A Don’s Life

Is Latin too hard?

Research at Durham University claims to show kids are put off taking Latin GCSE because it is too hard – about a grade harder than other supposedly “hard” subjects. That is to say, if you can get a grade C at Latin, you’d be in the running for a B in Physics or German. And teachers, it’s said, have too much of an eye on the league tables to persuade their pupils to take the risk.

At  least this is a change from the usual story about Latin. More than a third of all takers get the top A* grade (compared with less than 4% in Business Studies and around 6% in German – or, going the other way, 55% in Greek). And 60% in Latin get A* and A combined. How easy it must be, some wonder.

How it really was?

When you have studied the ancient world almost all your life, you sometimes wonder if it’s all a fantasy. I don’t mean that I nurture delusions that the Colosseum might have been built by moon-men. But I do wonder how much we can really believe of what ancient writers tell us about their world. How good a guide are they to that seductively old-fashioned question: “What was it really like?”

This came home to me a few weeks ago when I visited the Forum in Rome. Taking a break from the Forum itself, I walked up the Roman road to the top of the Capitoline Hill, where the main temple of Jupiter once stood.

This is very much my territory. I am just now finishing my book on the ancient Roman ceremony of triumph (a couple of thousand words into the last chapter, if anyone’s following) and this is exactly the path once taken by the conquering general in his chariot, surrounded by the admiring cheering crowds, preceded by wagon-loads of booty and followed by his riotous soldiery.

Pull the other one, I found myself thinking.

Return to sender

This morning I got an anonymous letter. This happens now and then. They usually threaten some unspeakable punishment for my “forthright” views (my adjective not theirs) on 9/11.

I know that public figures get such things almost daily. But they have battalions of staff to open and filter them. I’m not a public figure and so I open them myself. That tends to give them bigger impact.

This one was rather different from usual.  It was apparently a print out from an e-mail and it started like this (I’ve changed the names on the unlikely chance that there is something more than warped fantasy behind the whole thing):

“Your son, Richard, father of Jeremy left the church 5 years ago. He was given £60,000 BY THE CHURCH TO KEEP QUIET over another vicar who had been caught abusing a young girl. Richard, instead of going to the police, accepted the money.”

The name of the Dame

Saturday’s Honours List came with all the usual congratulations about the cross-section of the UK it now included. Alongside the new entrepreneurial elite of Stelios and co, a record 42% of the honorands were women.

Cue for picture in most newspapers of a smiling Esther Rantzen CBE (“Services to Children and Young People”) or 98-year old Constance Brown MBE who has run the same chippy in Pembroke since the 1920’s (“Services to Business and the Community”). Rather fewer, it must be said, of the reassuringly old elite Countess Cranbrook OBE (“Services to the Red Meat Industry in the East of England” – which I think translates into organic farming and saving small abattoirs).

But exactly how gender neutral is the whole process? Not quite as neutral as it boasts. I happened to take a look at the official list that is spewed out from the bowels of some government office. It’s not like what you read in your paper (which has been carefully “modernized”). It would look comfortably at home in some era before the Married Women’s Property Act (1882).

Mixed messages?

The dust has quickly died down after St Hilda’s announced ten days ago that it would be admitting men. The last “all-girls” college in Oxford (as most reports patronizingly put it) finally relented and opened its doors.

I wasn’t exactly thrilled by the news. There could after all be a knock-on effect on my own cherished single-sex Cambridge college. And besides it was hard to follow the logic of why letting men into St Hilda’s would improve the educational opportunities of women.

But worse were the arguments that came out on either side of this debate. “Pro-mixers” tended to heave a sigh of relief that this quaint anachronism had at last been done away with. The supporters of single-sex colleges, I’m afraid, did little better. Here, they said,  was a place where women could be cherished outside the nasty, competitive hurly burly of a man’s world.

Wrong on both counts.  Women’s colleges are not havens of refuge for those that can’t hack it in mixed company. And as for the accusation of anachronism – they are probably better equipped for promoting women’s opportunities into the 21st century than most other institutions.

Tampons for Africa

I have a soft spot for Woman’s Hour. I like the way it squeezes in wonderfully subversive feminist reports next to those drearily wholesome recipes for tuna pasta bake. And I have a particularly soft spot for it at the moment because one of the current producers is the inestimable Victoria Brignell. Victoria did Classics at Cambridge a few years ago, was clever and sparky, moved on to the BBC – and happens to be quadraplegic.

But, uncharacteristically, on Monday they missed a trick with a pious little item on sanitary protection in Kenya.

Brushing with royalty

Cambridge University is a bit like ancient Rome: grandeur exists cheek by jowl with squalor. One minute you’re in a lavish, wood-panelled, portrait-lined dining hall, with silver on the table that anywhere else would be safely behind museum glass. The next you can find yourself in some seedy back-stairs or damp, forgotten store-rooms of which even the most under-funded FE college would be ashamed.

This always makes for a dilemma if you’re thinking of chatting up some Labour party bigwig. Take him (or her) to high-table with a nice glass or two of claret and the full “Cambridge experience” and there’s the fear that he will soon be sounding off about the lives of fetid luxury we lead here. Take him to the buttery (our jargon for “canteen”), where most of us usually eat, and he’ll be distinctly miffed that he wasn’t given the claret treatment.

Last Wednesday I went  myself for a rare taste of the grandeur. A garden party in a marquee on a college lawn, policed by officials in top hats and bowlers – carrying strange poles topped with gold (for ceremonial purposes only, I think).

The amount of security on the way in suggested a mystery guest. The hot tip was Bill Gates.

Big Brother at Uni

Living in a student ghetto in a student city can make you feel horribly middle-aged. It’s not so much their extravagant – or extravagantly revealing – clothing, that you could no longer get away with yourself. Actually I rather like the annual summer display of belly buttons down King’s Parade. And it’s not their youthful argot either. Even I find myself saying “uni”, when I mean “university”.

What is most dispiriting for us old liberals is more ideological. It’s the way the students have come to take for granted all the things we fought against and lost. They can’t imagine what life would be like with a nationalized railway or free eye-tests; and they can’t think what  a second post would actually be for.

But even more alarming is that most of them have entirely bought into the idea of a surveillance culture. Show them a gloomy bike shed, a leafy path or a picturesque bend in the river, and there is nothing that your average Cambridge undergraduate would like to do more than install a CCTV camera in it.

Ancient or modern?

One of the great things about working in the Getty Research Institute Library is that you are only two minutes away from the Getty Museum. Just like in the old British Museum Reading Room, when you need a rest, or inspiration, you can go off and look at some art.

This week I've found myself taking breaks in front of an intriguing marble bust of the Roman emperor Commodus (of Gladiator fame). For he is currently the surprising star of the Getty's Early-Modern Sculpture Gallery.

His story is likely to turn curators in cash-strapped museums green with envy. For here, it seems, the richest museum in the world -- whose problem is more often finding things to buy than finding the money to buy them with -- just might have picked up an extremely good bargain.