A Don's Life by Mary Beard - Times Online - WBLG

10 things Londoners need to know about having a Classicist in County Hall

More than enough has written about what Boris Johnson might have learned about government from his classical training.  Isn’t it time to think about what we should learn from Mayor Johnson’s classical training in working out  how to prepare for him and what to expect.

Remember that Boris is much keener on Rome than on Greece. So we need to concentrate on Roman government, and its relatively democratic forms. I don’t think that Boris is (quite) like a Roman emperor, yet.

What would Roman history teach us to expect, if he’s acting on the Roman model?

One: He won’t be in power very long. People elected at Rome were elected for one year only. Occasionally they were allowed to repeat the office, but not go on for years and years. That’s what got Julius Caesar into trouble (I mean assassinated). If Boris is being truly Roman, he’ll resign in twelve months.

Two: Memoirs. Writing your memoirs once you’d left office was just as big a thing then as now, or getting someone else to do it for you. The wives, like Claudius’ empress Agrippina, did it too. Most of these books have now disappeared (a lesson for the moderns?). But Cicero’s poem on his consulship (which survives in fragments, mostly quoted by Cicero himself) might give Boris an idea or two. A Latin epic on his mayor-dom?

Three: A populist spin. Romans told the story about a toff (one Scipio Nasica) who , when put canvassing, shook the hand of a peasant. The hand was, predictably, horny.. “What, do you walk on it?”, the toff asked. The upshot? He lost the election. Roman politicians were nice to the poor, was the message. Boris wont (I hope) make that mistake.

Four: A relaxation in sartorial standards . . .

The face of Julius Caesar? Come off it!

What do you do if you are an archaeologist and you find a nice Roman portrait bust in the bottom of a river?

The answer is simple. You go through every book of Roman portraits and coins until you find some famous figure in Roman history who looks vaguely likely your man. It is laborious and time-consuming. But the principles are simple – it’s like a game of snap.

Why bother? Because almost every newspaper in the western world will be interested in your find if you say confidently that it is Cleopatra or Nero or Julius Caesar (and even more interested if you say that this is the earliest statue or the only one really taken from life – which is also a useful cover-up for the fact that your statue doesn’t look quite like all the others supposed to represent the famous figure).

However beautiful or important your find, no newspaper will be searching you out, if you have only found Marcus Cornelius Nonentito.

There’s a long tradition to this game. Heinrich Schliemann tried to convince the world that he had gazed upon the face of Agamemnon. Almost every local archaeological society in England was certain that the tiny little Roman villa they were digging up was actually the governor’s residence – and they labelled the plans accordingly, “Governor’s wife’s bedroom” and so on.

Now we have the story of the only surviving statue of Julius Caesar to be sculpted from life dragged out of the river at Arles. Right? And it’s even convinced the excellent Charles Bremner.

What has happened to the archaeology of Iraq?

Last week I reviewed an extraordinary book for the Times Saturday Books page.The Destruction of the Cultural Heritage in Iraq is a collection of essays about what has happened to the archaeology and museums of Iraq around, and since, the invasion. Where are the treasures of Ur, Babylon etc. now? Answer: many are lost, destroyed, or making a lot of money for antiquities dealers in the west.

The review was, in some ways, a stupid thing to take on. My Pompeii book is to be finished  -- bar the would-be elegant conclusion – on Tuesday (sic). But I have recently got very interested in the relationship between archaeology/culture and war. This is partly because of the bombing of Pompeii by the allies in 1943, which left many areas of the site a wreck (though thirsty travellers may be ironically grateful that it cleared the way for the site restaurant).

The book proved even more fascinating than I imagined, and more fascinating than I could squeeze into the 500 words I was given.

I hadn’t for a start properly appreciated the history of the Baghdad Museum, which had been founded by Gertrude Bell, as part of the British Mandate in the 1920s. Indeed it seems to have been Bell who started the practice of keeping some of the antiquities in Iraq, rather than sending them round the Museums of the Great Powers.

That said, given what has happened, one feels quite grateful – as I’m sure I’ve said  before – that some of the Iraqi treasures were in the safe housing of the British Museum.

Cannabis or alcohol? The listening prime-minister.

New Labour has shown again that it only has one response to things it doesn’t like: that is, criminalise them.

And if it wants to show it dislikes something more than it used to, it puts the criminal penalty up a notch, pour encourager les voters.

Many of us don’t like hunting, even if  -- in my case – we flirted with it in our rural pasts. But I can't help thinking that it would have been a good deal better to kill off this nasty nineteenth-century tradition (which is what it surely must be) with the drip, drip of ridicule than with unenforceable legislation. After all, those men in red (pink, I mean) jackets do look very silly, don’t you think?

As for cannabis, it is extremely enjoyable  (more enjoyable than hunting, as -- inter alia - it doesn’t require staying on the back of a horse). There is also no doubt at all that for some users it is dangerous, even life ruining. Surely there is a way of getting that message across without upping the potential prison sentence, which is what the government’s reclassification of the substance from Class C to B means. In fact young people's cannabis use had actually been falling since it was down-graded to C, which makes one wonder whether the risk of punishment might have been part of the allure.

But isn’t it odd that Gordon Brown’s first, turn-over-a-new-leaf, style of listening, actually means not listening to the very committee he got to advise him on this ? For they advocated precisely the reverse. I guess ‘listening’ is a good sound-bite, but it still means a choice about who you are going to listen to.

Keep Lesbos for the Lesbians

A tricky issue has just hit the Greek courts. Some residents of the island of  Lesbos have just decided to resort to the law to prevent the "Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece" from using the word Lesbian in its title.

The idea is that the heterosexual female denizens of the island don’t much like the idea that when they claim they are Lesbian everyone assumes that they are gay. (It’s a claim that might be stronger, I think, if the appellants in this case were women, not men representing their sisters. .) But if they are successful in their suit against the Greek organisation, the plan is to try to outlaw “Lesbians" (as a word) worldwide.

The problem here is the sixth-century BCE Greek poetess Sappho (on the right): born and bred in Lesbos, she addressed some of the most passionate erotic poetry the world has known to fellow women. An achievement which in the ancient world  earned her the title “10th Muse”. Almost ever since Lesbos has been synonymous with Lesbianism (in fact since the 18th century in British English).

This idea of decoupling Sappho, female homoeroticism and the island of Lesbos seems to me about as mad as trying to white out William Shakespeare from Stratford on Avon.

In fact, Sappho is the sexiest thing to have come from the island in 3000 years. Why on earth jack in the commercial possibilities?

I miss voting

It’s local election day -- and, of course, I have voted, in a way. I learned very young from a radical mother that women had only recently fought for suffrage and that it was little short of a crime not to use the right. So use it I do.

But nowadays I use it on the kitchen table, with a postal vote. It takes rather less time than going down to the polling station, which is why I opted for it. But actually the opaque instructions they give you, the complicated system of envelopes (two of them A and B) and the declaration that you have to sign, means that the saving is less than you think. I also half suspect that several of my previous postal votes will have been invalidated because I put the wrong piece of paper into the wrong envelope.

The real problem, though, is that on this system voting becomes a very low key experience – done over a bottle of wine, and a jolly chat with the husband about the merits of the various candidates (or in our case about the merits of the Lib Dem and the renegade Lib Dem now standing as an Independent -- I opted for the former; he did too, I think, but confidentiality here is still the rule).

All this is a far cry from walking to the polling station in the redundant school down the road, passing the friendly copper and the party reps taking your number, declaring your identity to the officials, going into the little booth, putting a cross with your pencil and finally folding the piece of paper up and slipping it into that battered tin box.

Even I could never do that without a bit of a shudder of civic responsibility and sense of occasion.

Congestion charge. What did the Romans do?

Will Cambridge have its own traffic congestion charge? It looks likely. A bit different from the London version, it would charge you (£3-£5) for driving around between 7.30 and 9.30 am; after that it would be free. One notch up from the London scheme, there would be no concessions for residents within the zone – and in fact the plan is that you will get charged even for driving out.

I’m all for this in principle, but can’t for the life of me see why someone should get charged for driving from where I live OUT of the city, and so relieving congestion.

What’s puzzling is exactly who is backing this. All the leaflets from the three main parties that have dropped through the letterbox in advance of the City Council elections on May 1 have come out against. The Lib Dems say that it is being introduced by the Conservative County Council, and object (like me) to the driving out charge, and to the fact that the profits are to be spent on a road in Ely, rather than improving cycling facilities etc in Cambridge itself.

The Labour leaflet had the nerve to complain about the civil liberties implications of all the cameras required to operate the scheme. There may well be a point here, but when the Labour party has enthusiastically spread CCTV cameras across the nation to make us the most photographed part of the planet, what idiot (or dissident) in the local Labour party thought we wouldn’t notice the inconsistency?

The Tory, on the other hand, claims that it is all being driven by the Labour party. And with a charming classical reference reassures us that “like all cities since Rome in 70AD, Cambridge suffers from congestion. It is part of being a city.”

So what would the Romans have done?

Ten excellent blogs

I was chuffed to be nominated as an “excellent blog” by Heresy Corner (an excellent blog itself). So, according to the rules of this game, I must now nominate ten more excellent blogs.

Here goes in no particular order  (not all are on my links list yet, but they will be soon).

One: BLDG BLOG is a real queen of blogs. Hosted by Geoff Manaugh in California, it’s mostly about architecture, art and urban (and other) spaces. A book of the blog is coming next year.

Two: Clive Davis' Spectator blog. The Spectator isn’t Beard’s natural home, but when I discovered he was reading me I gave him a go (OK -- how self-regarding can you get?). He picks up lots of good things – and has a nice wry take on them.

Three: Soleil en tête is one to catch for the francophone. A French Canadian writer and history teacher blogs about writing, teaching and her brain tumour. Not the usual illness-blog-cliché and not mawkish at all. She posts, for nice classical reasons, under the name of Danaee.

Four . . .

Old-fashioned mortgages

I am beginning to feel some nostalgia for the old-fashioned mortgage. I’m sure that some readers of this blog must remember what it was like borrowing money to buy a roof over your head in the old days. The old days? I mean a quarter of a century ago,  which is when I bought my first flat, overlooking the main railway line just north of Euston. Jolly nice it was too; but jolly noisy.

Anyway, the old system went something like this. First of all, you had to show you were a ‘regular saver’.  That usually meant picking a Building Society some years before you thought you would ever want to buy a house, and paying 50 quid or so into a savings account. Unless your Mum and Dad were going to help out, you’d need to do that anyway, because 100% mortgages were quite unheard of. If you were very lucky, you might get 90% -- so my £27,500 flat needed £2750 from my own little nest egg of savings.

Then there was the basic rule of thumb that you could have two and a half times your annual salary, which JUST about worked for me. But more than that there was the scary interview . . . all about financial responsibility and being part of a mutual building society. Patronising and paternalistic it may have been. But this was not a questions of banks and shareholders and profits; this was about membership, and the symbiosis of investors and borrowers.

So I had a quick check on the Halifax’s mortgage calculator website, to discover that the rule of thumb was now FIVE times your annual salary.

Travel sick?

I know that tales of travelling misery rarely touch anyone else’s heart. The obvious answer is: well if you must go off jet-setting around and spoiling the planet, why should the rest of the world feel sorry if you are delayed/your flight is cancelled/you lose your luggage…

All the same, I am going allow myself a moan about my latest trip to the States. It’s been huge fun in all sorts of ways: I gave a lecture on the triumph at Rutgers, talked to a great group of US high-school teachers in Cambridge Mass., and had a fantastic two days in Seattle at a wonderful conference on Roman Art, which had been timed to coincide with a loan exhibition of Roman art from the Louvre at the local museum. A long way, you might say, to go to see art from Paris, but the display in the Seattle Art Museum was brilliant – and actually made me see all kinds of objects afresh.

But, nice as the whole trip has been, every single leg of travel has gone wrong in some way or other. I’ll pass over the more trivial problems: the almost missed connection in Chicago on my way from Boston to Seattle (I got the plane by 30 seconds as it was closing its doors, and it took me most of the flight to get my breath back); the suspicious package on the railway line, which held up the inappropriately named Acela Express from New York to Boston,  in New Haven station for over an hour. (OK, I know: better safe than sorry – but it doesn’t always feel like that when you’re not moving).

One of the worst bits was arriving in Newark “Liberty” airport – which had the effect of making me feel rather benign towards Terminal 5.

Feminism now: should boys play harps?

Last week the main BBC news (plus the Today programme) was full of a piece of research which demonstrated a gender bias  in choice of musical instruments.  Whereas 90% of young harpists are (apparently) female, almost 80% of young tuba players are (apparently ) male – and even more  electric guitarist. Indeed kids are encouraged in those choices by friends, teachers, society . . .you name it.

While parts of the planet were in melt-down, while Zimbabwe tottered, Kenya  simmered and  too few people were  killed in Iraq to be newsworthy . . .THIS was transmitted as a piece of gender discrimination akin to the revelation (the sort of news we faced when I was a kid) that more girls than boys were encouraged to become doctors and vice versa.

After a short time, feeling a bit bad about this, as I was obviously supposed to, I found myself reflecting….do I care really  if tuba players are largely male?

Doctor Who -- Up Pompeii

There were enough good jokes to keep even the meanest classicist amused in Doctor Who’s visit to Pompeii on Saturday night.

For a start, when Donna and the Doctor emerged from the tardis, they immediately assumed that they were in ancient Rome. Well actually they were. Any keen follower of historical movies can spot the “ancient Rome” built at Cinecittà in modern Rome a mile off (it’s actually very like the “ancient Rome” built in modern Tunisia, except the whole thing is a bit bigger and the extras tend to have a slightly lighter facial colouring).

But just a few minutes into the plot, the table were nicely turned when we saw an unmistakable Vesuvius looming at the end of the street. The penny quickly dropped for us and for the Doctor. This must be Pompeii.

And it turned out to be August 23 AD 79: for those in the know (like the Doctor) the day before the final eruption. At least that is the usual date: an alternative school of thought, based on the traces of pollen found in the volcanic ash and on the heavy clothes worn by a number of the victims thinks it must have been later in the autumn. (I’m not convinced by the clothing argument. I always imagine I might put on my winter woollies in the middle of an eruption.)

A good start. And hopes that the writers actually knew something about the history of Pompeii and even knew a little Latin were not disappointed.

Meeting the military

Writing on the Roman Triumph has opened some very unexpected doors. I’m hoping to be able to report from the Emmy awards in Los Angeles in September (courtesy of the Triumph). But meanwhile, on Friday, I’m off to talk at RUSI (the Royal United Service Institute for Defence and Security Studies, founded by none other than the Duke of Wellington).

As a bit of a wobbly pacifist, I’m slightly surprised at myself for having invested (so apparently sympathetically) into the dilemmas of Roman warfare. Indeed I must also confess to having a bit of a soft spot for intellectual soldiers (the sort that end up as Bursars of Cambridge colleges). They  always seem to have better moral credentials when it comes to warfare than I do (a bit like the atheist clerics who end up as chaplains of Oxbridge colleges – a worthy tradition stretching back at least to the eighteenth century).

This is a romantic sensibility I must have inherited. For I also have a cousin who was once married to frontline member of the SAS, who managed to charm my mother (a far more hard-line pacifist that I am). Even she would somehow manage to overlook what this guy had done in the Iranian embassy siege, because he could intellectualise the moral problems so nicely (and help with the washing up).

The trouble is that smart generals and clever SAS boys are one thing; most other aspects of the military seem not so appealing.

Disabled access

I know it’s all too easy to knock Health and Safety rules, and the like. I’ve done it before and – yes – that smirky cynicism will be knocked out of me, if ever I get trapped in a blazing building because the Evac chairs have not been properly installed, or the emergency lighting isn’t working.

All the same . . . try this story.

The Classical Faculty building in Cambridge (where I tend at the moment, finishing my Pompeii book, to spend rather more hours of my life than I do at home) has just installed disabled access: (semi-)automatic front doors. This isn’t anyone’s fault. We were obliged to do this to be “compliant” (and, as one of my senior colleagues put it, to be “transparent” and “robust” too, no doubt).

So, until two weeks ago we had perfectly manageable front doors : a double set - one pair of outside doors plus another pair the other side of a small lobby. They were very easy to handle. The outside pair were heavy-ish, opened one way only and were still just about possible to manage if you had a large pile of books in your arms. The inner pair swung both ways and were easy to push or pull from whichever way you approached.

They have now been “up-graded’ to disabled use, and are almost unusable by the rest of us.

Yes please, Socrates

The result of the great debate was, as I predicted, that a rather large majority of the audience decided that they would accept the invitation. As Tom Holland said in the moments after our defeat: that’s democracy for you…but, of course, Socrates, wasn’t exactly a fan of that.

All the same I thought our side made as good a showing as we could, so didn’t feel especially pissed off. It’s a bit like doing an exam. You don’t mind doing not so well as you hoped, if you think you did as well as you could.

In fact, once the Taplin/McCabe side had trailed the idea that one might be having dinner not just with Socrates, but Hippocrates, Sophocles, Pheidias, Euripides, Hegel and Wittgenstein too – honestly I thought the audience would rebel. But they didn’t.

Anyway, everyone can listen to the podcast and see what you think.

I had the feeling that, zany silliness that it was, some more substantial ideas were bubbling under the surface.

A piss-up with Socrates

Preparations are now apace for our TLS debate in Oxford tomorrow: would you accept a dinner invitation with Socrates? Beard, in case you didn’t already know/guess, is on the NO THANKS side (along with fellow sceptic Tom Holland). Those thinking that they would reply with a YES PLEASE are Oliver Taplin and MM McCabe.

I am already, I must confess, resigned to defeat. For a start I have never been known to win in debates like this (not enough punchy, simple , populist rhetoric??). I managed to lose when I was standing up for the Parthenon in a head to head with the Alhambra, championed by Robert Irwin. His pitch was that the Alhambra was very very beautiful indeed. Mine was that the Parthenon not only stood for the whole of western culture, having been pagan temple, church and mosque – but that it also affected us more qua ruin, than any complete building ever could. True – but not a winner in the rhetorical cut and thrust.

Then last year I managed to lose in the Greeks versus Romans debate at Cheltenham. I lost so badly in fact that the Greeks registered more votes at the end of the session than they did at the beginning. In other words my inventions actually lost the Romans some of the votes they already had. The problem is that Hellenophiles find it so easy to stand up and bang on about well springs/originary moments of Western culture: QED. (It is what I should have done when speaking for the Parthenon….)

So what am I going to say about Socrates?

Terminal 5: the true horror

No, I have not had the misfortune to visit the new Terminal 5 at  Heathrow today, Thursday. But the husband has. Though, happily for him, he was arriving rather than trying to leave (hand baggage only, if your flight wasn’t cancelled).

The whole experience started brightly enough. The check-in at Athens was serving champagne (and juice for the minors) to celebrate T5 day. But things got darker pretty quickly when he discovered that, owing to problems at the new Terminal, the flight was delayed by two hours.

When it did finally take off, the cabin crew had stories that went rather beyond the official line of  “teething troubles with the baggage system”.

Lets get rid of the fascist Olympic torch

I don’t quite understand how we have forgotten that the “Olympic Torch” ceremony was invented by Hitler and his chums.

If ever there was an “invented tradition” well worth stamping out, it is this ridiculous, Fascist-inspired waste of money – which sends a Bunsen Burner around the world at tremendous cost for several months before the Games, manned (and womanned) by people dressed up in pseudo-ancient Greek costume, no doubt feeling very silly.

In London, we are now told, it will soon be doing a mini tour, carried by a London bus, Docklands Light Railway and Dame Kelly Holmes (inter alios).

I can’t quite work out whether most of the press reports are pleased at the pro-Tibetan protests which dented the hi-tech assisted, sunbeam lighting ceremonial (plucky little Tibet poking the Chinese dragon where it, for once, might hurt); or whether they are a touch censorious at this upsetting of the peaceful, non-political programme of the Olympic Games that we have inherited from the ancient Greeks; or whether they are wondering what might happen to the UK in the ceremonies to come in 2012  (don’t forget Iraq, Mr Blair/Brown….).

Hardly any commentator stops to mention that this silly torch ceremony has nothing to do with the ancient Greeks, and was really invented to be a magnificent shot in Leni Riefenstahl’s movie (choreographed by Carl Diem). This is one of Hitler’s most pervasive legacies.

They also don’t stop to mention that the ancient Olympics – far from being that sweet haven of peace -- were pretty political anyway. Even in their hay-day, they were often interrupted by the rough hand of Politics.

Do we need Wikipedia in Latin?

I’ve only just caught up with the fact that there is a version of Wikipedia in Latin: or, to be precise, Vicipaedia.

I have to say that it is all very well done. I explored it, hoping to discover some dreadful howlers. But a ten minute glance gave them pretty much a clean bill of health. And there is plenty of earnest worrying about how to translate such termini technici as ‘link’ into Latin. Ligamen, nexus or vinculum? Oh help…

They haven’t got very far yet. Check out  the section on “professores rerum classicarum” (professors of  Classics) and you’ll find they’ve only got to three: the distinguished, but unlikely trio of Barry Baldwin, E. R. Dodds and W. L. Westermann.

But my problem with this enterprise is not its accuracy in Latinity or its progress. It is: what on earth is the point?

Please can I have a bigger overdraft

The credit squeeze has started to hit even leafy Cambridge. Last week the son, who had received frequent communications from what we used to know as “The Listening Bank” suggesting that he might like to extend his overdraft, decided to take them up on their offer.

So he trotted off to the local branch and had an interview with some bank official not much older than himself, reviewing his assets etc. The upshot was that he was not a good enough credit risk. In other words, despite the come-on advertising campaign, the answer was no.

In some ways, this was an entirely sensible decision. The son has no assets at all apart from a few guitars and his Mum and Dad, so without some investigation into us, I don’t see why he should get a bigger overdraft.

On the other hand, he came home clutching his refusal letter explaining that he had not been given more credit for two reasons. One: he hadn’t passed the bank’s own guidelines. Two: he had “failed”, as it were, a credit reference agency check. The letter helpfully suggested that he might like to see what the credit reference agencies were saying about him and gave the names of three.

Having heard stories of terrible errors creeping into these records, we decided to take a look.