A Don's Life

Emperors' first speeches: Nero to Miliband

I'm sure you knew this post was coming. But any classicist reading Ed Miliband's first speech to conference will have instantly gone back to some good Roman precedents.

There was the new leader talking about his solid family life, not completely dishing his predecessors (he is partly dependent on them after all), but trying to put a bit of clear blue water between them and him: a new deal...new generation, who's in, who's out. (Here was the man who wrote the Labour manifesto, remember, now carefully rubbishing it!)

New Roman emperors were often in the same position, so not surprisingly they said much the same thing. That's what "succession" is all about -- a careful negotiation between past and present, to the advantage of the new order.

Ed Miliband: the police caution

The husband and I were out at the Faculty this afternoon (preparing a party for returning alumni) when the result of the Labour leadership election was announced. I'm not sure how curious we really were to find out which Miliband had been elected -- and not sure what difference it would make anyway (I guess if I had still been a member of the Labour Party I would have thrown my vote away on Diane Abbott).But we turned on the BBC News on the computer in the office to see it anyway.

The husband has had strong views on most of the candidates. On Miliband (E), the victor as it turns out, he has had little time for the line about how he was against the Iraq War, ID cards and the rest. True, he may not have been in parliament when we took the decision to invade Iraq. But did we actually hear him objecting from the sidelines?

Not a bit of it.

Museum parties: balls, dances, conferences and the great and the good

I have been doing some work in the archives of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and particularly the nineteenth-century history of the place (on which more later). But a very quick trawl produces some eye-opening surprises.

I had always imagined that the idea of holding parties in museums was an invention of (well?) the 1970s. It was, I thought, a consequence of the underfunding of museums, with an added push from a Thatcherite business ethic. Indeed, when the Greeks objected in the 1990s to the British Museum serving sandwiches in front of the Elgin Marbles, I gave them the benefit of the doubt -- that the British practice of eating and drinking in front of works of art might actually be new.

I have no idea what happened in the BM in the nineteenth century. But in Cambridge, in the Fitzwilliam, the practice of museum hospitality goes back to before the Museum was fully built.

Volcano! At Compton Verney

We had been meaning for ages to go and see the exhibition at Compton Verney on Volcanoes in art from Turner to Andy Warhol, but had been letting the time slip by (just like we didnt make it to see last year excellent show there on "The Artist's Studio"). The trouble is that it is two and a half hours drive from Cambridge each way, which makes it a bit of a long trip for a single day at a single exhibition.

But happily our friend from the Getty showed up in the UK wanting to see it, so we went over and stayed the night in Evesham (at a hotel with wonderful food, eccentric drink -- never seen Chinese wine on a wine list before, and simultaneously been warned off it by the maitre d -- and rather unnervingly filled with teddy bears). From there it was a quick nip to the Compton Verney show.

There were some great things here and some intriguing pictures (particularly of Vesuvius and Pompeii, I have to say that I didnt get much moved by the Iceland images); and the gallery itself, plus shop, was beautiful, in the restored house and grounds of Compton Verney. But there were some odd downsides too.

For a start, the catalogue was annoyingly thin. I kind of understand why you might want to avoid the door stopper style, with a vast entry on every piece exhibited -- but to have a very selective essay, which didnt even include a simple list of the works on show was infuriating/sloppy (I ended up copying down the labels from the walls into the back pages of my copy of the catalogue).

And some of the throw-aways were just as bad. It surely isn't fair or true to write off Bulwer Lytton as a "vain, effete, aristocratic figure". And, as for the display case labelled "ancient, medieval and twentieth century novels in which volcanoes are a theme" which included Plato's Phaedo and Virgil's Aeneid. . . where, oh where, are the classicists when these shows are being put together, I thought.

But this is to carp.

Digging for history: Newnham's excavations

Last year I reported on a lecture we had in college about Dorothy Garrod (first female professor of archaeology in Cambridge) excavating some Anglo Saxon skeletons in the college gardens in World War II. This year we have decided to re-excavate her excavation (on the site of the old air raid shelters near Peile Hall -- for those who know college), and to bring in school students to help in the dig. This is, actually, a big deal. In my day, if you were 17 there were plenty of excavations you could go on. As archaeology has become more and more professionalised, there is very little space for those not already 'trained' to participate 'in the field' (the field in this case being the college garden).

Anyway, these kids had a baptism of fire into archaeology. That is pouring rain and growing cold. These  tough conditions were mitigated by the head gardener, who reacted to the weather by putting up a party marquee over the site. I have to say that if someone who had done that when I excavated in Wroxeter in 1972, I might not have retired from real archaeology, at the the age of 19 (as I said to Carenza Lewis, who was leading the field party on this occasion).

But what was the result in the garden? And what did it tell us about those Anglo Saxon burials?

Classics news: bad and good

This is a bit if a round up, of classical news and events, I am starting with the bad.

I am told of bad news from Scotland, where the Scottish Qualifications Authority looks as if it wants to axe  Classical Greek on the grounds of low uptake. You can access the arguments via a pdf link to the 'overview'  here. If you want to object, then you can email Michael Russell (Michael.Russell.msp@scottish.parliament.uk) or go the the Have Your Say section of the SQA website. Needless to say, this limits the opportunities of keen young classicists in Scottish Schools (and what an insult to the tradition of Scottish Classics).

Just as bad is the news from France, as Michael Bulley reported a week or so ago.

But classicists can be too gloomy, and they do tend to love predicting their own demise. and indeed there is some good news on the horizon.

For a start there is the Golden Sponge Stick competition hosted by Burgess Hill school, for a short story by a school student about ancient Rome. The sponge stick, as you will know, is what Romans used to wipe their bottoms.

The politics of Britain's brainiest cemetery

I woke up this morning to a great item on the Today programme by my colleague Mark Goldie, about the cemetery 100 yards or so up the road from our house, "Ascension Burial Ground".

I first went there about 25 years ago, looking for the grave of James Frazer, on whom I was then working (with his fantastic, obsessive anal archive, compiled largely I suspect by Lady Frazer and now in the care of Trinity College -- on which more in a minute). And have wandered up every now and then ever since, doing what my mother used to call "churchyard creeping" and finding the memorials of the long lost dons. It's a great place for a Sunday stroll . . .and if I had to spend eternity somewhere it would be my place of choice. (I expect a plot is rather expensive.)

Mark obviously shares my enthusiasm for the Burial Ground, its slightly "overgrown-ness", its motley crowd of occupants, the striking contrasts and the hints of living character (as you would expect, that dandy, Sir Richard Jebb's monument is a very grand creation). But he carefully drew a veil over some of the more curious politics -- and other weirdnesses -- of the place.

Take Wittgenstein's grave.

Kicking the Tatler habit.

I don't have many secret vices. They are all pretty open. But I confess that -- unlikely as it may seem -- I do tend to buy a copy of Tatler, every now and then, to keep me going on the journey between Cambridge and London.

I'm not quite sure why. I'm really not much interested in which chinless wonder went to which party a couple of months ago...nor in the 100 most eligible heiresses. I think I like the glossy style (and indeed the glossy feel of the paper), the quality of the freebies (I actually wore their free sun glasses a few times) and those luscious full page adverts with pouting models persuading me to buy a Burberry. And since I've lost weight, I can even contemplate buying some of the clothes.

But perhaps the most appealing thing is the question of quite how self ironic it all is (unlike Hello, which seems to have not a jot of self-irony at all). The fun is never being quite sure just how serious they are being and who they are sending up -- the chinless wonders, or the readers who have been persuaded to pay their hard-earned money to read about the chinless wonders? or some nicely ambiguous combination of the two? 

It's a bit like what we were told about the Financial Times in the 70s: that it was all written by card-carrying members of the Communist Party, who speculated tongue in cheek about "futures" by day, and plotted the downfall of the capitalist system by night. So, when we find the Tatler diary talking about "Flee Brudenell-Bruce" moving into "a new Notting Hill bijou pad" and having to flog her art collection...quite how seriously are we supposed to take it? Is it really all written by closet lefties?

But this month's magazine (that's September) seemed to go beyond any possible questions of irony.

First there was the nasty little article about daughters' versus sons' education.

Does anyone here speak Dinka?

Our house is becoming a Babel of languages we don't understand . . . though I suppose "not understanding" is part of the definition of a Babel.

The husband and I don't do badly in the language department. We can read most major Western European languages and he can do Russian too ( and please don't ask me for a list of non major ones, but no certainly cant read Icelandic or Finnish).

And we can communicate in most of them, somewhere on the spectrum of competence between semi-fluent to "restaurant". By "restaurant", I mean that you can ask for the menu, the bill, more water, bread and wine, say you want the meat medium well done  -- and roughly comprehend what the waiter tells you are the specials of the day (at least sufficiently well not to end up with a plate of tripe when you thought you were getting red mullet).

Anyway, the kids (predictably enough) are busy boning up on languages far beyond that narrow back-garden range of expertise. The son has just gone to the American University in Cairo for a year to learn Arabic, both Modern Standard and Egyptian colloquial.I did acquire some lower level restaurant Arabic a couple of years ago, but have forgotten most of it. Anyway now I reckon I'll have my own interpreter on hand.

The daughter is about to start a PhD at Durham (on Southern Sudan and the history of veterinary care -- cattle vaccination pictured above). And she is embarking on Dinka, which is one of the languages spoken there. That is a rather different kettle of fish. For a start you can't enroll in a course on it, and surprise surprise the local language lab (sorry -- it's called "centre" now) doesn't have any Dinka tapes either.

So what do you do?

The (slightly boring) Blair interview

I was in the TLS office this afternoon, but rushed off smartish to catch the 5.45 and watch the Blair interview on telly at home. That's illogical I know -- as I could perfectly well have recorded it/watched it on iplayer or whatever -- but there is still something alluring in the idea of sitting at home and watching a television programme at the same time as millions of others, even if you are nowhere near them (it's a sort of 'virtual community').

Of course, I knew that it would feel like a book promotion exercise -- but two things had tickled my curiosity.

First, I had been intrigued by the "Blair and alcohol" stories from the book on the news this morning. I had always taken TB to be a Perrier water and rocket salad kind of guy -- but the idea that he was (like the rest of us over busy over-50s) a GandT plus half a bottle of wine made him seem much more interesting. (And remember what doctors are always told...or so I'm told ... take what they admit to and then double it...)

Second, there had been a curious item in the Sky tv guide about the interview:

"Questions like, "What did you have for breakfast this morning?" and "Do you think Mary Beard is the new Su-Bo?" won't feature in this tussle between the former Prime Minister and adorable political elf Andrew Marr."

For about 5 seconds, I managed to convince myself that this might just be flattering (if it really was referring to me, that is). You know ... Mary Beard will make ancient Pompeii as appealing to millions on the telly as Susan Boyle made... whatever it was she made apealing. Realism soon suggested, however, that the implication was much more likely along the lines of "how does a slightly weird over 50 year old think she can inflict herself on us", with more than a hint of allegations of social inadequacy!

But, anyway, it got me racing home for the interview, which was probably a mistake.