A Don’s Life

"Let them learn Latin"

Have university “students” turned into “consumers”, more anxious to get value for money for their fees and loans, than to expand their minds? How have traditional subjects – like Classics – fared in this last round of expansion in higher education?

The answers aren’t quite as simple as you think (“yes” and “badly”). In fact, just before I left for the conference in Italy I did an interview for an “Analysis” programme on Radio 4, which is taking a careful look at the debates and discontents around the twenty-first century university. It is being broadcast tonight, repeated on Sunday.

I am usually a bit nervous about this kind of thing. Whatever you actually say, it’s all too easy if you’re in my position to get edited into something that sounds like a cross between an Oxbridge toff and Marie-Antoinette: “Let them learn Latin”.

But I tend do such interviews anyway, on the not wholly worthy grounds that I’d rather it was me having my say than someone else. And on this occasion the programme was being put together by Ruth Scurr (biographer of Robespierre and historian in Cambridge) who wasn’t likely to play fast and loose with my no doubt elitist stumblings.

One of the questions was along the lines of “Why should the state pay for university courses in Latin and Greek”.

Please don't apologize

The slave trade was a truly terrible institution. But I fail to see the point of Tony Blair apologizing for it – or sort of apologizing for it (there is some debate about whether expressing your “sorrow” is quite the same thing).

Apologies (or, more usually, sort of apologies) for historic crimes have become increasingly fashionable. The Church of England Synod has already expressed its regrets for the slave trade. The Queen apologized to the Maori for the nineteenth-century devastation of their lands, though she has apparently drawn the line at the doing the same for the Boer War. Bill Clinton and the US congress apologized for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1893 (United States Public Law 103-150, for anyone interested in reading the exact terms). Pope John Paul II apologized for the sacking of Constantinople in 1204. The last vice-chancellor of my own university (sort of) apologized to the generations of women students who were denied formal Cambridge degrees, despite passing their exams, until 1948.

My problem is not simply a sense that these gestures do precious little good. But the smugness they tend to reveal on the part of the penitent apologizer adds insult to injury – and deflects attention from the wrongs we should currently be putting right.

Showing off Laocoon

I heartily disapprove of those people who sign up for a three day conference, but only show their faces in the conference room to give their own paper, not bothering to listen to what anyone else has to say. It’s a bit like teaching: part of the point of a conference is being there, the face to face encounters between the lectures, and what you have to say about other people’s ideas.

That said, I do think – as I’ve hinted before, when I paid a flying visit to Niagara Falls  – that playing hooky for a session or two is a forgivable crime. So on the Saturday morning of the “Oriental Religions” conference in Rome, I gave myself some time off to go to the Vatican Museums.

Visiting the Vatican is usually a struggle. Maybe some people know a secret that I don’t. But every time I choose to go, there is a huge queue simply to get in to the ticket office, the crowds inside mean that progress around the museum is slow (especially if you are anywhere near the route to the Sistine Chapel) and the restaurant is lousy.

But what attracted me to go back again was a new exhibition (it actually opened that very Saturday) of the most famous ancient Roman statue ever: the Laocoon. 

Crying wolf

Over the last few days I have become a world expert in the bottom left-hand corner of Pietro da Cortona’s painting of the “Rape of the Sabines”. Why? Because  -- although the connection is not, at first sight, an obvious one --  I have been giving a paper at conference organized by the Belgian Academy in Rome.

The gathering was arranged to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the publication of a famous book in the study of Roman Religion: Les religions orientales dans le paganisme romain, by the Belgian scholar, Franz Cumont. This book was a turning point in the study of the religions of Mithras, Isis, Cybele etc in the Roman world. And it is still worth reading, even though – and this was part of the agenda of the conference – we would now feel less confident than Cumont about dubbing religions as “orientales”.

Part of the proceedings took place in the Belgian Academy itself. But one day was held in the Capitoline Museum, in the room where most of the Pietro da Cortona’s are displayed – with rows of chairs specially installed for the occasion. When I was not actually giving my paper I was sitting right next to the “Rape of the Sabines”.

I have to confess that, for me at least, listening to a dozen or papers, back to back, in different foreign languages, some of them delivered at grand prix pace, demands considerable concentration. By the middle of the afternoon, after a Roman lunch, that concentration was wandering and my eyes drifted to the painting. From where I was sitting I could only see that one corner (turning round to catch the whole of the picture would have given my inattention away). It was an extraordinary mixture of male legs, female feet, dress and sandals, with an angry toddler beneath all this shaking his (or her) fists – presumably at the abduction of his (or her) sister – a detail you would hardly notice unless you were nose to nose with canvas, like me.

But as I was dreaming away next to Pietro da Cortona, another object in the museum, also pointing back to the myths of Rome’s foundation, was stealing the headlines. The famous bronze Wolf was being ‘outed’ as early medieval, not primitive Roman at all – in other words, at least a thousand years younger than we thought.

Taking the train

I am starting this blog somewhere between Bath Spa and Chippenham, on the 5.30 a.m. train from Bristol. I was giving a seminar there last night (trying to offer a rather different take on the Roman Triumph and Mantegna’s Trionfi) and I have to be back in Cambridge for that 10 o’clock first year lecture again. I haven’t done a precautionary video this time. But why I should imagine that a train is more likely to get me back on time than an airplane? Hence, in part, the very early start.

Actually it isn’t the pre-dawn rise that has given me the biggest shock. It’s the price of the ticket. Because I need to leave Bristol at a peak period (well, there’s only one other person in the carriage so far – hence I’ve got the laptop out), it tots up to an extraordinary £158. That would have got me to Istanbul and back on a with-frills airplane. And as people have pointed out, when you take the overnight hotel accommodation into account, it would have been a lot cheaper to send a taxi from Cambridge to pick me up from the post-seminar dinner. I then could have had a lie-in till at least 7.

Anyway I vowed to myself when I started this blog that I wasn’t going to use it to rant about the trains (not even the appalling state of the lavatories on the service from Cambridge to London, which would shame the thirdest of third-world countries). And the reason for getting my lap-top out is to return briefly to the television and the ancient world (apologies to those of you who have had enough of this topic; I’ll try not to let it happen again).

There is a really dreadful new archaeological series that I must alert you to.

The tragedy of George Bush

Classicists have to take any opportunity they can get to put -- or keep -- their subject on the map. So when a nice man from the Today programme rang up to say that they wondered if I would like to compare the fate of George Bush to a Greek tragedy, I could hardly say no.

The idea was that in the very same week that Saddam had been sentenced to death he had also (albeit indirectly) delivered a humiliating blow to Bush in the mid-term elections. It is indeed the kind of tragic reversal that Athenian dramatists discussed,  and I quickly agreed to do a 3 minute radio essay.

But which tragedy was I going to choose for the closest parallel to GW?

History backwards

People have e-mailed to ask what I really thought of the television series, Rome: Rise and Fall of an Empire. I posted about it before it was shown, but haven’t committed myself post eventum, as it were.

Part of the reason for that is that I have discovered how loyal you become to a programme you have had a hand in. It’s not that I can’t see the faults (for example, the line about the “infamy” of Nero was far too reminiscent of Carry on Cleo, as a number of reviewers pointed out). But I do somehow feel that, in modern management speak, I “own” it.

I realised this just before the series was broadcast, when a guy from the Radio Times rang to quiz me about its “perverse ordering”. Anyone who watched will remember that the first three episodes went chronologically backwards: first Nero, then Julius Caesar, and finally Tiberius Gracchus. I instantly leapt to the defence, with a smart argument about challenging standard forms of historical narration, and advantages of not always telling history from A to B (B to A sometimes works better). True enough, but the emotional force with which this all came out to slightly bemused man from the Radio Times was like that of a mother accusing a (largely) innocent toddler from an unjust accusation.

Anyway, on Tuesday I had another go at defending the show at a “Public History: seminar in Cambridge. This was part of an enterprising line-up of seminars designed to bring “public” and “media” historians face to face with academics. Often they feature big stars like David Starkey. On this occasion it was me and two of the programme makers of Rise and Fall, quizzed by an audience of dons and students.

The sign of the cross

I couldn’t quite believe my ears when I was listening to the Archbishop of Canterbury head to head with John Humphrys on his new radio programme. I had to check it out on the script posted on the web. 

For those of you who don’t follow the highlights of BBC Radio 4, Humphrys – the rottweiler of the Today programme and a religious sceptic – has a new series in which he interviews faith leaders to see if they can provide some convincing reasons to believe. Part of the appeal of this is to see whether he gives these venerable gentlemen the kind of treatment he usually metes out to some hapless junior minister. “Let me be quite clear. You’re claiming that God does not have a beard.”

First up was Rowan Williams. He’s a very clever man, who held a lectureship in Cambridge and a Chair in Oxford before moving onto higher things. (You can find an excellent introduction to his theology by the religion editor of the TLS, Rupert Shortt.) The interview in fact had more of the feeling of a Cambridge supervision than a Today programme grilling. But Williams got into severe difficulties at various points.

After coming close to denying that serious violence had ever been committed in the name of Christianity, he eventually admitted the Crusades had been “a bad episode” – which is a classic example of being economical with the truth. And he really didn’t seem to have the bottle to tell Humphrys, who was pressing him on this issue, that unless he mended his religious ways he was liable –- according to the rule book --  to end up in a rather fiery place after death..

But this wasn’t why I checked out the script. It was because of what Williams had to say about the relations between pagans and Christians in the Roman empire – a subject which is close to my own academic patch.

Lecturing in the flesh

It is close to madness to leave Cambridge in the middle of term. Coming to Buffalo meant, for a start, that I had to miss one of my first year lectures (though here I was rescued by a kind colleague who agreed to stand in for me). It also meant that every morning I dragged myself out of bed to deal with the 50+ urgent emails from back home, reviewing minutes of meetings, agendas and a host of admin. documents (let alone the queries from students, who quite reasonably expect an answer whether you are at your desk or not).

There was also the nagging question of whether I would manage get back to the university in time for my lecture of 10.00 a.m. on Monday if I took a flight from Newark on Sunday evening . . . scheduled to get to Heathrow at 6.45 a.m.

Buffalo weather at this time of year tends to be cold and windy -- and threatens to disrupt any travel plans. In fact the streets were still littered with the corpses of the trees that had not survived the blizzards of mid-October. Apparently these storms were particularly destructive because they came just a couple of weeks too early, when the leaves had not yet fallen. So the weight of snow on the branches was crippling – and indeed did cripple, beyond repair, more that 70% of Buffalo’s trees, which are now waiting to be hauled away. For me it was one of the most powerful arguments for being worried about climate change…never mind about sea levels, if snow just two weeks early in the season can do THIS….

But my immediate worries were more parochial.