A Don’s Life

Should the poet laureate answer questions?

I don't know what I think about Andrew Motion as a poet (too soon to call, we classicists would say). But I do admire the way, as poet laureate, he has put himself, and poetry, "about" - in radio interviews, lectures, question and answer sessions, you name it.

Let's hope his successor does the same.

I'm not so optimistic. A few years ago I asked one of the current front runners for the post to come and talk in Cambridge at a fairly big university occasion, for a fee of £400-500. (I'm not going to say which one, so don't even ask -- though if someone is groundlessly traduced, I guess I will be driven to make denials).

The first problem is that the poet didn't do talks, only readings (but would answer individual questions at book signings afterwards). OK, say I, how about a reading followed by a question and answer session from the audience with a "discussant chair"?

No, was the response (and I still have the email), "I don't take open/chaired questions after the reading, no".

So what next?

Literary ladies at Cambridge - and who's minding the baby?

There are many nice things about being a fellow of Newnham. I could go on at great length about the virtues even (or especially) in 2009 of having a college for women only. But I will spare you, till later. This weekend I've been thinking instead about Newnham's literary inheritance. Amongst our alums (as I have now almost got used to calling them) is a range of the best, and best known, writers of the twentieth century: A S Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Claire Tomalin, Sylvia Plath, Joan Bakewell, Germaine Greer, Katharine Whtehorne, Sarah Dunant -- and many more.

So it was partly in celebration of this that the Cambridge Wordfest (the local literary festival) held some appropriate events in Newnham this year, and the college hosted a dinner for the speakers and assorted others, me included. Almost all of us had some connection with Newnham; most had been students or on the staff at one time or another.

There were fourteen of us 'girls', and those at my end of the table included Frances Spalding and Isabelle Grey (who was in my year in Newnham when I was an undergraduate), plus Jean Wilson. And after dinner I quaffed -- I confess -- a lot more claret with Isabelle and Rebecca Abrams, and the college Vice Principal Catherine Seville.

So how was the conversation?

Travel expenses: are academics on the fiddle?

A few weeks ago I was puzzled why my $250 or so travelling expenses had not arrived from a "leading American University" for lecture I had done in November. (It was, by the way, UCLA -- but let me say that no blame lies with any of the Classics department staff for the little story I shall recount).

I had submitted the e-ticket, and full confirmation that I had travelled (besides I had, after all. delivered the lecture, so I had got to LA from San Francisco somehow). There was a problem, they explained. They didn't have full confirmation to show that I myself had bought the ticket on which I travelled, on my very own credit card. They could not reimburse me until they confirmed that I had paid for the ticket.I had two instant reactions to this. First, why the hell should I give a full credit card bill of mine to the accounts department at UCLA (I mean, I've heard about what happens when they go astray, and about identity theft and so on). Second, why was it any of their business if (say) my husband had paid on his credit card (suppose, not too unlikely, that mine had maxed out)? Would they not have paid then?

Of course, though, I needed the money and dutifully faxed them the credit card bill.

The point is, I reflected later, that these systems of reimbursement (my airfares or MPs expenses, for that matter) only work on a system of trust. Once you are tracking down each individual receipt, the system is in melt down.

Until recently my own Faculty's travel money worked on just such a system of trust. Each member of the Faculty had a travel/research fund limit each year, and you submitted a claim for expenses up to that amount. You could submit receipts, and that was sometimes easier, but you didn't have to. Each claim was looked at by two senior members of the Faculty, and if it looked odd they would 'give you a call' (you didn't want that, I can assure you). Otherwise, you were free to spend up to your limit, as you chose, on your research travel expenses.

Now they have said that the 'auditors' require receipts, and sooner or later we will be in the UCLA position.

So were we on the fiddle?

An American museum tour

While I've been posting on pirates and library fines, I've actually been doing a little US lecture tour -- mostly around museum in the mid-west. This is real 'don's life' stuff.

I began in Dallas (OK, not exactly the mid-west). It wasn't a particularly auspicious start, when the cab driver from the airport said, in response to my query, that there was really nothing to see in Dallas (if you want to see things, you should go to Fort Worth, was his line). As it happens he was wrong, although with only a day there I didn't get to see much.

I was lecturing in the Dallas Museum of Art (a two hour session for their docents in the morning and a public performance on the Roman triumph in the evening, with an hour's radio interview in between). The Museum looked great, but it was their closed day -- so even if there had been time, the possibilities were limited (only the travelling Tut show was open, and I've been avoiding that in most places it's been).

What I really wanted to see was the Kennedy assassination museum, in the very book depository (with the very window) from which the president was shot. There was no time for that either, but I did meet someone who had been in the crowd lining the streets on the very day. The next best thing I guess.

From Dallas, I went on the Green Bay Wisconsin.

What's the point of library fines?

Cambridge University has just announced a dramatic decrease in the money paid in library fines at the University Library. The amount paid by students, they say, went down from £27,635 in 2006-7, to £20,503 in 2007-8. This is said to be 'good news' and the reason is the new automated renewal system: you now get an email telling you that the book is about to become overdue and you can renew it online. You dont even have to set foot in the library.

That still didn't stop some eager students of the ancient world being caught out. Some young fan of Marco Fantuzzi and  Richard Hunter coughed up £75 for Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry (a fine volume, which they had presumably lost -- £75 being roughly what it costs). Another diligent young scholar had stumped up £96.59 for Gregory of Nyssa's, Homilies on the Beatitudes.

But is the fall in fines really such good news?

That depends on what you think fines are for.

Smear tactics: the Roman Damian McBride

My friend and fellow Classicist Peter Jones beat me to it, I discover, with a comparison of ancient and modern tactics against piracy (you can still 'listen again' to him on the Today programme for a couple of days yet; go to the 8.50 slot).

He now urges me to ask whether the Caepio Crispinus, a delator (an 'informer' to follow the usual translation) in the reign of the emperor Tiberius, had something in common with smearer-in-chief Damian McBride.

The story goes like this (taken directly from Tacitus Annals I, 74). Crispinus had been on the staff of Granius Marcellus, governor of Bithynia. To insinuate himself into the emperor's favour and to attract the rewards that he hoped would come to someone who could exploit Tiberius' paranoia, he accused his ex-boss of telling scurrilous stories about the emperor (and given Tiberius' nasty habits that was all too plausible). His partner in smear, one Hispo, added that Marcellus had given his own statues greater prominence than Tiberius' and (a strange one this) removing the head of a statue of the emperor Augustus and replacing it with one of Tiberius.

Actually the plan misfired. To cut a rather longer story short, Tiberius (pictured above) thought this was all below the belt and was worried about the tale drawing attention to his own failings. So he voted against the conviction of Marcellus. 

Was this a Damian McBride sort of incident, then?

Pirates? Try the Pompey-the-Great solution?

Piracy, it seems, has always been with us, and still is. Or, at least, as we've seen this last week, there are still people we don't like doing nasty things on the high seas with tragic consequences.

Exactly who is to count as a "pirate" as such will always remain a matter of opinion and dispute. for 'pirates' are no more objectively defined than 'terrorists'. To most of the world, after all, Sir Francis Drake was a dreadful pirate, to the British he still somehow manages to qualify as an 'explorer'.

But however you define them, the Romans had plenty of trouble with criminals sailing around the Mediterranean. It must sometimes have seemed hard to decide which was the greater danger of a sea voyage in antiquity: shipwreck or kidnapping by one of the many gangs of thugs looking to make quick money by getting ransom for the wealthy individuals they captured (or alternatively by selling them into slavery).

The most famous victim of this was the young Julius Caesar, who fell into pirate hands in the 70s BC. The story of this crime was almost certainly later embellished to make it a nice prequel of Caesar's later character and career. It is said that when the pirates told him that they were going to demand 20 talents ransom money (a hefty sum), Caesar replied that he was worth much more than that  -- and insisted that they double it.

Some of his party went off to get the cash, leaving Caesar to live for a month or so with this captors. He is supposed to have treated them as servants, telling them not to make too much noise when he wanted to rest, making them listen to him practising his oratory, and threatening that when he was released he would have them crucified. When the ransom arrived, he was set free -- and indeed, in due course, he did crucify the lot of them.

But it was Caesar's great rival Pompey the Great who had greatest success against the pirates, with a rather more liberal approach.

Can Boris boost Latin?

I went this week to a 'round table' in City Hall chaired by the London mayor (that's Boris Johnson, ex Tory MP and the world's most famous blonde old Etonian, for readers outside the UK). As mayor, Boris doesn't actually have any direct control over the capital's schools, but -- as a keen classicist -- he thought he might be able to encourage and coordinate efforts to make Latin available to more kids in London.

He had invited about twenty of us -- from schools, universities and other Classics "projects" -- to see what was already going on and to see what else could be done.

Now Classicists are, as a species, a rather gloomy crowd, and they have been predicting the extinction of their subject for over a hundred years (during which time it has in fact blossomed). In fact some would argue it has been predicting its own end since about 200 AD. Nostalgia, you see, is in the bones of Classicists. They're always liable to think that it was better and more expertly practised some time in the past; any time but now, in fact

But there are at the moment serious causes for concern. The worst thing, emphasised on Tuesday, is the government's cap on the numbers of places for training Classics teachers (those taking the Post Graduate Certificate of Education, which is the most common path into the teaching profession). There are only 27 PGCE places for Classics in the country each year, yet 70 teachers retire or leave the profession for other reasons. Even if you add in a handful who start teaching through the Graduate Training Programme (which trains you 'on the job') and a few more who go into teaching in independent schools untrained, the implications of this are obvious. There are simply not enough Classics teachers to take the jobs in the subject that are advertised, let alone get it back into schools where it has disappeared.

The next Tory government (lets suppose) may mouth its support for Latin as hard as it likes, but unless it increases the number of places available to train new teachers, the mouthing wont mean veru much.

On the other hand there are some "green shoots".

"The Ancient Greeks and Global Warming"

I am just back from the annual Classical Association conference, this year held in Glasgow jointly with the Classical Association of Scotland. I gave the opening talk on Friday night, on how Cicero might be a guide to the 'culture of Roman laughter' (a quite different lecture from the one on the ancient joke book -- in case you think I'm repeating myself). I thought it went rather well . . .

But before you accuse me of bragging, let me say that I thought that the other 'plenary' lecture at the conference was absolutely brilliant. This was the Presidential Address by Richard Seaford, who has a chair in the Classics Department at Exeter: a 50 minute presentation, without notes, to an audience of almost 400 on "The Ancient Greeks and Global Warming".

His theme was the relationship between political engagement in our own day and being a Classicist (or actually being a Hellenist). He started from Gilbert Murray, who was president of the Association in 1908, and had his own version of political engagement (in the League of Nations -- but Seaford told us of his enthusiasm for the United States, which he thought would turn out at best to be a guardian of world peace, at worst to be an enduring island of true Hellenic life!). But the bulk of the lecture was concerned with two particularly modern themes: money (and its acquisition, hence the golden Klimt at the top of this post) and -- as the title suggested - global warming and environmentalism.

The question was what could we gain by thinking about how the Greeks thought about these issues.

The History Girls vs David Starkey

David Starkey (who last appeared in this blog being a trifle inaccurate on the history of the ancient world) has been sounding off in the Radio Times about how ‘feminised’ history has become: not a development of which he is in favour.

He’s taking about his new TV series on Henry VIII: “One of the great problems has been that Henry, in a sense, has been absorbed by his wives. Which is bizarre. But it's what you expect from feminised history, the fact that so many of the writers who write about this are women and so much of their audience is a female audience. Unhappy marriages are big box office.”

If only it were true, I found myself thinking. Much as I admire the work of my male colleagues in ancient history, I think that the subject could only be improved by being  a bit more ‘feminised’. And, so far as I can see from my Cambridge vantage point, there’s not much sign of modern British history in universities being a bastion of women’s power and influence. In fact, it’s usually said of the gender balance in UK history departments that the further from the ‘central periods’ of British history a subject is, the more likely you’ll find a woman teaching it. We’re let in at the margins, in other words.

But what does a feminised history mean anyway? Is it history for women, by women, about women?