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

The desecration of Elgin

I don't mean LORD Elgin. I'm talking about the town of Elgin, north of Aberdeen (to which Marion Diamond suggested I might turn my attention).

The fact is that the husband has been up in Scotland this weekend, and we decided to spend a couple of nights even further north, and chose Elgin as a good base for all kinds of things we thought we wanted to see.

Elgin had once been a wonderful town. Not to mention the famous ruined cathedral, it still has an elegant Greek revival church (complete with a replica "Monument of Lysicrates", as you can see in the photo, on its top). This was just part of what had once been an elegantly proportioned town centre of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century.

But what on earth have the locals allowed to happen to it?

The High Street is now a complete disgrace (and I am afraid the pictures don't quite capture the horrors of it). All local efforts seem to have gone into a 1980s/90s shopping mall, leaving the beautiful street to crumble -- some of it boarded up, some of it taken over by rock-bottom rent charity shops, all of it scarred by modern shop-fronts that  pay no attention to what had been a beautiful street-scape.

What on earth as caused this?

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.

Did Portnoy's Complaint deserve the "Booker Prize"?

When I was a teenager, I took Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint to school in my satchel, in the hope -- I think -- of having it discovered by some prudish teacher and provoking an argument about freedom of speech and sexual expression (and also to show how hip I was). My Mother, I remember, requested it from the local library, for similar -- if slightly more grown-up -- reasons.

Until a few weeks ago I couldn't remember much about it, apart from the description of masturbation with the piece of liver. Presumably that's what everyone remembers.

I have, however, recently re-read it. It wasn't a happy experience. What was the virtue or merit of a 200-and-something page monologue of repetitive, blokeish sexual fantasy, preoccupied with the pleasures and guilt of masturbation (or alternatively with exploitative sex with exploited women...or if not sex, then constipation and other aspects of the 'lower bodily stratum' as Bakhtin would have put it). I wasn't shocked. In fact the liver bit was quite coyly done and the use of a cored apple for the same purpose was a rather underwhelming image.  It was the sheer self-indulgence of the book that was so irritating.

For a moment the horrible thought came to me that this really was what men thought about all the time -- that this was a true exposé of "what men were like". If so, I thought it was probably better not to know.

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.

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.

Is it a bollard? Is it a sculpture? Is it a book?

A couple of weeks ago, as I biked past the University Library (my usual route from home to my Faculty), I saw what I took to be a series of new bollards 'under wraps'.

For years now, car-parking at the UL has been increasingly out of control. When I was a student cars at the library were kept firmly in the car parks. Then one area of the car parking was re-assigned to university staff who work in the central administration (a sign of the times . . .) and readers' cars started to spill over -- first along the grass verges, then right in front of the library steps themselves.

It was only a matter of time, I often thought, before "the authorities" will put a stop to this. And here were the bollards.

But what emerged from the wrapping was rather different. It was a work of 'public art'.

The Egyptian Museum in Turin

You have been very nice in not complaining about my long haul, big carbon footprint weekends (I suspect because they were to visit the kids, and mothers get a bit extra on their emissions allowance if on maternal business). I fear that Sunday had no such excuse. I went to Turin with the husband for the sole purpose of visiting the Egyptian Museum -- which we had never visited and which is run by an old friend of ours from Cambridge, who showed us round.

This post is part of my very sporadic mini-series "Great Museums that you Might Not Know". Because it is tremendous.

I always get a slightly perverse kick out of Egyptian museums anyway. That is to say I know a very few of the barest bones of Egyptian history and culture. I can more or less tell my Middle Kingdom from my Old, I know a few of the great names and I good give a very rough and slightly inaccurate explanation of what "Egyptians" (which Egyptians you rightly ask) thought about what happened to the body after death. But more than that is all a bit of a mystery. All of which puts me in the same position as the many of visitors to classical collections -- who know something about the difference between the Republic and Empire, have heard of Nero and can describe a gladiatorial show. . .  So it turns out to be rather museologicallay instructive.

But there was a lot more to the Museo Egizio in Torino.

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.

Wadi Natrun. Was Curzon right?

We are in Egypt, just for a couple of days, to visit the son who is taking an Arabic course in Cairo. Our big day out was to Alexandria and -- en route -- to the Coptic monastery "of the Syrians" at Wadi Natrun, an hour and a half's drive from Cairo.

It was here that Lord (Robert) Curzon came in the 1830s and bought up a load of valuables manuscripts. Part of his excuse for doing so was the slovenly condition of the place. Manuscripts were lying around the floor, and were being used a jar covers, terribly "begrimed". The husband (who knows much more about this that i do) has always been suspicious of this account. For is sounds like a much too convenient alibi for walking off with the monks' prize possessions.

Anyway, on Saturday we went to see the place for ourselves.

Let me say straightway, it was a great -- and instructive -- day. There were plenty of Coptic Egyptian pilgrims there (the main religious attraction being the cell of St Bishoi). And as always such places make you rethink any simple approach to religious devotion. Here it was nice to see the paraphernalia of modern life conscripted to religious purpose: I watched many people come along, kiss the icons, leave a prayer and then take a quick photo on their mobile phones. Meanwhile (as you can see in the pictures) the fun the kids were having in the church helped you understand the fine line between holiday, a trip out to the countryside and the piety of pilgrimage.

This much have been true for all sorts of religious experience in the ancient world too. I bet consulting the Delphic oracle was just as mixed an experience.

But another striking feature of the place was that it was filthy.

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).