A Don’s Life

No sex please, we're drunk: rape ancient and modern

If it wasn’t such an important subject, it would be hard to take seriously the government’s  plans for raising the conviction rate in rape trials. One idea is that a woman should be deemed incapable of having giving consent if she was very drunk: in other words, all sex after binge-drinking would count as rape.

This is bonkers. Like many women I have my own rape story (and please read it before you post to say that I am not treating violence against women with due concern). But the idea that drunkenness and consent can be policed in this way, as judges have already pointed out, makes no sense at all.

It is not simply that a rough, unscientific survey suggests that most sex in this country takes place under the influence of alcohol. (Clive James has a bit to say on Kingsley Amis’ s drunken couplings in the coming issue of the TLS.) I actually went so far as to wonder whether the new proposals were not what they seemed, but rather were a cunning way of reducing teenage pregnancies or AIDS – or had been dreamt up by the manufacturers of breathalysers.

But more important is the obvious fact that a witness-less crime, where guilt is often to be determined more by motivation and will, rather than by any physical evidence, is almost impossible to adjudicate. That is to say, no one contests that they had sex; the question is whether she wanted to, or whether he reasonably thought that she did. These are difficulties that were brilliantly highlighted in the recent Channel 4 drama-doc, “Consent” where we saw the tricky deliberations of a jury coming to a Not Guilty verdict – followed by a final flashback which proved just how wrong they were.

The jury’s dilemma is not going to be helped by a series of tick-box rules, which in any case don’t match up to most people’s everyday experience. Why is no-one saying that it would be better to stop men having non-consensual sex in the first place rather than invent hopelessly ingenious ways of trying to convict them when they do?  To be fair, a government-sponsored advertising campaign,  aimed at men, might be moving a little way in that direction (though the "no entry" sign stamped on the woman's pants still suggests that the main reason you might not have sex with her is simply that you might find yourself in the dock if you did).

The real challenge, to take my own case, is how to stop men thinking that it is still on the margins of acceptability to pick up an exhausted student on Milan railway station, buy her a bed in a Wagon Lit, and then have (unwanted) sex with her on the way to Rome. Prosecution isn’t the only point.

Paganism without the blood

One of the good things about working on ancient “pagan” religion is that no one actually believes in it any more. (“Pagan” here is in inverted commas, of course, because it wasn’t a term people ever used of themselves: it was a term of semi-abuse from the Christian camp, and probably meant something like “hick” or “hillbilly”.)

It’s easy to debate paganism because you’re not always looking over your shoulder at a community of contemporary believers. Whenever I try to teach the “rise of Christianity” with a group of undergraduates – did economics underlie it? the institutional support of the emperor Constantine? – I’m always horribly aware that part of the group doesn’t really think it’s a question worth asking. For them the obvious reason that Christians won out against the pagans was that their religion was true. Simple as that.

In contrast, paganism is a teacher’s joy. You can dissect it as fiercely as you like. You can even claim that Zeus, Aphrodite and co. did not actually exist, without fear of being arraigned on a charge of incitement to religious hatred.

Or so I thought. But last week a group of modern Athenians, dressed in ancient Greek costume (so they claimed), descended on the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens, prayed to Zeus to bring about world peace and held a ceremony to celebrate the marriage of Zeus and Hera. A few months before they had gained official recognition as a religious organization from the Greek government.

At first sight not good news for me. But on closer inspection I needn’t have worried.

Racism in Greece and Rome

I didn’t actually watch Jade Goody and friends attack Shilpa Shetty. But it’s been impossible to avoid the endless follow-up wrangling about what was really going on. Was this appalling racism? An episode in the class war? Brutal bullying? Or just plain hatred of foreigners (which, though unpleasant enough, is not necessarily racist)?

It all reminded me uncannily of the debates about whether racism existed in Greek and Roman world.

There is no doubt at all that they often treated outsiders badly. The idea of the ‘barbarian’ (someone whose speech is just an incomprehensible “ba ba”) is a well known Greek invention. But the cultural identity of both societies was even more pervasively based on what we would now see as an unhealthy distrust of anyone different from themselves. Xenophobia in other words.

The list of unnatural things that foreigners were supposed to get up to is a long one. It ranged from peculiar eating habits (not just frogs legs or poppadoms, but at its worst cannibalism) to strange regimes of hygiene (women standing up to piss was a notable source of wonderment and/or disdain) and topsy-turvy ideas of sex and gender (women in charge).

The Greeks painted a contemptuous picture of the Persians as trousered, decadent softies who wore far too much perfume. Then the Romans came along and, minus the trousers, said much the same about the Greeks: a nice example of being given a taste of your own medicine.

But, strikingly, it’s usually claimed that neither Greeks nor Romans bothered very much about skin colour. This was a time ‘before colour prejudice’.

Why teaching can harm the planet

This has been the first week of the Cambridge term and I have been launching one of my favourite lecture courses. This is a series on “The History of Roman Britain” for third years (Part II students, in our jargon).

Despite the title it isn’t mainly about archaeology. I have to confess that I retired from proper “dirt” archaeology when I was 21 – when the pleasure of spending a fortnight in a field, sharing tents (and more) with a load of other late-adolescents and consuming vast  quantities of alcohol suddenly seemed outweighed by the hard work, the hangovers and the sheer discomfort of a soggy campsite after a week of rain.

The course does include a bit of dirt. But it is more literally about the History of Roman Britain…and how it has been represented from the Roman world right up to now. Tacitus rubs shoulders with Asterix, Cassius Dio with Manda Scott and Rudyard Kipling.

One of the highlights is watching some well chosen clips from the dreadful Channel 5 drama-doc of Boudicca made a few years ago, in which the Romans are cast as some ersatz American, Halliburton-style, corporate capitalists smooth talking the noble (but dim) Brits into parting with their valuable natural resources. Actually not a bad analogy, some of us may think.

Seamus Heaney and Latin

Seamus Heaney has just won the T. S. Eliot Prize for District and Circle.

Heaney is one of many modern poets engaging marvellously with classical literature.  He appeared in my last post being translated into Greek Elegiac couplets by Cambridge undergraduates (I hope he would be pleased if he knew!). Let me here single out one poem in the prize-winning collection, with a particularly classical turn.

“Anything can happen” reworks Horace Odes 1, 34 (Parcus deorum . . . ) in response to the events of 9/11. In the original,  Horace appears to claim a religious change of heart after experiencing the thunderbolt of Jupiter coming from the sky. And there has been a good deal of discussion, since the collection was published, about how successful the poem and the analogy is (including a pretty ambivalent reaction in the TLS).

It’s well worth having a look at, and not just by fans of Horace..

Exams are getting harder -- shock

Yesterday I was sent an intriguing present. It was the exam papers taken by a Newnham Classics student in 1901-1902. I’d seen these before, in their pristine, bound volumes in the University Library. But actually fingering the ones that come direct from the exam room, still marked with the blood, sweat and tears of the poor student (well, almost) makes a more powerful impression.

It’s hard not to ask yourself the obvious question: are these degree exams really more difficult than what our students do, like the gloomy commentators claim?

Well, put aside any romantic nostalgia for the glory days of rigourous classical education at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The good news is that what our undergraduates face at the beginning of the twenty-first is actually rather more challenging.

True, these papers look a bit more formidable (something to do with the close set typeface, I think), and there was a gruelling run of two three-hour papers per day (our students take only one a day). And you certainly had to know a lot. But there isn’t much evidence that a lot of thinking was required. Imagine the brightest and best classicists sitting down after three years at Cambridge to: “Mention the chief works of Zeuxis, Timanthes, Nikias and Timomachos” (a question about ancient painting, for which you just need to know the relevant passage of the elder Pliny). Or “Describe with a sketch-plan the Circus Maximus at Rome”.

My favourite is the one that asked “for a short description, showing where possible its evolution in classical times” of the “lock and key”.

Free tickets to the opera

I’ve posted before about some of the surprising gigs you get offered as a classicist. Visits to HM Prisons are at one end of the spectrum. Free tickets to the opera are at the other.

Well not exactly free. I’ve just finished writing some programme notes for Handel’s Agrippina which is about to open at the English National Opera (and I shall be doing a pre-performance talk in February). And the fee comes along with a couple of tickets thrown in.

There are in other words some collateral benefits for people like me in the perceived decline of classical learning amongst even the opera-going public. Agrippina? Who? Not even ENO thinks that you can put on a theme like this without explaining in the programme something about the ancient Roman character who lies behind the show. The same is true for Semele, Titus and Berenice, even Orpheus.

Enter the jobbing classicist.

Is anyone borrowing my books?

Public Lending Right is a marvellous institution. It pays money to writers for the loan of their books from public libraries – funded by the government, without charging the borrowers themselves.

It was a struggle to get it. Brigid Brophy and her father John were the leading lights of the campaign, strongly supported by the TLS. Appropriately enough, it was all conducted rather decorously and mostly in print -- though there is supposed to have been one piece of direct action, in the form of a well-behaved demonstration on a traffic island in Belgrave Square. (Swedish writers, in a similar campaign, had a sharper eye for publicity: on one day they turned up at the public libraries in the big cities and simply borrowed all the books.)

Anyway, the first pay-outs here came in 1982. Now it provides cash to over 20,000 authors (who get between £1 and £6,600, at which point payments are capped.) Notice of this year’s amounts have just gone out.

I shall be getting – wait for it -- £18.54.

On not knowing Arabic

I can’t understand why people make such a fuss about not keeping New Year Resolutions. It’s always seemed to me that the whole point about them was precisely NOT to keep them. That is to say, broken resolutions are one of the ways we have for coming to terms with what we would like to do, but know that we never will. It’s a way of looking our own human frailty in the eye; of publicly acknowledging hopeless ambitions.

Giving up smoking? Losing weight? No. In my case the resolution in question is learning Arabic.

Public Hanging? We're no better than the Romans.

Marcus Tullius Cicero was put to death in December 43 BC. Cicero had had a mixed record. He had already spent time in exile for putting Roman citizens to death without trial (or, as Cicero himself might have put it, for taking the necessary steps against a dangerous cell of terrorists: it was a “homeland security” problem). But his own execution was itself of dubious legality, masterminded by Mark Antony, in revenge for Cicero’s public smear campaign against him (documented in the speeches we still possess, and know as the Philippics).

Cicero died bravely, stretching his neck to meet the killer’s blade. What happened next is nastier. His head and hands were cut off and put on display on the speaker’s platform in the Forum (these particular parts symbolizing Cicero’s two key weapons: his ability to write and to speak with devastating effect). Antony’s wife, Fulvia, came along, it’s said, and drove her hairpins through the dead man’s tongue.

It was typical Roman behaviour to take vengeance on the body of the enemy, dead or alive. The public humiliation of the corpse goes beyond anything we could possibly countenance. But at least -- so far as we know – it wasn’t accompanied by the sanctimonious double standards that have greeted the public execution of Saddam, and its beaming round the planet. The best attended public execution in history.

The Romans enjoyed their cruelty straight.