Why classical myth and autism?

Why classical myth and autism?

The idea for this project started to take shape at a meeting in 2008 with a special needs teacher, who mentioned that, in her experience and those of her colleagues, autistic children often enjoy classical myth. I began to wonder why this might be the case, and whether – as a classicist who researches, and loves, classical myth – there was anything I could contribute. I started this blog to report on my progress which was often sporadic until the launch of the Warsaw-based European Research Council-funded project Our Mythical Childhood (2016-22) to trace the role of classics in children’s culture.

My key contribution to the project is an exploration of classics in autistic children’s culture, above all by producing myth-themed activities for autistic children. This blog shares my progress, often along Herculean paths, including to a book of lessons for autistic children focusing on the Choice of Hercules between two very different paths in life. The image above, illustrating the homepage of this blog, is one of the drawings by Steve K. Simons, the book's illustrator, of a chimneypiece panel in a neoclassical villa at Roehampton in South West London. The lessons centre on this panel.

Tuesday 10 December 2019

Hope 12 - Ciceronian thoughts on the Choice of Hercules ahead of a Congress in Warsaw informed a little by Binary Computation

When I last blogged at the end of last week, my session at the British Museum about Hercules and his choices was about to take place. This has now happened. I had some unexpectedly useful feedback, including from one of the participants who raised the potential of considering Hercules' Choice in the context of Computer Science and binary computation. I’ll say more about this as soon as I’m ready to get my head around this wonderfully unpredicted possible new path.

Tomorrow I’m off to Warsaw to take part in a congress on something that is more within my disciplinary comfort zone – it’s on a Roman rather than an ancient Greek topic. But that topic is Cicero, one of the few ancient authors who wrote about the Choice of Hercules. The key thing I will be doing is making a presentation during a session led by Katarzyna Marciniak. This sesson will be setting out work underway by members of The Cluster for the Past and the Present and the Our Mythical Childhood project. The presentation I shall make will be on the Choice of Hercules. The exact content is a surprise, so I’ll keep that a secret for now. Instead, I’ll say a few things here about Cicero’s take on the Choice of Hercules, as I will refer to this during my presentation.

Cicero raises the Choice of Hercules in the de officiis, a treatise concerned with how best to live and behave including where a conflict emerges between different obligations. Referring to the time when a youth, i.e. a male youth…, will need to decide which calling in life to take up, Cicero says that this is is ‘the most difficult problem in the world.’ For:

it is in the years of early youth, when our judgment is most immature, that each of us decides that his calling in life shall be that to which he has taken a special liking. And thus he becomes engaged in some particular calling and career in life, before he is fit to decide intelligently what is best for him. For we cannot all have the experience of Hercules (1.117-18, W. Miller Loeb tr.).
Cicero’s Hercules, then, is faced with a simple choice – between hardship that would bring great eventual rewards, and a life of pleasure. But it is always so simple for Hercules? Or perhaps I should put it like this: the choice might be simple. But does Hercules ever commit himself? He does… and he does not… And it is this lack of clarity in terms of the outcome that makes the episode so full of potential, as a talking point and as an opportunity for reflecting on moral positions and about dilemmas one might face in life. Making choices can be difficult for anyone. It is possible to feel caught in indecision. Looked at one way, the choice involves a clear decision between two things as opposed as Virtue and Vice, where the heroic career is reduced to a choice between things as extreme as they come, with none of the ambiguities that often accompany a choice in life. Or there is complexity (Computer Science, I’ve learnt since Saturday, is likewise moving beyond binary thinking – I’m itching to discuss this with the participant I mentioned above…).

It is not clear how to read the episode and how to determine what choice the hero made. It is this simultaneous simplicity and complexity that I shall be drawing on in my resources for autistic children. The episode offers potential for getting any user to reflect on a choice in life, and to think about different possibilities and what the implications of these possibilities could be including around where they fit in the world, between themselves and others. Meanwhile, it is this simplicity of Hercules' choice – the very thing that distinguishes Hercules’s choice from that of other young people according to Cicero – that counts as one of the reasons why the story has so much potential for use with autistic children. This is because it can enable children to think about moral dilemmas and to think about contrary ways to respond to making a decision in life. By doing this, the children for whom I'll be creating the resources will have the opportunity to engage in a process that has engaged others as well, including those for whom the particular representation of the choice was likely created.

I’ll come back to this on my return from Warsaw. Plus, I’m looking forward to learning from the assembled Ciceronian expects, which include my Roehampton colleague Kathryn Tempest. What I discover might well impact on my appreciation of the use of the Hercules example in the de officiis, especially as a strong focus of the conference will be Cicero’s vision of education.

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