A Don’s Life

Control of Our Own Borders?

 

I shall be voting "stay" in the EU referendum (it sounds more punchy than "remain"). I don't much like the arguments of fear on either side; neither has a monopoly on that, despite the rather desperate cat calls. And I wish that those leading the "in " campaign would lay out more of an ideological mission statement. Haven't they learned from the Scottish referendum that those arguing for the status quo run the real risk of losing unless they have a messianic rallying cry too?

Part of my reason is gut. Over the last few decades, the truth is that I really have begun to internalise a dual identity: I feel BOTH British AND European, and I dont see any real clash between them (that's a bit like the Roman model, I guess -- so far as we can tell, most citizens in the Roman world felt they 'belonged' both to Rome and to wherever it was they came from. That's not to say that I don't see problems with the EU. I'm as dissatisfied as anyone with the "democratic deficit". I don't like the voting system for the European parliament. And I dont think that it is entirely my fault that I dont know who my MEP/S is/are. That said, it feels like these are problems that I have to "own" and that I have a responsibility to do something about from the inside. It's a bit like saying that I wouldn't decide to emigrate to (say) New Zealand because I didnt like the UK's defence policy and austerity regime; I'd stay here and try to do something about it.

I also have real problems with many of the main planks of the "out" campaign, especially the mantra about controlling our own borders.

The Wrong Caesars

 

I hinted a couple of posts ago that I was planning to visit Anglesey Abbey over Easter. I was on the trail of a set of four Caesars, paintings (done in the seventeeth or eighteenth century?) based on some engravings of emperors by Antonio Tempesta. That is Claudius above, in the painting. And below, it's him in the Tempesta engraving. Obvious.

A paperback and a medal

I have a big few days coming up. First the paperback edition of SPQR comes out, technically on 1 April. This isn't quite like the experience of the appearance of the first hardback edition. If that is like giving birth, this is more like celebrating the child's first birthday. We're going out to dinner to mark the occasion -- and I'm also talking at an LRB event at the Senate House in London on the 1st (which I think is all sold out), and doing a few radio interviews. The pleasure really is that the book meets a new audience. There have been some very good deals on the hardback (which is a really lovely product, all writing apart). But the paperback is going to be widely available for under £7.50, and in handy "shove it in your suitcase" form. So that is something to be pleased about.

Perhaps even more to be chuffed about is that on 5 April, I am going to be talking in Oxford and receiving 'The Bodley Medal" (that's one side above, the other below).

The Easter hols

Leaving all the religious aspects aside, Easter is a very different kind of public holiday from Christmas. For a start it's a movable feast, and despite all the commonsensical reasons for fixing it, I would rather like it to stay that way, for the sheer variety. Sometimes, like this year, it feels like Easter is still in winter; other times, it happens when May is already in sight. But it also amounts to two bank holidays that still have a bit of a ritual and fitting music on the radio (unlike what happens in August) but are nevertheless very low maintenance.

When the kids were young, the biggest activity was the Easter egg hunt which usually happened in the large garden of my friend Sue Benson, who had a skill in hiding the eggs in places that would seem challenging even to a twelve year old (jammed into the bark of inconveniently high tree branches, for example -- when the kids always thought they should be looking on the ground). The combined hunt and consumption (stopping if you were lucky just this side of vomitting) gave the grown-ups a good two hours of peaceful drinking.

Now, short of importing some surrogate grandchildren (no thanks), there is just one traditional meal to be cooked: the leg of lamb on Sunday, a 'sudden death' meal in the sense that you dont need to have been making some of the key elements (like the Christmas pud) for weeks: an in-and-out of the oven job, which you hope comes out with enough bits of red for those that like their lamb bloody, and brown for those with a partiality to the well cooked.

What this means is four days in which you are at liberty to do "something else".

The problems of being called Beard

I have never much bothered about having the surname "Beard". In fact, there are considerable advantages -- like being near the start of the alphabet, and being easy to spell. And when it comes to jokes, they are for the most part pretty anodyne/juvenile. "Ho ho, the bearded lady.." etc, or the not hugely imaginative insertion of a beard onto a picture of yours truly. In short I can think of worse names to have.

But I have come across an extra little problem.

Who's buying the Wedgwood?

My project on images of Roman emperors (modern-style) is not going to be exclusively concerned with palaces and princes, with Mantegna's Triumphs and pricey sets of marble busts lining grand corridors. I am also trying to see how Roman imperial images entered the visual world of far more "ordinary" people.  And one obvious category to explore are the small Wedgwood portrait medallions that come, like the one above, in black basalt ware, but also in characteristic Wedgwood blue. They are just a few centimetres tall.

I am only just beginning on this (and I know that a visit to the Wedgwood Museum and Archive is going to be a must), but I am beginning to get a sense of the questions. There has been some work done on these portrait medallions in general, but not a huge amount (if you think I am missing something big, do let me know). There are a whole range of them, from 256 popes (not a huge commercial success....unsurprisingly?) through kings, queens, philosophers and playwrights, to 78 Roman emperors and empresses (this wasn't just the 12 Caesars). And there was an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in the early 1970s. Some of the questions I want to raise, usually asked and not asked, are coming into focus.

Living with a Museum

 

One day someone will write about how (for some of us!) 20th and 21st century lives interacted with museums.I have lived for more the 40 years a 20 minute bike-ride from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and in many ways it marks my life. It has not always been a smooth or easy ride, and I guess that there has been in some ways a bit of a stand off been me and the museum; but we end up very, very firm friends.

My first real memory goes back to 1973 when I was in my first year reading Classics. Our first 'Art and Archaeology' supervision was with the then curator of Antiquities in the museum, Dick Nicholls. He had put a group of miscellaneous classical objects in a case in the public gallery, which we -- as first years -- had to identify within a week (my discovery of Nicholls's own catalogue of classical sculpture in the Fitz helped, I confess). A decade or so later, when I had young kids, the family had a bit of a run in with the then director, who said that it was impossible to bring buggies into the museum (in case they bashed the precious furniture). And at about the same time (this is back in the 80s) I had a few troubles with the then archivist who didnt want me to see the records of museum purchases in the late 19th century (for reaons of commercial confidentiality, believe it or not).

I could go on and on. But almost all of these inciidents have ended with a happy outcome (Michael Jaffée didnt give in on the buggy, but the next director, Simon Jervis, let me loose in the archive). And I have lived happily with the Fitzwilliam ever since, almost as part of me. I'll go to my grave with Fitz's 'Rape of Lucretia' written on my heart.

 

Drugs legal and illegal

We will no doubt have to wait several months before we know something close to the truth about Maria Sharapova's substances, and whether she is deemed to have made an innocent error, whether and for how long she is banned, and whether risk averse companies who have severed their connections with her at the first hint of trouble decide to hitch up with her again. But from the outside, whatever the facts of this particuar case, it seems to point to many of the illogicalities of drug rules in sport.

The story appears to be that Sharapova has been taking this drug, meldonium or mildronate, on and off for 10 years, for medical reasons (even though most doctors claim that it is only prescribed for short term use) and had failed to notice that it had recently been placed on the banned list of performing enhancing substances. Whatever the truth, the general picture it conjures up is fairly clear.

In any sport where a lot of money is up for grabs or where huge national prestige is at stake (so I mean tennis rather than tiddly winks) there is a huge incentive to win. I rather doubt that they is any money making or big prestige sport with an entirely 'clean culture'. There are no doubt many clean individuals, but the practice of cheating tends to follow the money and the fame. Where winning brings big rewards, then a few will do or take anything they can to win, while hoping to avoid getting caught (though that is getting harder); many more will take any steps that remain on the right side of legality, from weird diets to pharmaceuticals that haven't been banned (yet).

I find myself wondering about the logic of all this.

The exclamation mark police

I am not meaning this flippantly, as I know well enough from friends and family what a ghastly illness Alzheimers is. But my heart sank this morning when the radio news announced that the government had decreed dementia checks for all of us over 40s. The truth when I read it didn't seem quite so draconian (more about advice than anything else). But I was already predicting the little brown NHS envelope through the door, and a couple of days spent learning up the kind of questions that I know memory tests are keen on. I can do the one about the name of the Prime Minister OK, but the day of the week sometimes eludes me (I'm currently on research leave and that does tend to remove the institutional pattern of everyday life). And  I have never been able to do visuo-spatial ability tests (probably means I dont have any), so I had already fast-forwarded to what would happen after I had failed to identify how the image would look when rotated 90 degrees anticlockwise. Would they believe me that it was nothing to do with me being 61, but that I had always been bad at it.

It is I guess the trade off that comes with mass health testing. You get an early diagnosis for a few, at the cost of putting more into a blind panic. Much the same goes with things like mass prescription of statins. Globally it saves lives, but it might not save yours even though you've been tied to taking them for 20 years. It's fair enough for public health officials to think the trade-off is worth it, but it's also hard not to suspect that it is a way of delivering mass health care without much of a personal element: the just 'give it to everyone' approach, or at least try to. I feel that every GP's surgery in the land should have on the wall of the waiting room a list of those procedures that the doctors have been 'incentivised' (ie paid extra each time) to carry out.

And its becoming not all that different in "mass education" too.

Some serious fun on Newsnight

Kirsty Wark is a real sport. As a kind of spin off from our grey hair programme (to be broadcast on Friday morning at 11.00 on Radio 4, in case you've forgotten), Kirsty and the Newsnight team agreed that she should go grey for an evening: that is present the programme in a silver wig. And they made a nice package to introduce it. (You can see the whole lot here , including the interview with me. ) It was of course a stunt, but not just that.

For a start the change was really interesting, and surprising. Almost everyone we talked to in the radio programme had given a desire for youthfulness as their main reason for colouring up their grey. Having a color makes you look younger, it removes the invisibility in which the greying process cloaks women, it is empowering . . . or that is what we were told. In fact, what was striking was that Kirsty didnt look a jot older with the grey and in a funny way she actually looked rather more powerful and noticeable, not less.

Very much the Christine Lagarde, silver vixen look.

Pompeii meets grey hair

You will probably think that I have been spending most of my time recently in front of a camera or a microphone, because next week I have a BBC1 documentary on Pompeii being shown on Thursday (at 9.00 pm) and a Radio4 documentary on grey hair on Friday morning at 11.00. In fact, both of these programmes had been more or less finished with my input months ago, but quite a huge of time is used up between finishing the shooting/recording and transmission (editing, music, voice over, capturing that one last sequence) ... and it is actually a complete coincidence that they end up getting their first outing within 24 hours of one another.

(It reminds me rather of when my book on Roman laughter came out very close to my Confronting the Classics. People thought i had been unbelievably productive in a very short time, but actually the timetable of my own completion was months and months apart and pure coincidence that they emerged into the world with a misleadingly short gap.)

Anyway, I do hope you will look and listen.

Be careful with the Classics

Whenever Boris Johnson gets in the news, it's a prompt for the classical parallels to come flooding out -- and a warning about how misleading they can be. Boris's rather histrionic decision to back the Out campaign and so desert David Cameron (with whatever aims at replacing him . . .) has elicited quite a few 'Et tu, Brute's, Shakespeare's last words of Julius Caesar, as he fell murdered by his one time friend and colleague Marcus Junius Brutus on the Ides of March 44 BC -- the ultimate case of disloyalty.

Classicists are forever pointing out that "Et tu Brute" were not actually what the ancients said that Caesar said as he died. The best bet is that he said to Brutus  (in Greek) 'kai su teknon?' or 'and you my child?', fuelling the suspicion that Brutus was actually Caesar's illegitimate son ('teknon' could be literally 'son' or a more general term of affection for a younger man). But what is less often pointed out is that the assassination was a rather inglorious failure, and not a successful coup at all. It wasn't just, as Shakespeare had it, that Brutus and his colleagues were shortly defeated by the supporters of the murdered leader (so watch your back, Boris). It was also that there whole political programme proved futile. They set out to destroy not just the tyrant, but also tyranny, in the name of Libery. The actual result of the assassination, after more than a decade of civil war, was autocracy (aka tyranny) established on a permanent basis under the emperor Augustus. 

So 'et tu Brute' isnt quite as apt as it is often assumed to be.

What poems make women cry?

A couple of years ago there was a great anthology, which caught people's imagination and in the process made a nice sum for Amnesty (which was the beneficiary), called Poems that make Grown Men Cry. It was a neat and provocative surprise: grown men aren't "supposed" to cry at poetry, so having a hundred of them fessing up to it, and talking about their own tear-jerking poem, was immediately enticing. It was Owen's Dulce et Decorum for Christopher Hitchens,  Keith Douglas's Canoe for Clive James, Sassoon's Everyone Sang for Barry Humphries; and there was a good sprinkling of AUden and Larkin.

When Anthony Holden asked me to suggest a poem for the female companion volume, I didn't hesitate to say yes -- it was a good cause after all. But I didnt think that it would have quite the éclat of the men's book. I mean women are "supposed" to cry at poetry, so where's the surprise.

I've now seen an advance copy of the book, and I'm happy to report that I was wrong. It is a wonderfully moving and unexpected volume, both in the choices, and the match of choice to woman.

I'm not going to give it all away, as the book is not out till February 25th (but available to pre-order now!). I will say, however, that there is considerably less Auden and Larkin. And I will tell you what I chose.

Vitellii in Genoa

 

I was idly googling a couple of weeks ago, in that late night kind of way, when, searching for the emperor Vitellius, I came across a notice about a "single object" show in Genoa, featuring a splendid object for my study of modern images of emperors: a seventeenth-century version of a portrait of that short-lived, rather disreputable Roman ruler (of course, that reputation is very largely to do with the fact that he was a losing claimant in the civil war of 69 CE, and it was in the interests of the winners, Vespasian and co, to blacken him). The statue looked tremendous, and obviously based on the so called "Grimani Vitellius" in Venice (on the right) -- an ancient portrait statue, once believed to represent Vitellius, though it's almost certainly not him. (That's one of the things that my emperors' project is interested in... how particular "faces" get strongly associated with particular rulers, even though they actually have nothing to do with them at all.)

Anyway, the show -- in the Royal Palace Museum (Palazzo Reale) -- was only on till the end of February, so I thought I had to get over to see it. I really hit lucky. For a start, it proved to be a tremendous piece, probably by the sculptor Filippo Parodi, and well worth the schlepp. Secondly I happened to bump into one of the curators, who knew a lot about the piece and we had a great chat (she had been at the main entrance and rightly inferred that someone who comes into a museum and specially asks for "il ritratto di Vitellio" is there on a mission. And thirdly, there were some more Vitellii to be found,

Old-fashioned human kindness (beats Twitter)

Those of you on Twitter will already know, I suspect, about my lost diary. I am a judge of an international prize, whose committe was meeting in Berlin last week. It was all a bit of a rush, and when I was waiting for the flight in the frequent flyer lounge at Heathrow, I used the time to do my email and make some dates in the diary (pictured above). When I got to Berlin, all was fine except I didn't any longer have my diary, which I concluded that I had left where I had been sitting Minor disaster. It wasnt that there were all that many appointments that I would have forgotten (my indispensible assistant keeps a copy of most things, for just this eventuality) but there were  a few and there were all kinds of carefully coded password reminders, which would have been a real nuisance not to have.

Anyway, lost property at airports is a bit hit and miss. And, even though I knew exactly where this little book was, the Heathrow lost property online reporting system basically told you to sit tight and wait for three days. Reasonable enough maybe, but I really wasnt sure that I could wait that long with equanimity (and it wasn't as if the damn thing was flying round the world...it wasnt nickable and I could describe exactly where it must be).

So I resorted to Twitter.

Women and history writing (and history selling)

I put my pennyworth last week into a discussion in the Guardian about women and history writing, which was itself a follow up to an article a few weeks ago on a similar theme. The prompt was some recent statistics from the US and the UK on authorship of, and sales figures for, popular history writing, which showed not only how far the output was gender divided, but generally how many fewer books women historians sold than men. You can find some of the stats if you click on the earlier article. But an extra gloomy one was produced by the Bookseller, which tabulated the 50 top earning 'history and military' UK books since Nielsen Bookscan records began (about 20 years ago). 49 out of the top 50 were by men. The top 10 go like this:

Schama, History of Britain vol 1; Beevor, Stalingrad; Ackroyd, London; MacGregor, 100 objects; Beevor, Berlin the downfall 1945; Ambrose, Band of Brothers, E company, 506th regiment; Beevor, D Day; Schama, History of Britain, 2, British Wars; Hastings, All Hell let loose, The world at War 1939-45.

Excellent books, but you see what I mean.

Now quite a number of commentators on the article, above and below the line, wanted to insist that there really were great women historians, popular and academic. But that seemed to me to miss the point rather. Of course it's true, there are some wonderful and eloquent female historians; but however wondeful and eloquent they are, their books are simply not selling as much. And it's worth asking why that might be.

My Uncle Tom's funeral

 

It is, as I have remarked before, the blight of the eldery to see the other elderly in the grave. Today I went to my Uncle Tom's funeral in the beautiful St Mary's, Banbury (above), my Mum's younger brother. He had lived to be, on my reckoning, 88, and with a spirit that could still tell me a thing or two about SPQR (which I had sent him) just before Christmas.

It was a wonderful joyous, as well as sad, occasion. Tom had grown up as a reckless country lad in the Herefordshire village of Stretton Grandison, with two older sisters (my mother the first born), a Dad who was the village wheelwright etc, and a Mum who was the village school mistress (until she was married). His daughter Mandy (herself a teacher) gave a brilliant eulogy, capturing those days when kids like Tom bunked off school and did little more wicked than explore the local wells. And she reminisced about the visits with her Dad and Mum, and younger sister Nikki,  to the local folk music evenings, so thick wth cigarette smoke that you'd be prosecuted if you took your children there now.

Tom had become an estate-agent cum auctioneer, and my own most vivid memories from way back were nothing to do with folk music, bit listening to him do his auctioneer patter. I had never known anyone to speak so quickly before (and I practised fruitlessly at home -- to be honest I'd have been useless at selling a sheep).

Ten years of a wickedly subversive Don's Life

It is, I am happy to say, "our" tenth anniversary. That is perhaps a bit premature because, as I recall, my very first post was about student exams (and all the strange anxieties that surround them .. 'is it OK to write in purple ink?' and so forth), which must be pushing it a bit nearer towards the summer -- April as I now check. But all the same we have decided to mark its ten years with a 'TLS voices' podcast. This offers some reflections about the genre in the widest sense.

And it gives you a few stats about the whole enterprise. There have, for example, been nigh on 8 million page views since the blog began, and 38,000 comments. As I was preening a little about this, the editor wisely said that we didn't actually have all that many comparanda by which to judge. But comparanda or not, I am still pleased.

Do listen to the podcast.

How to say "I disagree" in the 21st century

I dont think many commentators on this blog have much trouble in finding words in which to disagree, head on, full on, eyebrow to eyebrow (and usually with courtesy .. lets not forget!). But I am struck how often straightforward disagreement (a generally healthy state of affairs, which is often the bed-mate of broad agreement)  has been recently hi-jacked by a whole load of denials. I would like to put in a plea for good, old-fashioned diasagreemeht.

If you follow Twitter (or any of the follow up comments after Question Time or any such programme), you'll be familar with this one: "Mary Beard is out of her depth here", or only slightly more impolitely, "Stick to what you know, Mary". What this actually means is that "I think you are wrong", but as your day job is to teach Classics, I will say that there is this no point in hearing you on this topic.

It doesn't take much to see that there is a disequilibrium here. If Mary, as citizen, says something you dont like, then it's easier to say that she is 'out of her depth' than to confront her arguments (which may of course be wrong.. that's another matter) about migration, Corbyn, the EU or whatever. It's easier to say, "you dont know what you are talking about", than answer the citizenly question.

Classics in Copenhagen: a plea for support

I know that I have recently been in a head to head with Boris Johnson about Greece versus Rome. B ut the truth is, of course, that as a subject of study they are symbiotic: Greece wouldnt we with us without Rome, Rome wouldn't have a sense of its "own" culture without Greece. That's why the announcement that the University of Copenhagen MAY be about to close its ancient Greek department seems to spell the end for Classics in Denmark (a country not currently distinguishing itself for liberal values in other ways).

There is a long and lustrous past to the study of Greek in Denmark. I think only of the work of Mogens Hansen on the ancient city (I disagreed with all kinds of premises, but still hugely important and unmatched in many ways). There is also the Ny Carlsberg Museum in the same city, with one of the best classical collections in the world. And the truth is that a great classical collection and a thrivig classical department in the local museum add up to more than the sum of its parts. In many ways, forget Edinburgh (sorry), Copenhagen is the Athens of the North.