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

The knife and fork test?

There has been disappointing news about university entrants. The number of kids from state schools going to university has fallen. So has the number from the poorest families going to what are called “leading universities”. So too (though no-one seems quite so bothered about this one) has the number of boys.

News like this tends to provoke another round in the favourite national sport of Oxbridge bashing. The general line is that we sit round after dinner, quaffing our claret and plotting to let in thick privately educated  toffs, and keep out the brightest and best from ordinary schools. Just occasionally this is backed up by a  cause célèbre: an unlucky applicant with 15 A stars at GCSE and a raft of perfect A levels who was rejected, in favour (so the implication is) of a less qualified bloke who knew how to hold his knife and fork.

They make a desert and call it peace

I am usually suspicious of claims that understanding the history of the ancient world helps you understand the history of our own. When people tell me that antiquity was so like today, I tend to object that it was actually very different in almost every possible respect.

But two of the topics in Roman history that I regularly teach have recently come to seem almost uncomfortably topical – and raw.

The first is the whole theme of  “native” resistance to the Roman empire. If you didn't have the military resources, how could you stand up against the ancient world’s only super-power?

More reasons to visit Bologna

There have been murmurings that I short-changed the lovely city of Bologna, by implying that the only thing worth seeing was the Medieval Museum.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Give me the choice between Bologna and Florence, and I would choose Bologna at least eight times out of ten. Sure, Florence still wins on text-book “great art” (unless you’re a fan of the Carracci brothers, who were Bolognese born and bred). But on almost every other tourist check-list, Bologna is out there way ahead. In particular, the food is streets better and considerably cheaper, the people are not obviously out to rip you off, and there is a sense that the city still has a purpose other than fleecing its visitors. The Bolognese exist with, not just for (or off), the tourists.

After the Medieval Museum, there’s two places I would make a bee-line for: the Archaeological Museum and the intriguing monastic centre of Santo Stefano.

What are academics for?

Because we have very few fixed hours of work, university teachers are often assumed to have loads of free time. People see us taking retail therapy on a Tuesday morning or having a long lunch, and they tend to forget that all our weekend and most of the night was spent in the library. Not great for family life, as most partners of academics complain.

This makes us easy prey to all kinds of demands from those who think that we can easily give some of that “free time” to them. There are scores of  “independent television makers” who will ring you up and try to get you to plan their new programme on gladiators, sex in the ancient world,  the fall of the Roman empire, or whatever, over the phone. Now that e-mail is the standard medium of communication, we’ve got out of practice at the old art of putting the receiver down – which is, of course, why they ring.

Then there are the eager sixth-formers, who think that an enthusiastic letter or e-mail will prompt you to give them more help with their A level course work than you should by rights offer. As I can testify, there are more kids in this country working on “Roman Women” than you could possibly believe.

It is presumably in response to this kind of pressure that a senior Oxford academic has published on the web his, punningly titled, “Rules of Engagement”, for anyone wanting to use his services.

Ask a silly question

Last week I spent a morning doing “Media Training”, a marvellous crash course that the university occasionally lays on for its staff. The idea is to make you a more “effective communicator” on radio and television.

About half the morning was theory (what to wear, how to prepare, when and how to smile etc). The other half was practical, and took the form of some recorded interviews, which you then went over -- and picked to pieces -- with instructors and fellow victims. It was humiliating, but extraordinarily helpful. “Where’s your killer point?”, the instructor asked after we’d listened to me discussing the benefits of Latin. A fair cop, I thought. There wasn’t one.

I don’t imagine that I shall be following all the rules we were given. Honestly, I can’t see me in the recommended pastel colours and trim jackets, even if they are flattering in front of the camera. But, at the very least, it’s nice to know what the rules are that you’re breaking.

Overall, the main point seemed to be that you would do a better media interview once you had learned how to “set the agenda”. Roughly translated this means “how not to answer the question”.

Does Latin "train the brain"?

Spurred on by Eric Dickens’s comments on my last blog, I return to the topic of the moment, or at least to one currently exercising correspondents to the Times: the value of a “classical education”.

Eric suspects that the “bureaucratic spirit” of the modern university has “swept aside <my> enthusiasm” for proselytizing the study of the ancient world among the young. Boris Johnson, he hints, is doing a better job in this respect.

So let’s see if I can (enthusiastically) hit the nail more firmly on the head. What IS the point of learning Latin?

A blogger's life

I have been blogging for almost three months now. And I must admit to being a convert. When I started out, I was in two minds.

The pros were clear enough: the potential of instant contact with anyone (on-line) on the planet; the pleasure of the immediate responses; the chance to set entirely my own agenda.

But so were the cons. While friends warned darkly about the perils of the public confessional, I had a nasty feeling that to have a blog might be the literary equivalent of owning a camcorder (life would suddenly stop being life and become a series of photo/blogging opportunities). And besides there was a sniff of dumbing down. What was worth saying in a mere 600 words or so?

Twelve weeks of experience later, I feel much more wholeheartedly positive. Why have I come round?

A glimpse of Greece in Bologna

Occasionally insights into the ancient world hit you when you least expect it, and in surprising places.

I have always found those most precious ancient statues that formed the centrepiece of the grandest Greek temples extremely puzzling. I mean the kind of colossal gold and ivory (“chryselephantine” in academic jargon) creations that once dominated the inside of the Parthenon or the Temple of Zeus at Olympia.

My problem is not how to understand the technical side of their construction: it was a relatively simple process of erecting a frame of wood, then arranging the sheets of gold, or gilded, “clothing” around it in a relatively life-like way and adding a white ivory face, hands and feet. My problem has always been understanding how any such object could end up being anything other than laughably vulgar.

None of these so-called “masterpieces” actually survive; gold and ivory easily falls victims to robbers or flames. But for decades now I have been failing to convince generations of students (not to mention myself) that they were really impressive, awesome works of art – the fitting focus of antiquity’s most holy places. My project has not been helped, it must be said, by the available modern reconstructions, which mostly succeed in making these statues look plain silly.

But last weekend, in the Medieval Museum in Bologna, my eyes were opened.