I ran over to Reamer at 5:32 on a Thursday afternoon, running a bit behind schedule as the fact that I had to attend a lecture for my Ancient World in Film & Lit class had slipped my mind. The lecture was the latest in a series dedicated to Christy Sorum, who worked as the chair of classics at Union in 1982 and passed away in 2005. This year’s lecture welcomed Dr. Dan Curley from Skidmore college. 

I found a seat in the middle-left hand side of the Reamer Auditorium and placed my things down, lucky to have not missed the start. Pulling out my laptop, I finally had a second to catch my breath and actually read the slide in front of me, seeing the words Icarus & Daedalus in Hamilton – Self-Invention, Self-Destruction. Suffice to say, I was glad to have not missed even a few minutes of what Dr. Curley had to say.

The lecture began with a recap of Hamilton, both the musical’s plot as well as the behind-the-scenes production of it, before offering a similar recap for the myth of Icarus. After sharing the foundational knowledge required to understand his argument, he jumped into an analysis of several songs in Hamilton, beginning with “Burn,” and later including “My Shot,” “Meet Me Inside,” and “Tomorrow There’ll Be More of Us,” among others. While these songs demonstrated several instances in Hamilton that reflect Icarus’ story of killing himself with his ambition, Curley also made the fascinating point that Hamilton isn’t only a mirror to Icarus—but also the boy’s father Daedalus.

Not all that familiar with the story myself, I was surprised to learn that several interpretations blame Daedalus’ pride rather than Icarus’ ambition as having caused his ultimate death. Perhaps, if Daedalus had been wiser than to entrust his child with operating machinery which could easily cost him his life, Icarus would have lived. Applying this to Hamilton, Curley claimed that when the titular Alexander Hamilton instructed his son Phillip to aim his pistol at the sky in his duel, he, much like Daedalus before, believed himself to be smart enough to keep his son safe.

There were so many fascinating ideas expressed in so little time, and I wanted to learn more about the way that Curley had developed the lecture, so I reached out with a few questions.

Firstly, I asked where this idea had come about. Curley shared:

“As soon as I heard Eliza make that Icarus reference in “Burn,” so somewhere around 2016, when I first began listening to the Broadway soundtrack in earnest… I have to credit a student in my 2017 classical mythology class, who decided they wanted to write an essay on this topic.”

Expanding on the actual process of lecturing at Union, he wrote:

“Skidmore and Union overlap in many ways, and I’ve visited the campus many times, so I had a good sense of my audience… I try to be generous when lecturing, knowing that Classics can be a niche area; that’s why I took the time to contextualize works like…  Metamorphoses — and to unpack the plot of Hamilton, since I knew there would be [some] who hadn’t engaged much with Miranda’s work… All of this is in the service of trying to make the talk worthwhile. I know that instructors offer incentives to attend, but I hope that even with these measures, the audience comes away having learned something they didn’t know before.”

Speaking personally, I can say with confidence that his goal was definitely accomplished with my experience of the lecture. However, he was correct to point out that an instructor of mine had required attendance for this lecture, and I wanted to know more of her thoughts as well. A few days passed and I went to Stacie Raucci’s office hours to chat about her thoughts. Speaking broadly about the lecture, she shared:

“What I really appreciated about the lecture besides its specific point about Icarus and Hamilton (because I do have an interest in Broadway shows), is the way Curley used it to think about classical reception more broadly, pushing us to think of it as a two-way street. I think too often there’s an assumption, especially for a classicist, to think that an analysis on this modern work should be focused on how it represents ancient texts, with said texts being the tools to explore this modern work. But that modern work can also help us look more deeply into those ancient texts. Professor Curley was doing that kind of work, and pushed us to think in that kind of way. So that for me is a real high point.”

I share a lot of her sentiments, but with one notable caveat. Speaking as someone who isn’t a classicist, I found that, while his ideas were on point, there wasn’t a ton of breathing room or expansive context on the classical works he cited throughout. I’m sure this was due to the format and time constraints of a lecture, but I left feeling like I just wanted a little more. A little more context, and a little more expansion on how Miranda and Ovid reflect one another in the real world, since there seemed to be more time spent on examining how their works of Hamilton and The Myth of Icarus mirror each other in text. However, Dr. Curley also shared that he’d be publishing the ideas of this lecture into a longer form of writing, and I’m sure I’ll be reading that the moment it comes out.