The Search for Self and the Return Home: In Conversation with Eugenia Manolidou
Video from Ralston College
The Search for Self and the Return Home: In Conversation with Eugenia Manolidou
"What does it mean to find our way home? In this conversation with composer and classicist Eugenia Manolidou, President Stephen Blackwood asks how the living inheritance of ancient Greece – through language, music, poetry, and the pursuit of freedom – can reconnect us with sources of self-understanding, helping us to recover a sense of where we come from and what we are here for. Beginning with Homer, their discussion examines the enduring principles and intellectual postures that have characterized the spirit of Hellenism for millennia.
Beyond the language of the ancients, Eugenia raises music as an ontological reality, suggesting that melody and rhythm pervade the whole of existence. In considering what music and Greek thought have in common, she gestures toward a mutual intuition first pointed out by Pythagoras: beneath the seeming disorder of things, there exists intelligible harmony, ratio, and proportion. To live well, with this in mind, is to become attuned to that very order." from the video introduction
00:00:41 - Introduction
00:02:35 - The Odyssey
00:08:14 - Odysseus' Reconciliation
00:15:34 - Tradition in Greek Literature
00:23:51 - The Future of Human Curiosity
00:25:52 - What Ancient Greek Can Do Today
00:30:46 - Having the Ancients at Your Fingertips
00:35:27 - Studying the Humanities
00:37:43 - Coming Home
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