Chair, Department of Classics
LATI 716: Roman Religion and Latin Literature
Q: What was your educational path to the University of Virginia?
A: I was fortunate when I went to high school to study Latin for four years and Greek for three years. I went to a Jesuit high school, so it's always been something I did. When I went to college at Xavier University in Cincinnati I was in an honors program revolving around classics, so everybody did Latin and Greek every semester. You could have another major if you wanted, but we were all basically into classics. Then I went to graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and first got my M.A. in comparative literature, then found I was going in too many different directions for any of them to be satisfying. So since I knew I wanted to get into teaching, I asked myself what was the most fun, and the answer was Latin and Greek. And I happened to be at a school with a very good Latin program, so I stayed at Chapel Hill and got a Ph.D. in classical philology. Before I came here my first job was at the University of Minnesota. I've worked here since 1984.
Q: Academically, what do you do outside of lecture?
A: My research is in Latin literature and Roman culture, particularly that of the Augustine period. My work is twofold: one part is Latin literature which, has a strong religious background. I wrote a book on Ovid's Fasti, the Roman calendar, which is a religious calendar. Now I'm writing a book about the god Apollo at the time when he first became an important god in Rome. The second focal point of my work is the poet Ovid. Most recently I finished an article on the reception of Ovid in the Renaissance, particularly where Renaissance poets took the idea of Ovid's religious calendar and turned it into a Christian calendar, both imitating Ovid and, in a sense, polemicizing him.
Q: What are your hobbies?
A: I took up long-distance running about a dozen years ago, when I gave up smoking. I must have a bit of an addictive personality, to go from two-and-a-half packs a day to running 40 or 50 miles a week. I've run a few marathons. I haven't run one in a few years, since the Boston Marathon in 1996. My other hobby is probably cooking, mostly Mediterranean. When I first got married, my wife told me she didn't know how to cook. I had been living in an apartment, so I knew how to make about three things. And I believed her, which of course was false. So I took up cooking, and gradually I've come to like it, and it's become a hobby of sorts.
Q: What would you say, then, is your favorite Charlottesville restaurant?
A: I guess there are two, which are widely divergent. On the higher end, probably the C&O, which is a place that's been around forever and it's always reliable and has interesting food. And of another sort, I'd say the Szechuan restaurant. It's the first place I ate in Charlottesville 17 years ago. It's a reliable place that has excellent Chinese food, and we go there all the time.
Q: Do you follow University sports at all?
A: Basketball, because I was in North Carolina, where of course it's a religion. I was there at the beginning of the heyday of North Carolina basketball, so we became fans. We even followed ACC basketball when we were in Minnesota.
Q: When Virginia plays North Carolina, whose side are you on?
A: I root for Virginia -- and my wife considers me a traitor.
Q: Do you have any messages for your students?
A: As the chairman of the department, I spend a lot of time nowadays worrying about the future of the University. In spite of the budget cuts, I think the University remains an excellent place, and I enjoy being here and find it a challenging place because of the excellent students we have here. I'm optimistic about our future, once we can get over this gigantic hurdle that the legislature has put in front of us.
Q: How do you feel about the value of studying classics today?
A: One of the distinctive things about the University of Virginia is that we have a very vibrant program in Latin and Greek. Especially for Latin we have more students than we can accommodate. In part it is because the state of Virginia, along with the state of Texas, has one of the two strongest high school programs in the country. A lot of first-year students come prepared to do intermediate and advanced level work, and we have a hard time staffing all the classes. It's very unusual that we teach two or three advanced level classes every semester, when the typical big university teaches one, which is another reason why it's a stimulating place to teach classics. We also have a strong group of graduate students from many good schools around the country and abroad. In general, I think classics at the University is really on the upswing, so it makes sense that Homer's right out there in front.
-- Interview by Katie Sullivan
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