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

The face of Julius Caesar? Come off it!

What do you do if you are an archaeologist and you find a nice Roman portrait bust in the bottom of a river?

The answer is simple. You go through every book of Roman portraits and coins until you find some famous figure in Roman history who looks vaguely likely your man. It is laborious and time-consuming. But the principles are simple – it’s like a game of snap.

Why bother? Because almost every newspaper in the western world will be interested in your find if you say confidently that it is Cleopatra or Nero or Julius Caesar (and even more interested if you say that this is the earliest statue or the only one really taken from life – which is also a useful cover-up for the fact that your statue doesn’t look quite like all the others supposed to represent the famous figure).

However beautiful or important your find, no newspaper will be searching you out, if you have only found Marcus Cornelius Nonentito.

There’s a long tradition to this game. Heinrich Schliemann tried to convince the world that he had gazed upon the face of Agamemnon. Almost every local archaeological society in England was certain that the tiny little Roman villa they were digging up was actually the governor’s residence – and they labelled the plans accordingly, “Governor’s wife’s bedroom” and so on.

Now we have the story of the only surviving statue of Julius Caesar to be sculpted from life dragged out of the river at Arles. Right? And it’s even convinced the excellent Charles Bremner.

Keep Lesbos for the Lesbians

A tricky issue has just hit the Greek courts. Some residents of the island of  Lesbos have just decided to resort to the law to prevent the "Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece" from using the word Lesbian in its title.

The idea is that the heterosexual female denizens of the island don’t much like the idea that when they claim they are Lesbian everyone assumes that they are gay. (It’s a claim that might be stronger, I think, if the appellants in this case were women, not men representing their sisters. .) But if they are successful in their suit against the Greek organisation, the plan is to try to outlaw “Lesbians" (as a word) worldwide.

The problem here is the sixth-century BCE Greek poetess Sappho (on the right): born and bred in Lesbos, she addressed some of the most passionate erotic poetry the world has known to fellow women. An achievement which in the ancient world  earned her the title “10th Muse”. Almost ever since Lesbos has been synonymous with Lesbianism (in fact since the 18th century in British English).

This idea of decoupling Sappho, female homoeroticism and the island of Lesbos seems to me about as mad as trying to white out William Shakespeare from Stratford on Avon.

In fact, Sappho is the sexiest thing to have come from the island in 3000 years. Why on earth jack in the commercial possibilities?

Doctor Who -- Up Pompeii

There were enough good jokes to keep even the meanest classicist amused in Doctor Who’s visit to Pompeii on Saturday night.

For a start, when Donna and the Doctor emerged from the tardis, they immediately assumed that they were in ancient Rome. Well actually they were. Any keen follower of historical movies can spot the “ancient Rome” built at Cinecittà in modern Rome a mile off (it’s actually very like the “ancient Rome” built in modern Tunisia, except the whole thing is a bit bigger and the extras tend to have a slightly lighter facial colouring).

But just a few minutes into the plot, the table were nicely turned when we saw an unmistakable Vesuvius looming at the end of the street. The penny quickly dropped for us and for the Doctor. This must be Pompeii.

And it turned out to be August 23 AD 79: for those in the know (like the Doctor) the day before the final eruption. At least that is the usual date: an alternative school of thought, based on the traces of pollen found in the volcanic ash and on the heavy clothes worn by a number of the victims thinks it must have been later in the autumn. (I’m not convinced by the clothing argument. I always imagine I might put on my winter woollies in the middle of an eruption.)

A good start. And hopes that the writers actually knew something about the history of Pompeii and even knew a little Latin were not disappointed.

Yes please, Socrates

The result of the great debate was, as I predicted, that a rather large majority of the audience decided that they would accept the invitation. As Tom Holland said in the moments after our defeat: that’s democracy for you…but, of course, Socrates, wasn’t exactly a fan of that.

All the same I thought our side made as good a showing as we could, so didn’t feel especially pissed off. It’s a bit like doing an exam. You don’t mind doing not so well as you hoped, if you think you did as well as you could.

In fact, once the Taplin/McCabe side had trailed the idea that one might be having dinner not just with Socrates, but Hippocrates, Sophocles, Pheidias, Euripides, Hegel and Wittgenstein too – honestly I thought the audience would rebel. But they didn’t.

Anyway, everyone can listen to the podcast and see what you think.

I had the feeling that, zany silliness that it was, some more substantial ideas were bubbling under the surface.

A piss-up with Socrates

Preparations are now apace for our TLS debate in Oxford tomorrow: would you accept a dinner invitation with Socrates? Beard, in case you didn’t already know/guess, is on the NO THANKS side (along with fellow sceptic Tom Holland). Those thinking that they would reply with a YES PLEASE are Oliver Taplin and MM McCabe.

I am already, I must confess, resigned to defeat. For a start I have never been known to win in debates like this (not enough punchy, simple , populist rhetoric??). I managed to lose when I was standing up for the Parthenon in a head to head with the Alhambra, championed by Robert Irwin. His pitch was that the Alhambra was very very beautiful indeed. Mine was that the Parthenon not only stood for the whole of western culture, having been pagan temple, church and mosque – but that it also affected us more qua ruin, than any complete building ever could. True – but not a winner in the rhetorical cut and thrust.

Then last year I managed to lose in the Greeks versus Romans debate at Cheltenham. I lost so badly in fact that the Greeks registered more votes at the end of the session than they did at the beginning. In other words my inventions actually lost the Romans some of the votes they already had. The problem is that Hellenophiles find it so easy to stand up and bang on about well springs/originary moments of Western culture: QED. (It is what I should have done when speaking for the Parthenon….)

So what am I going to say about Socrates?

Lets get rid of the fascist Olympic torch

I don’t quite understand how we have forgotten that the “Olympic Torch” ceremony was invented by Hitler and his chums.

If ever there was an “invented tradition” well worth stamping out, it is this ridiculous, Fascist-inspired waste of money – which sends a Bunsen Burner around the world at tremendous cost for several months before the Games, manned (and womanned) by people dressed up in pseudo-ancient Greek costume, no doubt feeling very silly.

In London, we are now told, it will soon be doing a mini tour, carried by a London bus, Docklands Light Railway and Dame Kelly Holmes (inter alios).

I can’t quite work out whether most of the press reports are pleased at the pro-Tibetan protests which dented the hi-tech assisted, sunbeam lighting ceremonial (plucky little Tibet poking the Chinese dragon where it, for once, might hurt); or whether they are a touch censorious at this upsetting of the peaceful, non-political programme of the Olympic Games that we have inherited from the ancient Greeks; or whether they are wondering what might happen to the UK in the ceremonies to come in 2012  (don’t forget Iraq, Mr Blair/Brown….).

Hardly any commentator stops to mention that this silly torch ceremony has nothing to do with the ancient Greeks, and was really invented to be a magnificent shot in Leni Riefenstahl’s movie (choreographed by Carl Diem). This is one of Hitler’s most pervasive legacies.

They also don’t stop to mention that the ancient Olympics – far from being that sweet haven of peace -- were pretty political anyway. Even in their hay-day, they were often interrupted by the rough hand of Politics.

Do we need Wikipedia in Latin?

I’ve only just caught up with the fact that there is a version of Wikipedia in Latin: or, to be precise, Vicipaedia.

I have to say that it is all very well done. I explored it, hoping to discover some dreadful howlers. But a ten minute glance gave them pretty much a clean bill of health. And there is plenty of earnest worrying about how to translate such termini technici as ‘link’ into Latin. Ligamen, nexus or vinculum? Oh help…

They haven’t got very far yet. Check out  the section on “professores rerum classicarum” (professors of  Classics) and you’ll find they’ve only got to three: the distinguished, but unlikely trio of Barry Baldwin, E. R. Dodds and W. L. Westermann.

But my problem with this enterprise is not its accuracy in Latinity or its progress. It is: what on earth is the point?

Does size matter?

I had a quick peek at the excellent new Cranach exhibition at the Royal Academy this week. I didn’t know much about Lucas Cranach the Elder before I went along -- except that he was one of those few painters whose work even an amateur like me could spot a mile off.

The Academy’s Norman Rosenthal lumped him together with Modigliani and Botticelli for instant recognisability, which I thought was a bit unfair to Botticelli, but you know what he means.

This Cranach show had caught the headlines a few weeks ago when London Transport first of all banned his nude Venus advertising poster from the underground, then relented. So we can now see her on the tube in all her glory.

But seeing her in the flesh sprang a couple of surprises.

Richard and Judy meet the Classics

I honestly have very little ambition to be a tv don. I know that a good number of academics do secretly – or not so secretly --  hanker after the celebrity heaven of their own Starkey-style series. Not me.

The effort-reward ratio never seems quite right. The hours of preparation, make-up, nose-powdering, dressing-up is out of all proportion to those few minutes when you’re visible on the screen. Unlike radio, when you turn up at the studio, say your piece, have a friendly drink, and go.

All the same, when the call came from Richard and Judy a few days ago, I didn’t say no. The story is in the trade that a feature on Richard and Judy can turn even the most unprepossessing book into a best seller. Sadly, that’s not why the call came. They were wanting to talk about Spartacus, the Roman rebel slave. I’ve recently been advising another BBC drama-doc on the Spartacan rebellion (it’s broadcast on Friday night). Richard and Judy wanted to know if this was more historically accurate than the old Stanley Kubrick-Kirk Douglas version.

It turned out rather as I feared.

Did St Valentine exist?

Valentine’s day comes with a sense of relief for middle-aged. At least you are not on tenterhooks about what might, or might not, come in the mail. Truth to tell, apart from welcome tokens of affection from the husband, I don’t think I have ever received a Valentine – of the traditional, unexpected, “wonder who it is” sort.

Nor for that matter have I ever sent one, so far as I can remember. Except years ago as a joke to a senior colleague, who was instantly convinced that it was from someone else. The less said about this the better.

None of which stops me being curious about the Roman history of all this. In fact, for all of you wondering if there was ever a real Saint Valentinus, the good news is that there was not just one, but three.

The bad news is that we know almost nothing reliable about him/them. Earnest and detailed articles about his true history (like the one in last Sunday’s Telegraph) have, I am afraid, fallen for some very unreliable parts of Valentine’s myth.

The "facts" are these.

The return of the gods

My gig on Friday night was at Tate Britain, The first Friday of every month the gallery hosts a “Late at Tate” night. It’s a marvellous mixture of a regular evening out and a bit of gallery gawping – a combination of music, drinking, eating, acts, art and lectures. Apart from the food and drink, it’s all free. A sort of May Ball for grown-ups, but a lot cheaper.

I came in on the lecturing side. The Tate has just opened a new show of neo-classical sculpture, called “The Return of the Gods” – full of classically inspired themes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century sculpture, from Thetis dipping the baby Achilles in the Styx to Pandora wistfully wondering whether to open the box. My job was to talk to punters about just four pieces for ten minutes spread throughout the evening.

Highlight of the show, but not for me (I actually think it’s a bit irritating), is Canova’s Three Graces. I decided to talk about some of the less well known pieces. The aim was to explain why what may look like slightly insipid white marble, recreating some serenely voluptuous male and female flesh, is actually a lot cleverer and a lot more intellectually engaged with the Greco-Roman sources on which it is based than most people ever imagine.

I’m hugely keen on the sculptor John Gibson, who has several pieces in the show. Not, sadly, his Tinted Venus (on the right), a brilliant confection of the Aphrodite of Cnidos and the biblical Eve (the bright gold apple does double duty, as both the prize awarded by Paris to Aphrodite, and Eve’s fruit).

But an unexpected star on Friday was Johan Tobias Sergel’s, Diomedes.

Can Simon Schama cook?

In this month’s (that is February’s) Vogue, that wonderful polymath Simon Schama shares his views on, and recipes for, stews. In the course of this article, “Simmer of love”, he has some harsh words for the culinary knowledge of Virginia Woolf.

His particular target is the meal cooked by Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, a tremendous pot of boeuf en daube. Just one ladleful of the stuff is enough to turn awkward company into human beings, joined in “tender communion’. Mrs Ramsay is delighted at the success of this French recipe and swoons over the lovely “confusion of savoury yellow and brown meats.”

Hang on, say Schama. What are these yellow meats in a boeuf en daube? “A chicken foot lurking in there along with the beef and onions, is there?”

And it gets worse. Mrs Ramsay had been extremely worried by the timing. “Everything,” writes Woolf, “depended on being served up to the precise moment they were ready.” Hang on again, says Schama. You can’t ruin a daube by the timing. “Stews are the most forgiving dishes.”

Mrs Woolf doesn’t know what she’s talking about in the culinary department, he concludes. She was, after all, rather “bony”.

I am afraid that it is the far from bony Prof Schama who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Beard the Blog

What were the papers like at the APA? Several people have asked -- and the fact is that I didn’t actually go to any except my own, and those in my own panel. I wasn’t buried away interviewing, like some (though I did interview two potential graduate students for Cambridge).

No, I was sitting in my room writing an essay for a catalogue to go with an exhibition about the Roman Triumph, due to open in the Colosseum in the spring (it looks a good show by the way, for anyone who is going to be in Rome). My theme was fraud and deception at the triumph – including those marvellous stories of Roman emperors who dressed up fake prisoners to adorn their processions, or Domitian who, in the absence of any good spoils raided his own palace furniture store and  paraded that.  OK this should have been a piece of cake, but it still took me more than a day to put together.

Anyway my panel was called “From Classical Tradition to Receptions Studies: four national perspectives” – featuring me, Jim Porter from Michigan (on “Hellenism and Modernity”), Ernst Schmidt from Tübingen (on “The German rediscovery of Vergil in the Early 20th Century’) and Alessandro Barchiesi from Stanford (on whom more later).

So how did it go?

Does dry-cleaning get rid of radio-activity?

I am posting this between putting the turkey in the oven and getting the pudding on the boil. The husband and daughter meanwhile are just back from (?recovering from) a visit to the Ukraine – part sourcing objects for an exhibition at the Royal Academy and part (this was the daughter’s idea, needless to say) making a trip to Chernobyl.

Poor naïve creature that I am, I hadn’t realised that it was possible actually to visit Chernobyl. But you can now get an easy-to-arrange, custom-made, rather pricey trip from Kiev, with organisations that will get you a visa to visit the “exclusion zone” (a visa’s still necessary), drive you out from Kiev and show you round. Right up to the “sarcophagus” itself, as you can see in the picture.

Of course this is a moving experience. Heaven knows what is actually happening to the local people now. But I was particularly struck by the tales the family brought back of the (then) Soviet workers who leapt in to the reactor to block off the radio-active surge – knowing that it would kill them within days (which it did). And despite all that follows, I’d recommend taking the trip – even if that is a second-hand judgement.  Inter alia the site has become an amazing animal refuge/rare breeds centre…and the animals happily seem normal enough.

But Mum’s question was, predictably: is it dangerous? Or dangerous for humans?

One night stands

While I have been blithely posting on the irritations of car insurance etc, I have in fact been in the States on a tour of one night stands. No – not that sort. It’s the theatrical/lecturing sense of the term I’m using here.

I left the UK last week, after an excellent brunch for book-bloggers at Profile Books (who publish my “Wonders of the World” and “Profiles in History” series). Petrona’s already reported in on this. I just want to add that – enthusiastic book-blogger that I occasionally am -- I was a bit apprehensive about meeting my cyber-colleagues. Truth to tell, I suspected that, however sparky they might appear on the computer screen, they might prove to be a bit nerdy in the flesh (like me?). Actually I was wrong and good fun was had by all.

Why did Profile host it? Not total altruism. Blogging is increasingly an important review medium and leads to sales (or at least it may do). It’s worth a publisher being in with us.

After that, first stop was Boston . . . then New York, and I’m writing this on the plane to Los Angeles. It’s been good so far, but not as glam as you might think. The first 36 hours I didn’t set foot outside the hotel, but sat in my room, sustained by room-service (apart from the occasional trip to the gym/swimming pool/cocktail bar) finishing – well, writing really – the lectures I’m giving.

Want a motto? Do it in Latin.

I am delighted to see that some of the contributors to the great British national motto competition realised that a bit of Latin might help out here. For it is truth universally acknowledged that a society in search of a slogan, must be in need of Latin – which usually puts things snappier and shorter and cleverer than the poor old English vernacular.

I mean, could you ever capture “Per Ardua ad Astra” quite so neatly in our mother tongue? “Through struggles to the stars” seems horribly cumbersome. It's actually only one word more, it feels more like three times as long. (There were in fact a couple of 'tribute' parodies of this posted.."Per ardua ad nauseam" -- or "Per ardua ad Robin Reliant (cant afford an astra)")

I know this truth to be fairly universally acknowledged, as my Faculty in Cambridge gets so many requests from Rugby clubs, charities, WI’s, etc., to turn some reassuring platitude into a Latin slogan that we have a specially designated motto-writer. Professor X (I’m not going to reveal his name for fear of increasing the workload beyond what is manageable) is kept pretty busy.

Well, the British motto suggestions fell into two camps: a few who picked up an existing Latin slogan and redeployed it more or less appropriately; and most who tried their hand at their own bit of Latin. The results of this were what my older colleagues would call “alpha/gamma” – that is, occasionally brilliant but let down by some awful Latin grammar (or alternatively, disappointing in their grip on the Latin language, but enlivened by flashes of genius).

Playing safe with bona fide Latin was John Marshall with “O tempora O mores” (“What times, what customs!”). This is a quote from Cicero in 63 BCE railing in the senate against the standards of his own day and at the terrorist Catiline. Catiline was supposed to be bringing down civilisation as Cicero knew it, and planning to nuke Rome. The only trouble is, it is just as likely that Catiline was a relatively innocent stooge, set up by Cicero looking for reds under the bed, and for an excuse for a brutal campaign of summary executions (or, in our nicer days, detention without trial)…not a dangerous “terrorist” at all. So all the more appropriate then?

The trouble with inventing your own Latin is quite how to make it sound clever rather than “dog”. Not many succeeded. A few admitted their ignorance.

Archimedes thought the "National mottoes are for wimps" might sound better in Latin, but didn't risk it. Simon asked for the Latin for “Keep a stiff upper lip".

What would that be?

Self promotion?

Confession. I have spent a lot of last week in book promotion. Yes, I want it to sell -- and yes I want people to like it too, which may not be quite as closely connected to sales as one would like to think. There are, sadly, loads of wonderful books, brilliantly reviewed which actually sell in trivial numbers, and other which sell in their thousands but no one ever reads. How many people actually finished even the first chapter of A Brief History of Time?

So I started the week with Start the Week. It gets 2 million listeners so is probably the biggest audience who’ll ever get to hear abut the book. For that reason, it’s also pretty terrifying – and seems more so when you’ve left Cambridge at 6.00 in the morning to make absolutely sure you can get there for 8.30. I thought we were a motley crew of guests honestly, talking on some not entirely sexy subjects. Climate change in China and the role of the Commonwealth can usually be guaranteed to make even a worthy Radio 4 audience glaze over, I fear. The Roman Triumph I suppose seemed quite jolly in comparison. But what is more, everyone had a ghastly cold . . . so it felt a bit as if it was being broadcast from a sanatorium.

Did it sell the book? To judge from Amazon’s rating – yes, a bit.

Then there were the launch parties: one in a really great location in Greek St (perfect place to have a Triumph party…geddit?) and the other in our friendly neighbourhood bookshop in Cambridge. Memory of these is predictably a bit fuzzy. It felt rather like being the birthday girl at a kid’s party: hostess behaviour started off pretty well…but after an hour or so decorum lapsed and the rest is history. The best bit in Cambridge  was that some undergraduates had got to hear of it and just turned up. I don’t think they realised how flattering that felt.

Then of course there were the reviews . . .

10 tips for King Tut

It’s still a few days till the Tutankhamun spectacular opens at the Dome – so obviously I haven’t seen it yet. I’m not even one of the quarter of a million who have booked an advance ticket, so I imagine it’ll be a long time before I get in there. But I did catch the -- very similar -- version of the show that has been in the States (that's Chicago on the left). So I think I’m qualified to offer some tips. Or to be precise 5 tips for seeing the show, and 5 things to follow up with afterwards.

First . . . for seeing it:

One: Make a bee-line for the glorious alabaster cup carved in the shape of a lotus flower. Everyone goes  weak at the knees about Tutankhamun’s  gold. But for me this exquisite piece of stone wins every time. It’s got his name written on it, and it was found just at the entrance to the tomb, probably left there by robbers.

Two: Do some prep before you go. There’s more to this show than treasure, so get into Egyptian history and culture. It’ll help you get your money’s worth. As well as the exhibition’s own glossy guides, my favourites for quickly telling you what’s what are Ian Shaw’s, Ancient Egypt: a very short introduction or John Baines’s, Cultural Atlas of Ancient Egypt.

Three: Don’t forget Akhenaten. This show goes beyond King Tut (in fact, only a third or so of the objects are his). It has a lot to say about Akhenaten, his predecessor, and possibly father. Apart from the Tut treasure factor, “dad” was a much more interesting type, reigning in the middle of the fourteenth century BC and known for his commitment to monotheism. The art of his reign is really distinctive, eerily naturalistic, as you’ll see in the wonderful head in Gallery 5. Knocks on the head the idea that Egyptian art simply when on being the same for millennia.

Four: Don’t expect to see the big gold mask. The exhibition organisers are quite up front in saying that it was too fragile to travel, but people still come expecting to see it. Partly  because the publicity material for the show (as you can see above) uses an image of something striking similar. Actually it’s a vastly blown up version of a small “coffinette”, about 16 inches long in all, which IS in the show – and which originally held the pharaoh’s liver.

Five: Be prepared to come face to face, in a way, with Tut. His mummy has just been unveiled in Egypt and isn’t here. But the last gallery contains his CT scans – and from these they’ve reconstructed his head in latex. It was controversial exhibit in the US. What colour should Tut have been? Many people were convinced that he should have been darker.

But now for some surprising places where you can follow the show up – all in the UK . . .

Goodbye to the British Museum's Round Reading Room?

A few days ago I got to see the terracotta warriors at the British Museum. Old cynic that I am, I was ready to be decidedly unimpressed – and to come away judging them not quite up to the classical stuff I was used to.

In fact I was gob-smacked. The show is brilliantly displayed – and you get a brilliant sense of closeness to the objects (until, that is, you cross the magic electronic line which sets the alarms off, embarrassingly).

I was also pleased to go to an exhibition about which I knew absolutely nothing. I know the BM prides itself on giving you the historical context for all its treasures. But I ignored all that. I have quite enough chance to be learnedly contextual when I’m looking at a classical show. Here it was wonderful fun just to gawp.

Though I’ve since then read this week’s TLS article on the “army” by John Keay, and I’ve wondered if I  shouldn’t perhaps have looked more carefully at the labels. I’d missed the obviously crucial fact (and an obviously crucial crossover with Greek sculpture) that all these figures were originally brightly painted.

But what struck me almost as much as the objects was the setting. The show is mounted upstairs on a temporary floor above (I suppose) the carefully preserved  desks and catalogues of the old Round Reading Room of the BM.

I’d been one of the very best lovers of that room – emotionally connected to it by the pages of thesis written there, by the assignations set up in its wonderful panopticon, and by the afternoons spent sleeping off good lunches bought me by older and richer readers when I was still in my 20s.

Maybe, I thought, seeing this show, the Reading Room could find a permanent new use.

From Brussels with love

I suppose I will lose most of the sympathy I won from my last post about the working day of the average don, when I say that I am spending three days in Brussels – being an “evaluator” on a new scheme of European Research Council grants for young European scholars. This has meant interviewing 17 candidates over two days so far, and we are now about to discuss our recommendations.

Brussels is a much nicer city than you ever imagine (though not, I have to say the bit we’re in); the weather is glorious (though all we’re seeing of it is through a seventh floor window); and if, like me, you have a taste for mussels and chips, then the food counts as pretty good too.

That said, my experiences with the European Commission provide fodder for both the most loving Europhile and the most sceptical Eurosceptic.

Sylvia Plath and the milkman

Followers of the TLS blogs will have caught up by now with result of the Greeks vs Romans debate at Cheltenham. Indeed they may well be heartily sick of it (and this is the last post on the subject, promise). The truth is that, in his blog, the chair of this battle of the titans was a trifle generous to the losing side.

Almost 400 people turned up to listen to our debate about the relative merits or importance of Greece and Rome. Prof Beard had expected to start out behind and claw back a little over the course of the discussion – thereby claiming victory. In fact, as the Stothard blog delicately admits, Prof Beard started with a popular vote in favour of the Italian team, and actually lost ground by the vote at the end. A definite trouncing.

OK, lets not take all this too seriously. It was only a (sort of) balloon debate, after all --  and I have a pretty unrivalled record of losing those. I even lost when, in an architectural version of the game, I was supporting the Parthenon against the Alhambra. My pitch that a ruin was a more culturally interesting object than a standing building didn’t hack it with the audience at the London of Review of Books Bookshop.

But it still might be interesting to think why Rome didn’t win on Saturday. Well, reason number one was obviously the superior rhetorical skills of my sparring partner, Prof Hall. But there is also a question of what you can easily get people to be enthusiastic about.

When I came home, tail between legs, the husband observed that it would be almost impossible to get an average British audience to vote for the merits of Titian over Piero della Francesca. The quattrocento, with its originary simplicity, is always going to be easier to sell than the mature sophistication of the cinquecento (which we art historians, of course, prefer)

It reminded me of the words of an old (Romanist) literary friend years ago: that you could never convince the British public that a sophisticated twentieth-century poetic engagement with a passage of Dryden was ever as important as Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical account of her own encounter with the milkman.

A phallos-bird flies into the Barbican

Readers of the Stothard blog will have guessed that I have been prepping for the Greeks vs Romans battle at the Cheltenham Literary Festival tomorrow. So off to the new “Seduced” exhibition at the Barbican Gallery, the new show on “art and sex” through the ages to see how the ancient world fared.

It was, of course, a walk-over for the Romans. True, there were some very pretty Greek pots, decorated with various scenes of (rather uncomfortable-looking) copulation. But the Roman material was predictably more inventive. The show had got a real star in the gorgeous marble hermaphrodite from the Borghese Gallery in Rome. Come up to her from behind, and you’d think she was a lovely sleeping lady, walk round to take a look at her face – and, whoops, you find that she’s not exactly a lady, after all: she got breasts and a penis.

There were also some wonderfully writhing satyrs and nymphs, not to mention a good range of Pompeian erotica. I’ve always thought that one of the best ways of undermining male phallic power was to cast a phallus in bronze, give it some wings (that’s the “phallus-bird”) , hang bells on it, then hang it up as a wind-chime . And that, of course, is exactly what the Romans did – as you can see in the show.

The exhibition actually goes up to the twentieth century and is well worth a look (I particularly liked the “nipple-buttons” on sale in the shop). But overall I thought it was rather less than stimulating.

Two wonders on the bay of Naples

Tourist attractions come in two kinds: those that turn out to be far more impressive than you ever imagined, and those that look much better on the postcard than in real life. I always thought that the crater of Mount Vesuvius would fall firmly in the second category. But I was wrong.

Let me say straight away that, for the middle-aged, it’s not the gentle stroll that it's often made out to be. For this trip we had invested in the new edition of the Blue Guide to Southern Italy and the entry on Vesuvius was only one of many things it got wrong.

The Blue Guides used to be reassuringly boring: loads of close printed information, careful directions to the B. Daddi altarpiece in the second chapel on the left, and art gallery collections listed obsessively, but usefully, room by room. The new version has fewer “facts”, a smattering of sub-Dorling-Kindersley pictures and no obvious sign that those who have updated it have actually been to many of the places they talk about (always the benchmark of a good guidebook).

In the case of Vesuvius, it said that the crater was a ten minute walk from the car-park. Well maybe the athletic young can cover almost a kilometre at a 15% incline in ten minutes, but most of those making the trek on Sunday were taking a good half hour (even with the “free” walking sticks handed out at the start of the path).

Yet when you get to the top, there’s not only a great view, over Pompeii and Herculaneum, but the crater itself (il gran cono) is truly gob-smacking: vast, sulphur-smelling and ominously steaming through its fissures. It really did feel like coming face to face with the earth’s dangerous underbelly.

But if Vesuvius won a touristic star from me, so too – more surprisingly – did the Blue Grotto.

Greek treasures and global treasures

I only wish that many of those who exploded at my post on the Greek fires had read it in English. That’s not meant as a criticism. I can read modern Greek just about well enough when I need to, but given the chance to read an English translation I’d always take it. So I can hardly object to others relying on the account of my views on the Ethnos website.

The trouble is that it was a bit of a travesty of what I actually wrote. For the record, I’m NOT advocating that the Greek heritage should be distributed wholesale abroad for “safe-keeping”. I am simply arguing – as I’ll explain a bit more after the jump – that there is something to be said for some dispersal and replication. Part of the reason is an entirely practical one: its the ‘Wills-and-Harry-never-in-the-same-plane’ sort of principle.

And for those of you who thought that I was being decidedly insensitive - to say the least -  in even raising these issues at a time like this (“to make such ill comments/suggestions at the time of national crisis in Greece, it just shows the type of person that you are”), please note that I did start the post with an explicit apology for just that - and, for good measure, with a sombre reflection on the hundreds of Ottoman women and children killed when the Parthenon went up in smoke in the seventeenth century.

Now that I have the link, let me say that you can find details of how to give to the disaster fund by clicking here  (in Greek), or consult Spyros Iakovidis’s most recent comment on the earlier post.

All the same, the intensity of  the responses took me aback a bit. It wasn’t just the abuse: “fuck!! of!!!!” as George put it, or “UP YOURS MY DEAR..”, in the  (slightly) friendlier words of another George. It was more the bigger debate about the role and preservation of cultural heritage revealed by many of these hard-hitting reactions.

Olympia (almost) burns...but Paris survives

First let me apologise for writing about the antiquities of ancient Greece, when so many people have died in the terrible fires -- probably almost a hundred casualties altogether so far. It reminds me a bit of the “bombing” of the Parthenon in 1687, which everyone now laments as the loss of a great building, forgetting the hundreds of women and children killed in the process.

But, conscience apart, even as I’m writing, it is not entirely clear what exactly has happened to which ancient sites in the Peloponnese.

The good news seems to be that the Greek and Roman remains of Olympia have escaped (and a lot of them, let’s remember, are of Roman imperial date and not from the fifth-century BC well-springs of democracy at all). The Greek Archaeological Service is very good on disaster planning, and almost certainly its fire protection devices, as well as the brave fire-fighters and a dose of good luck, played their part in keeping the site safe..

But the news reports have tended to concentrate on Olympia alone – when, in fact, there are any number of sites round about whose loss would be almost equally troubling in archaeological, even if not symbolic, terms. I think here of the temple of Apollo at Bassae on its romantic hillside (the temple itself is now  covered with a strange almost post-modern tent, as you see in the picture). We still don’t know whether this has made it. Let alone the much less well known temple of the “Great Goddesses” at Lykosoura in the valley below. And that’s before we start to think about the Byzantine churches gone up in flames.

At this point I begin to feel grateful for the dispersal of antiquities around the museums of the world.

Sprechen Sie what?

I now feel it was a bit unfair to have a joke at the expense of Esperanto in my last post. After all, the GSCE figures just issued suggest that it might not be long before there are more people in this country capable of speaking Esperanto than German.

Most newspaper accounts of GSCE that you’ve read will have parroted the up-beat press release of the Joint Council of Qualifications: more students are getting A grades, more are taking science subjects, the gender gap is narrowing, standards are going up. Oh yes -- and there have been fewer entries in most modern languages: a 10 per cent decline in German (yet again), almost as much in French.

Currently abut 80,000 kids take German at GCSE – only about 8 times as many as take Latin. Keen classicist that I am, even I can’t believe that ratio is quite right. To look at it another way – and I get this from a House of Commons question -- the number of students in Shropshire taking any modern language at all at GCSE fell from 2549 in 2001 to 1821 in 2006. Any rise there has been in languages in the country overall, has come from Polish and Urdu, from native speakers in other words. I haven’t noticed a load of school kids starting Polish as a second language.

The hand-wringing about this has been a bit perfunctory. The Schools Minister, for example, claimed that making languages compulsory in primary school would eventually make a difference – while (consistent in its way, I guess) he also put the decline down to making languages optional in the National Curriculum after age 14

The insouciance was gobsmacking.

Going, going, gone

I am 52 and among the list of things still to do before I die is going to an auction – and managing to buy something. Actually I do remember going to a cattle market when I was about five to see my uncle, an auctioneer, in action. But that doesn’t quite count.

This weekend the ambition was at least half realised with a trip to the monthly “antique, furniture, art-works and everything else you can think of” auction at the local village of Willingham. The ostensible reason was to find some kitchen chairs.

Viewing began on Thursday. It turned out that the chairs we had spotted on the web were no good, but the shed-loads (literally) of other stuff looking for a good home was extremely enticing. OK, you could keep the cigarette cards, old teddy bears, televisions, garden furniture, military uniforms, People’s Princess figurines, and the rest.  But then there were the “five taxidermy exotic birds under glass domes” (export permit required; est. £150/200)  and the pair of 1850s Parian busts of  Victoria and Albert (the only trouble being that they came as a job lot with  another lone Victoria and a very nasty Shakespeare for a total est. of £80/140). More than 1300 lots in all.

It was a bit like going to a supermarket when you’re hungry.

Reality Television

I find myself unmoved by all the fuss about the “death” of the Malcolm Pointon in Paul Watson’s documentary on Alzheimer’s. OK, probably we should all wait till we have seen the programme (Malcolm and Barbara: love’s farewell) before pontificating. But according to the reports, the programme ends with Malcolm closing his eyes and slipping away. The message is pretty clear: he dies. It is only prurience on the part of the viewer to want to know whether we’ve just watched him falling into a coma or really dying.

I should add that I have never imagined that television phone-in competitions were anything other than “fixed”, at some level. And I’ve always known that premium rate phone numbers were making money for someone who was not me. So I am fairly unmoved by that scandal too. I  suppose I was bit taken aback that it went as far as Blue Peter – though, since the revelation that they had done a surreptitious dog-swap in the early 1960s so as not to have to confess to the viewers that “Petra” had actually died, it has been fairly clear that the usual standards apply to them as well.

What I find more surprising is that so many people seem to imagine that television can serve up unmediated “reality”.

Zero tolerance

Is tolerance a virtue in world religions? Last night I found myself arguing the apparently improbable case that it was not.

The context for this outburst was a public discussion, sponsored by the TLS and the British Library, in a series of events going with the BL’s current exhibition “Sacred” – a show of  “holy books” of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

“Sacred” has some marvellous stuff in it: a chunk of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest surviving New  Testament (the Codex Sinaiticus), the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of the earliest Korans we have, The Lisbon Bible (a magnificently illuminated fifteenth-century Jewish text - on the right), and loads more. It’s definitely worth a visit  -- if only because you’re never likely to get to see such an extraordinary and stunningly beautiful collection of religious book-art ever again.

If there’s a problem with the show, it’s the underlying message captured in its slogan “Discover what we share”.

David Beckham among the feminists

After his 12 minute celebrity debut on the pitch for LA Galaxy (they lost 0-1 to Chelsea), David and Victoria were given a celebrity welcoming party to Tinsel Town, courtesy of Tom Cruise and Will Smith. The venue was the “Geffen Contemporary” -- one time ha