- The promise of a liberal arts education has always been the insight offered to us by classic texts about the human experience.

Today's guests tell us the appeal is not limited just to traditional students in classrooms, but also students learned in environments as challenging as the American judicial system.

Our guests are Emily Ellen Hornblower, and Nafeesah Goldsmith, this week on Story in the Public Square.

(upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to Story in the Public Square, where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G.Wayne Miller with the Providence Journal.

- This week we're joined by two women with a sincere passion for the value of classic texts.

Emily Allen-Hornblower is an associate professor of classics at Rutgers University and the author of From Agent to Spectator, wouldn't have seen the aftermath in ancient Greek epic and tragedy.

And Nafeesah Goldsmith is CEO of RISE, which stands for real intervention supports excellence, a mission-based sustainability initiative that supports at-risk communities.

She's currently pursuing a degree in law.

Ladies, thank you so much for being with us.

- [Emily] Thank you for having us.

- So Emily, there's a lot that we wanna talk to you in this sort of exploration of the value of classic texts, but this is something that you've chosen to dedicate your life to study.

What drew you to the classics in the first place?

- I think what drew me to the classics was that in these ancient myths, and I'm thinking of Greek tragedies, which are 2,500 years old, Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey written down, put into writing, I should say in the eight century BC is a really old works and stories and they present us with characters that are not as squeaky clean Superman.

So when we're reading these stories about heroes who accomplish great things, but also make huge mistakes and costly ones, stories at foreground, fallibility and vulnerability showing that those who can do the best can also sometimes do the worst.

There's something so profound about that.

And not alienating, not demonizing, but humanizing.

And it's completely fascinating.

And I think also really essential.

And this comes across, for example, in the Elliot, it's a war between the Greeks and the Trojans, but the Trojans are not dehumanized, they are not demonized, they are not other, they are like the Greeks.

You come to love Hector, the way you love Achilles.

They love, they strive.

They fail, they die.

And the idea that a poem about a war and a great victory could end with the Trojan side lamenting, I think carries tremendous weight and something that we should certainly pay attention to in these very divisive times of not demonizing the other camp, because they have a different agenda.

- I don't want to say, how old were you, but how old were you when you came to appreciate classics?

Was this something that you were introduced to in high school, in college?

Where did that affinity begin?

- I was raised in France and I started Latin very early in sixth grade, I guess I was 10 years old and I loved the complexity of the language and the puzzle, but there's a saying that Latin marches and Greek dances and I just sort of feeling, I would love apologies to all the lattice.

I am a hellenist.

I had a feeling I would love Greek and I had a very Socratic figure in high school who taught intensive Greek.

He had lost a leg in a boating accident and he had a beard and he was in his wheelchair and all of us, this difficult, awkward teenager phase would just gravitate towards him and want to hear more about him and his stoicism, and also his love of these incredible texts.

So that was my entry into it and I never left.

- So Nafeesah, what drew you to the classics and maybe you can also relate whether it started in youth or more recently.

- I would say my attraction started in youth and it started with Clash of the Titans.

That was just amazing for me to see those characters.

And specifically the one that frightened me the most, which was Medusa.

I wanted to know more and so over time growing up, you pick up books and you're reading and you're taking yourself through those adventures.

And it wasn't until later on when I met Emily that she presented it to me and I'm like, wow, absolutely.

Like this is something that I've always been attracted to.

However, to be able to have conversations around, not just the texts but how it applies to just many different aspects of modern day life, it's just a necessary conversation to have.

And it's also quite healing.

- Were you in high school when that interest began or does it even predate high school?

- It predates high school.

I would say started around maybe six or seven when I saw that.

Yeah.

So.

- So how did you and Emily get to work together?

You come from different backgrounds obviously, but now you have a profound commonality.

How did that tell us that story?

And then maybe Emily, you can weigh in as well.

- [Emily] Go ahead Nefeesah.

- Well, I was a student at Rutgers.

I am a New Jersey step student and so that allows individuals who are formerly incarcerated to be able to earn their degrees through a consortium here of universities and the state.

And Emily was someone who not only taught inside, but she has this great passion for the classics.

And when she presented me with the opportunity to be able to have these discussions with her, it was like a no brainer, really, because this isn't an everyday topic, right?

People aren't going around and talking about Medea and heroically, then that's just not it.

But it really should be.

It's a space where we can allow everyday people to be able to understand the classics in a different way.

Picking up the text is a little more, I would say, complex versus having these discussions and being able to weigh in from different aspects, Emily being an academic and myself, being a student in life and lover of the classics and all things history.

So.

- Emily, I mean, so Nefeesah hinted at that there, you're a professor of classics at one of America's great public universities, but you also teach the classics in the New Jersey Prison System.

How did you come to find yourself working there?

- I heard about it serendipitously.

I was reading an article in the Rutgers Student Paper, written by a formerly incarcerated student who was part of the mountain view program that Nafeesah was a part of when she completed her BA, which enables students who have done some time on the inside to then complete their degrees at Rutgers.

And he talked about how his sister had put him through school.

He'd gotten his GED behind bars, and he was very passionate about his work at records and continuing.

And he also mentioned that he was still tutoring behind bars.

So I met with him, I wanted to hear more and I learned so much including about the program, New Jersey Step Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons.

And I realized that there was actually an opportunity to go in and teach full semester college courses behind bars.

And I went into, I've been doing it for six years now, and I've done it in two different men's prisons, medium and maximum security.

And we did some history and some literature and always some classics.

And let me tell you, back to what Nafeesah was saying, it should be a part of every conversation, not as a luxury, not as a polished liberal arts education.

The classics have been the purview of the happy few and the elites for far too long.

And they have this power to elicit crucial conversations about the humanity that we all share.

And this really becomes apparent when I go in and we talk about Greek tragedies and we discuss these heroes and the role of fate and the gods and extenuating circumstances, is that what it is or is it just a broader view of how profoundly vulnerable and fallible every human is?

There's a really deep implication in that that strikes my students on the outside.

And of course on the inside that if all of us are just one hair with the way from being hit by tragedy, by downfall, by loss, by tremendous mistakes, then surely we owe each other the ability to say that could be me at any moment.

And this is something that is actually brought out on stage in a play.

So Sophocles is Ajax.

At the beginning Ajax is second only to Achilles.

He rescued the corpse of Achilles from the battlefield when he was killed.

Did he get the armor?

No.

The leaders decided to give it to Odysseus.

So he goes into a rage.

He feels that he's being, his entire existence and meaning are being denied.

And he tries to kill the Greek leaders, Agamemnon and Menelause, and he tries to torture Odysseus.

So I think I've loved Odysseus, as you may well know.

Protects him, germs him and makes Ajax go mad and torture a bunch of animals instead.

And she invites Ajax to come and watch.

I'm sorry, she invites a Odysseus to come and walk with her.

Look, Ajax thinks he's torturing you, but I've blinded him with madness and now he's torturing animals.

And Odysseus instead of sort of grabbing the popcorn and joining in on the show says, I actually pity him.

Not in the condescending sense.

The entrants really use that in the mean of compassion as in suffering with.

He says that I see the power of the gods in human life, and that could be me.

And this is a message that I think grabs everyone.

And especially if you have an existence that is defined by being warehoused because of perhaps one moment in your life, when a wrong was taken, it resonates to a degree that is extremely powerful and contemporary, as Nafeesah was saying.

- So you found a very receptive audience behind bars, I'm guessing from what you just said and people who probably just hate this up and related to.

Talk about that.

I mean, it must've been eye opening for some people as well as for you.

- Exactly.

I think that that's crucial too, is that I am learning so much.

And I discovered so much in these plays when I go in and teach them.

And from those who are currently experiencing the devastating impact and dehumanizing impact of mass incarceration.

So the topics that come up and that come out of these plays are always new, always fresh and always burning issues.

So to give you an example, we've all just been through, and to some extent are continuing to go through an experience that is painful of isolation, of lack of human touch, lack of human contact, lack of human communication, the way we've known it for so long.

And so with COVID and everything that has come with it, we're experiencing to an infinitesimal degree that devastating human impact that being warehoused and set aside can have on an individual.

The Greeks have a play about that.

Sophocles is Philip TD's is about a hero traveling to Troy, the Greeks all go to Troy.

The face that launched a thousand ships.

And one of the men, while they stop over on an island, his name is Philip TD's, accidentally steps on a sacred serpent and gets wounded and he becomes loud and smelly and inconvenient and just bad for troop morale, I guess.

So they decided to just leave him there on the island, like a tool, you're no longer useful, there you go.

And then they find out that nine years into the Trojan war, they actually need him.

They find out from a prophet, to take Troy.

So there's a turn there where the one that was labeled as nothing and it's social pariah, turns out to be essential to the survival of the community.

There's so much there.

And it's a play that has the cast of only men.

But when I read it with Nafeesah, when we started doing these public conversations that we've been doing, bringing the classics to the broader audience, I said, does this play a about war and all about men resonate with you at all this, this lack of human touch.

And the answer was mind blowing and deeply moving.

- [Wayne] Nafeesah, could you speak to that?

- Well, absolutely.

When we have experienced that feeling of loss, those of us who grieve, and when we have experienced that feeling of, I don't anyone, it pales in comparison to being in prison and the people who were once your support system or the people who you once were so supportive of are no longer there for you.

It's like a phrase that's used amongst those of us who are incarcerated.

It's-- Excuse me.

(coughs) Sorry.

- [Wayne] That's okay.

- It's a feeling of being left for dead.

That feeling is not something that's easy to overcome because you start wondering, what did I do?

Or you begin to become bitter and angry, and you say, you know what?

I don't care, when in reality you really do.

And sometimes it takes a good look at yourself and your situation.

And when I think about Phillips TD's, I think about the smell, that stench and how for him, his focus was on that wound.

And it seems that the more he focused on the wound and how that wound was a result of him being where he was, it seemed that it was difficult for him to heal until there was someone who came, even though it was trickery, even though it was under the guise of something else, it started to make him feel like, you know what, maybe I can still become a part of what I once was, a part of that society, a part of that community that I felt like threw me away.

And now we begin to heal.

It really resonated with me because Philip TD's in myself, for me, the wound was having that stigma of being a convicted felon and constantly thinking about that.

It began to stink and it caused other people around you to not wanna be around you because no one wants to hear about you complaining about your condition.

It's only when you come to the realization that it doesn't have to stay this way.

I can still be a part of, I still have work.

I still have value.

And I see that just through that one particular piece.

Once he discovered that he still had value that's when things started to come together.

And just to go back on, what Emily said about Odysseus with him saying, I pity him, I can see the power of the gods and that could easily be me.

It makes me think about something that correction officers say often when they speak to individuals who are incarcerated and they'll say, it could have been me, or they'll say by the grace of God, there go I.

These are themes that they're constantly played out just in different ways and everyday life.

- Nafeesah, Emily talked about the dehumanizing conditions of incarceration and you endured those.

You endured even an extreme example of that, if I have this correct.

And that is, you were in solitary confinement for some period of time.

Do I have that correct.

And what was that like?

It seems beyond dehumanizing.

I have written about solitary confinement for the Providence Journal and the people who have experienced it, it's just horrible.

I don't know how else to explain it.

Talk about that if only briefly, 'cause that seems to be an important part of your road to where you are today too.

- As children, some of us were sent to our room when we were being chastised or disciplined and you're sent to your room.

But what if you lock that child in a room and you fed that child through a food port in the door, and you only allowed that child out to bathe maybe twice a week, you only let that child out to get sunlight, maybe three times during the week.

If the authorities knew that you were treating your child like this, you'd be in prison.

It's easy for society to throw away our members, especially when we feel as though they have wronged society, and to throw people away and then throw them away while they are in prison, which is to put them in solitary confinement and to lock them in a cell and to hardly feed them and then the food you feed them is totally inadequate.

You have some people who are in cells that don't even have running water.

It's tragic.

It is diabolical.

You cannot have a dog and take care of it the way that our society does individuals who are incarcerated, if you did, the humane society would be called.

How can we so easily throw away our citizens because we feel as though they've committed some sort of an offense.

And when we throw them away, we totally forget about them and we don't even consider the conditions in which they are living in.

I'll never forget what it was like to be behind those metal doors.

I can smell it.

I can taste the metallic taste of the water that comes out of that metal faucet.

I can just still hear the keys as they come down the corridor, the loud echo that you hear.

I can still hear the screens of people saying they want their medication.

People who have mental health issues and they're screaming, they need their medication.

I can still hear all of these things.

And this is something that I experienced in 2006.

- So much of this conversation in my mind makes me think of the word compassion.

And Emily, when we talked before taping, you used an expression, you talked about compassion as a civic duty.

I wonder if you could speak to that here now.

- The word compassion means suffering with, and it's not just, I think, a civic duty, but an imperative.

And this is something that comes out in many of the great tragedies that we've been discussing.

And Philip TD's, as we've said, the kind of utilitarian approach of using another human being like a tool destroys the fabric of society.

It destroys the individual and the community and everyone involved.

Discarding human beings like they are nothing the way Philip TD's is and the way Medea is, I'm gonna turn them a day in a moment, is degrading and dehumanizing for all involved.

And what happens when someone is put in a position where they are told that they have no words and they are discarded and they don't have a support network.

It's incredible that there's a play from 2,500 years ago written by a male, Euripides, the tragic playwright performed by men, mostly for an audience of men.

And yet several of these plays have a central female character, not a monstrous out of control, hysterical character, but in the case of Medea, everybody knows a story of Jason and the Argonauts.

Maybe you don't realize that Medea was a princess who helped him.

She had special powers to get the golden fleece and achieve her goals.

She did everything for Jason and then he brought her back to Greece.

They were married, they had small children, and then she became inconvenient.

He needed to marry the local princess.

So he effectively discards her.

And here's a play where instead of showing us a woman losing it and stigmatizing female anger, it lets you into the inner workings of her mind and you see her through those who are sympathetic to her.

And you see the process whereby she gradually comes to feel so powerless and unrecognized and discarded that she does the unspeakable, the self destructive end, the destructive.

Medea kills her children.

And Nafeesah and I talk about this so much because first off, there are some real life Medea's.

But second and more importantly, the question that this play goes right to the core of is, what happened to a human being?

How much did they suffer to get to that point?

Is she monstrous at that point or is she at her most human?

And the fact that the play shows that the rage, the uncontrollable rage that she gets to start with righteous indignation, and then alienation, really goes right to the core of what you can do to human beings when you put them in such a position where they have nothing to lose.

And effectively, perhaps lose their humanity.

Nafeesah what do you think, is Medea a monster in that moment?

What happens?

Why is that play so disturbing and provocative and also interesting in terms of putting forward women's condition?

You've talked about women behind bars, you've told me are there actually, because of men.

- [Jim] You've got about 30 seconds Nafeesah.

- Got you.

Medea is not a monster.

What we learned from listening to the chorus is that there is a gradual process of her going through the mourning of her relationship, the grief of her relationship, the feeling of being disrespected and inadequate, and not enough after she's given up everything, for the love of her life only to turn around and just be, once again, abandoned, thrown away.

She is not a monster.

She is a woman scorned and we have all heard, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

Now, the way she went about it, there's a lot to be said with that.

And like you said, there are modern day Medea's and each woman has a story.

It doesn't make her a monster.

Do we call men who commit the same acts monsters?

Or do we say, this is somebody who had enough and he snapped?

- That's a powerful, it's a powerful question.

And unfortunately it's where we need to leave you.

But I wanna thank you, Emily Ellen- Hornblower and Nafeesah Goldsmith for sharing these classic stories with us this week.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about Story in the Public Square, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org, we can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G.Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more Story in the Public Square.

(upbeat music)