A Don’s Life

Getting a word in edgeways

The wonderful World Service of the BBC has a great discussion programme, called The Forum. It's a rather less celebrity, but more leisurely and more upmarket, version of Radio 4's Start the Week -- featuring three guests, normally chaired by Bridget Kendall. The chat is about the guests' recent books or projects, and to break things up a bit half way through one of them presents a "Sixty Second Idea". This is supposed to be a slightly off-beat, zany idea for changing the world for the better, explained (as the title suggests) in just 60 seconds.

I was pleased to be one of the guests on the programme recorded last week (it'll soon be available on the website). The others were Carl Djerassi, the inventor of the pill (pictured right) and Harold Varmus, Nobel Laureate in Physiology.

I was down to do the Sixty Second Idea -- for which I proposed that prison be abolished for all but violent criminals, those who posed a real danger to their fellow human beings. But the main discussion was on reproductive technologies (Djerassi), open access, digital scientific libraries (Varmus) and Roman laughter (me).

So how did this discussion between me and the two science barons go?

Heston's Roman Feast

Heston Blumenthal's historic cookery series on Channel Four took on Roman food this week (filmed, I guess, before the Fat Duck's brush with the norovirus). There was plenty of luxury and sex (almost) on display. The Romans we learned were "theatrical, deviant and orgasmic" -- and Heston set out to recreate their theatrical, deviant and orgasmic food for a group of celebs (below) who had been hired to consume and comment on the finished product.

There was a lot of library work going on in the background, and plenty of pictures of Heston scanning the Loeb edition of Petronius. But the fun came in seeing if he could actually make the dishes.

He did rather well with the Roman staple of garum -- their favourite sauce made out of rotten fish which, as Heston pointed out, they seem to have smeared over most things. It is this that usually defeats undergraduate Roman dinner parties (anchovy paste doesn't quite get it). But even if Heston didnt have the patience to rot his fish for the three months that the Romans did, he did manage to heat up and blend together a load of mackerel intestines, so that they ended looking rather like a Thai sauce and was (so Heston insisted) really 'delicious'.

The most interesting bit for me was the recreation of the 'Trojan pig'. This is a joking dish described by Petronius in the Satyricon, but known elsewhere in Roman literature. It's a large roast pig stuffed with sausages, so that when the flesh of the pig is slit, what looks like intestines tumble out.

In Petronius, it is a neat joke played on the dinner guests, staged between the host Trimalchio and his cook. The pig is brought in to the banquet, and with it comes the cook -- full of apologies that he has forgotten to gut the animal. Trimalchio feigns anger and orders the cook to strip for a whipping, until the other guests plead for mercy. 'Ok,' says Trimalchio, 'gut it now'. And out come all those sausages . . . and everyone applauds.

Heston had rather more trouble with this one.

Was Hadrian's Wall built in the nineteenth century?

I am at a conference this weekend. It's called From Plunder to Preservation and it's organised by our Victorian Studies Group. In fact right now I should be at the conference dinner, but I begged off. It was bound, I thought, to be a Bacchanalian affair -- and, as I am not drinking, I feared that I would either get irritated at everyone else's jollity or else too tempted to have a glass myself. So I came home to write a review, which I've half finished now.

The idea of the conference is to explore the relationship between heritage and empire. There hasn't been a duff paper so far and there are too many highlights to go through them all. I particularly enjoyed Maya Jasanoff, who raised the issue of how far (or not) we ought to see the human plunder of empire, in the form of slaves, as analogous to the plunder in the form of art works. (In the course of this she talked interestingly about slave trade tourism in Ghana, and the different treatment of the monuments of the slave trade between Ghana and Sierra Leone).

On the classical/Greek side, the husband talked about the Anglican cathedral in Khartoum, designed by Robert Weir Schultz, an Arts and Crafts architect who had started his career drawing and recording Byzantine monuments in Greece (the Khartoum church is based on the church of St Demetrius in Thessaloniki). This paper fitted extraordinarily well with Simon Goldhill's  on the work of another Arts and Crafts-man, C. R. Ashbee in Jerusalem. Meanwhile Ed Richardson had spoken of the classical presentation of the Crimean War (with warships called things like "Agamemnon").

I looked instead at Roman Britain. The aim of my talk was to knock a nail into the coffin of the fashionable view that Roman British archaeology in the nineteenth century was a handmaiden of empire, that it was practised by classically trained public schoolboys, imbued with the spirit of empire. Archaeology was, in other words, imperialism pursued by other means. For Hadrian's Wall, read the North West frontier and vice versa.

My line is that this is a politically correct, but unthinking, approach to the study of Roman Britain in the nineteenth century. In short, it's wrong.

What exactly is the matter with it?

Taking the speed awareness course

Some of you will remember that I got caught by a speed camera a couple of months ago (and some of you, I remember, were not all that sympathetic to my plight). Rather than pay the small fine and take the three points on my licence, I accepted the offer of a slightly larger "fee", a four-hour speed awareness course in Milton Keynes and a clean record.

This is a privilege granted by Thames Valley Police -- who "seek to educate and not to prosecute" -- to those of us minor offenders who have been caught going between 36 and 39 in a 30 mile limit.Presumably if you're only going at 35 they don't bother with you. (Damn, I was going at 36, just a mile an hour over the safety zone). So last Saturday morning I turned up nice and early (the invitation made it clear that latecomers would not be admitted and would have to take the points), along with 18 other middle-aged speeders; the under 25s have their own special course.

I should say right away that, though I am going to share a few moans in this post, I would give the occasion a qualified thumbs-up. It was low on humiliation, completely non judgmental and free of the kind of sensationalism that you see in the "Kill your speed" poster. We didn't have to go around in Alcoholics Anonymous style, fessing up to our crimes. I don't even know how most of my fellow felons got caught. Certainly there were no sob stories, as one of my colleagues reported when he took the course: "I was taking my dying mother to hospital, your honour . . ."

What is more I did learn quite a lot.

For a start I had no idea that only 4% of traffic accidents in the UK took place on motorways (and accounted for only 6% of the road deaths). Nor did I realise quite how much the level of road casualties had fallen over the last 70 or so years -- it is now a third of the 7500 that it was (so estimates have it) in the 1930s. In fact one of the heroes of the morning was Leslie Hore-Belisha, not only the inventor of the Belisha Beacon in 1935, but of the Highway Code too, the driving test and various road markings, that are now taken for granted.

Most striking of all was the stuff about the "hard shoulder". I knew that it is the most dangerous place to be on the motorway. I hadnt realised that average time between stopping on the hard shoulder and being involved in an "incident" was 26 minutes. Can that really be true?

To judge from their answers to the questions the rest of my group (which in the quizzes were displayed, anonymously, on a big screen) were even more ignorant than me. One person thought the speed limit on a dual carriageway was 40 miles an hour, another (or perhaps the same one) thought that you were allowed to go no more than 60 miles on a motorway. In practice the average speed at which people actually drive in lanes two and three  is 82 miles miles an hour.

So why the moans?

The skeleton of Cleopatra's sister? Steady on.

There were enthusiastic reports this weekend that archaeologists had found the skeleton of the younger sister of Queen Cleopatra -- and that the bones suggested that Cleopatra herself was not ethnically Greek or Macedonian (as most people have assumed), but of mixed race, at least part African.

The woman's name was Arsinoe , and she was put to death as a potentially dangerous rival in Ephesus in 41 BC, on the orders of Cleopatra and Antony. The skeleton in question was found in a large tomb there, now known as the Octagon (on the right). The argument is that the shape of the skull shows that she had African blood. So Cleopatra too was part African.

Does it all add up? Well, no, sorry  -- it's not quite so simple.

 

The Laughter Lover

I should have known that giving a big lecture about the late Roman joke book (called the The Laughter Lover or, in Greek, Philogelos) in Comic Relief week would attract more interest in this particular by-way of the Classics than usual. But when -- months ago -- I fixed the date to go to Newcastle for the gig, I hadn't realised that it was Comic Relief.

In fact, I didnt actually realise the coincidence till someone pointed it out just before the lecture started. "Funny you're lecturing on Roman jokes when it's Red Nose Day tomorrow," they said.

Anyway, thanks to the efficent press-release put out by Newcastle University, there had already been a number of media enquiries to my mobile phone before I reached the banks of the Tyne. In this case, they were quite hard to deal with. The problem was that most of the journalists had got the impression that I had actually discovered -- or dug up, perhaps -- a new and entirely unknown book of Roman jokes.

The Daily Mail asked if they could have a picture of it, and didn't seem quite to understand why a picture of Roger Dawe's Teubner text (which is all I could offer) wasn't actually what they were looking for.

It was hard to get the point across that the text had been known for centuries (Dr Johnson had been keen on it and Jim Bowen had recently performed parts of it), but that I was looking at it harder than anyone had done for ages and in a new way. That's what being 'new' is, for the most part, in Classics.

Still, I soon found that having a little repertoire of ancientjokes that I could quote, tailored to the paper or show in question, did the trick. I even found some that pleased the man from The Sun.

Transparency is the new opacity

I have spent the evening writing my 'supervision reports' -- termly assessments for the students I'm teaching for essay work, either in small groups or 'one to one'. There's a strong incentive to get them done on time, because you don't get paid until you've submitted them. (OK, I know that at most other universities people don't get paid extra for this kind of work . . . In defence I'd say that teachers at Oxford and Cambridge have traditionally had more 'contact hours' of this sort than those at other universities.)

In the old days you used to do these on little sheaves of carbon paper, which made several copies of each of your reports (one for you, one for the director of studies, one for the tutor etc). You sent these off in the mail and the director of studies would mediate the contents to the students. It was a good way of not only reporting on the student's progress, as well as sharing concerns. "She never talks when she is in a group with Jenny." "Hasn't she got terribly thin....?" You relied on the discretion of the director of studies not to read that kind of thing out to the student. Occasionally some idiots did. But by and large the system, and the judgement calls, worked pretty well. The student got to know how they were doing, and you could pass on other useful, frank -- even if unrepeatable -- comments without fearing that it would be fed direct to the student concerned.

Now it's all computerised. This has done away with the infuriating mountain of paper. It also gives the students direct access to what you have written. No more confidential warnings. It's all bland 'record of achievement' kind of stuff ("Jenny has made good progress this term. She seems to be mastering making more complex arguments -- this was very clear in her essay on the reforms of Tiberius Gracchus" . . .and so on).

Ok, this all comes up to new standards of transparency. There are no secret comments hidden from the student. That must be good, mustn't it?

Well yes, except that there's less honesty in the record. All those frank, confidential comments are still made, but 'underground' as it were and not in the reports. If you have anxieties about, for example, a student's weight loss, or binge-drinking, the temptation is to convey it in a quiet word in the pub, or on the phone. So it never gets written down at all.

This is particularly awkward with graduate students, who get the same kind of open reports.

Imagine this fictional scenario. (Dont worry my grads -- it really is fictional and not about you).

Triumphs in Philadelphia

I got to Philadelphia late on Thursday -- to a beautiful, new and empty airport.  The words "All men are created equal" were displayed on the wall (the Declaration of Independence having been adopted here). Reassuring, but a sentiment that must seem a little tarnished to most of those arriving on a transatlantic flight, where the inequality of mankind is marked by those curtains between the classes -- sufficient to separate you from the better time that someone else is having on the same flight, but not quite sufficient to prevent you glimpsing their privileges.

I'm in the USA for a conference on 'Celebrations of continuity and change: triumph and spectacle in the ancient world', which happened on Friday. There were papers on Renaissance processional ceremonies, the Ottoman and Egyptian equivalents plus me and Konstantinos Zachos on the Roman world itself. He was talking about his important discoveries at Augustus' city of Nikopolis in Northern Greece, in particular the sculpted frieze showing the emperor's triumph in 29 BC.

I was down to talk generally about the issues of continuity and change in triumphal rituals. It's quite hard to do this kind of thing when you've already written a book on the subject (no-one wants to hear you just repeat what you've already said). So I decided to reflect a bit more radically on the very ideas of continuity and and change, how we identify continuity in a ritual and whether we should be so confident that we could tell a 'revival' of a ritual, from its ancient living tradition'. I'm not sure how far I got this across (my fault not the audience's no doubt) -- but my heart sank a bit in the final question session when one senior academic said in passing that 'the Etruscans had triumphs', as was clear from the surviving visual imagery. Part of my paper was to say that that was precisely NOT CLEAR from the visual imagery.

But it was a great occasion, and one of those conference where the papers actually seem to cohere. I also managed to fit in other things around it. With Brian Rose I did a video about Roman laughter in the Roman gallery of the Penn Museum. This was quite a challenge, walking round the exhibits finding objects that could 'naturally' lead on to stories Roman joking (the statue of a bald priest of Isis, on the left, prompted reflections on Roman jokes about baldness, a gold coin of emperor Elagabalus led to the stories about his practical jokes).

In some ways the highlight, though, was our visit on Saturday morning to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Grand Scale exhibition. The conference had been a sort of 'tie-in' with this show, because it features 'over-size', 'jumbo' Renaissance prints - many of which depict processions and other sort of triumphal imagery.

I must confess I hadn't been much looking forward to this. I'm the sort of person who thinks that prints are for hard=core art historians, not me. When I come to a room of prints in an exhibition, I tend to walk through rather briskly.

If Gordon Brown's Mark Antony, then who's Cleopatra?

Classicists have a bit of a soft spot for outlandish comparisons between modern politics and the ancient world. However far-fetched they may be, all those books and newspaper articles comparing the decline of Rome to the decline of the American empire, do make us feel that our subject is still on the political map.

But even I – a sucker for that kind of thing (and even known to peddle a few far-fetched comparisons myself) – found it hard to stomach the idea that Gordon Brown in congress was a modern Mark Antony. 

OK, I suppose Michael Billington had Shakespeare’s “friends, Romans, countrymen”  version in mind, rather than the ‘real thing’ when he floated the idea that the PM was a “natural” Antony – “someone who professes to be a plain blunt man, but who actually has all the oratorical tricks up his sleeve . . relying on the tricks of the speakers trade to cajole and flatter his audience”.  And he did got on to point out that Mark Antony’s triumph, after the death of Caesar, “was short-lived and was followed by civil commotion, global turmoil and his own ultimate downfall on foreign soil.”

But in truth there is almost nothing that Antony and Brown hold in common.

For a start Antony had style.

Literary festivals -- an author's view

Literary festivals are huge fun -- but also unnerving affairs if you're a performing author. The question is: what counts as a successful festival gig? Is it filling the hall they've assigned you? That's easier if the organisers have not expected a huge turnout and have given you a modest room with a modest number of seats.' Standing room only' is always good for morale, even if only takes 40 or so punters to achieve it. The other way round --  when a few faithful followers (usually friends and relations) are dotted around a vast hall fit for a best seller -- is at best a salutary reminder that one's own obsession with one's own book is not actually widely shared. At worst it's a real put-down.

Or do you judge it by books bought and signed? Is an audience of 40 each of whom buys a copy of your latest tome more a success than an audience of 500 if only 10 decide to take a copy home with them? There's a good deal of humiliation in store here too. I dont imagine that there's a single 'ordinary' author who hasnt been in a joint signing session, where the queue to get a signature out of the other authors snakes right out of the 'signing tent' -- while you're sitting there 'unbought', talking to an old student or a friend of your parents who has taken pity on you.

Anyway, these reflections are prompted by the Saturday evening gig that I did at the Bath Literary Festival -- a lecture on Pompeii, a 'tie in' with my new book. I should say that I had a great time (including a wonderful supper before the lecture). And on the first criterion I did just fine: every seat was sold, and more. But the sales weren't exactly brisk...ten or books altogether I would have said. The optimistic explanation would be that the audience had mostly bought it already (dream on, Beard . . . !). The truth must be that, even if I can deliver a good lecture (and I think it was OK), I haven't got much talent as a sales-person. Are you actually supposed to plug the book, I wonder? Imply that your kids will go unshod unless everyone goes away with at least a couple of copies of your latest book (and a few of your earlier efforts) under their arms?

But, sales apart maybe, it was -- for me at least -- a tremendous occasion. Until I came to go back to Cambridge . . .