A personal reflection on language and lifelong learning

By Alexander Pieroni

Ἀσσυρίου ποταμοῖο μέγας ῥόος, ἀλλὰ τὰ πολλὰ

λύματα γῆς καὶ πολλὸν ἐφ᾽ ὕδατι συρφετὸν ἕλκει.

Δηοῖ δ᾽ οὐκ ἀπὸ παντὸς ὕδωρ φορέουσι Μέλισσαι,

ἀλλ᾽ ἥτις καθαρή τε καὶ ἀχράαντος ἀνέρπει

πίδακος ἐξ ἱερῆς ὀλίγη λιβὰς ἄκρον ἄωτον.

Callimachus, Hymn to Apollo, 108-112

The Assyrian river rolls with a mighty flood—but it carries with it the filth of the land, and drags along a torrent of mud.

The bees do not fetch their water for Demeter from just any stream, but from a pure, untainted spring—a thin trickle drawn from a sacred source, the finest drop.

Translation by Alexander Pieroni

It’s tempting to frame an academic journey as a straight line. A path with a clear end, a tidy reason. But that was never how I approached Classics.

I declared a Classical Languages major because I was curious—and because I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t follow that curiosity. I wasn’t thinking about jobs, outcomes, or career ladders. I was thinking about how to build a life that's worth living.

In the short term, my goals were deceptively simple. I wanted to learn to read Latin and Greek to a level where the texts felt alive, rather than mechanical. I wanted to open Homer, Horace, or Plato and hear the voice underneath, without needing someone else to translate it for me. Long term, I didn’t know exactly where I was headed. But I knew the kind of person I wanted to become: someone who could walk into any intellectual arena—technology, education, business—and think with the depth, resilience, and clarity that Classics demands.

I entered Duke trying to balance STEM and the humanities, unsure how it would all fit together. I was considering neuroscience, linguistics, maybe even computer science. I worried about “falling behind” in more marketable fields. I worried that staying up late arguing about Homeric similes would somehow trap me outside of the “real world.” But underneath that noise, there was something quieter and much harder to ignore: the subjects that made me want to stay up late reading, writing, questioning. The subjects that made the questions feel bigger, not smaller.

From my first semester at Duke onward, Classics became the axis around which everything else revolved, with most semesters involving 2–3 courses taken concurrently. I dove into Propertius, Ovid, Lucretius, Tibullus. I tackled Horace, who terrified me at first, and found in him a hard-earned clarity that still echoes every spring when the cherry blossoms bloom (Odes 1.4).

I wandered through the sharp, compact epigrams of Callimachus, the aching pastoral worlds of Theocritus and Bion, the fantastical, laughing narratives of Lucian. I learned that even absurdity can carry its gravity: that a Cyclops in love could woo Galatea by calling her “finer than cheese” (Theocritus, Idyll 11), and that a Cheese Island could exist among Lucian’s stars without making the journey any less meaningful. I confronted Medea’s raw grief and Helen’s fractured illusions. I got just the right amount of drunk reading Plato’s Symposium, realizing that philosophy wasn’t about finding final answers—it was about staying in the space where longing sticks around.

Reading Greek and Latin stopped feeling like a slog toward correctness. It became a daily exercise in attention: in listening without forcing. Somewhere along the way, I realized why I’ve always fallen back into Homer over Vergil, a debate I have a hard time explaining to anyone who hasn’t lived inside the texts. It was never about tradition or ranking. It was about the voice underneath the repetition—the ache that no formula could smooth over. Reading Homeric Greek without fear—without constantly highlighting, color-coding, second-guessing—let me see it. With Homer, I stopped trying to master the text and started living inside it. I could feel the weight of grief that refuses neat resolution, the kind that Vergil, for all his brilliance, could only echo. Homer made me a freer reader, and a better one.

At Duke, I did more than learn to read Latin and Greek; I’d argue, more importantly, I learned to argue with care. To recognize when a scholar’s conclusion misses the gravity of a line. To trust my own scribbled manuscript. To acknowledge that learning wasn’t about accumulating knowledge—it was about standing in the arena where the questions didn’t resolve easily, and staying.

It wasn’t long before that same itch followed me into the dirt. During my freshman summer at Vulci, I learned firsthand that archaeology isn’t about flashes of discovery—it’s one of the best professors of patience. Under the sun, kneeling in the dust, I realized that real insight demands a willingness to sit with uncertainty long after the excitement fades. I became a better archaeologist not because I always knew what I was doing, but because I never hesitated to ask a dumb question.

Building photogrammetric VR models of those tombs years later for Duke’s Digital Archaeology Lab—and seeing them displayed at ISAW’s “Rethinking Etruria” a few weeks after I graduate—feels like closing a loop that first opened when I dreamed, as a kid, of growing up to be Indiana Jones. Not stealing artifacts, but preserving memory. A life moving between physical history, language, and new technology—but always anchored by slow, careful thinking.

Somewhere between the Wiktionary pages, digging, reading, revising, and re-reading, I began to understand that I wasn’t just studying the past. I was living out one of the oldest instructions, γνῶθι σεαυτόν, as a stubborn, daily act. Socrates began by admitting he knew nothing. Plato looked outward, seeing the soul reflected in the structure of the cosmos. Kierkegaard turned inward, daring to leap even when the ground was unclear. It was never about where I would land—or if I would land at all. It was about having the courage to move anyway, to meet uncertainty head-on.

There were setbacks, too. Coming back to Ancient Greek after three years away felt like rebuilding a house without blueprints. I almost backed down, convinced I wasn’t “one of those people.” The drills, the parsing, the long, lonely hours with dictionaries—they wore me down. I’m glad I stayed—not because it ever got easy, but because somewhere in the middle of that slow grind, it started to matter differently. It was the joy of Professor González walking through Aesop’s fables with me on Saturday mornings at Cloche Coffee. It was realizing that the work was never about getting every principal part right. It was about becoming the kind of person who kept building, even when you can’t see where you’re headed.

In my senior year, life taught that lesson again in sharper ways. An ACL injury forced everything to stop: no rehearsals, no work shifts, no steady rhythm of progress. For the first time, I couldn’t move forward by sheer effort. I thought productivity would comfort me. It didn’t.

What steadied me was grief, not my own at first, but Achilles’. Rereading the Iliad, I stopped clinging to the battles. I noticed the silences: Achilles cradling Patroclus’ body; Priam kneeling before the man who killed his son. In Book 24, Homer doesn’t resolve grief. He doesn’t offer catharsis. He simply shows two broken men sharing it, wordlessly. No dictionary will ever help me translate that—and honestly, I don’t want one.

Other texts spoke the same silence. Sappho’s fragments (Fragment 31) showed me that absence isn’t failure—it’s part of being human. Euripides’ Helen reminded me that even illusions can be acts of hope. Plato’s Symposium revealed that striving toward something we may never fully grasp isn’t a weakness; it’s a form of love. Every text kept teaching the same lesson, in a different dialect, meter, or tongue: incompleteness was never something to fix. It’s something to live with. And slowly—stubbornly—I’m learning to live with it too.