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Parties, Politics and Poetics
Classics come alive for college graduate student Eleanor Rust
By Eva Emerson
In the Doheny Library Humanities Reading Room, graduate student Eleanor
Rust scans the shelves of green and red cloth-covered books. This
collection of compact volumes, color-coded into red (for Latin texts by
ancient Romans) and green (Greek works), contains the canon of the
classics, the textual heart of scholarship into the language,
literature, history, art and culture of the ancient world.
A fourth-year doctoral student in classics at USC College, Rust reaches
for a single, compact red volume titled “Satyricon by Petronius.” In
Rust’s hands the book, written long ago in a tongue often referred to
as a “dead language,” brings antiquity to life.
One story describes a dinner party, Rust explains with the air of a
born teacher, hosted by a freed Roman slave who has become extremely
wealthy. The party’s extravagant food and spectacle, including live
birds escaping from one of the main courses, earns the host the
disapproval of the text’s hero.
The party, the narrator seems to be saying, is tacky.
“The narrator is defining ‘good taste,’ ” says Rust. “The narrator
labels the host Trimalchio as a crass social climber, a member of what
today we would call the nouveaux riche. This story is about the
anxieties of social class and class mobility—issues as relevant in our
world as they were in ancient Rome.”
Rust’s interest in classical languages began early. Her father, an
amateur classicist, began teaching her the Greek alphabet while she was
still a child. Her own appreciation for the classics began when she
read Ovid, the Roman poet, in college. Rust found a kindred spirit in
this writer, whose retelling of traditional myths, often from the
perspective of the heroine instead of the hero, were infused with humor
and even irreverence. She found them surprisingly modern.
Now, she sees that the ancient texts not only reflect the beginnings of
Western thought and literature, but also can inform the world in which
she lives today.
“Two thousand years ago, Rome had already become what today we would
call an urban landscape,” says Rust, who as an undergraduate at Indiana
University won eight academic scholarships, was named a member of Phi
Beta Kappa and graduated with highest distinctions in classics. “There
was a moment when I realized that the Romans were the first to deal
with issues similar to those we see in our modern urban culture.”
Recently, the U.S. Department of Education selected Rust to receive the
Jacob Javits Fellowship, a national award given to students of superior
academic ability and exceptional promise.
“Eleanor is exactly the kind of student who makes USC classics
special,” says Thomas Habinek, professor of classics and department
chair. “She has the technical skills of the traditional classicist, but
uses them to understand ancient culture more comprehensively. She is
both a scholar and an intellectual.”
In August, Rust took her last set of qualifying exams and has started
crafting a research project for her dissertation work. She is
considering focusing on the origins and customs of symposia and
convivia. In ancient Greece and Rome, these were terms for “drinking
parties” where elite young men were informally mentored by older men in
public speaking, poetics, philosophy, politics and, Rust says, how to
drink properly.
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