This reflective essay responds to current redundancies in the sector of Classics teaching. tristia ex Dorcestria recounts the author’s near-miss experience of redundancy and considers the place of Classical subjects in the twenty-first-century curriculum. Written from the intersectional perspective of a Classics teacher, researcher and poet, the piece discusses the composition of the award-winning poem Manifesto, recipient of the Classical Association’s 2025 Write–Speak–Design Prize, and explores how creative practice became a means of transforming professional loss into pedagogical insight. Drawing on the metaphor of Ovidian exile, the essay situates one teacher’s story within a broader context of national uncertainty about the value and future of Classics. The essay demonstrates that creative practice can function both as personal catharsis and as a mode of critical reflection, enabling educators to reimagine their role and reconnect with the emotional and ethical dimensions of ancient study. The accompanying poem models how teachers might use creative responses to engage students with questions of power, justice, and identity, and to affirm the continuing relevance of the ancient world in addressing modern crises, not least those relating to war and violence, marginalisation, and democracy.

This article focuses on the last moments of Le Sacre du printemps, which opened in Paris on 29 May 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Concentrating on the discourse of the creative practice that brought these moments into being, it seeks to add to our understanding of Le Sacre from the evidence of those most intimately involved with this first production. Analysis of Le Sacre demonstrates the equal viability of a great variety of readings of the work. Such readings are enabled by analysis, which regards any aspect of a creative work and its best interpretation as happily unfixed and unstable. It has sometimes been accepted that the job of critics and theorists is to fix interpretations of creative works and to demonstrate conveniently closed theses about them. Creative artists are not always willing to join their critical colleagues. This was certainly the case with Le Sacre. By reading the final seven seconds of its Danse sacrale through the accounts of the work’s primary creators – composer Igor Stravinsky, designer Nicholas Roerich, and their creative intimates – this article highlights an engrossing instability of intention and interpretation. It questions the idea that Le Sacre is a sacrificial ritual in the light of how Stravinsky himself considered his work in terms of coronation and consecration.