An Undergraduate Journal in Classics

William F. Wyatt, Jr.
Brown University

Welcome to the first issue of the Brown Classical Journal! New enterprises are always exciting, and this one if full of promise. Many at Brown have much to say, and it is good that classicists now have a place to say it. I hope that many of you will wish to contribute.

The aim of scholarship is to increase knowledge, and knowledge takes years of preparation to acquire. Many of you may, therefore, feel as yet ill-equipped to publish in a classical journal. I urge you not so to feel. There are many excellent scholarly journals in Classics, and they attract the finished, scholarly fruits of years of research. Not all publication, however, is or should be scholarly, and there are other legitimate aims of publication than scholarship. One can, for instance, best work out the implications of one's ideas in writing. Thought is too rapid, too ephemeral, too much influenced by emotion. Only by setting one's thoughts down for one (and others) to see (and perhaps criticize), can one attain the needed clarity and objectivity. Writing is a discipline, and a good one, too.

Writing is also persuasion. Though it is relatively unlikely that any of use will materially alter the course of events with a contribution to the Brown Classical Journal, we may yet change the minds of some people, and we can in any event be preparing ourselves for future endeavors which may change or modify the current state of affairs. We are all in a position in which we must influence opinion, and the sooner we become used to the responsibility of expressing our views forcefully and in print, the better.

Writing can serve to test and strengthen the mind and the imagination. That word in Horace, that line in Homer-what do they mean, both in context and for us today? Achilles, the heroic Achilles, behaved petulantly when Agamemnon took away Briseis, and refused to return to battle even when the Greeks were being defeated. What is one to make of this? Can Homer have been serious? Or is petulance in poetry acceptable while anathema at home or at work? Homer wrote a poem about all of this, and Catullus seems both to have lived it and to have written it. Perhaps we should emulate them in creating poems rather than learned tracts, though I do not recommend petulance as the only model for life.

The Journal is on its way, and we should rejoice. But it will need help, and I urge all classicists, fledgling or experienced, to contribute papers, articles, poems and reflection to this new venture.