Ancient tome leads to odyssey in the classics

by Nicole Findlay

Nestled in the shelves of a Minnesota bookstore lay an unusual gem that would inspire a life-long passion for one undergraduate student. Among the textbooks carried by the university bookstore, Shane Hawkins discovered a copy of Homer’s Iliad. A passing interest in the Classics was ignited when he opened it to discover he’d come across the epic in ancient Greek. Hawkins’ only problem was that he couldn’t read a word of the ancient language.

“I thought to myself, ‘How cool would it be if one day I could read Homer in ancient Greek’,” said Hawkins, an assistant professor in the College of the Humanities. “So that is what I set out to do, and I found I had an aptitude for and love of dead languages. Eventually, I became fascinated by how and why languages change over time. Now my research focuses on Historical Linguistics and bi- or even multi-lingualism in ancient Greece and Rome.”

Hawkins, who joined the College last July, moved on from an examination of Homer to research the work of a lesser known Greek poet of the sixth century B.C. “Hipponax of Ephesus was an unusual poet in several respects,” said Hawkins. “He wrote obscene invective verses that parodied the earlier Homeric epic and he borrowed non-Greek vocabulary from the neighbouring languages of Asia Minor.”

Although Hipponax’s work only survives in papyri fragments and scattered quotations from ancient grammarians, Hawkins has been piecing together these and secondary sources to map out the foreign vocabulary of the poet and to answer questions such as, ‘From which languages do these lexical items come? How does Hipponax use them and why?’

“It is a good time to be in Classics at Carleton,” said Hawkins, “The program is growing, we’re very excited about introducing a new independent B.A. next fall under the name Greek and Roman Studies, students are responding positively-our enrolment for first-year Latin this year doubled to 120 students-and we’re headed in the right direction.”