A Don’s Life

Roman election gaffes

In the wake of Bigot-gate, you will be expecting me to come out with some old Roman versions of politicians putting their feet in it.

My favourite, I mentioned a few months ago (re the Nicholas Winterton gaffe). It's the one about Scipio Nasica who was standing for the Aedileship in the very late third or early second century BC, and canvassing eagerly and shaking the hands of potential voters. He shook the hand of a peasant farmer, which was very horny. "What" said the toff, "do you walk on these".

It was taken as an insult to the honest Roman peasant and he lost the election.

That one comes from Valerius Maximus' book of Memorable Deeds and Sayings -- a collection of Republican anecdotes (compiled in the first century AD, perhaps to be a handy compendium for orators looking for an appropriate story).

It comes from his section "On electoral defeats" (Book VII, 5).

And there are others.

10 dotty (well meaning?) ideas from the party election manifestos

After a serious study of the main party manifestos, let me reveal some of the dottier ideas that have got by the party committees and into their official promises. How on earth, one wonders, do these things get the nod....? Have you noticed them?

1. Establish a new prize for engineering. This is a Tory idea (to "make Britain the leading hi-tech exporter in Europe")... may not be so bad an idea, but IN THE MANIFESTO? (No prize for Classics. I note!)

2. Create a specialist Mandarin teacher training qualification, so that many more primary schools have access to a qualified primary teacher able to teach Mandarin. So offers the Labour party. A worthy aim.... but when we can't teach French effectively? And where are these Mandarin teachers coming from?

3. Control bullying, including homophobic bullying. Another virtuous aim (this time from the Lib Dems), but is this an appropriate manifesto commitment? I mean, how are they going to do this?

4.  Launch an annual Big Society Day. Another holiday, on which "to celebrate the work of neighbourhood groups"...and, presumably the work of the middle class mums and dads who plan to set up their own schools. A Tory idea, needless to say.

The pope joke -- have we forgotten the meaning of satire?

You can easily imagine what it must be like if you are one of the Foreign Office team planning the Pope's up-coming visit. First, there are the hours of meetings in which you try to work out a suitable timetable and a suitable guest list. That nice elderly cardinal looks ideal for the top table -- then whoops, there's another scandal about smacking/child abuse/cover ups (this time involving the said cardinal) and it's back to the drawing board. Then, there is the ground work. You think you have found the ideal nursery for His Holiness to visit -- but when you do a recce, you discover that the road to it from the train station goes right through the red light district, unless you go on a detour that will take at least three hours and will overrun on His Holiness's comfort stops that you have been told to programme in every 90 minutes.

Was this what you joined the Foreign Office for, you wonder.

Anyway, to keep up morale -- for you and the rest of the team -- you sit down one evening, after another hard day as His Holiness's travel agent, and bang out a spoof programme....the one with the Benedict brand condoms and the apologies for the Spanish Armada. And you circulate it, dead-pan.

It's what any clever young person working on that kind of mind-numbing stuff would do. Thank God they still exist in the Foreign Office.

A three-cornered election: the ancient Athenian solution

One of the smart ideas of the ancient Athenian democracy was the system of ostracism. If the people wanted to decide between the policies of two different politicians, and they were deadlocked -- they had a vote and simply exiled one of them.

Every year from the beginning of the fifth century BC, the Athenians were asked if they wanted to hold an ostracism. If they voted yes, then another vote followed in which people scratched the name of the politician they wanted to get rid of on a piece of pottery (an "ostrakon").If more than 6000 people voted, the the one with the most votes was sent into "honourable exile" for ten years. It was one solution to policy dilemmas.

It wasn't perfect. A cache of almost 200 ostraka has been found down a well in Athens, each with the name "Themistocles" written on them (in a limited number of hands; they're pictured at the top of this post). It's a clear hint that the system was manipulable. "Get your Themistocles ostrakon here" someone must have been shouting --  or, given the illiteracy of much of the Athenian people, "Get your Cimon ostrakon here" -- and you actually got a Themistocles ostrakon, without realising it.

But it worked well enough, for almost a hundred years. Until there was a three cornered fight.

Grounded -- with books

I had been going to New York this weekend, to do a serious piece of study on the new Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, which the husband hasn't yet seen. I had been kicking myself, because our flight out to New York was just after the shut down of Heathrow on Thursday -- but I now see that if we HAD gone, we wouldn't have got back by Sunday evening (and that would have been a nightmare for the first week of term).

If there is a moral in this, it is that British Airways fixed me up with a new flight in June (it was a sort of holiday, so that was fine), the hotel we had booked into (The Library -- ok we were splashing out) generously didn't charge us, even though we had technically been on a three day cancellation deal -- but our travel insurance (BUPA), from whom we might have claimed some incidental expenses, told us to bog off (act of god, etc...anyone know a good travel insurance company?).

Meanwhile I have to say that the husband, as often these days, looks righter and righter... couldn't the planes just fly lower, he asked on day one. And that is beginning to look like what they will do. (How can you tell the difference between sensible precautions and "health and safety" gone mad? But it is beginning to look as if this is "health and safety" gone mad, at the cost of billions.)

Anyway, what do you do with two and a half days to spare? To start with, it is hard to use the time you didn't expect to have, but then -- there are those books you've been sent.

And the prize for the worst manifesto goes to . . .

I spent a rather gloomy day yesterday reading the various party manifestos. I admit that this was not in the cause of my own political development, but because I was due on the Today Programme this morning to sound off about them, and about the 'Great Debate'.

Honestly, I thought that there was not much to choose between the three main parties in this respect, though Labour and Tory were worse than Lib Dems by a short head. It wasn't just the graphics-- though quite where both of the big two had found their left-over Eastern bloc propagandists, heaven knows. The Tory "people power" illustration really did have the tractor factory feel to it -- and the fact that it was indeed an ad. for the TORY party is just one hint at the ideological emptiness that you will find if you read these documents.

As I blurted on the radio, the worst thing about these documents is their oozing platitudes. Whoever has written them has not grasped the point that political messages only count as interesting and engaging and worth bothering with if the opposite point of view could conceivable be held -- if that is there is something to argue about. The mainstream parties give us almost nothing that most of the human race could possible object to. "A future fair for all" (Labour)? Sure, but the country isn't actually teeming with people who are demanding a less fair future. "Children should be allowed to grow up at their own pace" (Tories)?  Is anyone seriously advocating the opposite? "As Conservatives, we trust people"? Unlike who...?

Often different parties actually come out with almost exactly the same platitudes. "Get better politics for less" (LibDem) or "Good government costs less with the Conservatives" -- in this case not only vacuous but untrue as well.

Partly, you get the impression that they are all so keen not to offend anyone that they resort to anything bland. Partly it's the simple absence of ideology again. (Another nice example, the Labour Manifesto includes enthusiastic words on "Creating a shareholding society" -- admittedly on the John Lewis model.). Oh -- and don't mention the war. There is plenty of stuff about military equipment and hospitals, and a couple of pics of soldiers fraternizing with natives, in the Tory manifesto with a football. But not a word about whether we should be in Afghanistan or not. As the husband remarked, "People Power" clearly doesn't extend to the "people" of Afghanistan.

Can women write reviews?

On Sunday I was chairing an discussion at the Cambridge Wordfest. Called "The Literary Editors' Breakfast", it featured a galaxy of Peter Stothard, fellow blogger and Editor of the TLS, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Editor of the London Review of Books, John Freeman of Granta Magazine and Lydia Wilson, one of the editors of the new Cambridge Literary Review.

The idea was to go beyond the usual whinging about the death of literary journalism (witness the fact that the almost every books section in the US broadsheets has disappeared in the last couple of years, and there has been a good deal of retrenchment in the UK too). In fact, nostalgia apart (and when have the chatterig classes not been nostalgic?), it is pretty clear that literary journalism is in rather good shape -- as we all, sort of, agreed.

But one question I wanted to get onto the agenda was the woman question.

Jane Asher wears the Villa of the Mysteries

 

This one is thanks to the husband, who spotted it online: a pity, as he said, that she didn't know what she was wearing.

The Daily Mail headline ran, "I cant remember how wicked I felt the first time I wore red". And the main featured red item in Jane Asher's wardrobe (for  this estimable actor  was the subject of the piece) was gorgeous Isabelle de Pedro dress. "It's red with short sleeves and is covered in art prints. It’s a real conversation piece."

Yes, sure. But it isnt just "art prints", it's the most famous set of Roman paintings from Pompeii, excavated in the early twentieth century and studied intensively ever since. (The lustrous red colour is at least partly due to restoration efforts - with petroleum jelly - soon after the building was discovered.)

Asher's dress is taken from one of the grandest reception rooms of a "villa' just outside the walls of Pompeii -- featuring flagellation, the revelation of a phallus, a female "Pan" suckling a goat and (probably) the god Dionysus with Ariadne on his lap.

Quite what they represent, who knows?

Why "good practice" can ruin good practice

When I was a graduate student, things were different. I didn't have to fill in many forms -- in fact, I think I just applied for a British Academy grant (as it then was) to work on a PhD in nothing more than "Roman history". I wasn't given a code of practice. If I wanted to learn something (like a new language), I went off and did it; I didn't demand a specially targeted Faculty class in it (Turkish for Roman historians, or whatever).

My supervisor didn't bother me too much (though he did give me a few big kicks towards the end). Whenever  I wanted to see him I sent him a note (pre-email) and he would have me round, and I would stay for as long as it took to go over my work or my problems. If I wanted to talk to one of the other senior Faculty members, I would catch them after a seminar or in the library, and we would have coffee or (more often) a drink.

I am sure that this laid back, unregulated system let some students down (we all heard stories/urban myths about PhD students who had not seen their supervisors in 12 months). But it worked wonderfully for me and for many of my friends -- and probably much better than what we now offer to our graduates.

Now, if students want funding, they have to explain what they will discover before they start (the best applications are, as most of us suspect, written by the supervisor). When they arrive on their course, they are given codes of practice up to their ears -- they know how often they should meet their supervisors, they have regular reviews with other members of the Faculty, they have a secondary supervisor (in case their first one isn't good enough), and they even have log books in which they can register their contact with their supervisor (in which I fear a jolly good, intellectually productive,  discussion in the pub doesn't quite count -- how wrong is that?).

All these initiatives were, I am sure, very well intentioned. They were intended to make sure that PhD students didn't go for 12 months without seeing their supervisors, or didn't take seven years to finish their theses, or, worse still, didn't fail at the end of the process. But I do wonder if the baby hasn't been thrown out with the bath water. To put it another way, despite (or because of) our good intentions, I suspect that most graduate students now have a worse "learning experience" than we did -- at a time before we knew what a "learning experience" was.

The cess-pits of Herculaneum

I have to confess that I quite enjoyed filming the TV documentary in Pompeii. You, oh readers, may not be surprised at that (imagining that there would be nothing that the don would like more than preening herself in front of a camera). But the honest truth is that I hadn't expected to enjoy it at all. I thought it would be a combination of hours of waiting around and being made to say things, on the record, that I didn't quite believe. In fact there was rather little waiting and no one made me say anything I didn't want to. So if things are wrong, I (and you) only have myself to blame.

What is more, we saw lots of amazing stuff. I'm not going to give the secrets away now (you'll have to wait till the autumn and watch). But one of the highlights for me was a trip down the excavated sewers -- or more correctly "cess-pits"  -- of  Herculaneum, in the company of my old mate Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, who used to be Director of the British School at Rome, and is now Master of Sidney Sussex College, here in Cambridge (pictured in his hard hat above).