A Don’s Life

Have we found Nero's rotating dining room?

OK, you knew that I would have to have my say on this. Actually I need your help.

The first I knew of this 'discovery' -- of Nero's famous dining room -- was when I got an email from the World Service, wondering if I had a view which could be broadcast. As it happened, I didn't (I had other things on today, even though the World Service is always worth helping out).

But I still haven't worked out what it was that had been 'discovered'.

The basic 'facts' go back to Suetonius, who claims in his 'Life of Nero' that in the famous 'Golden House'. Nero had some kind of revolving dining room: there were, Suetonius says, "dining rooms <plural> with fretted ceilings of ivory, whose panels could turn and shower down flowers and were fitted with pipes for sprinkling the guests with perfumes. The main banquet hall was circular and rotated day and night, like the heavens."

This vast palace took up huge tracts of land in the centre of Rome, but it has always been a bit unclear exactly what it looked like, and how far you could match up the literary descriptions with what remains on the ground.

And as usual there was a terrible temptation to equate what we can see with what the Romans

wrote about.

I was always told that the "octagonal room" (in the picture) in the excavated area was what Suetonius was referring to. How exactly it rotated, or what rotated, is anyone's guess. But obviously that's been a bit massaged (or forgotten) in the new story.

Do European trains run on time?

Last week I went to Holland and Belgium, on a "book tour" with (the appropriately surnamed) Tom Holland. We were doing lectures and interviews in connection with our recent books, both of which have recently been translated into Dutch, by the same publishing house.

We decided to go by Eurostar -- as it was as quicker, all told, as going by plane, not to mention being greener. That meant changing in Amsterdam. OK, we were pleased to have gone that way, but it wasn't a great advert for European trains (which -- when standing for an hour on First Capital Connect -- one always imagines to be faultless). 

On the way out, the Eurostar to Brussels was on time, but the Thalys to Amsterdam was announced to have a 45 minute delay. Mr Holland, who was more adventurous than I, discovered the damn thing sitting on the platform there, when it was due to leave --  so quite why it was delayed is unclear (staff shortages?). 

I should say that Tom's pluck in exploring the platform was not rewarded. For on Brussels Midi station passengers are kept in the underground bowels of the earth until they rise to a platform by escalator. Tom rose, but couldn't find an escalator to take him back down again (all the lifts were broken). He was forced to rush down the up-escalator school-boy style.

The way back was worse: trespassers (did they mean potentially illegal immigrants?) on the line near Lille, and an electric failure outside the tunnel. That meant a 50 minute delay altogether. It was only when I was back at home that I discovered that some people had suffered 4 hour delay that evening, and blessed ny good fortune. So in future when I complain about the British trains, I'll make myself remember that the grass isn't always greener.

The experience in Holland and Belgium was, by contrast, wonderful. While book pages in quality daily papers are going down the tubes all over the world, those in Flanders seems to have survived pretty much unscathed. We did several interviews for daily papers, and everyone of the interviewers knew a whole lot about what we had written, and many had a background in ancient or classical history -- Patrick de Rynck and Theo Toebosch, amongst them. (We also were repeatedly photographed -- and you can see above Tom's version of Beard against the 'no dog shitting' sign, a five minute walk from the publishers' office in Antwerp.)

Sex with students? Is Terence Kealey as misunderstood as Juvenal?

A few weeks ago I had an email from a friend who works on Times Higher Education (THE) asking if I would contribute 500 words to their forthcoming feature on "The Seven Deadly Sins of the Academy".

I was tempted, but as my favourite sins (notably sartorial inelegance and procrastination) had already been taken, I gave it a miss. And when the article actually appeared last week, I hardly had time to look at it (except to notice a cheap pot shot at the complacency of nineteenth-century Classics by the multi-talented Simon Blackburn -- who should, in this case, have known better).

I hadn't realised that there was a storm about Terence Kealey's piece on Lust, till I was in Holland (doing some lectures and book promotion, I confess) and got an email from a man on the Evening Standard, asking me if I would like to comment on it -- largely because I had past 'form' on the issue of sex between students and university teachers. So I took a look at it.

"Clark Kerr" it began, "the president of the University of California from 1958-1967, used to describe his job as providing sex for the students, car parking for the Faculty and football for the alumni. But what happens when the natural order is disrupted by faculty members who, on parking their cars, head for the students' bedroom.   . . . . Why do universities pullulate with transgressive intercourse? . . . The fault lies with the females." You can read the rest here.

It was instantly clear to me that this was SATIRE. So I replied in these terms:

"I have looked at the Kealey piece . . . and thought it wicked satire, but certainly SATIRE (which is of course always meant to be offensive, thought provoking, and often intended to rebound on the very views it satirises . . . that's the point . . .try Juvenal, if you want an ancient precedent."

Flesh Eaters

As I mentioned in the last post, I am back in Berkeley at a conference on Roman sarcophagi -- the aptly titled "Flesh Eaters" (which is what sarcophagi actually means).

The truth is that I had never before been hugely interested in the elaborately decorated sarcophagi (largely dated to the second and third centuries AD)  that were the focus of the conference. When I was an undergraduate I did an essay on them, and I still remember ploughing through some pretty impenetrable stuff (and some of it in pretty impenetrable German), which saw the decoration in terms of complicated eschatology, Dionysiac religion, apotheosis and weird views of the afterlife.

Since then, that's all changed. There's been a load of much more interesting recent work, and a now classic 'new look' at how to understand sarcophagi with mythological scenes by Paul Zanker and Björn Christian Ewald (both of whom were are the conference) called Mit Mythen leben -- "Living with Myths" (Roman sarcophagus studies remains something of a German niche market). Its a big and wide ranging book, but one of its central points is that we should see these scenes of myth not in eschatological terms, but as aids for the living. Re-presenting death in terms of the classic mythic stories offered a means of consolation: the bereaved wife could see herself, in the sarcophagus, as the lovely Selene mourning Endymion; the deceased was given the heroic form of (say Meleager). The parallels were sometimes hammered home even more forcefully by giving the mythological heroes the portrait heads of the dead.

That was about as far as I had got, until I was asked to be a 'respondent' at this conference (I didn't have to give a paper, just listen hard and do some summing up at the end). It seemed a good chance to find out a bit more about what was going on in the sarcophagus world.

Lets have LESS choice, not more

I may not be quite up to speed on this one, as I am actually in California, mugging up on the pre-circulated  papers for a conference on Roman sarcophagi that's starting tomorrow. But so far as I can gather from internet, Andy Burnham has decided to scrap GP catchment areas and say we can all choose our GPs from wherever we want -- near home, near work ... or anywhere. If we particularly wanted that excellent man in Manchester, while we lived in London, then so be it. You can read the full speech here.

The argument (as always) is that choice will "drive up" standards. But I have never quite seen why that is so.

I can see that some tinkering with GP systems might be in order. Students, for example, often live in two places (their university during term, their old home during the vacation) and there seems to be no easy way on the current rules of coping with that. It's also the case that the usual GP surgery opening hours dont fit with most of our current working patterns (but most surgeries are now doing early and late shifts to cope with that).

But CHOICE is a dangerous mantra, and usually a cheap substitute for serious improvement. As with primary schools, or hospitals, I don't particularly want choice -- I would prefer good local services, so that I don't need to think about choosing, or wondering if the grass in another postcode is greener.

Vetting and barring. Where are the sensible MPs when you need them?

It is funny how issues go in and out of the news. Over the last few days there has been a lot of huffing and puffing over the new Vetting and Barring measures (designed to prevent paedophiles getting at our kids) and how these are likely to discourage hockey mums from helping out the local scout troop -- as taxis for the neighbourhood. A few weeks ago the same measures were under scrutiny because they were likely to prevent Philip Pullman and others visiting schools.

I had my pennyworth then, wondering if I would have to be vetted in order to visit schools to talk about doing classics or applying for Cambridge. The jury is still out on that one, but one of my administrative colleagues pointed out that this would be likely to hit our visits to state schools hard -- as they were much more likely than independent school to feel that they had to obey the rules more scrupulously (or be made to feel...). So here we are trying to reach state schools who don't commonly apply to Oxbridge -- while another arm of government makes that more difficult.

Anyway, when it all came back into the news, I decided to have a look at what our expert legislators had said when this bill was going through parliament. There has been some righteous indignation from (eg) Kenneth Clarke, But what had these protesters said at the time? Not much, as far as I could see.

Is it a bollard? Is it a sculpture? Is it a book?

A couple of weeks ago, as I biked past the University Library (my usual route from home to my Faculty), I saw what I took to be a series of new bollards 'under wraps'.

For years now, car-parking at the UL has been increasingly out of control. When I was a student cars at the library were kept firmly in the car parks. Then one area of the car parking was re-assigned to university staff who work in the central administration (a sign of the times . . .) and readers' cars started to spill over -- first along the grass verges, then right in front of the library steps themselves.

It was only a matter of time, I often thought, before "the authorities" will put a stop to this. And here were the bollards.

But what emerged from the wrapping was rather different. It was a work of 'public art'.

The Egyptian Museum in Turin

You have been very nice in not complaining about my long haul, big carbon footprint weekends (I suspect because they were to visit the kids, and mothers get a bit extra on their emissions allowance if on maternal business). I fear that Sunday had no such excuse. I went to Turin with the husband for the sole purpose of visiting the Egyptian Museum -- which we had never visited and which is run by an old friend of ours from Cambridge, who showed us round.

This post is part of my very sporadic mini-series "Great Museums that you Might Not Know". Because it is tremendous.

I always get a slightly perverse kick out of Egyptian museums anyway. That is to say I know a very few of the barest bones of Egyptian history and culture. I can more or less tell my Middle Kingdom from my Old, I know a few of the great names and I good give a very rough and slightly inaccurate explanation of what "Egyptians" (which Egyptians you rightly ask) thought about what happened to the body after death. But more than that is all a bit of a mystery. All of which puts me in the same position as the many of visitors to classical collections -- who know something about the difference between the Republic and Empire, have heard of Nero and can describe a gladiatorial show. . .  So it turns out to be rather museologicallay instructive.

But there was a lot more to the Museo Egizio in Torino.

Spotting the influence

Spotting “influence” is one of the favourite games of art historians and classicists. What is the “source” of this or that idea in a painting, sculpture or poem? Sometimes it is dead easy to spot.

Take Alma Tadema’s “Sculpture Gallery” (below, on the right) which parades semi-portraits of the artist and his family in amongst famous works of sculpture from antiquity – “Hercules strangling the snakes”, or the lampstand from the House of Pansa at Pompeii (discovered in 1812).

But sometimes the story is more puzzling.

On the walls of the Capitoline Museum in Rome (in the room with the Spinario if you know it), there is a great picture of Alexander the Great defeating Darius, the king of the Persians (below). Anyone who knows the mosaic of the same subject at Pompeii (from the House of the Faun), will instantly spot

 the resemblance: Alexander zooming in from the left, Darius about to take flight on the right (his horses already turned round) , a confused melee in front (with a horse’s bum right in your face in the middle).

It looks obvious that the painter had seen the mosaic and recreated/adapted it in his painting.

Except that the painter in question is Pietro da Cortona, who died more than 200 years before mosaic in the House of the Faun was excavated.

Saturday Live -- the questions

As I said in the last post, we didn't have time on Saturday Live to get onto the questions and comments sent by email and texts, so I'm answering some of them here. I'm not sure that those people who submitted questions will know to look at this blog -- but it is better than nothing, and the least I can do.

So here goes:

1. More than one contributor wanted to know more about Athenian Democracy and Socrates. My crude view would be: Athenian Democracy --  nice but a bit over-rated (it' s easy to have a democracy when your citizen body is the size of an average student union); Socrates -- guilty as charged. But in general, have a look at my colleague Paul Cartledge's Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice (Cambridge, 2009) or M. I. Finley's Democracy Ancient and Modern (1985)

2. Some recommended books?