A Don’s Life

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?

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).

A ride up Vesuvius

As I have  been hinting from time to time, I am currently making a documentary about Pompeii. When I say "making", I mean presenting and having quite a lot of content input -- it's actually been "made" by an assortment of excellent producers, directors, camera- and sound-men. Two of these, Daisy and Paul, you see in the pic, over last night's pizza -- because we are now filming and today was our first day.

I am still amazed that it takes a weeks solid filming to make a programme that will run for 59 minutes on television, but I am beginning to see why. I'm also beginning to see the skill of imagining a programme in your head, but actually filming it in a completely different order

This morning we went to the Naples Archaeological Museum, to look at various things, especially some jewelry kept there. Television certainly lets you do things that you don't get away with usually in academic life, like trying on the rings and the bracelets. I'm not sure I wholly approve - but it was certainly a buzz. Who could be so cynical that they did not feel a buzz slipping on an armlet once worn by a dead Pompeian? Not me.

And in the afternoon we went up Vesuvius to get a look over the area once submerged by the eruption, and out over the sea (plus back into the crater, which was steaming slightly).

Presidential condoms: the ultimate stimulus package

I have just been in Madison, Wisconsin -- giving a lecture on Pompeii as part of their Year of the Humanities celebrations. Was it sensible to go away from Cambridge for the last two days of term? No it wasn't. I had so little sleep that I was close to weeping at the very slightest provocation (like "how are you?") by the time I had left.

Was it worth it? Yes it was. And so many people turned up that we had to move to a bigger room. OK, a boast -- but, I promise, I have done my time turning up to lecture in rooms laid out for 250 to find some 20 faithful followers, most of whom were relatives. So I know what it's like when you don't get an audience.

I had last been to Madison something like 20 years ago. I remember, first of all, the cows. Wisconsin is the Dairy State and it's not hard to spot (one lunchtime I had some delicious deep fried curds, which were not wholly in step with the current diet). And I remember that State Street had been full of intriguing little shops and cafes run by left over hippies. I thought that these would have long since disappeared, with the hippies. But in fact they were still there.

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.

How to lose an election -- the Roman (or Nicholas Winterton) way

Some time in the second century BC, a member of the aristocratic Scipio family lost an election. Standing for the office of aedile, he had been eagerly canvassing the people -- and happened to shake the hands of a peasant. Now the peasant's hands were horny, from all his tough agricultural labour and Scipio -- being an effete toff -- was not used to the feel. "Wot," he said (as a joke?), "do you walk on these?"

Now Rome might not have been a radical democracy, but the Roman people didn't put up with toffs insulting the honest labouring poor and they took their revenge. Scipio lost the election. That, at least is the story handed down by the early imperial writer Valerius Maximus in a section of his Memorable Deeds and Sayings devoted to people who lost elections (The Latin text is here: Book 7, 5, 2; and the picture above is a denarius of 63 BC showing Roman voting in action). 

It's not the kind of revenge that the British electorate will get to take on Nicholas Winterton for his aspersions on those of us who usually travel in Standard Class on the trains. He is standing down from parliament anyway. 

(Actually, in fairness to Winterton, at many hours of the day it is totally impossible to work in Standard Class between Cambridge and London -- you would be lucky to get a seat, opening a lap-top would be impossible. Your blogger has occasionally been known to shell out for First Class, when she has been desperate to get something done.)

All in all, it's hard not to feel a bit envious of Roman face to face politics -- when compared with what we shall get in May or whenever.

Desert Island Discs -- the verdict?

No, I couldn't listen to the Desert Island Discs while it was actually broadcast. And for most of today, I just tried to judge how it was from what other people said.

Bluff and double bluff. I went to a meeting of our Leverhulme project (yes at 6.00 pm on a Sunday) -- and there was a good bit of ribaldry. Oh yes, they said (when I confessed that I didn't remember a thing I'd said), we loved it when you said what a silly c*** the Vice Chancellor said... brave to do it on the radio (isn't there a Dorothy Parker poem on these lines?) .

Anyway the programme is here (for a week) and the records, not in the right order necessarily, were:

Quote Unquote

I guess that I am a sucker for exams of all sorts. So when I got an email a couple of months ago, asking if I would go on the Radio 4 quiz show,'Quote Unquote', I said yes. That's the show that quizzes about famous and not so famous quotations, who said what about whom.

Well it's not quite true that I said yes straightaway. My first reaction was to think that I could only lose by showing up my ignorance. The nice producer said that I didn't have to worry, as some of the questions would come from my specialist area. Even worse, I thought. If I am revealed as ignorant about quotes from the backwaters of James Joyce -- well so what? If I don't know my Virgil, then I look dead stupid.

But anyway I said yes.

Social mobility -- down and up? Like Roman slaves?

Listening to Gordon Brown waxing lyrical in another pre-election address, this time about social mobility, you wonder if he (or his think tank) have quite thought this one through.

No-one could possible object to the slogans: "opportunity and reward cannot be hoarded at the top and it is not enough to protect people at the bottom"; "the glass ceiling is not merely to be raised but broken"; plus a promise of the "biggest wave of social mobility since the second world war". Who, apart from the loony right, would ever get up and argue that the poor should stay poor no matter what their talents were, or that the glass ceiling should stay firmly intact....or that we should energetically push BACK such elements of social mobility as have been achieved since World War II?

But no political argument  to which it would be impossible 'in polite society' to object is worth the paper it is printed on or the airwaves on which it is disseminated. It is, in other words, only a slogan, not an argument.

In this case the real questions are twofold. First: HOW are we going to deliver on the promise of social mobility? The usual answer of 'blame Oxbridge for our ills and interfere with the well thought out system of university admissions in the <false> name of fairness' wont do.

The second is even more important, and usually neglected: namely, how are we going to manage the downward social mobility of some that must inevitably be the consequence of upward social mobility for others -- unless (on our current system) we imagine a period of unparalleled economic growth combined with the import of an underclass (with no upwardly mobile prospects) to do the shitty jobs that are left unfilled. All social progress has losers as well as winners. It is often, and probably correctly said, that the increase in numbers of women students at Cambridge in the 1980s (which, needless to say, I wholly support) came at the expense of working class boys (which I deplore).

The answer in the general social mobility case must be that government needs (or better WE need) to work towards a system in which success and social hierarchy are differently configured, and in which the thrusting upwardly mobile are not forced simply to trample on others on their way to the top, or wave them goodbye from above (sending the odd food parcel), or look happily on as others tumble down past them. Can we imagine a society in which if I leave my job as garbage collector, I am not simply forcing someone else into the undesirable place I have left? Doesn't this mean thinking again about what we value and what brings status and rewards? And how pay is distributed? (Is it awfully old fashioned Socialism to suggest that an interesting job is in part its own reward?)

You might think that ancient Rome was a paradise of Brown-style upward social mobility.

The "new" Parthenon, my new edition?

I wrote my little book on the Parthenon about a decade ago. It looked at the material of, and from, the temples in all its different locations -- from the Acropolis itself to the diaspora of the Parthenon in London, Paris, Rome and Wurzburg and other places.

Things have changed a little since then. A small fragment of the Parthenon frieze (and I mean very small) has been sent "back" to Athens from Heidelberg (thanks, largely to a Greek then in the administration of the University of Heidelberg); another, slightly larger piece, has gone back from Palermo.

But the biggest development since I wrote is the opening of the new Acropolis Museum last year. You can hardly have a book on the Parthenon on sale, which laments the fact that the new museum has still not yet opened after years of delay, when any visitor to Athens see a great pile the size of a multi-storey car park standing about 300 metres from the Acropolis.

So a new edition is called for.