A Don’s Life

A piss-up with Socrates

Preparations are now apace for our TLS debate in Oxford tomorrow: would you accept a dinner invitation with Socrates? Beard, in case you didn’t already know/guess, is on the NO THANKS side (along with fellow sceptic Tom Holland). Those thinking that they would reply with a YES PLEASE are Oliver Taplin and MM McCabe.

I am already, I must confess, resigned to defeat. For a start I have never been known to win in debates like this (not enough punchy, simple , populist rhetoric??). I managed to lose when I was standing up for the Parthenon in a head to head with the Alhambra, championed by Robert Irwin. His pitch was that the Alhambra was very very beautiful indeed. Mine was that the Parthenon not only stood for the whole of western culture, having been pagan temple, church and mosque – but that it also affected us more qua ruin, than any complete building ever could. True – but not a winner in the rhetorical cut and thrust.

Then last year I managed to lose in the Greeks versus Romans debate at Cheltenham. I lost so badly in fact that the Greeks registered more votes at the end of the session than they did at the beginning. In other words my inventions actually lost the Romans some of the votes they already had. The problem is that Hellenophiles find it so easy to stand up and bang on about well springs/originary moments of Western culture: QED. (It is what I should have done when speaking for the Parthenon….)

So what am I going to say about Socrates?

Terminal 5: the true horror

No, I have not had the misfortune to visit the new Terminal 5 at  Heathrow today, Thursday. But the husband has. Though, happily for him, he was arriving rather than trying to leave (hand baggage only, if your flight wasn’t cancelled).

The whole experience started brightly enough. The check-in at Athens was serving champagne (and juice for the minors) to celebrate T5 day. But things got darker pretty quickly when he discovered that, owing to problems at the new Terminal, the flight was delayed by two hours.

When it did finally take off, the cabin crew had stories that went rather beyond the official line of  “teething troubles with the baggage system”.

Lets get rid of the fascist Olympic torch

I don’t quite understand how we have forgotten that the “Olympic Torch” ceremony was invented by Hitler and his chums.

If ever there was an “invented tradition” well worth stamping out, it is this ridiculous, Fascist-inspired waste of money – which sends a Bunsen Burner around the world at tremendous cost for several months before the Games, manned (and womanned) by people dressed up in pseudo-ancient Greek costume, no doubt feeling very silly.

In London, we are now told, it will soon be doing a mini tour, carried by a London bus, Docklands Light Railway and Dame Kelly Holmes (inter alios).

I can’t quite work out whether most of the press reports are pleased at the pro-Tibetan protests which dented the hi-tech assisted, sunbeam lighting ceremonial (plucky little Tibet poking the Chinese dragon where it, for once, might hurt); or whether they are a touch censorious at this upsetting of the peaceful, non-political programme of the Olympic Games that we have inherited from the ancient Greeks; or whether they are wondering what might happen to the UK in the ceremonies to come in 2012  (don’t forget Iraq, Mr Blair/Brown….).

Hardly any commentator stops to mention that this silly torch ceremony has nothing to do with the ancient Greeks, and was really invented to be a magnificent shot in Leni Riefenstahl’s movie (choreographed by Carl Diem). This is one of Hitler’s most pervasive legacies.

They also don’t stop to mention that the ancient Olympics – far from being that sweet haven of peace -- were pretty political anyway. Even in their hay-day, they were often interrupted by the rough hand of Politics.

Do we need Wikipedia in Latin?

I’ve only just caught up with the fact that there is a version of Wikipedia in Latin: or, to be precise, Vicipaedia.

I have to say that it is all very well done. I explored it, hoping to discover some dreadful howlers. But a ten minute glance gave them pretty much a clean bill of health. And there is plenty of earnest worrying about how to translate such termini technici as ‘link’ into Latin. Ligamen, nexus or vinculum? Oh help…

They haven’t got very far yet. Check out  the section on “professores rerum classicarum” (professors of  Classics) and you’ll find they’ve only got to three: the distinguished, but unlikely trio of Barry Baldwin, E. R. Dodds and W. L. Westermann.

But my problem with this enterprise is not its accuracy in Latinity or its progress. It is: what on earth is the point?

Please can I have a bigger overdraft

The credit squeeze has started to hit even leafy Cambridge. Last week the son, who had received frequent communications from what we used to know as “The Listening Bank” suggesting that he might like to extend his overdraft, decided to take them up on their offer.

So he trotted off to the local branch and had an interview with some bank official not much older than himself, reviewing his assets etc. The upshot was that he was not a good enough credit risk. In other words, despite the come-on advertising campaign, the answer was no.

In some ways, this was an entirely sensible decision. The son has no assets at all apart from a few guitars and his Mum and Dad, so without some investigation into us, I don’t see why he should get a bigger overdraft.

On the other hand, he came home clutching his refusal letter explaining that he had not been given more credit for two reasons. One: he hadn’t passed the bank’s own guidelines. Two: he had “failed”, as it were, a credit reference agency check. The letter helpfully suggested that he might like to see what the credit reference agencies were saying about him and gave the names of three.

Having heard stories of terrible errors creeping into these records, we decided to take a look.

Do physicists need French?

If you have academically elite universities, it’s only predictable – indeed it's right and proper – that people debate exactly what qualifications students should have to get into them.

A hundred years ago, the headlines were all about whether ancient Greek should be a  necessary qualification to get  into Cambridge. Technically speaking it wasn’t actually a qualification you needed to be admitted in the first  place. But, if you wanted an honours degree, you had to do a preliminary exam in Greek soon after you arrived – which was pretty much the same thing in practice.

The arguments went as you might expect. The abolitionists claimed that the Greek requirement was preventing highly intelligent boys (sic) from coming to Cambridge, if they weren’t already at a select group of socially elite schools (the access argument). They also suggested that it was pretty ante-diluvian requiring a dead language when you could be getting the boys to learn a modern language, French or German (the utility argument).

On the other side, the retentionists argued that Greek was an essential part of a liberal education, and that it would disappear from schools unless Cambridge continued to require it. To this the abolitionists retorted that it wasn’t Cambridge’s job to take responsibility for the school curriculum.

The arguments went on from 1870 to 1919, when in the brave new post-war world the Greek requirement was abolished (and, true to the retentionists fears, the decline of Greek in schools had begun).

A hundred years on and the radical choice of the early twentieth century – namely French and German – are now in their turn to be toppled. Cambridge is planning no longer to require a modern language from all students across the board.

Dead men's books

When my mother was dying, she made it very clear that she didn’t want anyone wearing her clothes after she was dead. I didn’t quite understand this at the time. After all, she would have happily have given away her internal organs if they hadn’t been past their sell by date. And she happily distributed her used clothes during her lifetime. So why not after her death?

I vaguely supposed that it was something to do with the final annihilation that people going through, choosing or rejecting your clothes would seem to entail. And didn’t give it much more thought.

But last week, I came face to face with that sense of annihilation when the vultures(self included) descended to take the pickings of my old, recently dead supervisor’s books.

For many academics, books have much the same significance as clothes. They are what you use every day and you have your favourites as well as your expensive mistakes. Not to mention the carefully mended, the carelessly torn, the messily annotated.

The trouble is what happens to them when you’ve gone to the great library in the sky.

The house of Augustus: all mod cons?

Another new site to visit opens in Rome this week. It’s four rooms of the House of the first Emperor Augustus on the Palatine hill, never on show to the public before. Some parts of this building have opened from time to time, but those bits which you might have seen in the past  are currently closed. The plan is that in due course, when conservation has finished, they will open again to join this new section.

You’ll have to pay (11 euros), to cover entrance to this and  the whole of the Forum area. In fact, there’s been a bit of a sleight of hand here. For the last few years entrance to the Roman Forum has been free – one of the few major Roman sites in Italy making no charge at all. This ‘combined’ 11 euro ticket uses the new display of these four painted rooms to conceal the fact that you’re now being charged for the Forum too.

But the material you can see is so good that its hard to complain about the price. For what you’re walking into is part of the ‘modest house’ of the first emperor.

Of course modesty comes at various levels.

Does size matter?

I had a quick peek at the excellent new Cranach exhibition at the Royal Academy this week. I didn’t know much about Lucas Cranach the Elder before I went along -- except that he was one of those few painters whose work even an amateur like me could spot a mile off.

The Academy’s Norman Rosenthal lumped him together with Modigliani and Botticelli for instant recognisability, which I thought was a bit unfair to Botticelli, but you know what he means.

This Cranach show had caught the headlines a few weeks ago when London Transport first of all banned his nude Venus advertising poster from the underground, then relented. So we can now see her on the tube in all her glory.

But seeing her in the flesh sprang a couple of surprises.

Prince Harry: the Roman solution

I’ve found the adulation of Prince Harry -- who appears to have spent a couple of months driving a lap-top and something called a “Spartan vehicle” in Afghanistan -- a bit hard to take. OK, it’s easy for me to sneer, as I haven’t been in the Taliban firing line, but you know what I mean. Wouldn’t it actually have been more honourable if he had faced danger on some humanitarian project rather than pushing forward whatever military folly we’re committing in Afghanistan.

Almost equally insufferable were the interviews with the said youth, including his memorable comment about how he didn’t like England much.  To this, I had two reactions. One is that it is Harry’s job to like England. The rest of us are allowed to feel as ambivalent as we like. But, as third in line to the throne, he doesn’t have that luxury (though he has plenty of other ones). So he’d better just get on with it.

Second is that, if it’s the paparazzi who are bothering him, then may be fewer late night romps at Boujis could do the trick.

But further thought suggested that there was a Roman angle to this trip of the young prince to the military front line. In fact, Roman emperors knew a thing or two about the problems of sending the son and heir off to war.