Friday 15 January 2021

Among the Ciceronians in December 2019


My work building up activities for autistic children involving classical myth has taken me down unexpected paths. One of these has been a Ciceronian one above all when, in late 2019, I spent several days in Warsaw immersed in discussions about Cicero and his writings on education in the midst of Ciceronian scholars from around the globe at the congress Cicero, Society and the Idea of Artes Liberales

A volume of papers from this event has recently been published and it is pleasure to include a link to the preface by Prof. Katarzyna Marciniak which includes comments about my project and how it is being informed by Cicero's discussion of the difficult choices children can experience when on the cusp of adulthood in the De officiis. These comments are on the fourth and five pages of the pdf - pp. 264-5.

The image at the head of this current posting shows the assembled delegates. I'm the one holding the 2019 poster.

I have reflected previously on Cicero including here when I was about to leave for Warsaw and here soon after my return to the UK. My plans for 2021 and beyond include further explorations around how Cicero might 'speak' to what it is to experience the world in an autistic way...