A Don’s Life

The rape of Britannia

I shall be rather sad if Britannia does indeed, as the Prime Minister plans, disappear from British coins. After all, it’s part of the point of a modern coin design that it should include some hoary old symbol that is simultaneously easily recognisable and also not fully comprehensible (or not comprehensible without a bit of research, anyway).

After all one of the Greek Euros has the Rape of Europa on it:  a frisky bull, about to run off with -- and worse – an innocent young maid. (Imagine what the New Labour moral police would have done with that one.) And what on earth was that little bird on the old farthing. Was it a wren or a robin? And why?

So Britannia fits the bill rather nicely. An appropriately antique goddess, invented by the Romans, as a symbol of their new province, and used on British coins since the seventeenth century. If she goes, I don’t hold out much hope, long term, for that nice bit of Virgil (decus et tutamen -- from Aeneid Book V) around the pound coin. I have a sneaking suspicion that Mr Brown isn’t much of a fan of Latin.

But while the traditionalists lament Britannia’s disappearance, they might like to reflect on her first appearance in Roman art. As rape victim of the doddery old emperor Claudius.

Can Simon Schama cook?

In this month’s (that is February’s) Vogue, that wonderful polymath Simon Schama shares his views on, and recipes for, stews. In the course of this article, “Simmer of love”, he has some harsh words for the culinary knowledge of Virginia Woolf.

His particular target is the meal cooked by Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, a tremendous pot of boeuf en daube. Just one ladleful of the stuff is enough to turn awkward company into human beings, joined in “tender communion’. Mrs Ramsay is delighted at the success of this French recipe and swoons over the lovely “confusion of savoury yellow and brown meats.”

Hang on, say Schama. What are these yellow meats in a boeuf en daube? “A chicken foot lurking in there along with the beef and onions, is there?”

And it gets worse. Mrs Ramsay had been extremely worried by the timing. “Everything,” writes Woolf, “depended on being served up to the precise moment they were ready.” Hang on again, says Schama. You can’t ruin a daube by the timing. “Stews are the most forgiving dishes.”

Mrs Woolf doesn’t know what she’s talking about in the culinary department, he concludes. She was, after all, rather “bony”.

I am afraid that it is the far from bony Prof Schama who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Roman gardening

I had missed the sad fact that Wilhelmina Jashemski died just before Christmas, aged 97. Hardly a household name, she had been Professor at the University of Maryland for almost 40 years, retiring in the 1980s. It was, however, thanks to her that we have a reasonably good idea what the average Roman garden once looked like.  I never met her .. and our only contact was when she asked me to write an article on ancient cucumber frames (sic -- which I regretfully declined). But I find that I’ve been using her more and more while I’ve been writing about Pompeii.

Jashemski’s triumph was to see that you could do a proper archaeology of Roman gardens. That meant  not just picking up all those microscopic traces of seeds and pollen that earlier archaeologists simply didn’t spot. Jashesmski did for plant roots what Giuseppe Fiorelli did for dead bodies.

That is to say, where Fiorelli in the late nineteenth century saw that you could pour Plaster of Paris into the cavities left in the lava by decaying corpses and reveal the shapes of the bodies, Jashemski saw that you could do the same with  the roots of plants … and so see what big trees/shrubs had been growing.

Whole gardens came to life.

Any Questions -- and Roman omens

When I was about 12, I asked a question on “Any Questions” when it visited Telford New Town. It was one of those “What should the government do. . . “ type questions. In this case, what should the government about a group of merchant seamen who (as I recall ) had been arrested by the Chinese. One of the said seamen came from Market Drayton in Shropshire, and was indeed the brother of one of my school friends.

I remember two things about this occasion. The first was that I was a bit disappointed with the panel’s answers (one of them, I remember, called me “Madam” -- a form of address I didn’t feel particularly applied to me, aged 12). The second was that it seemed wonderfully exciting to be sitting up there on the stage saying what you thought about all these questions that people threw at you. And there, I suppose, a little ambition was born.

An ambition fulfilled on Friday night, when I did appear on “Any Questions” – broadcast from Ashtead in Surrey.

Heathrow border control

The immigration minister, Liam Byrne, says that we all want “compassionate” but “stronger” borders – to prevent illegal immigrants, identity fraudsters and the like entering our fair country. Hence fingerprinting visa applicants, plus other “compassionate” schemes – increased deportation powers, ID cards for visa holders etc.

When I came back from the APA in Chicago to Heathrow Terminal 4 last week, I thought things had already changed, even for us UK passport holders.  Maybe I haven’t been concentrating on what has been happening there recently, but (if you were a suspicious soul, unlike me, of course) it seemed to have taken a few steps further towards the police state.

Of course, shamefully, I am a paid-up member of biometric Britain, so I whizzed through the iris-recognition booth with no delay at all. But my colleague was wanting to wave his passport, for which there was a large queue – so I had plenty of time (some 25 minutes) to observe the surroundings, while I waited for him. It turned out to be even worse than the USA, where at least citizens slip through quite quickly, even if visitors are herded into a long and twisty line.

Breathalysed for my birthday

My latest proud possession is a home breathalyser kit. With Christmas and birthday combined, I’ve had loads of presents over the last few weeks (from shoes through iPhone accessories – yes I have one, “come friendly muggers” – to a new suitcase instantly recognisable on any airport carousel). But a couple have only just turned up.

The first is a jolly Victorian Parian-ware figure of the Muse Ourania (Astronomy), courtesy of Willingham Auctions. (Actually, the catalogue said just “a classical figure”,  but the globe and compasses clearly identifies her, I think.) She is going in my study at home, as soon as I have got some more shelves, and then got books off the floor – so I can actually walk into it again and there’s space for her.

The second is the said home breathalyser.

What prompted this present was this Christmas’s drink-driving campaign, suggesting that a good dinner would very likely leave you still over the limit the next morning. I feel quite confident that I know when not to drive during or after an evening out. But I haven’t got a clue what the score would be the day after.

The good news is that I haven’t yet, after many times of trying, been over the limit at 8.00 am (or at least not according to my kit – assuming it’s accurate). But there are still all kinds of odd discrepancies on the evening before, between me and the husband. Which is to say, after about half an hour into a shared bottle of wine I am regularly twice the legal limit – he is only half way there

Beard the Blog

What were the papers like at the APA? Several people have asked -- and the fact is that I didn’t actually go to any except my own, and those in my own panel. I wasn’t buried away interviewing, like some (though I did interview two potential graduate students for Cambridge).

No, I was sitting in my room writing an essay for a catalogue to go with an exhibition about the Roman Triumph, due to open in the Colosseum in the spring (it looks a good show by the way, for anyone who is going to be in Rome). My theme was fraud and deception at the triumph – including those marvellous stories of Roman emperors who dressed up fake prisoners to adorn their processions, or Domitian who, in the absence of any good spoils raided his own palace furniture store and  paraded that.  OK this should have been a piece of cake, but it still took me more than a day to put together.

Anyway my panel was called “From Classical Tradition to Receptions Studies: four national perspectives” – featuring me, Jim Porter from Michigan (on “Hellenism and Modernity”), Ernst Schmidt from Tübingen (on “The German rediscovery of Vergil in the Early 20th Century’) and Alessandro Barchiesi from Stanford (on whom more later).

So how did it go?

Professors for hire

I’m writing this in the “151 Bar”  of the Hyatt Regency hotel in Chicago, to the accompaniment of a Diet Coke (an unusual tipple for Beard) and a chicken quesedilla (an equally unusual food). Apart from two brief cab-rides to restaurants, I haven’t left this hotel for three days. The only real glimpse of the Windy City for me has been from my bedroom window (thirtieth floor but still not particularly inspiring – being face to face with a yet taller office block).

The reason for being here is the annual APA conference, the biggest classical conference in the USA (and therefore the world). These vast American jamborees are strange affairs. There are literally thousands of punters, which means that “plenary sessions” are more or less impossible (you need a vast ballroom to fit in even half those who attend). Instead there are dozens of “parallel panel sessions”, four to six mini papers of 15 or 20 minutes, grouped (rather optimistically sometimes) around a single theme.

But like with most conferences, it’s not the lectures that you go for.

What's an acceptable alternative to democracy?

The main difference between ancient Athenian democracy and our own was nothing to do with all those things the textbooks usually tell us: the use of a lottery to choose most state officials (the fairest, most equal kind of selection after all); the participation of everyone -- well every male citizen -- in the decision making process, not just selected representatives, as in our parliament; and so on.

Much more important than these institutional distinctions was the simple fact that Athenian democracy existed in a world in which it was perfectly acceptable NOT to be a democrat. It was quite OK to think that oligarchy, for example, might be a better idea.  Suggesting that democracy might not always be the best political system wouldn’t have caused a nasty silence at parties. In fact most surviving Athenian writers fell firmly in the anti-democrat camp.

To be honest, I wouldn’t have fancied living under an oligarchy, especially if I was poor and so firmly excluded from that particular political process (I know, as a woman I’d have been excluded from every kind of ancient political system – but I’m leaving that on one side just for the moment). And I wouldn’t much have fancied getting caught up in the civil wars that periodically broke out between oligarchs and democrats. But having some viable alternative did at least keep democracy on its toes – and it kept “democracy” meaning something.

Unlike now, when all kinds of corrupt and corrupting versions of the system trundle on under the legitimating title of “democracy” . . . and when we're all "democrats", or claim to be.

This last week has certainly been a bad one for the D-word.

Labouring Classicists -- and New year Resolutions

It’s New Years day and my birthday (OK.. 53). And my devotion to study on days that might in other circumstances be devoted to jollity is, I am afraid, getting to be a habit.

Today, I’ve been writing a paper for a big Classics conference (“the APA”)  in Chicago, where I’m going on Thursday. I promised a talk on “working-class engagement in Classics” in the nineteenth century. I’ve been fed up for a long time with the usual line that Classics has always been an exclusively elite subject, designed only to shore up such dubious notions as British imperialism and the un-contestable superiority of the British elite.

The idea in proposing this paper was to try to get some flesh on those doubts. It turns out that I only have to talk for 20 minutes, into which you can hardly squeeze much of an argument. But even so I’ve left it a bit to the last minute. Hence full steam ahead to today.

Actually – never mind the argument of the paper -- I’ve found some tremendous characters. My particular favourite is Alfred Williams (born 1877 and the man in the picture), and author of Life in a Railway Factory, who taught himself Greek and Latin, partly by chalking up his irregular verbs on the casing of his forge.