Words from the Ghosts: Awakening Indo-European Philology
Picture this. You’re somewhere west of sunrise, but you can still taste the Mediterranean on the breeze. Ithaca, then, or Sicily. A liminal time, not quite night. The poor goat has stopped bleating long before you pour away its life, down some crack or fissure. Blood, milk, honey too. The things that give life, are life, or sustain it. It is a heavy price, but what wouldn’t you pay to speak with the dead?
Classics is necromancy. To pick up a text, trace its derivation through to early modern scholars, medieval monks, Roman scribes; to read it out in its own language, to pair the words with artefacts and remains, all this is to try to make the dead speak. No wonder that cliché – stolen (“borrowed”) from the Odyssey – of summoning the dead with blood (or milk, or honey) is so often wheeled out by Classicists. This metaphor is nowhere more piquant than when it comes to Classical Philology, especially when it branches out to the study of consanguineous languages and their shared ancestor, which scholars call Proto-Indo-European.
Writing not even a defence but a promotion of, an invitation to, what has long been considered one of the most esoteric and least accessible fields for Classicists may seem bizarre under the current circumstances. After all, we have come a long way from Martianus Capella in the 5th century AD, who apotheosised philology into an actual goddess Philologia. Indeed, there are currently serious discussions as to the very place of the Classical languages in a Classics degree.
