A Don’s Life

My five favourite Roman classics . . . that we have lost

Classicists can be a miserable lot. When such a rich array of ancient Greek and Roman writing has survived, you’ll still find them lamenting about what has been lost.

Most of the ancient literature we still have, we owe to the efforts of medieval monks who eagerly copied and preserved it. They didn’t do a bad job. True there are some oddities. Has it ever struck you how many of the plays of Euripides have a title beginning with "i" or “e” (or, what is much the same in Greek,"hi" or “he”): Iphigeneia, Hippolytus, Electra, Helen, Hecuba etc . . . ? It looks as if somehow, at some date, a single alphabetically-arranged volume of the master’s complete works managed to escape, when others were lost in fire, flood or whatever.

And just occasionally there is a dramatic find in the ancient papyri from the sands of Egypt. Most of the works of the Greek comic dramatist Menander reached us that way. So too (if you think that the monks maybe had it right in not bothering with Menander) did Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians – actually probably the work of a research assistant, but still a good find for anyone interested in Athenian history.

But Alan posted a comment to ask what I would like to come up from any new excavation of the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, where eighteenth-century diggers found loads of papyri rolls, the vast majority of which (apologies now to my philosophical colleagues) were rather dreary treatises from an also-ran Epicurean philosopher by the name of Philodemus.

I confess that I am not a tremendous enthusiast for more excavation on the Villa site. Various reasons. First, my feeling is that – if you have millions of euros to spend – you’d be better off preserving the parts of the ancient town of Herculaneum that have already been dug up, but are so badly crumbling that they wont make it to the next century. Second, I’m not honestly sure that we are desperate for much more classical literature, when we haven’t really studied very hard vast tracts of what we have already got. Third, when most of what has come up from the Villa so far has been Philodemus,
I don’t see much reason to be optimistic about finding a more varied selection if we only dig deeper. (This place was obviously the bolt hole of an obsessive Philodemus fan.)

But if I had to pick my 5 favourite lost classics to find in the lava, what would they be?

First off  (and I’m scrupulously sticking to Latin – and written before the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD here) would be the Autobiography of Agrippina, Nero’s mum.

From Brussels with love

I suppose I will lose most of the sympathy I won from my last post about the working day of the average don, when I say that I am spending three days in Brussels – being an “evaluator” on a new scheme of European Research Council grants for young European scholars. This has meant interviewing 17 candidates over two days so far, and we are now about to discuss our recommendations.

Brussels is a much nicer city than you ever imagine (though not, I have to say the bit we’re in); the weather is glorious (though all we’re seeing of it is through a seventh floor window); and if, like me, you have a taste for mussels and chips, then the food counts as pretty good too.

That said, my experiences with the European Commission provide fodder for both the most loving Europhile and the most sceptical Eurosceptic.

A life in the day of a don

This week I am off to Brussels to be a Euro-academic – for the final selection round of some big Euro-research-grants. I’m on the awarding panel, not one of those seeking the research money. But no plutocrat me. As it’s the end of the month, I’m off on the Eurostar equipped with a range of plastic, none of which will be able to extract any cash from any hole-in-the-wall – which adds a sense of boy-scoutish adventure to the voyage. (It’ll have to be reef knots and a compass, rather than a taxi from the station!)

Part of the reason for this particular cash crisis is that the European Commission still hasn’t  managed to pay me the expenses from my last trip to Brussels in June. This circumstance alone is enough to make me very suspicious of the whole new-Europe project. If they can’t get me my expenses within 4 months, then what hope is there for financial management on a bigger scale? (The husband points out that he is largely in favour of the treaty etc and is, in fact, subsidizing my trip, so it kind of cancels out.)

Anyway, I’ll be reporting back on this expedition soon. Meanwhile, to a question that several emails have raised. What on earth do you dons do? I had a moan a few weeks back about the general idea that our long vacation is in fact an extended holiday. But what is it we do during term-time?

How am I doing on Amazon?

Most people go into Amazon to buy books: easy shopping, and it would an entirely admirable enterprise, if it wasn’t systematically killing all our local bookshops. Authors, though, sneakily visit Amazon to check how their books are selling, to plot their progress up (and down) the Amazon sales rankings – the bit that says “#47,543 in books”.

Actually there are some odd things about this calculation. I was rejoicing the other day that my new book on the Roman Triumph (soon to appear in the UK)  had reached #2 in the Amazon.com (that’s the US site) rankings … but in the niche sub-category of “General Geometry”. (Quite how it got classified as “geometry” beats me, but I guess it felt nice even so.)

But what every author wants to know is how many sales does it take to get you zooming up the Amazon ranks. I’ve always suspected that we were dealing with single figures here. But proof came the other day when the husband decided to buy 4 copies of his own book on Icons, which seemed almost as cheap, and a lot easier to obtain, from Amazon than from the publishers. The result was that he zoomed more than 250,000 places up the rankings.

Then there are those innocent customer reviews. Are they all written by real punters, or by the authors paid up friends or enemies? Is it like those suspiciously frank hotel reviews on TripAdvisor (“Quite the best hotel in Beachville and far better than the awful Hotel Sunny next door”)?

Sylvia Plath and the milkman

Followers of the TLS blogs will have caught up by now with result of the Greeks vs Romans debate at Cheltenham. Indeed they may well be heartily sick of it (and this is the last post on the subject, promise). The truth is that, in his blog, the chair of this battle of the titans was a trifle generous to the losing side.

Almost 400 people turned up to listen to our debate about the relative merits or importance of Greece and Rome. Prof Beard had expected to start out behind and claw back a little over the course of the discussion – thereby claiming victory. In fact, as the Stothard blog delicately admits, Prof Beard started with a popular vote in favour of the Italian team, and actually lost ground by the vote at the end. A definite trouncing.

OK, lets not take all this too seriously. It was only a (sort of) balloon debate, after all --  and I have a pretty unrivalled record of losing those. I even lost when, in an architectural version of the game, I was supporting the Parthenon against the Alhambra. My pitch that a ruin was a more culturally interesting object than a standing building didn’t hack it with the audience at the London of Review of Books Bookshop.

But it still might be interesting to think why Rome didn’t win on Saturday. Well, reason number one was obviously the superior rhetorical skills of my sparring partner, Prof Hall. But there is also a question of what you can easily get people to be enthusiastic about.

When I came home, tail between legs, the husband observed that it would be almost impossible to get an average British audience to vote for the merits of Titian over Piero della Francesca. The quattrocento, with its originary simplicity, is always going to be easier to sell than the mature sophistication of the cinquecento (which we art historians, of course, prefer)

It reminded me of the words of an old (Romanist) literary friend years ago: that you could never convince the British public that a sophisticated twentieth-century poetic engagement with a passage of Dryden was ever as important as Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical account of her own encounter with the milkman.

A phallos-bird flies into the Barbican

Readers of the Stothard blog will have guessed that I have been prepping for the Greeks vs Romans battle at the Cheltenham Literary Festival tomorrow. So off to the new “Seduced” exhibition at the Barbican Gallery, the new show on “art and sex” through the ages to see how the ancient world fared.

It was, of course, a walk-over for the Romans. True, there were some very pretty Greek pots, decorated with various scenes of (rather uncomfortable-looking) copulation. But the Roman material was predictably more inventive. The show had got a real star in the gorgeous marble hermaphrodite from the Borghese Gallery in Rome. Come up to her from behind, and you’d think she was a lovely sleeping lady, walk round to take a look at her face – and, whoops, you find that she’s not exactly a lady, after all: she got breasts and a penis.

There were also some wonderfully writhing satyrs and nymphs, not to mention a good range of Pompeian erotica. I’ve always thought that one of the best ways of undermining male phallic power was to cast a phallus in bronze, give it some wings (that’s the “phallus-bird”) , hang bells on it, then hang it up as a wind-chime . And that, of course, is exactly what the Romans did – as you can see in the show.

The exhibition actually goes up to the twentieth century and is well worth a look (I particularly liked the “nipple-buttons” on sale in the shop). But overall I thought it was rather less than stimulating.

Tips for new students -- from an old don

The first week of term has ended, and our new students have just gone through the increasingly absurd ritual that is “Freshers’ Week”. I don’t much mind the old-fashioned rites of passage that many of them organise for themselves: a bit too much alcohol and getting off with the wrong bloke to huge, but temporary, embarrassment all round. ("Wrong bloke" nicely illustrated on the left -- but to be fair this isn't a Cambridge ad!)  It’s the ridiculous quantities of “information” that we now feel obliged to impart.

They have lectures, workshops and leaflets on safe cycling, safe sex, how to write an essay, how to recognise meningitis, what plagiarism is, how the library works (in triplicate), how to deal with budgeting, how to have a good time without it getting in the way of the 2.1 of your dreams – and that’s before they have even met their Director of Studies, received their work schedule or been to a lecture.

We must be mad. In the rest of our teaching lives, we are only too well aware of how much information the average highly-intelligent young person can possibly absorb in an hour. At the beginning of term we simply ignore that. Though you only have to look at the behaviour of many of our first years on their bicycles to see that the safe-cycling advice falls on deaf ears. Luckily, for most of them, experience teaches that one.

So why do we do it? It’s partly unthinkingly well-meaning, and partly tick box again I fear. Do you explain to your students about aids/plagiarism/loan management. . . ? asks some higher authority (whether the government or the students’ union). Yes, sir, we can reply.

Left to myself, I’d cut it back down to a speedy hour or so.

But what would you say, if you could give them just one piece of advice?

10 things the makers of '300' got right

300, the movie, is out on DVD this week. When it was first released in the cinema, I was as sniffy as most classicists (no, the Persians didn’t fight with rhinoceroses . . . and, sorry, wouldn’t Xerxes have had a beard . . .?). 

But taking another look, on the DVD, I decided that the movie-makers actually deserved a pat on the back for some of the things they did get right.

1) The ‘Three Hundred’. Yes there were 300 Spartans who tried to keep the Persians back at the pass of Thermopylae in 480BC. There were also, as it happens, about 900 Spartan slaves plus several hundred soldiers from the cities of Thebes and Thespiae. But the Greeks, like us, tended to forget about them.

2) Spartans fought for ‘freedom’. Well, it was a funny sort of freedom, a bit in the line of Soviet democracy. But freedom it was. In fact 50 years later, when freedom-loving Athens was busy enslaving the states of Greece in her nasty little empire, Sparta waved the flag of liberty. And that was what the next big war in Greece – the Peloponnesian War – was all about.

3) The Persians were Oriental  monsters. Not literally, of course; and that’s what a lot of fuss over the  movie was all about. But in Greek imagination indeed they were. This is where the ‘Orientalism’ that I was talking in my last post really starts. If you want an idea of how ancient Greeks themselves portrayed the Persians, try these pictures from a fifth-century BC vase. There’s a manly Greek on one side (here, the left), hands on his erect penis – all ready to do something . . . well something pretty rough . . . to the effeminate Persian (dressed in a clingy body suit) who’s bending down and waiting, on the other.

4) Spartan mothers used to tell their sons, “Come back with your shield or on it” (that is – either victorious, or dead, but not a fugitive whose thrown his shield away). I’m afraid this is probably true too. Or at least, according to the Roman writer Plutarch, one Spartan mother once made this threat. It’s quoted in an essay of his called “Sayings of Spartan Women” – which features plenty of other tough talk from mothers to sons.

5) The Spartans fought naked . . .

Orientalism . . . or, What's in a name?

On the front door of what was the Faculty of Oriental Studies in Cambridge, I have just spotted a new notice. Next to the stern warnings about not leaning your bicycle against the windows (a hopeless prohibition in Cambridge), is the following equally stern announcement: “Name Change. We are now known as The Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies”.

I am sure that this has been the subject of long discussions. And I can see why they wanted to change. The word “Oriental” now reeks of unacceptable “orientalism”, a nastily Western construction of any culture slightly to the east: decadent, effeminate but at the same time slightly menacing. (It’s what the Greeks felt about the Persians, and the Romans in their turn about the Greeks, and so on westwards.) How, for a start, do you explain to a group of new first year undergraduates what an “Oriental” Faculty is all about, and why it doesn’t exactly mean what they might think it does? More to the point, how do you get them, in the first place, to apply to something with a name like that?

It’s a bit like having “Women’s Studies” being called the “Department of the Second Sex”.