The Classics Department were honoured to welcome Professor Matthew Leigh, Fellow and Tutor of Classical Languages at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, for what proved to be an invaluable lecture on Virgil’s Aeneid. For the GCSE and A-level Classicists present, the talk provided the opportunity for sensitive and detailed analysis of sections of Virgil’s poem, namely Books 4 and 6, as well as a wider contextualisation of the historical and political backdrop to the epic. Dr Leigh’s passion for the text developed the students’ own heightened appreciation of the Aeneid, and his lecture facilitated both humour and bases for serious discussion, not least as he prompted those attending to envisage the respective dating profiles of the epic’s characters! We are all immensely grateful to have been given the occasion to engage with the text in a manner which bridged university and secondary school style teaching, and thank Dr Leigh for his time.
