March 26 - 2026 L.H. Thomas Lecture

Join us on Thursday, March 26 at 4 p.m. in Tory B-87 for the 2026 L. H. Thomas Lecture. This year's lecture, "Lighting the Way: Hero and Leander Reappraised" will be given by Timothy Whitmarsh, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge University.

In the Renaissance, the ancient Greek romantic mini-epic Hero and Leander was dubbed ‘the incomparable love poem of the world’, and believed to be the oldest surviving Greek poem. Nowadays it is held to be among the latest surviving ancient epics, and its few modern readers have found it turgid and unbalanced. This paper argues that we have been reading it wrong: if we reposition it within the context of late antique interpretative systems, we can begin to appreciate what made it a classic.

Reception to follow.