Studies

The Pharos Monday Lectures for Spring 2026

Lecture 1: The Sound of Music in Ancient Greece

Lecture 2: Archimedes’ Eureka

Lecture 3. Catullus and his Lesbia

Lecture 4. Aspasia, Teacher of Socrates

It is sometimes thought that answers to big questions in classics are either known or beyond solution - questions such as what Greek music sounded like, or the true identity of Catullus’s Lesbia. In this series Prof Armand D'Angour will address four such questions and show that even today it’s possible to provide new and convincing answers to problems that many scholars had given up on.

Armand d'Angour is Professor of Classics and a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. His work has ranged across wide areas of Greek culture, especially music and lyric poetry. His works include Socrates in Love (Bloomsbury 2019) and How to Innovate: An Ancient Guide to Creative Thinking (Princeton 2021).

The Pharos Monday Lectures for Spring 2026

Lecture 1: The Sound of Music in Ancient Greece

Lecture 2: Archimedes’ Eureka

Lecture 3. Catullus and his Lesbia

Lecture 4. Aspasia, Teacher of Socrates

It is sometimes thought that answers to big questions in classics are either known or beyond solution - questions such as what Greek music sounded like, or the true identity of Catullus’s Lesbia. In this series Prof Armand D'Angour will address four such questions and show that even today it’s possible to provide new and convincing answers to problems that many scholars had given up on.

Armand d'Angour is Professor of Classics and a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. His work has ranged across wide areas of Greek culture, especially music and lyric poetry. His works include Socrates in Love (Bloomsbury 2019) and How to Innovate: An Ancient Guide to Creative Thinking (Princeton 2021).

Focusing on the works of Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida, these lectures present a tradition of philosophical ethics in France. This ethics does not concern what we should do. Ethics concerns responsibility in an extensive, immaterial sense: how can you be a person who takes responsibility beyond your immediate personal and social interests? We shall see how for Ricoeur this leads to a reflection on memory as a responsibility for the past and for Derrida it entails a conception of political utopia understood as responsibility for the unfulfilled hopes of history.