Creative Involvement with the Texts: Bernhard Goetz and the Ancient Historians

In the words of the famous Molly Malone, what any teacher wants is for the classics to be "alive alive-o." The question is: how? I hope Plato and Aeschylus, Catullus and Tacitus, will not be insulted by my posing the question. They are undoubtedly alive to us, who have devoted ourselves to reading the classics in the original. But for students new to the classics, able to approach them only in translation or wrestling with basic problems of language, the question does exist: how to make their experience of the classical texts a living one.