Kyle Gervais
Thinking About the Ancient World Today
By Busra Copuroglu
What got Kyle Gervais, Associate Professor in the Department of Classical Studies, interested in Classics? Believe it or not, it was a Latin course he took as an undergraduate student in biology. “First, I thought I would be a dentist, then a doctor, then an environmental biologist,” he said. Then he landed on Classics. “I think people get into ancient languages because they seem cool – this secret language that you and a few of your friends know how to speak. My excuse was I thought [it] would be good for med school!” he added.
Gervais has been teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in the Classics department at Western since 2014. His courses draw students from a wide range of disciplines. His Latin and Greek courses, in particular, attract students from STEM fields. Like Gervais himself once did as an undergraduate student in biology, these students come to his classes thinking Latin and Greek elements in English will help them with the technical vocabulary in their field. “So many medical terms are drawn from Greek and Latin,” Gervais said. “If you learn the stems that come from Latin, then you can find an unfamiliar word and figure out what that means just by looking at it -- words like otology, lithotripsy or lucifugus, for instance” he explained. However, Gervais’s approach to teaching languages is not about making the students do the tedious work of memorizing words and stems; students also learn about how some of the colloquial, daily expressions, such as “YOLO” and “it’s complicated,” we use today were expressed in the ancient world. “Learning a new language opens up a whole new aspect of the world that you wouldn’t be exposed to. I think with ancient languages all the more so because … it’s giving you a window into this world that is so far removed from us in time and space,” he said.
In 2022, Gervais also used his expertise working as a Latin language consultant for the comic book series Eternus, created by Andy Serkis and Andrew Levitas for Scout Comics. The series is inspired by myths and takes place 30 years after the murder of Zeus. A comic book fan himself, the project came to Gervais through Kelly Olson, a Classics professor at Western who was consulting on the costumes for the series. Gervais looked at the mythological aspects of the story and corrected some of the Latin that was already in the story. In addition to these corrections, Gervais also had the opportunity to be a part of the creative process and made suggestions to add Latin to the story. “I would read one scene and it would remind me of some scene from Ovid or Virgil or Roman Comedy and I would say here is some Latin that would sound pretty cool here,” he said.
Popular Culture, and the Uses and Abuses of the Ancient World
In his teaching and research Gervais frequently asks, how we, today, respond to the ancient world and its literature. In his classes, students do not merely learn the meaning of the words; Gervais also asks them to reflect on what these words tell us about the social fabric of the ancient world. Learning the language, for Gervais, thus becomes a way to access culture in an intimate way. “You can spend half a class on individual words. The word virtue, for instance.
The whole concept of virtue in ancient Rome was about manliness — the Latin word virtus was derived from their word for “man”, vir — so what does it tell us about [the perceptions of] gender in the Classical World?” he explained. “Getting inside a language gives you access to their thought process in a way that is hard to replicate in other ways,” he added.
Gervais’s approach to the reception of the Classical world today has long been a focus of one of the more popular courses at Western. His Classics and Pop Culture course explores how Western pop culture in the 20th and 21st centuries has adapted and appropriated topics and themes from ancient Greece and Rome. The class draws from a wide range of aesthetic mediums, from texts and mythological figures in Classics to popular TV shows and movies like RuPaul’s Drag Race, Star Trek, Hunger Games series, comic books and music. In the course, students get the opportunity to do creative projects, such as recreating ancient dresses, as well as writing more traditional critical essays.
Aside from the artistic influences on pop culture, Gervais’s course also looks at the politics of the reception of
the Classical world. For example, a couple of years ago, Gervais included a section “Classics in the age of Donald Trump” to look at how the Classical world has been used and abused in the modern world to advance “racist, sexist, and other harmful discourses.” “One of the challenges in classics is this long tradition of thinking of the ancient world as a source of wisdom that we should learn from and imitate ... because [this is how] generations of European philosophers approached the Classics,” Gervais remarked. Gervais believes that it’s the job of the scholar to understand and show the complexity of this world with a critical distance: “There are certainly things that ancient authors say that are very wise and worthy of imitation -- like too much anger is dangerous and having self-control is good, supporting those you love is important. But they also say things like ‘women belong in the kitchen.’ But that’s what they said, so why are we saying that that’s worthy of imitation? It's understanding the differences between our culture and their culture,” he explained.
Gervais also points out that it is important to note the privileged positions of the authors of these texts. “Almost all of the literature that survives from the ancient world is written by elite men,” he said. “So [we] should also talk about the challenges of understanding the full complexity of the ancient world when all the sources are from this small group of the privileged world. You could do a small exercise: what would a woman reading this would think? What would a slave think? You can try to show all the complexities that are easy to forget,” he remarked.
Violence in the Ancient World
One of the main focuses of Gervais’s research is the concept of violence in the ancient world. “The Roman world was particularly violent – it wasn’t a well-ordered society -- [and] people would see [violence] as a form of entertainment -- most famously gladiatorial games, for instance,” Gervais said. But violence was also ingrained in the social fabric of the society: “[Violence] was also an expression of dominance over less powerful groups. The Roman world was hierarchical in all sorts of ways. [There was] violence against women [and the violence] of slave-owning people,” he added.
One of Gervais’s current projects explores violence in book 12 of the “fantastically dark” poem Thebaid, written by the Roman poet Statius. The poem depicts a civil war, the fight between the sons of Oedipus for their father’s throne. Gervais first started to think about this project when he published a book chapter in which he compared violence in Thebaid with the films of Quentin Tarantino. Violence, Gervais believes, is often used to manipulate the emotions of the audience. “[Tarantino] is so effective in portraying violence in an interesting, fun way but also in a shocking way to manipulate his audience’s emotions and I think these ancient texts are doing the same,” he explained.
Democratization of the Field and Digital Humanities
Gervais is also invested in the methodologies of research in the field of Classics. Though travelling around the world, visiting the archives where the ancient manuscripts are stored bring the element of wonder to the process, Gervais believes that the digital humanities democratize the process of research: “Before, you needed to have the resources to travel to see these manuscripts in person or the money to pay for expensive copies, but now a lot of important material is freely available online,” he noted.
Another advantage of the digital humanities, for Gervais, is that they help scholars widen the scope of their research. “[Digital tools] let you ask questions that you wouldn’t be able to ask,” he said. In terms of intertextuality, for instance, these tools help recognize the patterns in a way that wasn’t available before: “Ancient authors tell their stories by imitating or adapting previous works. In a lot of that process, you can see there are similarities between one text and another. There are tools that you can use to search for those similarities. And this lets us significantly expand our list of potential links between texts, compared to traditional methods of hunting for verbal similarities with human labour,” Gervais explained.
The use of digital tools is not without challenges, however. “It can also spit back massive data, so you need to sort through that. [When you] hunt for textual similarities you can get thousands of them,” Gervais remarked. “The algorithm defines these similarities, but the computer doesn’t think the way humans think – I think more deeply about what counts as a meaningful similarity between texts,” he added.
Currently, Gervais is using the capacities of digital tools for a literature review project on the marginalized works of Lucan and Flavian poets of ancient Rome, which he is co-authoring with Western Classics Professor Randall Pogorzelski for the new series of Brill Research Perspectives in Classical Poetry. Pogorzelski and Gervais look at the trends in scholarship that led these works to be marginalized. Thanks to the rise in digital tools, Gervais said, “we can now think about [these texts] intertextually [and] ask, what are trends in the scholarship and how do these trends happen?”
New Course on Medieval Manuscripts
More recently, thanks to the digitized collections of libraries in Europe, Gervais completed a book project during the pandemic, working on the manuscripts of a thirteenth-century poem 
Integumenta Ovidii (“Allegories on Ovid”) by John of Garland. Providing comprehensive explanatory notes for the first time in 90 years, Gervais edited and translated the text to help readers to understand John’s allegories in their medieval context. Looking at the scanned copies, and handwriting of the scribes, and sometimes dwelling on one word for hours, Gervais reconstructed the text from the original manuscript. Working on this project inspired Gervais to take up a Medieval Studies course on medieval manuscripts, which will be offered in 2023-2024. For this course, along with the digitized collections of libraries around the world, the students will also get the chance to work with manuscripts pages in Western Libraries’ rare books collection and hopefully discover some of the wonders of the ancient world.
About our Contributor
Busra Copuroglu is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature with a background in French Studies. Her current doctoral dissertation, in progress, is about literary depictions of boredom and complaint from the late nineteenth century to the present.
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