A Don’s Life

In a rut

I’m off to Los Angeles next week for my stint at the Getty Research Institute. The plan is to work on Pompeii.

First of all, I’m going to be taking a serious, hard look at the traces of religious activities that have come up from the excavations (what exactly were those “lararia” for?). But that’s supposed to move on to writing a more general book. My sense is that most books about Pompeii for non-specialists don’t manage to exploit a lot of the new archaeological work that’s being done on the site. Except, of course, for studies of vulcanology. They’re always full of the latest boffin theory on pyroclastic flow, lava surges and the like – and they detail the death throes of the poor inhabitants minute by minute.

I’m intending to steer clear of death and destruction, “Pompeii the disaster movie”. Instead I want to think about what the buried city can tell us about ancient life.

The Getty Library probably owns one of the best collections on Pompeii in the world. But I still felt that I ought to go and take another look at the ruins themselves before I ended up so many thousand miles away. So last weekend, I went off to Naples to spend a couple of days on the site and at the Naples Museum.

Top of the agenda -- thanks in part to your interest in an earlier post -- were the loos (the Roman ones, that is) and the cart ruts in the streets.

Do it yourself cremation

Death tends to play a big part in a Classics degree. Ancient poetry and drama is full of murder, suicide, assassination, contested burials. Archaeologists love nothing better than a cemetery to dig up. At Cambridge we have a whole third year course on the topic, which covers death from every possible angle – from Socrates to Trajan’s column (which, of course, to return to this contested subject, contained Trajan’s ashes in its base).

One of the first things the students learn is that with the exception of emperors, a few other dignitaries and the occasional new-born babies, Romans were always buried outside the city. Hence those roads like the Appian Way outside Rome, lined with tombs.

With a nostalgic image of an English village in mind (graveyard nestling next to the village green. . .), we tend to treat this as a slightly odd, unfamiliar practice. In fact, arrangements in modern Cambridge are strikingly similar. The crematorium is located outside the city limits, on the main A14 road towards Huntingdon.

Once upon a time this may have been a peaceful green-field site. Now the grieving friends and relatives are forced to negotiate one of the most accident prone highways in the country (perhaps not all that different from the Appian Way in that respect). I dread to think how, on exit, they tearfully weave their way into the speeding lanes of trucks.

Black humour would suggest that this was a way of the crem drumming up its own trade.

History Carnival

I am pleased to say that I shall be hosting the 51st History Carnival on this site on 1 April. For those of you who don’t yet know it, this Carnival aims to search out and showcase some of the very best history-related blog posts. It appears twice a month and is hosted on various different sites…and now on mine.

So if you have found any great history blogs since 15 March that you think I should have on my list, then do send them to me.

Either direct on the Carnival’s submission form, or to me at  mb127@cam.ac.uk. Or, if you like, post them in the Comments below (and I’ll keep  them for the Carnival, rather than publishing them straightaway).

Supping with the devil?

If anyone is following my Lenten abstinence, I must confess that yesterday I deemed the Irish Embassy (which was hosting a friend’s  book launch) to be foreign soil and I allowed myself a couple of whiskies. It was the first alcohol that I have knowingly consumed in several weeks, unless you count some sherry sauce on a bowl of ice cream.

I’m not a regular at embassy parties, but – alcohol or not – this little piece of Ireland seemed an unusually jolly place, from the welcoming doorman to the cloakroom attendant and the generous barmen. The consequence, I suspect, of being a small nation which is doing very nicely thank you, and which (unlike us) no-one hates.

By and large, though, abstinence has changed my party habits. I haven’t been the last to leave for a whole month. Instead I’ve tended to enjoy (sic?) one glass of orange juice, graze on the nibbles -- and slip away after half an hour or so, before too much temptation has been waved under my nose.

This is exactly what I did on Wednesday at the party to re-launch the Campaign for the Restitution of the Elgin Marbles (“Marbles Reunited”), and so I missed the speeches – by one of my Cambridge colleagues and by the President of the Organizing Committee for the new Acropolis Museum, which is due to open this year. (The brochure we were given made it look extremely attractive, rather more so than in this picture – though whether a glass building in sunny Athens is a good idea for visitor comfort or the environment remains to be seen.)

The event was held at the House of Commons, which is decidedly less welcoming to its citizens than the Irish Embassy is to its guests. Some of the security staff and police try their best to look friendly, but the Gulag-style body search at the entrance is as off-putting as it is humourless.

The party spirit thrived nonetheless. In fact, most surprising of all (given the sometimes bad tempered conduct of this long standing cultural squabble) was the fact that both “sides” – the British Museum and the Restitutionists -- were happily quaffing together.

Where's the loo?

Most Cambridge colleges “went mixed” some twenty years ago. But they still preserve unexpected corners of male power and privilege. None of these corners is more irritating than the location of the female loos.

Imagine it. You’re sitting in the SCR – that’s the fellows’ common room – after dinner. You casually ask for the Ladies. The chances are that there will be a bit of a flap, while the equivalent of an AA route map and a compass is produced. It usually involves going out into the courtyard, through the rain, into the next court, up a staircase three doors on the left – only to discover a set of facilities which you know to be decidedly inferior to whatever is laid on for the men, and much less ‘convenient’ in almost every way.

Some colleges, to be fair, are a bit better organised; and my own, I confess, treats male needs with almost equal disdain. But the general rule seems to be that women’s ablutions are lower down the pecking order than men’s.

I have never really understood why single sex loos are necessary, anyway, in a place like a university (King’s Cross station late at night is probably another matter).

Why can’t we just share?

Is university entrance squeezing the middle class?

Reinventing the wheel often causes a flurry of headlines. This time (once again) it is about university entrance and the decision to have information about parents included on the University (UCAS) application form. The idea is that it will help to “widen access” if admissions’ tutors know what the potential student’s Mum and Dad do, and whether have been to university themselves.

Squeals of horror from the usual (middle class) suspects.

There is in fact nothing new at all here.

The Stasi . . .and Emperor Commodus

I haven’t seen The Lives of Others yet, the German movie that won the Best Foreign Language Film award at this year’s Oscars. But I have been reading some of the discussion it has prompted about the so-called “shield and the sword” of the old East German regime -- the Stasi.

Were they a faintly comic bunch of bumbling Keystone Secret-Kops? Or were they a truly menacing force of internal oppression, who made the Gestapo look like a troupe of renegade boy-scouts?

It has all reminded me of a visit to Leipzig a decade or so ago, to give a lecture. My hosts at the university urged me to visit the Stasi-Museum there (technically the Museum “in der Runden Ecke” / “in the round corner”). This, they stressed, was no bright, shiny western museum display of communism’s crimes. This museum had actually taken over the old Stasi HQ. It still smelled of the Stasi – the only place in the new Leipzig that had retained a distinctively eastern odour.

De-mob happy

It’s coming up to the last week of Cambridge term, and my third-year Roman Britain class has been enjoying the end-of-course field trips. De-mob happy, last week we all went off in a coach to the Castle Museum in Colchester; this Saturday it was a train to the Museum of London.

First stop in London was actually the amphitheatre of the Roman city, partly preserved down in the basement under the Guildhall Art Gallery. Opened to the public in 1999, this gallery houses the Corporation of London’s art collection --  including some amazing Victorian stuff, from a clutch of A-list pre-Raphaelites to some of my favourite bits of nineteenth-century Hellenism (Lord Leighton, Alma-Tadema, Poynter and co).

The whole set up is pretty strange. There’s an airport style security system when you go in  -- ever since some free-thinker came along with a cricket bat and took a swipe at the head of their statue of Margaret Thatcher. I don’t know if that puts the hordes off (and maybe the place is swarming with city-workers during the week), but on the three occasions I’ve visited on a Saturday, it has been deserted. In fact it gives the distinct impression that its main function is to provide overspill cloakroom and loo space for the VIPs from the Guildhall next door – and that the paintings etc are really just the background decoration.

There is actually a little spy-hole down into what is left of the amphitheatre from just outside the palatial made-for-royalty loos. And it does look wonderful – with a green laser effect to reconstruct the seating, plus some green laser spectators and fighters.

Entertaining Boris Johnson

Or rather “Boris Johnson entertains”. For the Member for Henley came to the Classics Faculty today to give a seminar called “The Love of Classics” (his choice of title, not ours). BJ read Classics at Oxford – and is one of the keenest supporters of the subject we have. “Love” is hardly too strong a word.

Our idea in inviting him was to get him talking Classics to Classicists. This wasn’t to be a lobby on tuition fees, or university funding. No-one even mentioned Patrick Mercer who was being ejected from the Tory front-bench practically as we spoke. This was all about Rome.

My verdict? Well, it is only in a fit of madness that I would find myself  actually voting for this endearing toff (even if I did live in Henley). But he passed this particular test pretty well. To put it another way, I ought to hate the guy – but, in fact, I cant help but think that he’s rather a good thing.

Forty days and forty nights

I have given up alcohol for Lent. This has nothing to do with faith. I simply wanted to see whether I could manage it – with the gloomy thought that the more difficult I found it, the more necessary it was to persevere. I was also quite taken with the idea of sparing my body all those liquid calories..

I should confess to allowing myself a few exceptions. By prior agreement with my conscience I quaffed some pink champagne at a party last week, strictly as a one-off. And I have decided that Lent doesn’t happen abroad (by which I mean once I’ve got through Security at an airport). I’m currently wondering if the Irish Embassy can count as “abroad”. No, I haven’t started mixing in diplomatic circles, but I have been invited to a friend’s book launch there – and have been much looking forward to a “I’m a Professor of Classics, it’s what I do” kind of evening. (For readers outside the UK baffled by this arcane allusion, it’s all explained in the link.)

Anyway, these occasions apart, I have kept to the resolve – even though the hours between 6.00 and 9.00 pm each day require a considerable exercise of willpower. The disappointment is that I don’t feel any different yet. True, the good news is that I’m obviously not such a drinker that I’ve had withdrawal symptoms. But I’m not feeling noticeably healthier either. All in all my body seems in pretty much the same shape as it was before.

I have, however, learned quite a lot  from my current vantage point about the social ubiquity of alcohol in my world. Being a temporary teetotaller round here can feel a bit like wearing a burka in a bar.