A Don’s Life

Greek love and museum labels

I am currently a small part of a small team, engaged in re-displaying the Greco-Roman collections in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Most of the hard work is being done by the Museum Curators (guided by the Curator of Greek and Roman, Lucilla Burn - of the Fitzwilliam and Newnham). But we have a substantial AHRC grant to get a dialogue going between the local academic classicts and the museum professionals (including conservators) ... the idea being to inform" the new display. You can find out more about the people and the project here.

Anyway, we have a regular meetings to talk about the philosophy lying behind the new galleries -- and to get get down to real practical details. What is going to go on the labels?How many words are going to be on the information panels? (We are a university museum -- so can we escape the usual modern museum Stalinism.... nothing over 75 words, reading age of 11 and no more than three syllables . . . ?)

As so often, actually getting round the table and thinking about how you are going to describe a pot (say) turns out to expose the tricky issues, and to bring up all kinds of questions about how we know what we know, and what we want to say to visitors about these objects.

Today we had fun with one particular Athenian pot -- which appears to show a load of sexually predatory blokes, moving in on a desirable boy. Greek love, in other words.

Vespasian's villa? Don't you believe it

Just an interim bulletin -- from Rome.

The news here, and in the UK, is full of the discovery of the villa of the emperor Vespasian (who ruled 69 - 79 AD) at Falacrina, a town north of Rome.

As usual a combination of fantasy and wishful thinking has driven this non-story. Even the excavator, Filippo Coarelli, who 'has form' with a whole series of over-optimistic 'identifications', admits that there isn't exactly any evidence for this. It's just a large Roman house of roughly the right date in roughly the right place.

The talk among British and US archaeologists in Rome (where I have come to say goodbye to Andrew Wallace--Hadrill  who is leaving the British School at Rome) is rueful. After all the 'advances' in archaeology, and what it can tell us about the ancient world, are we still looking for a 'Vespasian lived here' spot?

There was of course much other gossip -- which I am under ban of reporting. As if I would. Wallace Hadrill by the way is coming to be il capo of Sidney Sussex in Cambridge, while Jo W-H will become a colleague of mine at Newnham.  So instead of gossip, here is a blurry picture.

Can the Roman Forum get any worse?

The last time I went to the Roman Forum was two years or so ago when I went for an intensive two days of Forum study with a friend who was writing a book (now out) on the place for my "Wonders of the World" series.

David’s main point (for the friend was David Watkin) was that the archaeological site itself was pretty disappointing – too many archaeological holes, too much concern with the ancient Roman past at the expense of the glorious renaissance and later history of the Forum (like all those wonderful churches which line it, for example).

Yesterday, I went back for the first time since then, and must report that the experience is yet worse than it was two years ago.

For a start, it used to be free – which was some mitigation for the frankly disappointing state of the centre of the Roman empire. Now , since early 2008, you have had to buy a ticket  -- full price of 12 euros giving entrance to the Palatine, Colosseum and Forum combined (no-one would have the nerve to charge for the Forum alone).

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?