A Don’s Life

10 things you thought you knew about the Romans . . . but didn't

I shall be replying to the flood of comments about the last post on the Greek fires by the by (though let me say here and now that something very odd happened in the translation of my post on the Greek website that so many people saw!). But meanwhile to happier topics. A fellow blogger suggests that we classicists tend to keep too many secrets about the ancient world to ourselves. So let me share a few.

Here are 10 things you thought you knew about the Romans but didn’t. 10 myths about the Romans exploded…!

1) JULIUS CAESAR’S LAST WORDS WERE ‘ET TU BRUTE’
Well, only in Shakespeare’s version of the assassination. Probably our best ancient source is Suetonius and he records the words as (in Greek) “kai su teknon” – or “you too my child”. What this means, in fact, isn’t so clear. If it is has a question mark, it smacks of quizzical, dying desperation. Give it an exclamation mark and it becomes a threat (“they’ll get you too kid…”).

2) ROME WAS BUILT ON SEVEN HILLS.
Some serious miscalculation here. Palatine, Aventine, Capitoline, Janiculan, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, Caelian, Pincian, Vatican. That’s 10 for a start. Though it all depends I suppose, on what you call a hill.

3) ROMANS HAD ‘VOMITORIA’ TO BE SICK IN BETWEEN COURSES AT LAVISH DINNERS
Sorry. This is an old one, But vomitoria were the exit routes which spewed people out of the amphitheatres.

4) ROMAN MEN DRESSED IN TOGAS
OK sometimes they did. But it was very formal wear – and it’s a bit like saying ‘Englishmen wear dinner jackets’. Actually you’d have seen all kinds of dress on the Roman street, from tunics to trousers -- and, just to confuse things, prostitutes in togas. (Here’s a neat article which sets this one straight.)

5) NERO FIDDLED WHILE ROME BURNED
Not if you mean that he sat around ineffectually twiddling his thumbs while the city went up in flames. Actually what Nero did was fiddle in another sense: he played the violin (or so it was said).

Five more after the jump. . .

Olympia (almost) burns...but Paris survives

First let me apologise for writing about the antiquities of ancient Greece, when so many people have died in the terrible fires -- probably almost a hundred casualties altogether so far. It reminds me a bit of the “bombing” of the Parthenon in 1687, which everyone now laments as the loss of a great building, forgetting the hundreds of women and children killed in the process.

But, conscience apart, even as I’m writing, it is not entirely clear what exactly has happened to which ancient sites in the Peloponnese.

The good news seems to be that the Greek and Roman remains of Olympia have escaped (and a lot of them, let’s remember, are of Roman imperial date and not from the fifth-century BC well-springs of democracy at all). The Greek Archaeological Service is very good on disaster planning, and almost certainly its fire protection devices, as well as the brave fire-fighters and a dose of good luck, played their part in keeping the site safe..

But the news reports have tended to concentrate on Olympia alone – when, in fact, there are any number of sites round about whose loss would be almost equally troubling in archaeological, even if not symbolic, terms. I think here of the temple of Apollo at Bassae on its romantic hillside (the temple itself is now  covered with a strange almost post-modern tent, as you see in the picture). We still don’t know whether this has made it. Let alone the much less well known temple of the “Great Goddesses” at Lykosoura in the valley below. And that’s before we start to think about the Byzantine churches gone up in flames.

At this point I begin to feel grateful for the dispersal of antiquities around the museums of the world.

Sprechen Sie what?

I now feel it was a bit unfair to have a joke at the expense of Esperanto in my last post. After all, the GSCE figures just issued suggest that it might not be long before there are more people in this country capable of speaking Esperanto than German.

Most newspaper accounts of GSCE that you’ve read will have parroted the up-beat press release of the Joint Council of Qualifications: more students are getting A grades, more are taking science subjects, the gender gap is narrowing, standards are going up. Oh yes -- and there have been fewer entries in most modern languages: a 10 per cent decline in German (yet again), almost as much in French.

Currently abut 80,000 kids take German at GCSE – only about 8 times as many as take Latin. Keen classicist that I am, even I can’t believe that ratio is quite right. To look at it another way – and I get this from a House of Commons question -- the number of students in Shropshire taking any modern language at all at GCSE fell from 2549 in 2001 to 1821 in 2006. Any rise there has been in languages in the country overall, has come from Polish and Urdu, from native speakers in other words. I haven’t noticed a load of school kids starting Polish as a second language.

The hand-wringing about this has been a bit perfunctory. The Schools Minister, for example, claimed that making languages compulsory in primary school would eventually make a difference – while (consistent in its way, I guess) he also put the decline down to making languages optional in the National Curriculum after age 14

The insouciance was gobsmacking.

Esperanto, Welsh and the language wars

Could Esperanto save the world? When I was a kid I did learn a few words of this proto-global language, invented (as a gesture to intra-planetary understanding) in the 1880s by the doctor-cum-linguist, Polish-cum-Lithuanian, Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof. He had, it was said, toyed with idea of bringing back Latin as the world’s second language (that actually would have been easier for me). But instead he decide to construct his own, making it nicely simple, with no pronunciation traps and easy, consistent rules.

It ended up as an odd hybrid of Latin and German, with a smattering of French and Italian (not to mention a bit of ancient Greek “kaj” is “and” in Esperanto, after “kai” in Greek). So “plena” is “full”, and “plenplena” is “very full” (Greek reduplication, I suppose). And “mal” is the negative: “ami’ means “to love”, “malami”, “to hate”. Get it?

It was through my Dad that I ventured into Esperanto a little. He, in the spirit  of his times, saw Esperanto as a weapon in Moral Rearmament – as well as a blow to Welsh (which, as we lived in Shrewsbury, crept incomprehensibly through our letterbox on the phone and electric bills).

I didn’t meet Esperanto again till the 1990s.

Are A levels (still) dumbing down?

As if to make it very clear that the answer to that question was a resounding ‘no’, the QCA (The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority) took out a full page advert in some of today’s papers. It congratulated all those students getting their results and quoted some of the questions they had had to answer.

The question that was read out on the morning news  – from Psychology A level -- was “Describe and evaluate the contributions of the Psychodynamic Approach and the Cognitive Approach to society”. Cor, we were meant to think, that’s hard.

It was, of course, something of a hostage to fortune. For a start, it may look gob-smackingly arcane to you and me, but turn to the A level board’s specification for that paper (Unit 6) and it is exactly what the students should have prepared themselves for:

Students, it says clearly in the syllabus, should be able to distinguish “between approaches/perspectives in psychology, including . . . the psychodynamic approach, the cognitive approach and the physiological approach.”

So it wasn’t exactly a wild card. 

Next, it was just one part of a 90 minute paper, which – bearing in mind the time taken reading the paper and making your choice of options – would be answered in something like 20 minutes, which hardly gives time for much intellectual nuance. And according to the examiners’ reports, also published today, it wasn’t even all that well done.

Going, going, gone

I am 52 and among the list of things still to do before I die is going to an auction – and managing to buy something. Actually I do remember going to a cattle market when I was about five to see my uncle, an auctioneer, in action. But that doesn’t quite count.

This weekend the ambition was at least half realised with a trip to the monthly “antique, furniture, art-works and everything else you can think of” auction at the local village of Willingham. The ostensible reason was to find some kitchen chairs.

Viewing began on Thursday. It turned out that the chairs we had spotted on the web were no good, but the shed-loads (literally) of other stuff looking for a good home was extremely enticing. OK, you could keep the cigarette cards, old teddy bears, televisions, garden furniture, military uniforms, People’s Princess figurines, and the rest.  But then there were the “five taxidermy exotic birds under glass domes” (export permit required; est. £150/200)  and the pair of 1850s Parian busts of  Victoria and Albert (the only trouble being that they came as a job lot with  another lone Victoria and a very nasty Shakespeare for a total est. of £80/140). More than 1300 lots in all.

It was a bit like going to a supermarket when you’re hungry.

Why are we crying over Foot and Mouth

I am puzzled why people get so sentimental about Foot and Mouth. Sure it is a disaster. It’s an economic disaster for the agricultural business which risks yet again not being able to sell any meat abroad – not to mention for al the rest of us who must bail the unfortunate farmers out.  And it’s decidedly unpleasant for people like me who would prefer to have our animals slaughtered behind the closed doors of an abattoir, than loaded as corpses into trucks in full view of the television cameras.

But why so much sentimental hype? And all the talk of “tragedy”?

Foot and Mouth is a very odd disease. For a start, despite the deathly impression you would get from most of the news, the vast majority of animals would recover from it anyway, with no long term ill-effects. It is the easy contagion, the visible nastiness and – most important --  the fact that European rules ban any infected animal from any European markets, that give foot and mouth its edge.

All the same, even the most austere newspaper and television reports treat it as the bovine equivalent of AIDS. A deadly virus that could move anywhere next; a surreptitious contagion creeping through the country.

As if we thought that these infected animals were in other, disease-free circumstances likely to have passed a long and happy life scampering through the meadows.

Brideshead rejected

This week’s confession is that last week, to pass the time on the way to Durham, I bought a Tatler to read on the train. Such vice, it turned out, was rewarded in a way, because they had a feature on the Spires of Oxford – that is, on the new generation of undergraduates, “hot . . . clever and . . . on the cusp of greatness”.

Now, I spend a lot of time persuading perfectly normal and clever kids that coming to Oxbridge is not to enter the maw of Brideshead, that we want to encourage the brightest of whatever background, wealth or race to come here, to feel at home and do well. Reading this sort of rubbish, which was of course about a handful of the glossy privileged and their pranks, makes me want to weep – or scream.

Reality Television

I find myself unmoved by all the fuss about the “death” of the Malcolm Pointon in Paul Watson’s documentary on Alzheimer’s. OK, probably we should all wait till we have seen the programme (Malcolm and Barbara: love’s farewell) before pontificating. But according to the reports, the programme ends with Malcolm closing his eyes and slipping away. The message is pretty clear: he dies. It is only prurience on the part of the viewer to want to know whether we’ve just watched him falling into a coma or really dying.

I should add that I have never imagined that television phone-in competitions were anything other than “fixed”, at some level. And I’ve always known that premium rate phone numbers were making money for someone who was not me. So I am fairly unmoved by that scandal too. I  suppose I was bit taken aback that it went as far as Blue Peter – though, since the revelation that they had done a surreptitious dog-swap in the early 1960s so as not to have to confess to the viewers that “Petra” had actually died, it has been fairly clear that the usual standards apply to them as well.

What I find more surprising is that so many people seem to imagine that television can serve up unmediated “reality”.