A Don's Life by Mary Beard - Times Online - WBLG

Crime victim in the University Library

I have been spending rather more hours than I have managed for ages in the University Library. And I am as happy as a sandgirl. I am working on a paper that I am giving on Monday to a big Victorian Studies conference in Cambridge. I'm looking at how Pompeii was visited, imagined, painted and written about in the nineteenth century. It's a pool I've stepped into before, but of course I've now found so much more material than I had ever unearthed before. So much it's making writing the paper very hard.

Some of the most fun stuff has been the spin-offs from Bulwer Lytton's, The Last Days of Pompeii. I knew about the sculptures and paintings inspired by this novel (all those blind flower sellers). But I hadn't realised quite how many theatrical adaptations there were... and parodies. I've had great fun with an 1870's squib called (a century before Frankie Howerd) The Last Daze of Pompeii (in which the virtutous Ione turns out to be a wicked little flirt) and another 1870s parody, The Very Last Days of Pompeii (in which Nydia is a very nasty piece of work).

Anyway in the middle of all this I was the victim of another crime!

10 Latin quotes for the underground

Last week it was reported that the drivers on the Piccadilly line would be adding some well chosen quotes to their announcements on the underground: "Hell is other people", "Beauty will save the world" and other appropriate thoughts for a commuting journey.

Surely, with Boris as Mayor, there ought to be some real Latin among the anglophone platitudes. Indeed, a surprising number of the best known Latin quotes turn out to be surprisingly appropriate for the journey to work. In no particular order:

1. "perfer et obdura! dolor hic tibi proderit olim" -- or "Be patient and put up with it; one day this pain will pay dividends". That's Ovid (Amores III, XIa) reflecting on the insults of his mistress -- but fits well enough for the rush hour commute.

2 "quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra" -- or "How long Catiline will you abuse our patience?". The famous first line of Cicero's first speech against Catiline, attacking the would-be revolutionary (or innocent stooge), Catiline. But you can substitute any adversary for Catiline.. 'quousque tandem abutere, Boris, patientia nostra?"

3. "arma virumque cano" -- or "Arms and the man I sing". The most famous line in the whole of Latin poetry, the first line of the first book of Virgil's Aeneid. Though Virgil didn't exactly mean the arms of the man digging into your side, as you're stuck in the tunnel between Covent Garden and Leicester Square.

Was Alexander the Great a Slav?

This is a row I really don't get. Over the last few years FYROM (the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) has been investing heavily in Alexander the Great. FYROM's main airport is now called "Alexander the Great Airport" (better than "John Lennon" or "Bob Hope" airports, you might think).  A vast statue of Alexander (eight storeys high, apparently) is planned for the centre of Skopje. And the word on the street is that Alexander was a Slav.

This seems to me to be at best rather touching. It's nice to think that there is still enough symbolic life in this drunken juvenile thug that someone wants him for their nation. At worst, it is faintly silly. The antecedents of Alexander are a bit murky, but in truth there isn't a cat in hell's chance that he was a Slav. I can see also that it could be a bit annoying to some Greeks who might want to try to claim Alexander for themselves (this is a better claim than the Slavic one, but not exactly cast iron).

But what on earth has persuaded over 300 classical scholars (several of whom are good friends of mine) to sign a letter to President Obama (copy to Mrs Clinton et al.) asking him to intervene personally to clear up this FYROM historical travesty.

I hope Obama has got some more important wrongs to right. But supposing that he has had a minute to look at this missive, I trust that he won't be won over by the outraged arguments.

"Pompeii" wins the Wolfson History Prize

Almost three months ago I got a letter saying that my Pompeii had won one of the Wolfson History Prizes for 2008 (and very handsome in financial terms it is too). And, so the letter went on, I was to keep this absolutely quiet till 9 June. This has been one of the most difficult secrets I have kept in my life. You cant imagine how I've wanted to spill the beans. But, terrified at the idea of the prize being removed for bad behaviour, I have kept absolutely quiet.

This hasn't made life easy. I gave a short list of those that I would like to invite to the ceremony, but I didn't dare tell them why. So in the event not many could go. All the same, lots of friends were -- as it happens -- there at the prize giving at Claridges this evening.

Did Julius Caesar trip up?

Last week the husband and I motored to Stratford, to see the new RSC production of Julius Caesar directed by Lucy Bailey. I had written an essay for the programme, and asked for two tickets as part of the fee (it actually makes you go!).

Was it any good. Well, I guess I'm a bit biased -- but yes it was (some wonderful visuals and a brilliant Mark Antony in the shape of Darrell D'Silva, and some murders that really had me on the edge of my seat); with just a few 'buts'.

The trouble with any production of Julius Caesar is that you can't ever quite tell whether the problems with it are the fault of the play or of the production. I suspect that I'm being very unsophisticated here, but I've never found the last two acts of the play, where we see the assassins of Caesar themselves get slaughtered (by their own hands), at all gripping. After Cinna the poet has been killed, I find I couldn't care very much about how the noblest Roman of them all actually dies. Basically I know what happens at the battle of Philippi, but don't feel too curious about exactly how Shakespeare presents it.

But then last week there was the question of whether this Julius Caesar (Greg Hicks) had intentionally, or unintentionally, tripped on his toga just before his assassination.

Reviewing: the nastiness test

I am just on the way back from Columbus Ohio, where I’ve done two gigs. The first was at a great colloquium on Saturday organised by the graduate students in the Greek and Latin department at OSU. The theme was the “Future of the Ancient”, and I was booked to do the last lecture of the day.

Classicists find it terribly easy to feel embattled, and love nothing better than predicting their own imminent extinction (this gloom-mongering has gone on almost since the second century AD). So I decided to take a rather more upbeat line. It’s not a question of whether the study of the Greeks and Romans will survive, but of in what form … And I took the opportunity to have a little attack on two current favourites themes of avant-garde classicists (‘reception” and “interdisciplinarity”). I have done quite a lot of both of these, but it’s always useful to think how odd our intellectual fashions might look like from the outside (or, as I said, from a hundred years hence).

The second gig was today, just before I left. It was a ‘brown bag lunch” on the “politics of reviewing”. I kicked off for half an hour or so, talking about how Classics books get chosen to be reviewed in the TLS (a much less devious process than most people suspect), what the basic ground rules are and various bits of “good advice” in the fine old craft of reviewing.

Near the top of the list for me is “never say anything in a review that you wouldn’t say to the author’s face”. I don’t think any author minds disagreement. I mean if everyone agreed with what you said in a book, it couldn’t possibly be really interesting could it. What they mind is nastiness. I said this with some feeling, having just had what I considered an onslaught, rather than a review, from a colleague in California that certainly did not pass the ‘Beard nastiness test’!

Smear tactics: the Roman Damian McBride

My friend and fellow Classicist Peter Jones beat me to it, I discover, with a comparison of ancient and modern tactics against piracy (you can still 'listen again' to him on the Today programme for a couple of days yet; go to the 8.50 slot).

He now urges me to ask whether the Caepio Crispinus, a delator (an 'informer' to follow the usual translation) in the reign of the emperor Tiberius, had something in common with smearer-in-chief Damian McBride.

The story goes like this (taken directly from Tacitus Annals I, 74). Crispinus had been on the staff of Granius Marcellus, governor of Bithynia. To insinuate himself into the emperor's favour and to attract the rewards that he hoped would come to someone who could exploit Tiberius' paranoia, he accused his ex-boss of telling scurrilous stories about the emperor (and given Tiberius' nasty habits that was all too plausible). His partner in smear, one Hispo, added that Marcellus had given his own statues greater prominence than Tiberius' and (a strange one this) removing the head of a statue of the emperor Augustus and replacing it with one of Tiberius.

Actually the plan misfired. To cut a rather longer story short, Tiberius (pictured above) thought this was all below the belt and was worried about the tale drawing attention to his own failings. So he voted against the conviction of Marcellus. 

Was this a Damian McBride sort of incident, then?

Pirates? Try the Pompey-the-Great solution?

Piracy, it seems, has always been with us, and still is. Or, at least, as we've seen this last week, there are still people we don't like doing nasty things on the high seas with tragic consequences.

Exactly who is to count as a "pirate" as such will always remain a matter of opinion and dispute. for 'pirates' are no more objectively defined than 'terrorists'. To most of the world, after all, Sir Francis Drake was a dreadful pirate, to the British he still somehow manages to qualify as an 'explorer'.

But however you define them, the Romans had plenty of trouble with criminals sailing around the Mediterranean. It must sometimes have seemed hard to decide which was the greater danger of a sea voyage in antiquity: shipwreck or kidnapping by one of the many gangs of thugs looking to make quick money by getting ransom for the wealthy individuals they captured (or alternatively by selling them into slavery).

The most famous victim of this was the young Julius Caesar, who fell into pirate hands in the 70s BC. The story of this crime was almost certainly later embellished to make it a nice prequel of Caesar's later character and career. It is said that when the pirates told him that they were going to demand 20 talents ransom money (a hefty sum), Caesar replied that he was worth much more than that  -- and insisted that they double it.

Some of his party went off to get the cash, leaving Caesar to live for a month or so with this captors. He is supposed to have treated them as servants, telling them not to make too much noise when he wanted to rest, making them listen to him practising his oratory, and threatening that when he was released he would have them crucified. When the ransom arrived, he was set free -- and indeed, in due course, he did crucify the lot of them.

But it was Caesar's great rival Pompey the Great who had greatest success against the pirates, with a rather more liberal approach.

Can Boris boost Latin?

I went this week to a 'round table' in City Hall chaired by the London mayor (that's Boris Johnson, ex Tory MP and the world's most famous blonde old Etonian, for readers outside the UK). As mayor, Boris doesn't actually have any direct control over the capital's schools, but -- as a keen classicist -- he thought he might be able to encourage and coordinate efforts to make Latin available to more kids in London.

He had invited about twenty of us -- from schools, universities and other Classics "projects" -- to see what was already going on and to see what else could be done.

Now Classicists are, as a species, a rather gloomy crowd, and they have been predicting the extinction of their subject for over a hundred years (during which time it has in fact blossomed). In fact some would argue it has been predicting its own end since about 200 AD. Nostalgia, you see, is in the bones of Classicists. They're always liable to think that it was better and more expertly practised some time in the past; any time but now, in fact

But there are at the moment serious causes for concern. The worst thing, emphasised on Tuesday, is the government's cap on the numbers of places for training Classics teachers (those taking the Post Graduate Certificate of Education, which is the most common path into the teaching profession). There are only 27 PGCE places for Classics in the country each year, yet 70 teachers retire or leave the profession for other reasons. Even if you add in a handful who start teaching through the Graduate Training Programme (which trains you 'on the job') and a few more who go into teaching in independent schools untrained, the implications of this are obvious. There are simply not enough Classics teachers to take the jobs in the subject that are advertised, let alone get it back into schools where it has disappeared.

The next Tory government (lets suppose) may mouth its support for Latin as hard as it likes, but unless it increases the number of places available to train new teachers, the mouthing wont mean veru much.

On the other hand there are some "green shoots".

"The Ancient Greeks and Global Warming"

I am just back from the annual Classical Association conference, this year held in Glasgow jointly with the Classical Association of Scotland. I gave the opening talk on Friday night, on how Cicero might be a guide to the 'culture of Roman laughter' (a quite different lecture from the one on the ancient joke book -- in case you think I'm repeating myself). I thought it went rather well . . .

But before you accuse me of bragging, let me say that I thought that the other 'plenary' lecture at the conference was absolutely brilliant. This was the Presidential Address by Richard Seaford, who has a chair in the Classics Department at Exeter: a 50 minute presentation, without notes, to an audience of almost 400 on "The Ancient Greeks and Global Warming".

His theme was the relationship between political engagement in our own day and being a Classicist (or actually being a Hellenist). He started from Gilbert Murray, who was president of the Association in 1908, and had his own version of political engagement (in the League of Nations -- but Seaford told us of his enthusiasm for the United States, which he thought would turn out at best to be a guardian of world peace, at worst to be an enduring island of true Hellenic life!). But the bulk of the lecture was concerned with two particularly modern themes: money (and its acquisition, hence the golden Klimt at the top of this post) and -- as the title suggested - global warming and environmentalism.

The question was what could we gain by thinking about how the Greeks thought about these issues.