Gobbets

Have you ever done a gobbet?

If the answer is "yes", the chances are that you once studied Classics or History. For a "gobbet" (a word that also means a little piece of raw flesh) is a small snatch of historical "source" set for students to comment on -- and to explain the historical significance.

It's a venerable, traditional pedagogic exercise. And when I was an undergraduate, our history exam papers always started with a compulsory "gobbet" question: that was, about 10 short passages in Greek and Latin, with the instruction to comment on three. We dreaded this exercise. There were two ghastly prospects. Either you would be able to translate the thing, but wouldn't have a clue about the historical significance. Or you would think you could spot the historical significance, from memory at least (isn't this Plutarch commenting on the motivations of Tiberius Gracchus?), but you didn't remember it well enough actually to know what it was saying.

Soon after I went back to Cambridge as a lecturer in 1984, under the influence of the then Professor of Ancient History, Keith Hopkins, we abolished the gobbet question.

Keith's view was that gobbets encouraged all the worst and most conservative tendencies in Ancient History. They turned the ancient world into a series of puzzle problems ("is this that passage of Florus where he claims that Livius Drusus wanted to enfranchise the Italians for his own personal power?") and didn't encourage students to think about the really big questions - the economy, demography, social mobility, and so on. In short, they sniffed of Oxford Ancient History, not of radical Cambridge.

Those of us who, as students, had lived in dread of this question were all too ready to dance on its grave.

But now I wonder whether we didn't throw the baby out with the bath water. True, gobbets didn't give students much of a chance to get their teeth into the ancient economy (but maybe that is because the wrong texts were chosen). But they were good at revealing what a student did or didn't know; it is easy enough to use avoidance strategies to conceal patches of ignorance when you are writing an essay, but not when you are gobbeting. They were also good methodologically,  at showing exactly how you draw historical inferences from individual passages of Greek and Latin.

Its for these reasons that I have decided to revive my gobbets and set them to the first years to whom I'm teaching Ancient History. And this afternoon we have devoted to all those old favourites: Plutarch on Tiberius Gracchus' shock at seeing the plight of the peasantry in Etruria, Florus on Livius Drusus and the Social War etc.

Good for the students, nostalgic fun for me -- and Keith will be turning in his grave.