the Greco-Roman or Caribbean traditions. In the latter area, my favorite authors whose work I have interpreted in print are the anglophone St. Lucian Nobel laureate, Derek Walcott, and the francophone Martinican poet/politician, Aimé Césaire, who was a co-founder of the Negritude movement in pre-WWII Paris.
How did you become interested in your field?
As a pupil at the Antigua Grammar School (the leading secondary school on the island which is modeled on the English “public” [read: “elite”] school) I had the good fortune to have been taught Latin by a brilliant Barbadian scholar, Alfred Blackett, who went on to earn a doctorate at the University of London, where his thesis supervisor was the eminent Classicist, Otto Skutsch. At Harvard, my interest in Latin poetry was sealed by my encounter with the late Phil Levine who was renowned in the classroom for his flawless reading aloud of Latin lyric poetry in the original meter (including the challenging galliambics of the “Attis” poem of Catullus). Concurrently with developing an abiding love for the poetry of Horace, Lucretius and Vergil, I read widely at my own initiative in the rising field of Caribbean literature in French and English (prose fiction as well as poetry). This expansion of cultural horizons eventually prompted me to do my PhD in Comparative Literature (Latin, Greek and French) in graduate school at Berkeley, following an intellectually stimulating trip to Europe (primarily Italy and France) on a Traveling Fellowship from Harvard.
What do you find most exciting about teaching classics and/or classical receptions? What challenges have you faced in teaching in this field?
I have been especially excited to learn (and teach) the great tradition of Greco-Roman literature through a non-Eurocentric lens. As a comparatist, I revel in looking at poetics across cultures and in obliterating the specious distinction between “civilized” and “primitive” societies. This has been a challenge in the field of Classics because of the pernicious appropriation by right-wing ideologues of what they mistakenly take to be the values of a superior “Western” civilization originating with the ancient Greeks. It has been very encouraging in this regard to note the vibrant criticisms of this historical distortion being conducted by a younger generation of scholars.
Tell us about a work you love to teach and/or one you find particularly difficult (and why).
After all these years I most enjoy teaching a course for undergraduates that I call “Rhetorical conventions of the lyric.” In this course, I compare universal formal devices of “persuasion”, such as the priamel, recusatio, and hymnal encomia. I analyze examples selected from a wide range of “other” (non-European) cultural traditions and historical periods. This exercise in cross-cultural comparison has always led me to a deeper understanding of “Classical” poetic texts. For the students it provides a very effective means to their revaluation of deep-seated myths of “Western” uniqueness in matters of cultural achievement.
What advice do you have for students or scholars interested in working in your field?
I always advise students to bring to bear insights from other disciplines than the ones in which they have chosen to major on their study of Classical texts. For the study of poetics, in particular, I encourage them to read widely in linguistics (especially in the subfields of semiotics, structuralism, discourse analysis, speech act theory, and pragmatics). Cultural anthropology and philosophy are, in my judgment, equally instrumental disciplines in extending one’s methodological horizons beyond the domain of traditional Classical “philology.”
How has your field changed since you started working in it? Where do you think it needs to go next?
The most patent change is the widespread burgeoning interest in “reception” studies. I applaud this orientation, though with the caveat that “reception” has always been inherent in the act of interpretation which all audiences, including contemporary ones, bring to any text, oral or written. I am not clairvoyant, so will decline looking into the crystal ball to discern future directions. That said, it is my hope that Classics will take a significant “philosophical turn” and examine the patterns of thought that may often have to be extrapolated from the subtexts of literary works. In the interest of “full disclosure” I am happy to admit that this turn is one that I have made in my own scholarship, as reflected in all of my recent publications on Latin poetry. In my own case, I have been focusing more and more on the pervasive influence of Epicurean systems of thought on all the major Late Republican authors.
What have been the top five most influential texts to your work?
This is a great question and my answer may seem cryptic in the nature of the case. Here goes:
(1) Elroy Bundy’s Studia Pindarica first opened my eyes to the crucial importance of understanding formal rhetorical conventions (a hitherto neglected dimension of the praise poetics that shaped the Epinikia). My book on Horace’s Odes (Polyhymnia: The Rhetoric of Horatian Lyric Discourse) was the fruit of the insights I gained from Bundy’s renowned Pindar seminar at Berkeley which I attended in the mid-sixties as a grad student in Comparative Literature.
(2) E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, made a great impact on my understanding of the universality of such “primitive” phenomena as ritual possession.
(3) Roland Barthes’ Mythologies introduced me to the principles and methods of semiotics at a crucial stage in my intellectual development. My book on Ovidian narratology in the Metamorphoses (The Death of Procris) is based on semiotic principles and the “analyse du récit.”
(4) Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, which I read as a freshman, taught me about the relativity of cultural and societal norms and helped me to look critically at my British colonial past.
(5) The authoritative essays in The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism (especially those by scholars of Hellenistic philosophy as Voula Tsouna, Elizabeth Asmis, Raphael Woolf, Michael Erler and David Sedley) made me aware of the crucial relevance of the Garden to the thought of Vergil and Horace. They led me to engage in the study of the extant works of Philodemus that are so important to the poets in the “Campanian” circle of Latin poets. My monograph on Vergil’s Eclogues (Parthenope: The Interplay of Ideas in Vergilian Bucolic) applies a deeper and more refined knowledge of Epicurean thought acquired by this collection of essays to the re-interpretation of all the major works of these great poet-friends.