A Don's Life by Mary Beard - Times Online - WBLG

Richard and Judy meet the Classics

I honestly have very little ambition to be a tv don. I know that a good number of academics do secretly – or not so secretly --  hanker after the celebrity heaven of their own Starkey-style series. Not me.

The effort-reward ratio never seems quite right. The hours of preparation, make-up, nose-powdering, dressing-up is out of all proportion to those few minutes when you’re visible on the screen. Unlike radio, when you turn up at the studio, say your piece, have a friendly drink, and go.

All the same, when the call came from Richard and Judy a few days ago, I didn’t say no. The story is in the trade that a feature on Richard and Judy can turn even the most unprepossessing book into a best seller. Sadly, that’s not why the call came. They were wanting to talk about Spartacus, the Roman rebel slave. I’ve recently been advising another BBC drama-doc on the Spartacan rebellion (it’s broadcast on Friday night). Richard and Judy wanted to know if this was more historically accurate than the old Stanley Kubrick-Kirk Douglas version.

It turned out rather as I feared.

To booze or not to booze . . .

I usually avoid newspaper articles about the dangers of alcohol consumption.

I don’t mind the one’s about teenage binge-ing. These tend to prompt a few minutes thought along the lines of: if we hadn’t put all our energies for the last twenty years into trying to keep the young off cigarettes and Class C recreational pharmaceuticals, then maybe they wouldn’t be going out to get slaughtered every Friday night. The kids have got to do something transgressive after all.

In the same vein I have some sympathy with the Moslem parents who opposed the ‘smoking in public places’ ban. Given that their children weren’t allowed to drink alcohol, there ought to be something a bit wicked they could go and do while they sipped their orange juice, without having to stand outside in the cold and rain.

It’s the doom-laden articles about middle-aged, middle-class women hitting the Sauvignon Blanc after a hard day in the office that I  prefer to avoid.

A day in Guantanamo

OK not quite. But I have just spent a day in an orange Guantanamo style jump-suit, as part of our student Amnesty Group’s “Orange Wednesday”. This was a bit of harmless and colourful street theatre, designed to draw attention to the injustices of illegal detention all over the world. A few hundred of us, mostly students but some staff, went about our daily business dressed as Guantanamo detainees.

I volunteered for this fancy dress partly because I believe in the cause. But partly because most students seem so un-bothered by issues of  surveillance, civil liberties and human rights that it is important to show some solidarity with those who are.

That said, I’m afraid I’ve lost some of my old knack for political action.

The first problem was: was I going to be able to get into the damn suit? (Not an issue for the poor thin creatures at the real Guantanamo, needless to say.) I had ordered an extra-large, but still had my doubts – particularly when the word went about that they only came in one size.

The good news was that it fitted. The bad news was that once in, it was almost impossible to get out. Going to the loo involved a good five minutes twisting and wriggling, before I could manage to release my shoulders and gradually pull the whole thing down.

Trouble on the Cam

The good burghers of Cambridge have got two particular troubles on their mind.

The first is the threatened invasion of a Tesco Express into ‘bohemian’ Mill Road. Why, they ask, when Tesco already controls more than 50% of the grocery retail in the town should we hand it any more? And why should we give them a chance to squeeze out all the local shops? Particularly in this area of town, which is (as it is fondly put) a ‘retail version of the United Nations’, from butchers (old fashioned and halal) to health foods, Italians delis and Korean supermarkets.

I’m entirely on the side of the objectors. However many lorries it will take per day to replenish the proposed outlet, is bound to be too many. Yet it is funny to watch the middle class residents change their tune with the wind. Those who only recently used to deplore the vomit on the pavements, the loitering drug dealers, and the rubbish around Mill Road, are now extolling the cosy multi-culturalism of it all – against the even worse enemy of Tesco plc.

And well-connected as they are, they get their objections onto the Today programme too. All power to them. But it’s not a route open to most of the population who don’t want things in their back yard.

Even more worrying though is what is planned for the Cam.

Did St Valentine exist?

Valentine’s day comes with a sense of relief for middle-aged. At least you are not on tenterhooks about what might, or might not, come in the mail. Truth to tell, apart from welcome tokens of affection from the husband, I don’t think I have ever received a Valentine – of the traditional, unexpected, “wonder who it is” sort.

Nor for that matter have I ever sent one, so far as I can remember. Except years ago as a joke to a senior colleague, who was instantly convinced that it was from someone else. The less said about this the better.

None of which stops me being curious about the Roman history of all this. In fact, for all of you wondering if there was ever a real Saint Valentinus, the good news is that there was not just one, but three.

The bad news is that we know almost nothing reliable about him/them. Earnest and detailed articles about his true history (like the one in last Sunday’s Telegraph) have, I am afraid, fallen for some very unreliable parts of Valentine’s myth.

The "facts" are these.

What made the Romans laugh?

This is my new project, which I’m soon going to be working on full time and full speed. But, as I was down to give a lecture to a group of “lifelong learners” on Saturday night (they were spending their weekend reading Latin at the University’s Continuing Education Centre at Madingley Hall), I decided to give them a first taster.

So we spent an hour looking at Roman jokes. It’s a richer subject than you might imagine, though it’s shame that some of the best texts haven’t survived. Just think what you could have done with the 150 volumes of joke anthologies by one Melissus, a contemporary of the Emperor Augustus.

Still, I tried out some of those we do still have, curious to see how they went down.

The winner, I think, wasn’t exactly a joke, but a bit of Roman imperial sit-com. It’s a story about the bonkers emperor Elagabalus, recounted in the hugely unreliable late imperial series of biographies known as the Historia Augusta. It still had them laughing on Saturday:

"He had the custom of asking to dinner eight bald men, or else eight one-eyed men or eight men who suffered from gout, or eight deaf men, or eight men of dark complexion, or eight tall men or eight fat men  -- his purpose being in the case of these last, since they could not be accompanied on one couch, to call forth general laughter."

Elagabalus had a strong suit in practical jokes, and can be credited with the invention of a Roman version of the whoopy cushion. But they had a dangerous side too. He was the emperor (again according to the Historia Augusta) who showered his guests with so many rose petals they suffocated and died. (On the left, as pictured by Alma Tadema.)

But as for jokes proper, the winner was an ancient version of a “nutty professor” joke.

"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:

The return of the gods

My gig on Friday night was at Tate Britain, The first Friday of every month the gallery hosts a “Late at Tate” night. It’s a marvellous mixture of a regular evening out and a bit of gallery gawping – a combination of music, drinking, eating, acts, art and lectures. Apart from the food and drink, it’s all free. A sort of May Ball for grown-ups, but a lot cheaper.

I came in on the lecturing side. The Tate has just opened a new show of neo-classical sculpture, called “The Return of the Gods” – full of classically inspired themes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century sculpture, from Thetis dipping the baby Achilles in the Styx to Pandora wistfully wondering whether to open the box. My job was to talk to punters about just four pieces for ten minutes spread throughout the evening.

Highlight of the show, but not for me (I actually think it’s a bit irritating), is Canova’s Three Graces. I decided to talk about some of the less well known pieces. The aim was to explain why what may look like slightly insipid white marble, recreating some serenely voluptuous male and female flesh, is actually a lot cleverer and a lot more intellectually engaged with the Greco-Roman sources on which it is based than most people ever imagine.

I’m hugely keen on the sculptor John Gibson, who has several pieces in the show. Not, sadly, his Tinted Venus (on the right), a brilliant confection of the Aphrodite of Cnidos and the biblical Eve (the bright gold apple does double duty, as both the prize awarded by Paris to Aphrodite, and Eve’s fruit).

But an unexpected star on Friday was Johan Tobias Sergel’s, Diomedes.