A Don’s Life

Conference in Disneyland

To those of you who asked whether I made it out of Heathrow to the American Philological Association meeting in Anaheim, the answer is YES -- but it took me 39 hours door to door.

OK, only 11 hours flying time; but a good few hours in the Sofitel at Heathrow, and a good few hours on the tarmac, wondering if we would outlive the legal flying time of the crew (in the end they gave us an extra pilot from some plane that had been cancelled to somewhere else). Still, the good news was that I got here, unlike our panel chair and organiser, who was stranded at Heathrow and forced back to Oxford.

So far as I can see, Anaheim is not my kind of place. And outside the conference hotel, there is little to do by explore Disneyland. This has its advantages for a big conference. Go to Chicago or New York, and the big rich guys are always off to some expensive foodie restaurant, or at least doing the galleries (for the not so rich). Here in Anaheim, everyone stays in the conference hotel, because there is no alternative.

The result is that I have seen more people in a shorter time than at almost any other recent conference I have been to. Moral, I suppose: hold conferences in nasty places and the delegates will meet each other much more easily.

Anyway, all the speakers at our panel (apart from the organiser) made it: me, then, in order, Sarah Iles Johnston, Robin Lane Fox and Jim Porter.

Why does 'election 2010' remind me of AD 54?

When Nero came to the Roman throne in 54 (thanks, scurrilous rumour had it, to his mother administering those poisoned mushrooms to his stepfather, emperor Claudius), his first job was to give a eulogy of his predecessor.

It was an eloquent address, according to Tacitus (Annals XIII, 3), even if a bit over the top on the old man's foresight and wisdom. The real trouble was that Nero hadn't actually written it; it had been run up for him by his old tutor Seneca. Some senators tutted: Nero, they observed, was the first emperor to "have to borrow someone else's eloquence".

The next stop was the senate, where Nero made another well targeted oration, full of vacuous but heart warming slogans, aimed to please to assembled Roman political aristocracy.He brought to the job, he assured them, no grudges . . . . there would be no bribery and corruption in his administration, he would keep his own household quite separate from the affairs of state, the senate would exercise its old prerogatives.

"Nor was the pledge dishonoured" remarks Tacitus archly (Annals XIII, 5), and goes on to list a few things done on the senate's initiative. But within a few lines he has given the game away. The senate starting meeting in the palace, so that Nero's mother Agrippina could listen to proceedings from behind a curtain. So much for the separation of household and affairs of state. And as if to rub the point home, Tacitus uses the same Latin word, discreta/m for the separation of public and private business, and the separation of Agrippina behind her curtain.

OK -- so hardly an election, but what is the similarity between then and now?

Borrowed eloquence, for a start.

Writing my first chapter

Happy New Year all...and Happy Birthday me (55 on 1 January).

We have had a great Christmas, but not a huge holiday. Daughter and son working like devils, husband writing an article and Beard trying to write the first chapter of her Roman Laughter book, and a lecture for California.

The good news is that I met my resolution to have written the first page by Christmas Eve. Since then things haven't gone quite so smoothly (though I have been in the library plus laptop on every day except The Day itself). Let me explain a bit .... what follows may be a bit dull, but so few people ever try to share the PROCESS of writing academic books. So here goes.

I have more or less determined to keep the structure of the six lectures I gave in Berkeley last year as the basic structure of the book. But I still needed an introduction, to get readers interested -- and to give a first glimpse of the big issues coming up.

I had decided to start with a couple of scenes from the Roman comedy "The Eunuch", by Terence, first performed in 161 BCE. The are from the middle of the play (around lines 420-500), a patch of repartee between a "braggart soldier", Thraso and a professional sponger, Gnatho.

I chose this because on two occasions during these lines Gnatho ("Gnasher") actually laughs -"hahahae" (there are a dozen or so "hahahae"s in classical Latin literature). And it is a great couple of passages for showing just how slippery Roman laughter is.

Gnatho, as a professional sponger/flatterer, is bound to laugh at his patron's "jokes". So here we have two "jokes" that Gnatho cracks up about, but of course they are emphatically NOT funny. Lesson one: laughter doesnt always erupt at the funniest jokes (and you can see how the methodological line might go on from there).

So far, so good.

Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo: what was Catullus on about?

Lucky Catullus (in Alma-Tadema's version, centre, above). He has had more publicity in the last 24 hours than in the last 24 years. Whole cohorts of journalists who have never read a word of the first century BC poet have been puzzling (with the help of wiki usually) about what the words 'pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo" really mean?

Because these were the word written by Mark Lowe in an email to a young woman who had asked him the meaning of "diligite inimicos vestros".

What it means is quite simple (though a number of family newspapers have refrained from printing a translation without a good few dashes and asterisks): "I will ram my cock up your ass and down your throat."

Mark Lowe's defence is that Catullus was being witty. A few journalists have half-sided with him -- suggesting that this was meant as a lusty to retort to the Latin she wanted him to translate. The passage, which is from St Matthew, says 'love your enemies'. No says Catullus, bugger them.

If anyone had actually read (and thought about) the complete poem -- for the offending phrase is the first and last line of Catullus Poem 16 -- they would have seen a better joke and a better defence.

It's a don's life -- the book

The book of this blog is due out on 5 November. But advance copies are now available from Amazon, and are on their way to those commenters whose comments are included in the compendium (you know who you are). I like the look of it and, obviously, feel some trepidation about how it will be 'received', and -- of course -- bought.

The book reprints some selected posts, as well as including quite a few comments (and I think that debate actually makes the book). It also has an essay, by yours truly, on the nature of blogging -- and why I am a convert to the genre, despite many initial misgivings about dumbing down etc etc.

I hope you'll like it.

High School Latin -- and the Gettysburg battlefield

As I hinted in my last post, I have been in Philadelphia - giving  a couple of lectures at Dickinson College in Carlisle PA.

It was a great occasion, at a wonderful Liberal Arts College founded in the eighteenth century, with an audience comprising academics of all shapes, sizes and disciplines, plus ex students from Dickinson, plus  interested people from the local community.

But what was most striking was the glimpse of the state of Latin teaching in US high schools, on the East Coast at least. I had always been fed the line that Latin was effectively dead in US schools (or the non-fee-paying ones anyway). And, even though I had met a good number of high school-teachers from Virginia who had thriving Latin classes, I had assumed that Virginia (and its links to the founding fathers) was a special case.

I wasn't entirely right. One of the great things about the lecture at Dickinson was that so many "alums" turned up -- and a good number of them were teaching at Philadelphia schools. The basic position seemed to me that public (ie state) schools in "Philly" would normally offer four languages: Latin, Spanish, French and German. A  bright student would take two, possibly -- but rarely -- three. 

Exactly how far they got in high school wasn't clear (and there did seem to be some odd idea that you didn't study two languages simultaneously, but normally one after the other). All the same it seems a far cry from the limited range offered in UK schools.

The other surprise was going to Gettysburg.

The luxury amphitheatre at Portus

Oh dear a good deal of tosh has been written about this luxury amphitheatre discovered in the 'imperial palace' at the harbour of Portus. The 'emperor's private amphitheatre' enthused the report in the Times. It was the setting for 'gladiator fights, bear baiting and even mock sea battles', suggested the Telegraph, 'probably reserved for use by emperors such as Trajan and Hadrian and their guests'. And there was plenty more along the same lines.

Who is responsible for all this? Well partly the excellent team of archaeologists who are currently excavating the Roman harbour installations. Public 'impact' is the order of the day for universities at the moment, and they obviously saw an opportunity to make some. But if you look carefully at what Simon Keay, the Director of the project actually said, the more extravagant claims are always qualified by 'possibly' or 'could have been', and other careful caveats (apart, that is, from his assertion that all this should "certainly .. be rated alongside such wonders as Stonehenge and Angkor Wat".... do you really mean that Simon??)

Maybe the Portus team was blissfully unaware of the tendencies of the genus journalisticum when it comes to archaeological discoveries. Because not many caveats are in evidence in the reporting, and most people will come away with the impression that an exclusive luxury  amphitheatre, a miniature Colosseum without the rabble, has been found in the emperor's seaside palace (a useful stopping off point on the imperial trips abroad).

Sorry, but no.

Have we found Nero's rotating dining room?

OK, you knew that I would have to have my say on this. Actually I need your help.

The first I knew of this 'discovery' -- of Nero's famous dining room -- was when I got an email from the World Service, wondering if I had a view which could be broadcast. As it happened, I didn't (I had other things on today, even though the World Service is always worth helping out).

But I still haven't worked out what it was that had been 'discovered'.

The basic 'facts' go back to Suetonius, who claims in his 'Life of Nero' that in the famous 'Golden House'. Nero had some kind of revolving dining room: there were, Suetonius says, "dining rooms <plural> with fretted ceilings of ivory, whose panels could turn and shower down flowers and were fitted with pipes for sprinkling the guests with perfumes. The main banquet hall was circular and rotated day and night, like the heavens."

This vast palace took up huge tracts of land in the centre of Rome, but it has always been a bit unclear exactly what it looked like, and how far you could match up the literary descriptions with what remains on the ground.

And as usual there was a terrible temptation to equate what we can see with what the Romans

wrote about.

I was always told that the "octagonal room" (in the picture) in the excavated area was what Suetonius was referring to. How exactly it rotated, or what rotated, is anyone's guess. But obviously that's been a bit massaged (or forgotten) in the new story.

Do European trains run on time?

Last week I went to Holland and Belgium, on a "book tour" with (the appropriately surnamed) Tom Holland. We were doing lectures and interviews in connection with our recent books, both of which have recently been translated into Dutch, by the same publishing house.

We decided to go by Eurostar -- as it was as quicker, all told, as going by plane, not to mention being greener. That meant changing in Amsterdam. OK, we were pleased to have gone that way, but it wasn't a great advert for European trains (which -- when standing for an hour on First Capital Connect -- one always imagines to be faultless). 

On the way out, the Eurostar to Brussels was on time, but the Thalys to Amsterdam was announced to have a 45 minute delay. Mr Holland, who was more adventurous than I, discovered the damn thing sitting on the platform there, when it was due to leave --  so quite why it was delayed is unclear (staff shortages?). 

I should say that Tom's pluck in exploring the platform was not rewarded. For on Brussels Midi station passengers are kept in the underground bowels of the earth until they rise to a platform by escalator. Tom rose, but couldn't find an escalator to take him back down again (all the lifts were broken). He was forced to rush down the up-escalator school-boy style.

The way back was worse: trespassers (did they mean potentially illegal immigrants?) on the line near Lille, and an electric failure outside the tunnel. That meant a 50 minute delay altogether. It was only when I was back at home that I discovered that some people had suffered 4 hour delay that evening, and blessed ny good fortune. So in future when I complain about the British trains, I'll make myself remember that the grass isn't always greener.

The experience in Holland and Belgium was, by contrast, wonderful. While book pages in quality daily papers are going down the tubes all over the world, those in Flanders seems to have survived pretty much unscathed. We did several interviews for daily papers, and everyone of the interviewers knew a whole lot about what we had written, and many had a background in ancient or classical history -- Patrick de Rynck and Theo Toebosch, amongst them. (We also were repeatedly photographed -- and you can see above Tom's version of Beard against the 'no dog shitting' sign, a five minute walk from the publishers' office in Antwerp.)

Saturday Live

I had a great gig on Saturday morning -- as I was a guest on Saturday Live, 9.00 am on Radio Four presented by Fi Glover.

I have listened to this programme for a long time on and off. It took over from the John Peel, "Home Truths" spot . . .  and I listen partly because, in our house (as in millions of others), Radio Four tends to be on at nine on a Saturday. So how could you not?

You can judge how I did yourselves. (You can listen to the whole programme here.) But I have become even more of a convert to this show that I ever was  before -- partly, of course, because  I was dead flattered to be asked to come on. But there is more to it than that.

First of all, any time you do a Radio Programme of this kind on the BBC, you discover they really have done their homework. Fi -- who did Classical Studies plus Philosophy at Kent -- had actually read quite a lot of what I had written. You don't get that on most commercial stations, I can assure you -- more likely, they will phone you up in advance and say, "Can you tell me all you know about Roman Sex . . . and no, I've not read anything about it ." This is what the Licence Fee is all about (and never mind J Ross's salary, it really is well worth it).

Second, it is great to go and talk about Classics, and other things, on a programme that isn't overtly didactic or dead serious (as Fi said, "Saturday Live" isn't the same as "In Our Time", great as IOT is - I hasten to say). Otherwise, people like me do tend to get pigeonholed into the "this is the austerely serious/good for you" spot. Actually Classics is FUN too.