First words: a valedictory lecture

Abstract

Mr Vice-Chancellor, May I thank you for coming to preside at this occasion, and thank everyone else for coming to be presided over – most especially my colleagues in the Faculty of Classics. You were not all here when I joined the Faculty eighteen years ago, but you have all helped to sustain the atmosphere of cooperation, good will, and intellectual adventure, which has made this Faculty such a wonderful place to work and teach in. There is much that I shall miss when I go. But that is not what I want to talk about now. To borrow the words of our Chairman, Ian DuQuesnay, I should like this occasion to be a party rather than a wake. What I want to say is this. It is too late now – twelve years too late – to apologize for not having given an Inaugural Lecture. There was no particular moment when I decided not to, just many many moments when other work seemed both more urgent and, to be honest, more interesting. The trouble with Inaugural Lectures is that you are expected to define your subject and say how it ought to be done. You begin by paying respectful tribute to your predecessor – in my case G. E. L. Owen, so the tribute would have been sincere and a pleasure to compose. But then comes the hard part, in which you set out ‘the aims and objectives’ (as the managerial language of our present rulers would have us call them) of your discipline. In other words, I would have had to tell myself and my colleagues where ancient philosophy in Cambridge ought to go and how it ought to get there.