Professor of Classics Hanna Roisman loves a good argument. Or, to be more specific, a good arguer. She enjoys jousting with ideas and admires the mental agility required to leap from position to position during a discussion, of, say, what makes a virtuous human being. "The ancients really knew how to argue," she said. "They saw persuasion almost as seduction." Roisman says she wants her students "not to see the world in black and white, but a great many shades of gray; to learn that there are no simple answers to questions and to problems in life." Classics education provides the means for exploring those problems, she says. "The classics will be important as long as humans struggle with their own humanity," Roisman said. "We have the same problems now that they did three thousand years ago. We're still trying to figure it all out." Trained to believe that details count, Roisman brings a variety of scholarly opinions to her classroom and helps her students analyze them. In upper-level classes students discuss these opinions, ferreting out weaknesses in the arguments and developing their own perspectives. But they can't reach that level of scholarship without first experiencing the emotional, human dimension of the works, Roisman says. "I don't see the ancient Greeks and Romans as frozen figures sitting there in the `thinking' position. When they went to a performance and didn't like something they threw food at the actors. They were arguing all the time. For me, those people are breathing. They are living," she said. "I like my students to get the same feeling of relevance and living emotion that I have for them. It is not just an intellectual exercise; I want the humanity to be part of it." Roisman's 1996 book, The Odyssey Re-formed (with Frederick Ahl, Cornell University Press), presents a sophisticated treatment of Homer to persons who cannot read the Homeric epics in the original ancient Greek, a book she says was needed because translations often do not adequately address the subtleties of the text. Although it is essentially a scholarly book, The Odessey Re-formed is aimed not just at scholars but also at a more general audience of "adventurous readers" who want a more enlightened view of Homer. The book has received good academic reviews and was favorably mentioned in a New Republic article on developments in Homeric scholarship. Roisman encourages her students to draw parallels between Greek mythic heroes and contemporary figures because, she says, the lessons of classical literature and mythology still resonate today. She may be the only classics professor around who includes the movie Star Wars in the syllabus. "When I first saw Star Wars in graduate school, Captain Solo reminded me of Odysseus," she said. "Odysseus has a very stubborn instinct to survive, and he overcomes his problems with resourcefulness. Solo also is a canny, resourceful fellow, and he gets out of impossible situations either due to luck or some basic guile. "Odysseus has no technology to get out of these situations, and Solo's technology is not impressive compared to the Empire; Chewie is all the time making repairs, and the two of them are kicking the ship and hitting it to finally make it go. I could go on forever with it." Yoda, Luke Skywalker's Jedi master, is similar to the educators from Greek myth, like Chiron, the centaur who taught Achilles, Roisman says. "What is important to see here is that both of these educators are outside of humanity and they have some kind of superior knowledge. They are wise and just," she said. Roisman's approach may be unorthodox, but her scholarship is not. Study of the classics remains primarily a matter of meticulously dissecting the ancient texts, she says. And that process is the source of many students' success in fields far from the Homeric province. "It teaches them the importance of not skipping steps," Roisman said. "It trains the mind to be precise and thorough." Classics students take the discipline of their discipline with them into their various careers. Their problem-solving skills make them good managers, diplomats and consultants, Roisman says. Classics students are coveted at law firms, too, because they excel at reading documents with a critical eye, she says. "[Classics] students know how to synthesize; they develop intellectual discrimination. They know how to develop an argument and how to support it." She makes a good case.