Hi, my name is Ahuvia Kahane, 
I’m Professor of Greek here in Trinity College Dublin
and I’m also your instructor for the Module
‘Ancient Culture Lab: Homer’s Experience and the Greek Language’.
Well… you probably heard the phrase, ‘It’s all Greek to me!’. 
And it is true, ancient Greek is often thought of as one of the most distant, the most arcane, and frankly, the most ‘dead’ of languages...
And Homer – well he’s an oldie, a real oldie. And so the question comes up, 
‘Why Homer? Why ancient Greek?’ ‘Why should we do it?’ 
The truth of it is that, love it or hate it, ancient Greek and ancient Greek culture and its values are in our blood; 
they’re part of our cultural and linguistic DNA, part of our ancestry. 
If we just speak English as we do today and, say, talk about ‘democracy’, demo-kratia, that’s a Greek word:‘the rule of the people’. 
We talk about ‘politics’ that comes from the Greek word ‘polis’ the city, the commonwealth, where the Greeks met each other and interacted ‘politically’. 
If we speak about history ‘historia’, that’s the name Herodotus gave to his enquiries, his attempt to describe the events of the past in words, Greek words of course.
If we speak about philosophy ‘philosophia’, the ‘love of wisdom’, or poetry ‘poesis’…these are all Greek words and the truth of it is that, love it or hate it,
we are all today living speakers of ancient Greek. 
Now, that’s not to say that we should simply 
follow the past or accept its authority. 
Quite the contrary, we often rebel against it. 
Time and history itself would not exist without change. 
But that’s simply to say that we are often in animated dialogue with the past. 
If we want to know who we were, or perhaps who we were not; 
if we want to know who we are or who we are not – 
we’re not all chest-thumping Homeric heroes and we don’t want to be; 
more importantly, if we want to know who we might be in the future, 
what we want to be in the future; 
if we want to engage with the many burning issues that trouble and 
concern us today around the world,
living issues then we need to explore our DNA, 
our cultural DNA, our linguistic DNA, who we were. 
living issues then we need to explore our DNA, our cultural DNA, 
our linguistic DNA, who we were. 
And ancient Greek culture, and ancient Greek language, and Homer, 
no matter how we judge them and their values
 – and judge we must always, never simply accept – these are elements in our universe, in our cultural universe, in our world, in the world of our thought. 
These elements I promise you, will form part of our experiments in 
‘Ancient Culture Lab’. 
Come and see the sparks fly.
