Luca Grillo is a professor and chair of the Department of Classics at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on Latin prose and the historiography and rhetoric of the Roman Republic.
His current work explores Romans’ daily lives when it comes to making and spending money (which culminated with his book, How to Make Money: An Ancient Guide to Wealth Management) and, in another project, he is examining irony in Latin literature.
For Grillo, analyzing these historical topics — and classics as a whole — can bring a greater understanding of today’s world.
Video transcription:
Luca Grillo: My name is Luca Grillo, and I’m a professor of classics. I love literature. I love the Latin language. And I like to be able to understand it or to explain how it works and what it does to you as a reader.
At the moment, I have two main projects. My first project is interested in the way Romans conceived of their jobs — meaning their daily activity, what they consume, what they spend their time doing, and also ways they make money, support the family, make a living.
It's interesting the way the Romans negotiated the gap between the traditional values linked to agriculture — and the extra points that you get for getting your hands dirty and actually dealing with cows and cattle and manure and fields and plowing and sweating — versus more profitable and convenient and quick means to make money.
I have another project which is called “Irony in Latin Literature,” and the idea is to establish a three-partied conversation between ancient theory, cutting-edge contemporary theory, and ancient texts. So the idea of irony as imitation, the idea of irony as expressing a judgment, the idea of irony as saying the opposite of what you mean, the idea of irony as a pretense, or the idea of irony as a way to refer to a statement or an expectation which has been cheated and disappointed. These are all present in the contemporary and ancient theories.
What I would like to show is that the Romans had a quite sophisticated understanding of irony, and many of the basics of the contemporary theories — of the cutting-edge theories — are actually already present in Roman theory.
Classics is very much at the origin of our culture and our civilization. When I teach students — and they have these questions, say, "Why classics?" — one of the first things I tell them is that more than 50% of English comes straight from Latin. So I try to show them how understanding and appreciating the classics leads to a deeper understanding and seeing some connections in today’s world.
Notre Dame is a fantastic place to conduct these projects. Since I’ve been here, I’ve been meeting not only with people within my department, of course, but also with people in psychology, with people in neurosciences, with people in anthropology. It’s very accessible to meet up and talk about research, and very often, these conversations can spark an incredible amount of excitement and energy.
