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

Aberdeen Connections

I am currently spending a few weeks north of the border, giving the Geddes-Harrower lectures in Aberdeen. I have to confess that (unlike a number of my colleagues) I have never been one to go weak at the knees at the mere thought of the banks and braes of Caledonia, etc etc . . . In fact, I am none too keen on the great outdoors, and have always been a little suspicious of the Scottish weather, the cult of tartan (et al) and all that whisky-buffery (the 'nice little island malt' stuff).

So Aberdeen has been a nice surprise. Not in terms of the weather, which is pretty dark and rainy. But I haven't come across a single piece of tartan. I have eaten my first pot of stovies (thanks, Chris and Liz). And even more important there have been some real intellectual discoveries and satisfying coincidences.

My lectures are on various forms of nineteenth-century engagement with classical archaeology, and I have been looking for Aberdonian connections to my usual themes.

These have come in abundance -- coincidentally and unexpectedly.

The Tesco University Library?

"The Tesco Library" doesn't exactly trip off my tongue very easily. Not that I have anything against Tesco. The "Cadbury Schweppes Library" or even "The John Lewis Partnership Library" wouldn't sound any better. But I'm sure I could get used to it -- if it came with a few million pounds to keep the library as great it has always been. This year has been the first time in 25 years working in Cambridge that I have had a suggestion for a library purchase rejected for the sole reason that it was too expensive. And if a Tesco (vel sim) "naming opportunity" would make sure I got the books I needed, I would be happy.

So I dont really understand the fuss in some quarters about the possible Tesco scenario. There are all kinds of dangers in raising private money to fund university research. But they are all about the possible power that the donor thinks they are buying -- over policy, academic priorities, or appointments. If Tesco thought that, for their millions, they could have a say in what books were acquired, who should be allowed to borrow, or who should be University Librarian, that would be a different matter. We have a regular and generous donor to the Classics section of my college library. The letter always comes saying "the choice of books is of course yours". That's exactly how it should be,

For mega-donations, naming is a good way of recognising benefaction which doesn't hurt anybody. After all it hasn't hurt the Bodleian to be called after their sixteenth-century bank-roller, Sir Thomas Bodley.

Launching the blog book -- and Midweek

This was the week which launched the blog book. It is now well over 3 years since I have been blogging (reluctantly to start with, but soon with terrifying enthusiasm and not without its irritations, I am sure, for the long-suffering family). The whole thing has been strangely life changing, and in quite unexpected ways. If anyone had said to me four years ago that I would be sitting down to Sunday lunch to a couple of people from Swaziland whom I had previously only met electronically, I would not have understood what they were talking about.

But that is, of course, what happened a few days ago. (Thank you Paul and Glorious for coming from Africa to see the book on its way, thank you Eileen from the US, and thank you everyone else who went to such trouble to come to join in the fun.)

For those who haven't yet seen it, the book of the blog includes quite a few of the original comments from various commenters. And we decided to have two parties to launch the book, one in London and one in Cambridge, to make it as easy as possible for all those published commenters to make it. The Cambridge party was at Heffers, the London one at the Society of Antiquaries -- excellent locations, I should say.

A good time was had by all. The only problem for me -- who has an increasing difficulty with names (not, I like to think, a consequence of failing memory, but simply of having too many to remember . . . ha ha) --  was how to recognise the guests. Or rather it was how to tell those guests I had never seen before (the commenters known only previously through cyberspace) from my familiar friends whom I just happened to have temporarily forgotten.

I got it wrong several times. Sorry all. And it didn't get better after more alcohol.

Do universities need Mandelson's 'consumer revolution'?

In twenty years time, I am afraid we will look back and wonder what happened to the "education" in higher education. We will have no doubt that the blame for turning them into training establishments at the behest of business (which is almost certainly where they will end up if things go on the way they are) lay with the Labour government of the early 2000s.

According to today's papers Lord Mandelson will be announcing the way forward on Tuesday. University courses, it is predicted, will now be advertised with their drop out rates, the number of contact hours with  students have ("how often they will have tutorials with star academics") etc.  The model for this is apparently the new "food-labelling system".

Now, I realise that all this has not been announced yet, and I should perhaps hold my anger until it has, But these leaks have a habit of being right, so here goes.

For a start, anyone can surely see that a system made for a hamburger with too much salt is not likely to be "fit for purpose" (one of new Labour's own favourite slogans) in assessing the education, learning and research of hundreds and thousands of bright young people. Besides, after the signal failures of the British business and financial sectors over the last few years, many will wonder whether the "business" model that underlies all this is really the magic bullet that it cracked up to be. (Thank God that universities HAVEN'T been run like businesses, one might say.) And if they reflect further, many will soon realise that Mandelson's reported desire to slash the funding of those courses which do "not benefit the economy directly" will have the effect of decimating departments of Maths and Theoretical Physics, as well as the more obvious targets of Classics, History and Anglo-Saxon -- all of which are jewels in the crown of British intellectual life and by EDUCATING their students rather than TRAINING them have in fact turned out a generations of students who (among many other things) know what thinking is, and how to adapt their mental processes to new circumstances.

Of course, all is not perfect with the higher education sector. And they haven't got better in the last few years -- largely as a consequence of being asked to do a lot more for not a lot more money, and the conflicting aims and aspirations of successive policy makers. Mandelson may complain about the student experience, but it is his government that has ensured that university funding depends differentially on research "output". So what does he expect us to prioritise?

Even so British universities are among the very best in the world for much less money than pours into higher education in other places. (Compare the achievements of Cambridge and Harvard, pound for pound.) They are, as we have observed before, a much more glittering star in the British firmament than British sport. They do not deserve these ill-informed attacks. When was the last time that Mandelson spent more than a morning in a university, I wonder?

Pit stop at Pompeii

Tourists have been complaining about the refreshments provided at, or near, Pompeii since the mid nineteenth century. The careful Murray's Handbook to Southern Italy warned visitors in the late 1800s to be careful about the prices at the Hotel Diomede (a convenient watering hole near the entrance to the site, just outside): better to fix a price with mein Host before you sit down to lunch; else you might find yourself seriously ripped off.

For the last few decades there has been a decent restaurant in the middle of the ancient city, not far from the Forum. It came courtesy of the allied bombing which smashed holes in Pompeii in 1943 (it had been reported that the enemy was hiding out there). One of those holes was not made good after the war, but found a new use in providing for hungry visitor (plus one of the few loos on the sites). It wasn't ever brilliant -- but it did offer a decent plate of pasta rather cheaper than the modern equivalents of the Hotel Diomede just outside the site.

Then a couple of years ago, it was closed.

I wish Nick Griffin hadn't seemed quite so MAD

Don't misunderstand me. I think the policies of the BNP are appalling. But the Question Time programme did play into our comfortable assumptions that people with terrible ideas are recognisably monstrous -- when the truth is that some of those with the vilest views on earth can be charming dinner guests.

And it's that truth that politics needs to grapple with. Demonisation is easy, but it doesnt reach the complexity of the problem. (Look where the demonisation of Saddam Hussein got us.)

Part of the problem on Thursday night was the way the programme had been reformulated to consist in a series of personal attacks on Griffin himself. The husband remarked, after we had watched, that it felt as if Griffin had been in the stocks and the audience and other panellists had been pelting him with past its sell-by-date tomatoes. (Bonnie Greer was the only one who used a bit of cleverness and wit in the attack -- and I gave her full marks for that, even if not for what she said after the programme.)

Where, I wondered was that old-fashioned idea of loving the sinner while hating the sin (a nice formulation of Gandhi, St Augustine others)? The problem about Griffin is his ARGUMENTS, and it's those that need to be demolished, not his personal qualities, or lack of them. But sadly Griffin played into their hands, and came across as barking, if not repulsive.

The bigger problem here is how we understand Virtue and Evil. It suits the cheaper side of political debate and media hype to imagine that somehow all the virtues (or vices) come together, as a package: a good person will be good across the board, a bad one similarly bad. It's a view with a long pedigree (and Aristotle has got a lot to answer for), but it crudifies political culture, is almost always a gross oversimplification and it undermines our capacity to deal with racism, terrorism, discrimination or whatever.

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.

The history of holidays

I spent most of yesterday on a business park just outside Peterborough. I was at the HQ of Thomas Cook, the travel company -- not booking a holiday (though the vast number of people working busily here suggested that the holiday business had not been as hit by the recession as you might guess), but exploring the company's archive. For the company goes back to the mid nineteenth century, and to an excursion he arranged in 1845 from Leicester to Liverpool. In fact one of the objects on display in the archive was an 1840s Cook's guidebook-cum-brochure for Liverpool.

I was there, as you might guess, to try to find out more about Cook's travel to Pompeii and Athens in the nineteenth century. Now, Cook's customers were not anything like so downmarket as they are sometimes painted (and were painted at the time in the more snobbish sectors of the British press), but they do give you a glimpse of the travel experience of those who are not simply blue-blooded aristocrats. Amonhst his early travellers to the Mediterranean, you find retired army officers, families from New Zealand, single ladies and all sorts.

So what did I turn up?

Obama's Nobel Prize. Why does the Peace Committee have such a bad record?

I am fairly sure that Barack Obama's heart is roughly in the right place, but to give him a Peace Prize when he hasn't yet achieved any actual peace anywhere in the world (and indeed may well yet raise the stakes in Afghanistan) is faintly ludicrous. In fact, it seems a bit like giving Neville Chamberlain one in 1938, on his way back from Munich, without stopping to find out what happens next. The Peace Prize should surely be for achievement, not effort.

But there is 'form' here. While the Nobel Literature committee every other year or so hands out its millions to geniuses most of us have never heard of (and good for them, I say), the Peace committee seems much more star struck. Or to put it more generously, they can be uncomfortably quick to reward any world leader (or plucky campaigner) for what seems to be the faintest, temporary step in the right direction.

Don and dusted: The "Institute of Ideas" meets HEFCE

A few months ago I agreed to be part of a debate at the British Library organised by the estimable Institute of Ideas (a great and brave name which somehow manages to stay this side of over-confident). The theme was to be "was the age of the 'old-fashioned scholar' over"? ... what with new HEFCE models, a pressure for research "outcomes", "impact" and "evidenced based research" (what other sort is there, I wonder?). The title (another great one) was to be "Don and dusted?".

No great surprise then that, as the day approached, the Today programme got interested (for their nice post-8.30 slot when nutty academics get wheeled out to discourse on their new theories and have a donnish argument for three minutes or so).

Yesterday, as a prequel to the debate, I was to go head to head with David Sweeney, Head of "Research, Innovation and Skills" at HEFCE. Now I am not a knee-jerk HEFCE hater, though like many academics I have a visceral distrust (or at least wariness) of the men and women from HEFCE. So I had rather expected that Sweeney would be a bit of a "now look here, how on earth can you expect the taxpayer to support thirty-year research projects on ancient Athenian dice" sort of man. ("Athenian dice" is one of my friends definition of a "useless research subject".) So I did my passionate opening about how no subject was "useless" (only a subject for which we had not yet found a use) -- and so on, throwing in a bit of stuff about humanities research contributing to human happiness etc.

Far from being the academic equivalent of a hanger and flogger, Sweeney came back with the wonderful line that people like me and my research was precisely what HEFCE was trying to support and protect. You can listen here.

But do we believe him?

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.)

Sex with students? Is Terence Kealey as misunderstood as Juvenal?

A few weeks ago I had an email from a friend who works on Times Higher Education (THE) asking if I would contribute 500 words to their forthcoming feature on "The Seven Deadly Sins of the Academy".

I was tempted, but as my favourite sins (notably sartorial inelegance and procrastination) had already been taken, I gave it a miss. And when the article actually appeared last week, I hardly had time to look at it (except to notice a cheap pot shot at the complacency of nineteenth-century Classics by the multi-talented Simon Blackburn -- who should, in this case, have known better).

I hadn't realised that there was a storm about Terence Kealey's piece on Lust, till I was in Holland (doing some lectures and book promotion, I confess) and got an email from a man on the Evening Standard, asking me if I would like to comment on it -- largely because I had past 'form' on the issue of sex between students and university teachers. So I took a look at it.

"Clark Kerr" it began, "the president of the University of California from 1958-1967, used to describe his job as providing sex for the students, car parking for the Faculty and football for the alumni. But what happens when the natural order is disrupted by faculty members who, on parking their cars, head for the students' bedroom.   . . . . Why do universities pullulate with transgressive intercourse? . . . The fault lies with the females." You can read the rest here.

It was instantly clear to me that this was SATIRE. So I replied in these terms:

"I have looked at the Kealey piece . . . and thought it wicked satire, but certainly SATIRE (which is of course always meant to be offensive, thought provoking, and often intended to rebound on the very views it satirises . . . that's the point . . .try Juvenal, if you want an ancient precedent."

Flesh Eaters

As I mentioned in the last post, I am back in Berkeley at a conference on Roman sarcophagi -- the aptly titled "Flesh Eaters" (which is what sarcophagi actually means).

The truth is that I had never before been hugely interested in the elaborately decorated sarcophagi (largely dated to the second and third centuries AD)  that were the focus of the conference. When I was an undergraduate I did an essay on them, and I still remember ploughing through some pretty impenetrable stuff (and some of it in pretty impenetrable German), which saw the decoration in terms of complicated eschatology, Dionysiac religion, apotheosis and weird views of the afterlife.

Since then, that's all changed. There's been a load of much more interesting recent work, and a now classic 'new look' at how to understand sarcophagi with mythological scenes by Paul Zanker and Björn Christian Ewald (both of whom were are the conference) called Mit Mythen leben -- "Living with Myths" (Roman sarcophagus studies remains something of a German niche market). Its a big and wide ranging book, but one of its central points is that we should see these scenes of myth not in eschatological terms, but as aids for the living. Re-presenting death in terms of the classic mythic stories offered a means of consolation: the bereaved wife could see herself, in the sarcophagus, as the lovely Selene mourning Endymion; the deceased was given the heroic form of (say Meleager). The parallels were sometimes hammered home even more forcefully by giving the mythological heroes the portrait heads of the dead.

That was about as far as I had got, until I was asked to be a 'respondent' at this conference (I didn't have to give a paper, just listen hard and do some summing up at the end). It seemed a good chance to find out a bit more about what was going on in the sarcophagus world.

Lets have LESS choice, not more

I may not be quite up to speed on this one, as I am actually in California, mugging up on the pre-circulated  papers for a conference on Roman sarcophagi that's starting tomorrow. But so far as I can gather from internet, Andy Burnham has decided to scrap GP catchment areas and say we can all choose our GPs from wherever we want -- near home, near work ... or anywhere. If we particularly wanted that excellent man in Manchester, while we lived in London, then so be it. You can read the full speech here.

The argument (as always) is that choice will "drive up" standards. But I have never quite seen why that is so.

I can see that some tinkering with GP systems might be in order. Students, for example, often live in two places (their university during term, their old home during the vacation) and there seems to be no easy way on the current rules of coping with that. It's also the case that the usual GP surgery opening hours dont fit with most of our current working patterns (but most surgeries are now doing early and late shifts to cope with that).

But CHOICE is a dangerous mantra, and usually a cheap substitute for serious improvement. As with primary schools, or hospitals, I don't particularly want choice -- I would prefer good local services, so that I don't need to think about choosing, or wondering if the grass in another postcode is greener.

Vetting and barring. Where are the sensible MPs when you need them?

It is funny how issues go in and out of the news. Over the last few days there has been a lot of huffing and puffing over the new Vetting and Barring measures (designed to prevent paedophiles getting at our kids) and how these are likely to discourage hockey mums from helping out the local scout troop -- as taxis for the neighbourhood. A few weeks ago the same measures were under scrutiny because they were likely to prevent Philip Pullman and others visiting schools.

I had my pennyworth then, wondering if I would have to be vetted in order to visit schools to talk about doing classics or applying for Cambridge. The jury is still out on that one, but one of my administrative colleagues pointed out that this would be likely to hit our visits to state schools hard -- as they were much more likely than independent school to feel that they had to obey the rules more scrupulously (or be made to feel...). So here we are trying to reach state schools who don't commonly apply to Oxbridge -- while another arm of government makes that more difficult.

Anyway, when it all came back into the news, I decided to have a look at what our expert legislators had said when this bill was going through parliament. There has been some righteous indignation from (eg) Kenneth Clarke, But what had these protesters said at the time? Not much, as far as I could see.

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'.