A Don’s Life

Is Zadie Smith right on Trajan's column?

Should authors reply to wrong-headed reviews? Is it a good idea to write in to the offending paper and point out that, despite the sweeping claims of their reviewer, you did in fact mention Pompey the Great (indeed devoted most of chapter 12 to him)/ that you didn’t mis-spell Caesar throughout/ that you are not nor ever have been a member of UKIP . . . or whatever?

In one way, of course it is. If reviews are part of a dialogue, then why silence the poor old author? Needless to say, reviewers on the TLS are not the sort to make crass errors – and, in any case, there is team of hawk-eyed editors who try to run to ground any mistakes that may have slipped through. But there are still a good many readers (myself included sometimes) who head straight for Letters page. There’s nothing like it for a ring-side seat at someone else’s literary row.

All the same, my advice to a friend about to pen an outraged letter would always be to think twice. It can often be more sensible to write the reply in your head, or even on the screen, but not to press the “send” button.

The truth is that no one ever scrutinises a review with quite the obsessive intensity as the book’s author. The chances are that your self-defence will actually draw attention to your alleged inadequacies. And there’s a high risk too that you’ll come across as more miffed than traduced. Unless the allegations are career threatening (plagiarism and the like) or your letter is drop-dead clever and witty, it may be better to hold your horses, to wait and see if anyone writes in on your behalf, and claim the dignified high ground .

What goes for the author also goes, even more so, for the criticized reviewer. So all this preamble is by way of saying that this post is about to (half-)break my own rule.

In last week’s TLS Letters, the excellent Zadie Smith commented on a review I had just published of a new book on the Roman “art of war”. I had said that one of the problems about interpreting the sculpture on Trajan’s and Marcus Aurelius’ columns in Rome was that their “visual narratives were virtually invisible from the ground”.

Zadie Smith objects – in the case of Trajan’s column – that it “originally stood in the middle of a courtyard surrounded by galleries from which viewing was possible.”

Is she right?

Visa Rage

In April I am going to the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles for a few weeks. I am much looking forward to it – as a sort of reward to myself for two years hard labour being Chair of my Faculty. I think I’ve mentioned before that my stint finished in January. Now I’m just plain busy, not on the sort of work schedule that makes you look with envy at the hours of junior hospital doctors.

Anyway, because I shall be getting living expenses from the Getty, I need a “J1” US visa (and the husband needs a “J2”). Let the bureaucracy commence.

In fact, that bureaucracy has sprung a variety of surprises -- from unexpected pockets of  painless efficiency to a style of “processing” designed to make the average middle-aged academic feel more like a known heroin-dealer seeking political asylum.

First off, I needed a new passport. Unwilling to wait weeks for it (as I had to have it to get the visa), I went for the pricey option. For £108 the alarmingly named “Identity and Passport Service” will renew a passport within a day. I turned up in their office behind Victoria Station at 10.00 a.m, waited for about 5 minutes before I could deposit my documents and pay up. I went back to collect the new passport at 4.00. Not a queue in sight. Hassle-free, if you can afford it (a big “if”).

The next thing was a marriage certificate. My husband and I have different surnames and there were hints in the American information that we might need documentary proof of marriage. Of course, we couldn’t find it. But the General Register Office now lets you order a copy online. If you don’t know the certificate’s “index number” (who on earth would?), but do know the date of the wedding, then £10 will get it posted to you within 15 days. For £26 you can have it posted the next day. Mine arrived just as promised within three days (though, predictably enough, I’d found the original almost as soon as I had pressed the "pay" button).

The American part of the process was rather different. Let me say here and now that everyone I dealt with was personally charming, helpful and, on occasion, witty. But the system they were operating seemed designed to get as much money out of you as they dared and to make you feel as disempowered as possible.

Gladiators in Chester - and Afghanistan

I’m writing this from an international conference on Roman amphitheatres in Chester. I had intended to leave yesterday but in the end couldn’t resist staying for the conference dinner – after which a “gladiatorial entertainment” was promised, courtesy of some fighters from Roman Tours, whose normal business is to provide “authentic” Roman guides around the town and museum.

All the high-minded academic diners on my table seemed to be looking forward to it as much as I was. After all, it was a wonderfully Roman idea. For gladiators didn’t just appear in the amphitheatre, they featured at funerals and – among the rich – as a private, dinner-time spectacle.

I’m glad I stayed. But it did turn out to be a little tamer than I had hoped (or feared). The bouts didn’t actually last very long and most of the fighters were so burdened with all the gear that they couldn’t muster much agility. That may have been true of the real version too. But I don’t imagine that ancient gladiators were quite as portly as most of this lot. Far be it from me to point the finger at others who should lose a bit of weight, but the impression I got was that it was overwhelmingly middle-aged men of the short and dumpy variety who liked dressing up as Romans.

The conference itself was partly to celebrate the re-excavation of the amphitheatre at Chester, which captured the media’s imagination on Saturday. All the usual suspects, from the Today programme to the Times, had luridly entertaining features on the blood and guts of the Chester arena two thousand years ago. As the Times put it,  “Torture topped the bill in Roman Chester”.

Really?

The Romans in Kabul

Spurred on by the enthusiastic review in the TLS, I’ve just been to Paris to visit the exhibition of Treasures of Afghanistan at the Musée Guimet, one of the main French collections of Asian Antiquities. It’s a loan exhibition from the Archaeological Museum in Kabul which is travelling to various other venues -- but as yet (and maybe for obvious reasons) there are no firm plans for it to come to the UK. It is well worth going to Paris to see.

It is a brilliant show, putting on display the strikingly multi-cultural “classical sites” of ancient Afghanistan, including the cities founded by Alexander the Great on his way through.

It’s hard to imagine a better, or more timely and in some ways more poignant, advert for the Greco-Roman world as a bridge between East and West.

Was Cleopatra beautiful?

I woke up this morning to the seven o' clock news and to the revelation (thanks to the "new" discovery of a Roman coin in a Newcastle collection) that Cleopatra was not, after all, drop-dead gorgeous. This coin - which made not it only into the Today programme, but also most national newspapers, including a full page in the Guardian - shows a nasty jowly Mark Antony on one side and a decidedly middle-aged, not to say frankly ugly, Cleopatra on the other.

Of course, Classicists live by every puff on the oxygen of publicity that they can get. So the headline billing for the first century BC cheered me up in a way. But this "exclusive" (reassuring as it might have been to most women in the land on Valentine's day) was also puzzling. That's largely because it is not a "new" discovery at all. This particular specimen of the coin might only recently have seen the light in Newcastle, but as a type it's long been very well known -- and there are loads of examples of this and other very similar coin images found across the world. The picture shows one like the Newcastle type, and you can find a whole array of others nicely illustrated in the catalogue of a British Museum "Cleopatra" exhibition, held a few years ago (edited by Susan Walker and Peter Higgs). In almost none does the queen match up to the Elizabeth Taylor image. More like Edna Everage.

When classicists get their teeth into these coins they usually have more interesting questions to ask than simply "was she really pretty or not?" . One question is how far such tiny images are life-like anyway (compare our own queen -- she never ever looked like the chocolate-box teenager which was until recently her standard coin portrait). Another is how far even full-sized Roman portraits can be taken as "drawn from life". Another is what kind of conventions were at play in the ancient world for representing the anomaly of the "powerful woman". As Susan Walker points out in the catalogue, the earliest representation of Cleopatra (in Pharaonic style) shows her as a man.

So my second, curmudgeonly, thought by ten past seven was "why waste an interesting topic with a Valentine's day laugh about Cleopatra's nose?"

But that was too severe. If Cleopatra can make it to news headlines after 2000 years, then good luck to her. And good luck to the excellent Shefton Museum in Newcastle -- which deserves to be better known, and no doubt now will be.

David Cameron's "Georgic"

I suspect that much of the country -- the younger part at least -- was actually relieved to discover that David Cameron had joined in with his mates to enjoy a few youthful spliffs. It’s not a question of his school days being ‘private’. In fact I’m rather suspicious of the idea that anything you do before you’ve entered politics somehow doesn’t count. As if bullying, cheating, thuggery, assault would all  be OK before you’ve plighted your troth to the Tory party.

More to the point is the fact that (as some estimates have it) at least 40% of young people have at some stage smoked dope. It’s surely preposterous to have political leaders selected only from the remaining 60% who (say they) haven’t.

My guess is that the cannabis will have surprised very few. What really will have puzzled most people who read the Cameron story is the punishment for his misdemeanor meted out by the Eton beaks. What was the ‘Georgic’ that was imposed on him? And what on earth did it have to do with Virgil’s Latin poem of the same name?

A real howler

This post is a confession. I have just made a real classic howler – in an embarrassingly public way. It serves me right. I’m a reviewer who is often ready to tut-tut about other people’s silly errors, mistaken dates and mangled spellings (“. . . only a pity that Professor X seems to imagine that the third triumph of Pompey took place in 59 BC”, and the like). This biter is now well and truly bit.

You may remember that I was writing the programme notes for Handel’s Agrippina at the Coliseum (which I’m off to see tonight, snow permitting). I was actually rather pleased about what I’d done, teasing out a lot more about the classical roots of the plot than your average opera critic. Well, pride came before a fall.

A couple of days ago one of those opera critics (one who had actually read Classics with me at Cambridge all those years ago) sent me a wonderfully tactful e-mail. He had just seen ENO’s Agrippina (in the picture), much enjoyed my programme notes … but. . .err . . .wasn’t the Agrippina in question not the grand-daughter of the first emperor Augustus (as I had written), but the great-grand-daughter?

The Elgin Marbles - and a sentimental journey

Last week this jobbing Classicist visited Shrewsbury to talk to the Friends of Shrewsbury Museum about the Elgin Marbles. This is a subject on which I’m a maverick (or a free-spirit, depending on your point of view), belonging neither to the “send them back” campaign, nor to the “over my dead body” retentionists.

It’s an uncomfortable fence on which to sit, liable to attack by both sides. But most of the arguments usually brought out on this subject seem pretty weak to me. In the red corner: Melina Mercouri (on the stamp) weeping in front of the captured sculptures in the British Museum. In the blue: one of its ex-Directors calling the Greeks “cultural fascists” for wanting them back. Both are cheap tricks.

When I lecture about it I try to talk about why the debate is so long running and what the big issues are that drive it. No argument goes on for two hundred years unless it raises problems that really are hard to solve. What does “ownership” mean in the case of such world famous masterpieces? Why do we think that objects belong where they were made? Why is repatriation generally advocated by the Left in the case of lumps of marble, but not in the case of people?

I’m particularly interested in the question of when “history” or “historic removal” seems irrevocable – historically irreversible. If the Marbles had been taken in the Second World War, there is hardly any doubt that some process, however ineffectual,  would have been initiated to send them back. On the other hand, if they had been taken to Rome by some general or dynast, in an act of Roman spoliation in the first century AD, they would now be a prime example of ancient Rome’s ambivalent dependence of Greek culture – not the subject of a reparation dispute. Where on this spectrum do the Marbles belong? And why?

There’s always a good discussion when you talk about these topics. Shrewsbury was no exception. But it meant rather more to me than usual, because going to Shrewsbury was going back “home”. Shropshire  is where I was born and brought up.

Classics rejected

The history of the study of Classics has become a fashionable topic to explore over the last few years (well, fashionable among professional classicists, that is). It’s a branch of what we have come to call “reception studies”.

Mostly we have concentrated on investigating the careers of our successful predecessors. Top of the list have been the likes of Sir Richard Jebb (in the picture), prolific commentator on Sophocles (his commentaries are still in use today after more than a hundred years), professor of Greek at Cambridge, member of parliament and self-interested dandy (“What time he can spare from the adornment of his person he devotes to the neglect of his duties” as the Master of his college nicely quipped).

Or there’s my own particular love-hate subject --  Newnham don, contrived eccentric and the first professional woman classicist in this country, Jane Ellen Harrison. When she was a student she apparently turned William Gladstone apoplectic on a visit to the college. Asked what her favourite Greek author was, she replied “Euripides”. Not enough to enrage a modern Prime Minister. But for Gladstone the right answer was always Homer, and Harrison – by choosing the radical and unsettling Athenian dramatist – was intentionally trying to needle the Grand Old Man. It worked.

But last Saturday one of our graduate students hosted an excellent conference on the other side of this story: those who didn’t make it, those who were squeezed out by the big guys, those who hated it. It was called “Classics rejected": the start, as one of the session chairs quipped, almost as nicely as Jebb’s Master, of a new science of “rejection studies”.