"How old is the Parthenon?"

Last week I got an email from a “researcher” in the office of the National Geographic Traveler Magazine. “Hello, Prof Beard”, it started.

The gist was that they were about to run a short article on Athens, and wanted to check a few facts. The first question was “How many years old is the  Parthenon?” Others followed: “Back in the early 1900s could visitors wander the ruins of the Parthenon at will?” “Is it currently surrounded by scaffolding as part of a meticulous restoration project?”

Now, without advertising my services too widely, I am usually very happy to help people out with classical things, if they have done something to help themselves (like read a book) , or if it is a bit arcane (I’m currently having a jolly exchange with a clinical psychologist about ‘thrill seeking’ in ancient Rome).

But I get pretty cross if I’m just being used a free ‘book-substitute”. OK, she did promise me a free copy of the magazine. But didn’t the guy who was getting a no doubt fat fee for writing this article think it was part of his job to know how old the Parthenon was?

So I wrote back like this:

“Dear x,

You don’t mention a fee for this professional advice...

Most of this information is widely available in the public domain... I am happy to help for no fee once you have done some basic researches yourself. If you are using me INSTEAD of doing that yourself, there is I am afraid a charge...”

A slightly hurt/unrepentant email came back within a few minutes.

“Since we like to double and triple check all of our work, I was merely hoping for an expert perspective to balance out the previously published information on the Parthenon. . . . I have, in fact, already done research (and have answers for those questions) but thought you might be able to easily answer them as validation of my other research. I do understand my questions are very basic, but so often available research is inaccurate (especially on the Internet), and it's great to have an expert's opinion.

Does that help? We do not offer a fee for our expert consultants, considering the number of experts we contact for each article we publish.”

This wasn’t an encouraging response. There are obviously hundreds of us out there having our time wasted being asked to “validate” straightforward factoids for the National Geographic.

But the problems runs deeper and are bound up in part with new technology. As soon as your email is out there in the world, you are prey to all those people who think “I wonder when the Parthenon was built . ..  I know I’ll email a Cambridge professor, she should know.”

It’s also about internet research tools. As my hapless researcher had correctly realised, you can’t trust what you read on the web. But if you wont go to a library, how do you decide what is right and what is wrong? Well, same answer: “email a professor.”

Of course, I weakened at this point and gave a few desultory responses on the questions I could do from the top of my head (most of them). I did, however, suggest that my book on The Parthenon would have been a reliable vade mecum.

I needn’t have bothered. She had her answer ready on that one:

“Working against tight deadlines, unfortunately, means we often don't have time to attain books (that aren't already in our library), but rather must rely on experts for consultation.”

Same story again. Why take the trouble to read something, when an email will get the answer for you a lot quicker?

I mustn’t weaken next time.

Comments

[Andrew Griffin]

I've worked in the past for a magazine and this apparent laziness is, in fact, part of a fact-checker's job. When fact-checking, one needs to find an expert who will independently confirm all the facts included included in an article. The only way to do this is to send an email or make a phone call asking such open-ended and utterly banal questions. I've had to send emails to scholars, for instance, asking them to tell me exactly what year the Empire State Building was constructed, even though I had the information in books sitting beside me -- books that these scholars had written. It's a hoop-jumping, ass-covering move that I, admittedly, have never gotten my head around. I'm sure that the NG folks are not as dim as the superficiality of the questions would suggest, though the conventions of magazine fact-checking seem utterly ass-backwards in contexts such as this one.

[montag]

We were always taught that free advice is unreliable advice.

So take the date and subtract ( or add-it doesn't matter) a number of years equal to the euros that should have been paid for expert advice.

Since fees paid for Classics consults are just beyond paltry, no one will notice the minor errors in the timeline.

[david nystuen]

If National Geo hadn't asked, you would have complained. They did ask, it is not like some student who wants the easy way out. Ask the expert, who will be to busy, to be bothered.

[abc]

One can do this the other way round and consider the absolute seriousness of the incestual point which has been taken flippantly and impressionally from the start but then, well, one has to abstract from the hostilities of broody old dikes and other such terms which are fundamentally unimpressive, so the isolation of mutants is probably a better result, to pick up on Beard and further comparative points.

[abc]

Icarus is indeed linked to the mutant.

[Ed]

On thrill seekers - odysseus and the sirens maybe?

[Jenny]

Should have told him you wrote your answers on leaves and cast them to the four winds.

[anthony alcock]

The crossness seems a bit synthetic.
What about Phaethon as a thrill seeker ?

[abc]

On artists: the Archbishop of Canterbury needs to watch X-men.

[Mary]

The best example I could think of for "thrill seeking" was Icarus.

[Tony Francis]

This house on the Potomac River was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and owned by one of the founders of the National Geographic. Perhaps you could have gotten a stay there had you answered the questions.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marden_House
Following M. Bulley's suggestion, you could have waxed philosophic and answered the question with another question: "It is very old, but then, how old is anything?" Or given an answer like the Delphic Oracle: 'It is older than some, but not as old as others."

[arindam bandyopadhaya]

Thrill seeking in ancient Rome! Interesting. Is it about Petronius Arbiter and his masterpiece ' Satyricon'?

[Michael Bulley]

Perhaps the question was just of the rhetorical sort that has come into fashion in recent times in sports commentaries and which I find infuriating. Whereas once a football commentator might have said "What a good shot that was!", now they say "How good a shot was that?". So maybe "How old is the Parthenon?" is just a modern way of saying "How the Parthenon is old!". So Mary Beard should simply have replied "Isn't it?".

[Ted Gallagher]

You're "currently having a jolly exchange with a clinical psychologist about ‘thrill seeking’ in ancient Rome."
DO TELL...DON'T KEEP US HANGING.

[abc]

Penny has just dropped. 35 years old.

[Dorothy King]

Next time, why not try telling them that the Parthenon was erected by Nicholas Balanos in the 1930s? It would be factually accurate, and they might think twice about bothering you with silly questions.

[dr venables preller]

Mary, I wonder if you have considered the possibility of this being a mild practical joke? The best of these target the vanity of their prey, and the implied prospect of a name slipped into the NG might be considered an amusing bait.

There's also the idea of the 'researcher' being library-shy, possibly as a result of other associations libraries can have (recently discussed on your blog,) and risks of lurking in them.. As for 'geography,' there's a wealth of association there, from the colour photographs of exotic native dancing which were so popular in the 1950s NG magazine, to a code for visual and tactile play when it was discovered that lights could be left on.

[Angela]

I work as a copy editor/fact-checker for magazines in the USA, and we have such a tight schedule that we wouldn't even have time to wait for an e-mail to arrive, let alone waste our time writing multiple professors with questions. The time said researcher wasted looking up your name and e-mail address could have been better spent looking up that info on any number of Web sites, which is where I do most of my fact-checking. Some of those questions sound a little more detailed, though, in which case it sounds like you were being interviewed and should have been quoted as a source in the article. In any case, I'd depend on my writer to get more detailed facts like those straight before the article reached my desk. I'd just check specific dates and names. The rest is up to them...not you.

[abc]

She won't have a hizzy-fit. She'll learn and so will he. Triple set.

[Maxine Clarke]

At Nature we get just so many of these time-wasting emails. Often they start "I am a student and am writing an essay on...." "so can you tell me .....". Why do these people equate a science journal with a library? If they are students, why aren't they finding this out for themselves? You hit it on the nail: it is much quicker to send out 100 emails asking a few questions, in the hope that at least one of your recipients will be bothered to check out the answers and reply. But very annoying to be on the receiving end.

[Eileen]

maybe someone with a devilish streak should send a link to this post to the editor of said magazine.
for my part, the residue of my southern upbringing prevents me from being anything other than completely angelic...

[Tony Francis]

I spend hours a day yakking on the phone, mostly with lawyers who want their hand held. The idea is that they will think to call me when the "money cases" come up. So it is advertising, and creates the impression that I am available. It seems to work in my case. Lawyers are big gossips, so I usually get some juicy dirt from the call. I also answer every e-mail (except for ones wanting my bank account numbers). There are two bad categories: Trial lawyers and e-mail passers-on. Trial lawyers call up and "try the case" on the phone. I tell them: "You convinced me, now if you can do it in front of a jury and a court reporter, you are all set." The e-mail passers-on send me every off-color thing that was e-mailed to them. Some guys just shouldn't have access to the internet, and I know them all. If I had Foska's e-mail address, I would just have all that stuff diverted there, and I wouldn't have to put up with it. After your hizzy-fit, I, like Worst of Perth would like to know just when the Parthenon was built. I know Jackie has given us a date. But we would like to hear it from the Cambridge Professor.

[abc]

Well done. Double girl agreement. Blokes to chase...

[Gi]

I wonder if the guy was really from NG.
I've read basic questions like that asked by (surely very young) students in sites I visit and where some reasonably detailed discussions were going on (http://www.ancientworlds.net for instance)
You were certainly more generous than we were by even answering the email.

[abc]

Some people are impressed by name dropping and others are not. It depends, as with anything, on the audience.

[J.J. Tato]

Worse is when they quote you, with your name badly spelled; and when you read what they say are your words, they have nothing in common with what you actually said.
Patientia...

[Jackie]

At least if they send you a free copy of the magazine you can check if they have used your name without actually having to pay for the thing! As for the date, a guide book I picked up when I visited a few years ago says 'Work on the temple lasted from 447 to 432BC. The architects were Ictinus and Callicrates, both of them renowned in their own day. The sculptures were executed by Pheidias.' As these dates are backed up by OCD someone had done their homework!

[abc]

And i know what it is because i was doing about 99.9% of the research.

[abc]

Mary,

There is huge amounts of credible material on-line, and by on-line I mean academic databases eg JSTOR etc. One can practically set up a virtual office at home and then back up your work with hard cross-refs. I'm not talking about the main internet links but subscriptions. I've been used to a very sophisticated research network myself (albeit it a private commercial environment) but the working practices are top-flight. We can discuss, amidst this insightful learning curve.

[abc]

bravo for the learning! ego sum bollocks in high chairs

[dr venables preller]

The ease with which information may be obtained and replicated far removed from original prime record or authority may have added a fuzzy slippage and spectrum of reliability to much data.

The academic tradition of quoting sources in papers needs to be more widespread if we are to avoid being engulfed in a torrent of partial truth.

Unfortunately, preferences for colouring reality in accordance with sometimes covert purpose, and usage of language suitable for that do not necessarily resonate with a wish for elevation of standards of veracity.

If the information on which thinking is based can be so readily corrupted, apparent deterioration of once reliable paradigms, institutions or belief systems may be more easily understood.

Those with the skills to distinguish between grades of data and the requisite knowledge should certainly charge for their services, preferably as part of a paid consultancy.

[Ray]

Mary Beard was overly generous to the enquirer who should have employed the services of a research assistant in his own organisation or should have popped along to the local library. A call to a reference librarian would have solved the problem.

You'd think that a professional writer would have a reference network all set up.

[Bridget Murnaghan]

Call me a stickler, but to me the saddest feature of this tale is the revelation that a National Geographic staffer doesn't know the difference between "attain" and "obtain"!

[Mary]

OK Worst of Perth.. when you have had a little look round your local library... do give me an email if you're still uncertain!
I'm learning......!!

[Richard]

I note that the Manhattan address which the National Geographic Society gives on its website (given by Mary above) is only a few minutes away from New York's famously extensive public library:
http://www.nypl.org/hours/index.cfm?Trg=6
Though perhaps this prestigious (5th Ave) address is for receptions, head office, etc. rather than being the place of work for magazine hacks. But anyway it's feeble for them to mutter about "tight deadlines" (it's a travel magazine, not a newspaper: a story about the Parthenon as travel destination can't be being written to a 24 hour deadline!).
Presumably in the years Pre-Web the writer would a) have gone to the library and then b) if still anxious, made contact with a classicist at one of the several universities on Manhattan to check through the piece before submission (and at least would have bought him/her lunch for their trouble!).
All best,
R

[Xjy]

They were probably out to namesdrop you to give a bit of prestige to the article. What are the going rates for namesdropping??
Perhaps you should have demanded the names of all the other Profs the writer was sounding out about Parthenon scaffolding.
Interesting sidelight on the interface between non-fiction mass media (with pretensions), scholarship, and reality.

[The Worst of Perth]

So how old is it? heh heh.
The Worst of Perth

[Marion Diamond]

I sympathise entirely!

And then there's the one who, when you suggest he should read your book first, before asking inane questions, complains that you're trying to sell copies of your book instead of answering questions which - as a taxpayer! - he has a right to get answers to. And sends the complaint not to you, but to your head of school.

you shouldn't have weakened this time!! even before the era of the internet it was possible to get any book from anywhere very very quickly (it was once my job, so I know...), and especially if you could say dangle those strings of being the Nat'l Geographic or Time-Life. To think they couldnt overnight it from amazon on the huge budget of the Nat'l Geog is absurd. just laziness on their part.