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.

And that’s only part of it. People come to look at Roman culture with a whole lot of convenient prejudices. What would you say, as one member of the audience asked me, about the tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people slaughtered in the Roman amphitheatres?

Well, you don’t win too many votes by telling the questioner that they’re wrong. Actually far fewer people than we ever imagine met their end that way – but, for different reasons, it suited both Christians and Roman emperors (not to mention filmmakers and cartoonists) to claim that they did. Nor do you make friends by saying that neither the Greeks nor the Roman were “nice” in our terms. (That’s when your interlocutor sticks the knife in by saying that the Greeks only learned to be beastly from the Romans – choosing to gloss over what the Athenians did to the slaves in the silver mines)

People are also none too sympathetic to the notion that a lot of the people we call Greek were actually Roman anyway. So – take Lucian, the second century AD satirist, who may perhaps win the prize for inventing the genre of science fiction (or at least the idea of moon travel, in his satirically entitled True History). Sure, he wrote in Greek; but he came from Syria and was an inhabitant of the Roman empire. There is almost as much separating him and Pericles, as there is separating Cicero and the Venerable Bede.

So reflecting on the mature sophistication of Roman culture, we live to fight another day.

Comments

[Jenny]

You needed to play up Virgil and Ovid a bit more (was there, asked that question)!! Also you did let Prof Hall get away with de-romanticising the Romans a good deal, what with the muddy Hadrian's wall comments etc, while actually the fact that the soldiers at a remote outpost could read and write seems like a pretty good cultural achievement to me. I love both, and couldn't choose, though language-wise I'd have Latin any day.

[B.U. Eluma]

In the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, those of us who do classics refer to the languages as grief and laughing. The idea is not that the lingos and thier respective cultures are different in terms of merit and achievement. They are both much of a muchness to us. Studying classics has helped to put in perspective my attitude to the past. Nostalgia is the disease of ignoramuses and the deluded. From Hesiod to Augustulus, it's grief and laughing: basic conditions of human existence.

[Sonja B]

And what of the Macedonians? Perhaps consideration of the Macedonians (together with Syrians like Lucian & co.) would lessen the argument for the Greek city states (or the Greeks) and further highlight the ancient problem of "It's all Greek to me"... ?

[abc]

No one has discussed the soul mate.

[Jackie]

Professor Hall based her argument, loosely, on the Odyssey. This was the story of a married man taking 10 years to cover a small amount of sea to get back to his patient wife. A man, incidentally, who lived his life by lies, cheating and deception. A really good role model. And what was the subject of Homer's other epic? A supposed hero who threw his toys out of the pram and threatened to take his ball home! As you can probably guess I am not a fan of Homer!
The other problem I had with the Greek argument was a failure to actually define 'Greek'. The popular picture relates, I think, to the classical Greeks of 5th century Athens, but in reality the Greeks consisted of a loosely knit group of small city states, all with different political systems, and the resultant strengths and weaknesses. Professor Hall made a good job of 'cherry picking' the bits that suited her viewpoint!

[The Worst of Perth]

Naffrodite?
No classisists in Embleton W.A. Greek or Roman? The patina may be mould rather than age.
http://perthworst.wordpress.com/2007/10/16/naffrodite/

Don's Life, one of my favourites. We want one per day, not week!

[F.Gamberini]

A difficult debate, especially for someone with as cautious an attitude to the past as I have; I don't think I would have been able to take up the case for either side.
The point about the exact identity of Lucian might perhaps be resolved by saying he is really Hellenistic. The problem, I think, recurs more subtly in architecture. What would you call the architecture of the Roman empire (especially of its Eastern provinces)? Roman? Graeco-Roman? Hellenistic? If you are ever short of subjects, I would read with interest a treatment of the matter on these pages.

[abc]

I guess it's about what Plath did with Hughes and the rest of English literature, unless, of course, we do go abroad.

[Michael Bulley]

A choice between reading an academic dissertation on the poetry of Dryden and finding out what Sylvia Plath did with the milkman? Mm, that's a tough one. Elegiacally:

uerba professorum exaudire recondita nolo
Sylvia dum dicat quid caprimulgo ageret

[Xjy]

The Romans didn't invent Germanic conceptions of justice or loyalty or nation, either, but they did indeed "provide the infrastructure through which the virus spread". The Great Vector.

The Greeks defined man, the world and their needs, but the Romans designed the arena, and the Germans filled it.

Pirenne is brilliant when he fixes on Roman law as the constant, the great axiom, of social interaction. The various leprotic decays that helped bring down the Empire only helped metastasize the cancer of the Law. Instead of one great Empire, there sprang up the myriad metastatic organisms of the mediaeval communes, the city-states, not as uniquely individual as the earlier Greek colonies, but each stamped with the irrepressible DNA of the Law and the Bureaucracy. Each a gold coin of equal value (so to say) regardless of the kingly conks embossed on it.

Then the Germans fused Greek Life and Roman Identity into Living Being, which (with a bit of decoration from Byzantium and Islam)
and set the top spinning down through the Middle Ages and on to today.

Maybe it's a question of Equality. The Greeks were on to Abstract Equality but foundered on the reef of Slavery (resurrecting phoenix-like in Christianity). The Romans actually achieved Concrete Equality - of the quintessential Thing, Money. And the Germans, using the instruments of the gold solidus and the Graeco-Christian soul, achieved a more or less concrete Social Equality. One in which despite all the distinctions abd various strict feudal and institutional loyalties, no individual group (nation, family, caste, class) was strong enough to resist the constant pressure to realize the graspable ideal of One Equal Universal Human Society.

Not strong enough then, and not strong enough today, either. The process is ongoing.

I don't know whether I could take sides in Greece versus Rome - two faces of the same coin... opposite poles in the same magnet. Dialectically separate and united at the same time. I smile more readily at the prospect of encountering Greek than Roman, but the Romans built better roads and more versatile housing. And the Germans gave the impulse that got the engine turning the way it should and made the drama of Greek characters in a Roman theatre interactive and universally accessible.

(Maybe useful to mention a couple of books: Hegel's Philosophy of History, Marx's Grundrisse (the early chapters including Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations), and Henri Pirenne's Medieval Cities, and Mohammed and Charlemagne.)

[Alan R]

I thought the curious aspect of the debate was that neither of you mentioned religion even in passing. The Romans may not have invented Christianity but providing the infrastucture through which the virus spread was surely their most important legacy to us by far. Hot and cold running water is important but I rather think someone else would have hit upon it by now if the Romans hadn't.

Mind you, as an atheist myself I don't know whether fifteen minutes on the triumph of the cross would have strengthened my vote for you or sent me screaming over to Prof. Hall....anyway, thanks for a good morning, I would have liked to stop by and mention this afterwards, but events at the Town Hall were scheduled after yours with no gap.