A Don’s Life

All in a don's day?

This is, I fear, a piece of bloggish narcissism. But on Tuesday we had a bit of a get together at Profile books  for all those whose comments had been published in the lastest volume of a don's blog. (If you comment was included and you didnt get an invitation, please can I say that we went to every trouble to get in touch). The husband was in Greece, but the son and the daughter were there (on the door, and at the bash); as was the brilliant Debbie, whom many of you know.

Anyway, that's a survivors' photo above (taken in Profile's offices). I suppose I ought to be offering prizes for the number of correct identifications anyone can make.. PL, SW Foska, Cerberus, A Dennis, and a couple of Stroppy's (Author and Liz).

But really, this is another chance to say to you all THANK YOU for making this blog what it is. In my speech (a rather aggrandizing description ???) I did say that I was so pleased that together we had made a blog in which we all contributed without that weirdly aggressive ranting that you find on plenty of websites (none of that "what a load of  f****** tosh, what does this f***** woman know, who does she f********* think she is" -- more the wry dart, the poem and the Latin quote)

 So onwards and upwards all; and thank you..... keep on commenting.

(And some sort of prize will go to any non-attendee who gets 90% of the above attenders right! Noms de blog will do)

How to read a Latin poem, the ancient Booker -- and other Cheltenham events

I have just got back from the Cheltenham Literature Festival -- and from the start of the Classics "strand" which worked better than I could ever have hoped (there is still a "heroines" debate next week, if you are near Cheltenham and up for some high-fibre entertainment). I've already trailed this, so apologies for any repetition... but it has now actually happened.

First off, on Saturday, was that discussion I mentioned between Kevin MacDonald and Maria Wyke about the forthcoming movie, Eagle - based on the Rosemary Sutcliff novel. This went really well, I thought, because both Maria and Kevin were prepared to play and engage with the audience -- and in Kevin's case to talk frankly about how he had changed the original story and why (like the relationship between Marcus and Esca becoming less deferential and more edgy, and the virtual disappearance from the movie of Cottia -- the only possible heterosexual love interest in the original book). For me this was an eye opener onto adapting a book for the screen. (No less fascinating was people's recollection of old BBC versions on both radio and tv, which had stuck in their memory more firmly, I think, than the book itself.)

 Saturday evening turned out to be a big prequel to an even bigger day on Sunday -- with two classical events. The first was the high risk discussion of two Latin poems, Catullus and Horace. I guess this is what I am most proud of -- because it would have been so easy to get it wrong (and dull). But we managed to go through the poems in such a way that I felt I saw more in them than I ever had before, and honestly I thought we had 250 people really gripped. One of the reasons it worked so well was that the Horace (the Plancus Ode, ie Odes 1, 7) looks pretty rebarbative at first sight, full of proper names and myths you havent heard of. Just the kind of thing that puts people off Latin poetry, in English or in Latin. But give it half an hours and it is quite easy to see what is going on, and why. (In fact one of the questins we dealt with was, quite how bookish and learned this all was for Roman readers too.)

So thank you Llew and Peter. I'd love to hear reactions from anyone who was there.

And finally, as some of you who could not be there have asked me to post, who won the ancient Booker prize?

How much does a picture of the Parthenon cost?

How can we keep the Greek economy afloat? Well, one answer is by asking for permission to reproduce pictures from Greek museums.

Just recently I produced a new edition of my Parthenon book, brought up to date with a new chapter on the new Acropolis Museum (plus all the to-ing and fro-ing about the Elgin Marbles in the years since the first edition came out).

I am quite a fan of the inside of the new Museum, and so wanted to illustrate it in my book. Just a couple of weeks after the museum opened, the husband visited and took some photos. It turned out to be a small window of opportunity -- within a few days, photography was banned through all the Museum except the Parthenon Gallery; a few weeks after that the whole Museum was a no-go zone to cameras.

Anyway, I had a nice picture of the frieze as displayed in Athens, taken by the husband, which I wanted to reproduce in my book. My publishers did the proper thing and wrote to the Museum, explaining that we had a picture to reproduce, and asking what  the fee would be .. for black and white, inside image, world rights, with a print run of 7500 (well let's hope we need more, but that is the current number).

What do you guess it was?

Killing babies

One of the things that makes the Greco-Roman world seem so alien is the practice of killing unwanted babies. However much we are shocked by the recent  discoveries of the remains of 8 new-born babies in France (and whatever human tragedy underlies it), the fact is that such things were common in antiquity. Some were disposed of by 'exposure' (put out on a dung heap), others by rather more aggressive forms of murder. There were many Roman houses where dead babies lay under the floorboards or buried in the garden.

Indeed the very myth of the foundation of Rome itself starts with a story of exposure. Their wicked uncle ordered Romulus and Remus to be disposed of, and it was only good luck that meant that they were washed up on the banks of the flooded Tiber -- to be found by the wolf (the lupa -- a word which in Latin could also mean 'prostitute', which led to all kinds of predictable speculation on the part of hard-headed Roman rationalists).

And several of the plots of Roman comedies feature a slave girl who turns out to be have been born free -- but exposed at birth, and picked up by someone to be brought up as a slave. The revelation of free birth usually means that she gets to marry the (free) boy of her dreams.

But it's not just in myth and fiction. There is plenty of evidence from real life too. A famous papyrus letter from husband to wife in Roman Egypt, asks her to "let the baby live, if it is male; if it is female, expose it'. And the Jewish writer Philo, writes (disapprovingly) about the practice, explaining that some people strangle or suffocate the babies, while others expose them (after which they are just as likely to be eaten by wild animals as rescued by another human being).That's in Special Laws III, 114-5.

Classicists have found this puts them in a moral spot. Some have denied that the practise was, in real life, a common as is often imagined. One ostrich writing in the 1930s (to be precise, Classical Review for 1932) claimed that "the cruelty involved in infanticide even by exposure is very slight". The more recent line has tended to be that we are dealing here with a significantly different definition of "humanity" from our own. Of course, we have plenty enough debates about when someone becomes a person with human rights (at conception? at birth? somewhere in between?). For the Romans it was when the person was formally "accepted" (usually by the father) into the community, at a few days old. Before that the baby, although outside the womb, was no more than a foetus; infanticide, in other words, was a late abortion.

That is all logical enough, though I suspect in a hundred years or so, it will look as desperately exculpatory as the 1930s garbage about it not being 'cruel now does.

But why did the Romans (and the Greeks too, for that matter) do it?

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The alibi for the trip to New York was a visit to the Metropolitan Museum. The husband is part of a team organising a Syria exhibition at the Royal Academy and wanted to look out some early Christian Syrian material and talk to the curators who might lend it (interestingly -- or horrifyingly -- it turns out that a Syrian exhibition would not be possible in the USA, as Bush's legislation about not dealing with terrorist states extends to cultural objects and projects). We also wanted to "do" the new Roman galleries in detail.

Let me say to start with that there is some fabulous stuff in these galleries -- and interestingly different from what you find in European collections. There are no big bits of 'state art' in New York... it's by and large smaller in scale, but almost everything would provide the subject for a whole lecture. It also shows the necessity of actually SEEING the the things you write about.The bronze image of the goddess Cybele pulled by lions in her chariot is often illustrated in books on Roman religion (including my own). I had never realised before that it was part of some water feature, with the lions' mouths acting as spouts. That makes it something rather different from the cult object it is usually assumed to be.

So the whole visit was tremendously worthwhile.  In particular the glass, like this gorgeous blue piece -- which I suspect, if one saw it in an antique shop, one would never guess was Roman. Eighteenth-century perhaps?

It made me think that if I was starting my research career all over again, I'd seriously consider going into ancient glassware.

But despite the tremendous riches, there were some problems. Notably some of the labels and information panels. Now, I know from experience that writing museum labels is much harder than people imagine -- and it is too easy to carp.

But the Met didn't come out very well.

Escaping exams

I am knackered -- for a myriad of reasons, but partly because I have just finished being chair of our Part 1a exams. OK I am sure that taking exams is more exhausting than marking them; but marking takes it out of you too, and you don't get all the sympathy/ (The picture shows the examiners consuming a well-deserved lunch after their labours.)

It's tiring not only because of all those scripts to mark (pushing 200 in my case) but because of the absolute obligation to make the process as fair as it could possibly be. By fair I mean this: would it be possible to face each and every candidate with their results and explain to them why they had got a 2.1 or a 2.2 or whatever -- and to feel comfortable with that explanation? To put it another way, "classing" (explained here for those unfamiliar with this system)  candidates cannot possibly be fair if the classers themselves don't believe in the results.

That is not to say that the whole process is without its rough edges. There are candidates who do badly on the day because of all kinds of unpredictable and unfair reasons (row with girlfriend, toothache etc). And it is not to say that there might not be all kinds of other ways of assessing university achievement (some of which we already use, side by side with sit-down exams... dissertations, portfolios of essays etc). but -- the bottom line at the final stage -- the examiners' job is to assess and grade the results in front of them fairly.

In my experience, we do this as well as is humanly possible within the constraints of the system -- and it is  time-consuming.

How do we do it?

I blogged last year about using both alphabetical and numerical marks. But the nuances in our system don't stop there.

The key is to have principles and criteria, not rules. It's a key, in my view, that might have an application for other areas of life ( isn't part of the problem about MPs expenses that it has got fixated on universal applicable rules, rather the principles of what is reasonable  . . .).

Should universities teach better?

In the 1980s, my clever friends who had gone into the Civil Service used to complain about the press they got. There they were, young people working 15 hours a day, trying to improve the conditions in prisons (or whatever); and there was Thatcher saying they were a load of expensive lay-abouts, and that they were a waste of space. My friends always said that, however much they had good arguments against that, the Thatcher rhetoric still got you down. It made you want to change your job.

Well, it isn't all that different in UK Universities right now.Mr Willetts is telling us that we should all teach better. As if we were all letting down our students with poor teaching. We are, in other words, doing badly. Or so the coalition says.  Really?

Pliny -- the elder and the younger

It has been a good and bad week for the family Pliny. The "elder" was that unsufferable polymath who wrote the multi-volume Natural History and was killed in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 (a combination of curiosity about the eruption and a rescue mission for some stranded friends). The "younger" was his nephew, the eye-witness of the eruption. It is his letters to Tacitus about the event that give us our best account of it  -- even though, they were written almost 30 years later (Angelica Kauffman's reinvention of the scene preceding the eruption, with young Pliny and his mother, is at the top of this post).

As for Pliny himself, he would no doubt be disappointed to find himself best remembered for witnessing a natural disaster. The highspots of his career must have been his consulship in AD 100, plus his special imperial commission in Bithynia. He seems to have allowed the letters he exchanged with the emperor during that commission into the public domain -- and a crawling collection they are, with Trajan scarcely able to contain his irritation at Pliny constantly bothering him with trivia (one of the bits of trivia being the inconvenient Christians in his province). 

Anyway both "elder" and "younger" got an outing on Radio 4 this week.

Better off in Brussels

I am in Brussels for most of this week, interviewing for the European Research Council Starting Grant programme (and what you see is the view from our interview room in EuroTower; the less scenic aspect below). Which is probably just as well, as it means I escape the rumpus caused by my last post on the sigma on the new Faculty doors (or rather the absence of the sigma).

This little squib has now been picked up by the Cambridge News, The Mail, The Telegraph, Corriere della Sera, and Anglia TV News -- to name just a few. That itself has a moral. In the old days bloodhound reporters would get out in all weathers to track their scoops down (or that's the myth at any rate). Nowadays it's easier to find them via Google.

But why on earth did this particular little item of news capture the imagination?

Well, in part, it must be that the idea the boffins getting it wrong always has a certain pleasure.  In this case a load of journalists who didn't have the foggiest clue about the difference between a Roman 'S' and a Greek 'Sigma' laid into Cambridge classicists for getting their spelling wrong. (In fact The Mail was so muddled that the first version of its headline said that we had got our LATIN wrong . . .)

In any case it wasn't a question of spelling -- and my first blog never said that it was.

Door rage (and wedding bells)

We have a sparkling new extension to our Faculty building in Cambridge, which wonderful in every way -- except for its FRONT DOORS. They look OK (although the photograph here doesn't quite bring out the best in them). The problem is opening the damn things. Because they are both (that is the exterior ones and those  that then lead into the lobby) fitted with Health and Safety approved disabled operation.

This means that, in order to open them, you have to press an electronic 'open door' button -- and they then sweep aside dramatically in front of you. Dramatically and slowly. So, at busy times (like, on the hour, when lectures are changing over), there is a mass of bodies trying to get into and out of the building, but needing  to wait for the stately pace of the doors' operation.

Can't you just push them anyway? Yes you can, but they are very heavy indeed (because of their motor), and not for the frail or those carrying a pile of books. In any case, as soon as you come along and push them open and then someone pushes the button from the other side, the doors take on a life of their own and come back and attack you.