A Don’s Life

Can computers mark exams?

Blog followers will know that there is little is more reliably guaranteed to get Beard reaching for her lap-top than some new development in on-line learning. This is not (simply) because I am a nasty old Luddite. In fact I have become something of a convert to putting public lectures on-line. The events we've been launching at the British Museum, for example, in connection with the Pompeii exhibition are reaching thousands more people by being put on-line, and also reaching those who live miles away from London and could never get there in person. And that's great.

Not that there isnt a downside for the lecturer, mind you. Time was when you could give a public lecture or seminar more than once, in different parts of the globe. Now you'll find it's instantly podcast and you can't ever use it again. I mean, however value-added your actual presence is,  you can hardly deliver to a group of people, whether they are paying or not, a talk that they could have through their computer at the click of a button. The result is -- since it takes (me at least) a lot of time to construct a new lecture -- that you end up going to fewer fewer places and doing fewer gigs.

But all the same, the balance still seems to me to come down on the side of new technology in the case of public lectures and events. That isn't the case for a lot of what is called on-line learning, and for the replacement of face to face instruction with some form of web-delivery.

If you want a frightening glimpse of the future, take a look at this article in the New Yorker, which heralds -- not-uncritically, I must concede -- the dawn of MOOCs: that is "Massive Online Open Courses". One of its lead characters is Greg Nagy, Professor of Greek at Harvard.

Read a Latin Poem at the BM . . . and Pompeii coming to a cinema near you!

Our Latin poetry trio -- that's Peter Stothard, Llewelyn Morgan and me -- have had a regular gig at the Cheltenham Literary Festival for some years now on "how to read a Latin poem in Latin". The format is basically this. 

We choose a bit of Latin text .. we've done Horace, and Virgil, and Juvenal in the past .. we put it onto a handout and a powerpoint with a literal "interlinear" translation, and we take the audience through it, explaining how the poetry work IN LATIN. Sure, we give a bit of background etc, situate our poets in their cultural and political context, but the main aim is to explore how the language and metre works. What's amazing is that it works, and even people who know little or know Latin seem to get a real lot out of it.

We each have our different roles in the line up. Peter is the guy who keeps us firmly on track -- and reminds us from time to time to STICK TO THE TEXT. Llew is the real expert literary voice, and the "metre man" (he will explain to even the most sceptical why the absence of a caesura in line 22 makes all the difference). And I am somewhere in the middle.

Anyway last night we ventured -- with some trepidation -- to take our road show to the British Museum. The poet we had chosen to get the treatment was Virgil. 

Newnham in Paris -- and a surprising Michelangelo

It was our Newnham finalists' annual trip to Paris on Saturday (and this blog comes with heartfelt thanks to all those who have made this event possible with their generous donations). As I have said on previous years, it's a long day: leave Cambridge just after 5.00, onto the 7.30 Eurostar, 90+ minutes in the Louvre before lunch (see the mille feuilles above.. NOT,  let me stress, paid for by donor money), then another 90+ minutes in the museum, then a drink in a café, then back on the train, knackered. Participants were all our college finalists, plus me and Francesca Martelli who has been a lecturer with us for a year but is now (sadly for us, happily for her) going off to be Assistant Prof at UCLA.

There really isn't a better way of cheering yourself up before the final exams, as well as seeing some really good visual and archaeological material that you might never have seen before. We had (as often) a great talk together about the Louvre Hermaphrodite. What is the point of this figure which is a female from one side and a male from the other? I was trying to argue that it was not just a clever joke, but an attempt much more fundamentally to challenge the foundations of how you can judge what you see... Francesca tried to push us to consider how flimsy its male characteristics were, no more than a little willy (and so what does that say about masculinity?). 

"Why did Mary Beard stoop to writing about shoes" -- & in the Daily Mail to boot?

Earlier in the week, as some of you will have spotted, I wrote an article about why I like shoes in the Daily Mail. The reactions to this piece, largely on twitter, were varied, colourful -- and took every side of the issue you could imagine. What was especially nice for me (who has known very different style objections in the past) was that almost every comment was as polite and good-humoured as it was forceful and uncompromising. In fact, I could imagine myself on another day making even the most negative comments that were raised against me. The web at its best, I thought.

The only exception was a guy (I assume, a guy) left over from the Dont Start Me Off website, who observed: "What a career boost outside of the world of history you have had Mary, all thanks to some "vile misogynists"" (Career boost?? Article on shoes in the Mail?); apart from that about the worst was an early morning tweet from an ex-Cambridge student (female) who complained: "Morning Daily Mail fix utterly ruined by Mary Beard chiming on about how much she loves shoes". (I dont THINK it was meant to be supportive?)

Apart from that many comments included those who thought the whole thing was hugely engaging ("such fun to learn about your love of shoes! Surely Mercury's footwear the original Roman 'it shoe'?") or enticing (@wmarybeard has made me want to buy shoes!! said one; 'I loved to read this: M Beard says there's nothing like a new pair of shoes" insisted another). Others (fewer overall, but still a significant minority) were not impressed. What was I doing writing about SHOES and in the Daily Mail to boot. As my friends on the Telegraph said: "Oh Mary Beard, why did you stoop to writing about shoes?"

So here's a bit of the answer, in rather more than 140 characters.

Were the ancient Pompeians just like us?

The current Pompeii-and-Herculaneum exhibition at the British Museum treads a very careful path between the immediately approachable familiarity of the ancient city and its strange distance from us. 

On the one hand, there are all kinds of things about the ancient town that we can still recognise -- the chamber pots, the taps, the bread that (if it weren't actually carbonised) you could pick up and eat out of the oven. On the other hand, as the catalogue makes clear, the context is utterly destabilizing. It's partly the omnipresent slavery (men and women who didnt really count -- or counted so little that you could have sex in front of them and not even notice they were there). But then it's also the puzzling structures of domestic life and the organisation of the ancient "home". There are all those rooms we call "cubicula", so often transated "bedrooms" -- but they are not "bedrooms" in our sense at all. These might be places you went to lie down on a couch, but also to entertain your intimate friends and do the most important business you had on your hands (a sort of inner office). So hardly "bedroom" -- and indeed the truth is we dont really know where most Romans actually slept anyway.

So far so good.

Sex in the (19)70s

 

Over the last year or so, there has been a lot of stuff talked (in the context of Jimmy Savile et al) about how different the sexual culture was in the 1970s from now. And what that might mean for how we "judge" it all. It sure was different; but not exactly in the ways that are usually bandied about. I have no doubt that a lot of people had, and have, conflicting views about how it "really" used to be .. but, in a bit of a nutshell (too short, too simple) here are mine, clouded with false memory no doubt. I was between age 15 and 25 in the 70s.

First, let's be clear, no bits of mainstream popular youth culture were advocating sex with children. It's true that in my recollection there was a debate about where the "age of consent" should be set (13, 14, 15 16...?)...but 10 years old (lets say) was never in the frame. The idea, as some reports are insinuating, that child sex was all part of part of "hippy culture" (a culture that most of us did not anyway see much of) is bonkers.

But bonkers also is the idea that the conventional, traditional rules of sexuality somehow hadn't been invented then. Of course they had been.... The point is that youth culture was gunning for them, and trying to overthrow them.

Most of that gunning was done -- as always -- in our heads, with no practical experience attached (let's be honest). But all the same we were gunning. We were part we thought (or I thought) of a revolution.

Pompeii -- for the hard, and not so hard, of hearing

 

This is a recantation.

I did the first of our British Museum gigs for the Pompeii show on Friday (a discussion with Robert Harris -- more below). In the run up to the event I had been asked to give all kinds of information (spellings etc) to help the person who was doing the running sub-titling for deaf people.

I did this with enthusiasm, but I should confess -- I guess --  that I have generally thought that these gestures to the hard of hearing were really more gestures than useful or real. As I've said before on this blog, I've always suspected that a tick-box culture was at work in many of the initiatives for the disabled.

By that I mean that when we have put an automatic door-opener on the front door of the Faculty, we imagine we have done our bit ... when actually we should be looking out, much more widely, for how we make things work for those who cant open the doors.

So far, so cynical.

The runners and riders in our local elections.

Since the Iraq War I have been a semi-floating voter. Up to then I had been Labour by default (unless tactics demanded -- as they sometimes did in Shropshire -- that one put one's cross by what was back then still the Liberal Party). Since then I've looked afresh at each election for someone, somewhere on the left, the less Blairite the better.

This time at the up-coming County Council elections, my mind was made up for me rather early on. The excellent Belinda Brooks-Gordon, the sitting Lib-Dem councillor for Castle Ward, turned up on the doorstep asking if I would sign her nomination papers. She's, actually, done a great job on the Council and shows every sign of going on in the same style -- so I was happy to put my name to her form.

Now I suppose there is nothing to stop you nominating one candidate and voting for another, but would seem a bit perverse -- so with my vote now pledged to Belinda, I looked at the other candidates with more academic detachment, and also hoping that I wouldn't discover that I had made a grave error.

I didn't.

Who should review what book?

I am an inveterate reader "below the line" on newspaper websites -- especially "below the line" under anything I have written. I know that sensible people always say "dont read what people say online about your articles . . .  there's too much venom and madness, better not to know". Maybe I'm just too curious. But I cant help WANTING to know what people bother to post in reaction to what I've written. .

And I often can't resist replying, if only to put the record straight. Last week I had a review in the Guardian of Jay Griffiths's book Kith -- a "popular", and frankly slightly eccentric, book about how we have come to over-protect our kids. The book was launched from the 2007 UNICEF survey which rated the happiness of UK kids as about the lowest of the developed world. Actually the latest survey a couple ofweek ago suggested that the UK was now doing a bit better.

One below-the-line commenter wondered why I hadnt mentioned that. Fair point.

The fact was that I had written the review weeks before the second report came out; and I belatedly tried to add a sentence to reflect that, but it didnt meet the cut.

Does the modern world move quicker?

When I was working on Jane Harrison and reading her letters from the end of the nineteenth century, I was struck by how often the post was collected and delivered then: three or four times a day. Harrison would put an invitation to dinner in the post in the morning and have the answer by mid afternoon.

And it struck me that communication wasnt always any quicker now. OK, electronic assistance helps, and sometimes one can exchange ten emails in as many minutes. But when it come to getting a package from A to B within the UK, you can still be stuck at an even slower delivery rate than 100 or for matter 20 years ago -- as I've just discovered.

I am, let me confess (and you'll hear more later), making another little tv offering in Italy, and I needed to get a matching top for the Toast loopback sweater tunic (Black, size 14) that I intend to wear on screen -- so I wasn't committed to recycling the same one all the time. I'd rather assumed that I would be able to pick an extra one up at Toast in Islington, but they only had blue in size 14. So stuck in London on Thursday, I asked the husband to order one online by the quickest delivery possible. We were leaving on Sunday -- and it seemed to me that something ordered on Thursday afternoon, at £8.95 shipping, really ought to get to Cambridge by Saturday.

(To be fair to Toast, I hadnt read the small print)

Starting a new course

 

I am just about to launch -- with a colleague -- a new Part II (final year) course for the history strand of Cambridge Classics (a "C2" course for you Cam classicists). I suspect students have very little idea what kind of work goes into getting a course off the ground and on offer. Maybe in the old days you'd say, in an old-fashioned Cambridge type of way, "I think I might give 'em a course on the Severans, next year", and everyone would nod wisely and leave you to it.

It's not like that now. You have to construct the more or less full course, months or years in advance, for approval by your "caucus" or subject group, by the Teaching Committee and the Faculty Board. You have to lay out aims and objectives and  a schedule of lectures,  you have to give a specimen exam paper (no specimen answers but I'll sure that will come), and you have to explain who will actually do the essay supervision work for the course. Some of this is a hugely good idea. It's no good launching a popular course if you havent got the foggiest clue who is going to do the supervision and small group work (and it's usually a good idea if it's NOT you doing that -- so the students get some diverse views or different perspectives).

On the other hand, my sense after more than 30 years university teaching now, is that advanced students actually thrive if there are a few loose ends. The more expertly packaged you have everything, the more they tend to follow what appears to be the party line -- and they tend to do well but not VERY well; fewer 2.2s and fewer firsts. That's partly because a bit of "throwing in the deep end" (... what do YOU think this course is all about) really does get them to get their noses into a bit of independent work.

Anyway we are launching a Part II course in "Popular culture in the Roman World", and it will be one quarter of a year's work. We're reckoning on 16 one hour lectures over a term, plus 4 two-hour classes, so that we can inject some discussion in and look at some evidence close up. The idea is to get students to think about what we can know about Roman life below the level of the elite, not just (or even mainly) in terms of housing, employment or economics -- but in terms of culture and ideology. Was there as distinctive culture among the relatively poor, a distinctive sense of humour and pastimes (NB the scene of gaming in the bar above), a distinctive attitude to life? And how would we know?

There's a great opportunity here to get students reading stuff that they wouldnt have come across much, if at all, before....from the "Roman Joke Book" to ancient proverbs, fables and popular fortune telling manuals.

Losing your electronic ID

You may recall that in an earlier post I lamented my lost University card. I had then got back from picking up my Classical Association Prize and the bubble was appropriately burst by discovering that my Uni card was not in the place it belonged. I was still then hoping it would re-appear.

The point about this little piece of plastic is that it gives you access to almost everything you need in the Univerisity: I need it to get into my Faculty Library after normal working hours, to get through the archway that leads to my college room after 8.00pm; it gives me access to my college SCR, and to the Faculty coffee room, xerox machine, post etc after closing time; it lets me unto the University Library and allows me to borrow books; it is even what I need to get Emergency Out of Hours treatment by the University Dentist.

In fact the reason I lost the damn thing was that I was working in the Faculty Building after hours and needed it every time I went out of the Library to the loo or to my office and needed to get back in again . So I had it convenient (and conveniently losable) in my pocket, instead of in my bag.

Anyway it didnt turn up over the weekend, and then started the marathon of getting it replaced and so back into my life. Let me underline that absolutely everyone involved in this process bent over backwards to be helpful, and not a single person even hinted what they must quite reasonably have felt: namely that I was a silly old thing who had got herself into this mess by losing the card in the first place. I couldn't fault them (and Thank You). But all the same what a palaver to get your identity back.

It went something like this.

Lose some, win some: and looking forward to the Royal Academy

I have a proud little success to report, as you'll see if you read down. But, in case some of you regular readers, are getting fed up with Beard's honours loading this website, let me start with a good and proper FAILURE.

I have just failed to get a three-year funded stretch of research leave in the shape of a British Academy Wolfson Research Professorship. Well done to all who were successful, whoever you are! It's a brilliant scheme which gives the lucky winners (there are 4 in this current round) three years funding to pursue a project with a "public engagement" commitment). I was happy to get through to the long list stage -- with a proposal focussing on the writing up of my Mellon Lectures at the NGA in Washington on the representation of Roman emperors in Renaissance and later art (how much more "public engagement" can you get, I thought.. and the lectures themselves went down a storm I felt, even though I say it myself.. and opened up a real new subject...oh well).

Anyway, it was not to be. And I feel a bit rueful. For obvious reasons; but also  because I know in my heart of hearts  that, if I am going to do the next really good piece of research, I need a bit of serious THINKING TIME -- and that's the one thing I am certainly not getting right now. And I also need a real good excuse to turn a few gigs down which the Wolfson award would have given me. Bugger, bugger...

So why mention this? I cant imagine that there are too many tears out there ("lucky prof fails to get 3 years leave..." is hardly a sob story). But, as I've said, I think that I might need to undermine the idea that MB just goes from success to success! But I also think it's quite a good idea to share a bit of the downside of life as well as the up.

Thank you to the Class Ass.

 

I have just been very very lucky. I have won the Classical Association Prize for  'a significant contribution to the public understanding of Classics'...about which I am dead chuffed. Previous winners include Peter Parsons, Charlotte Higgins, Tom Holland and Caroline Lawrence .. and it is very generous. (OK, let me confess, as you'll only ask, it was £5000... some of which, for what it's worth, I shall be giving to my Faculty without which and whom none of what I do would be possible.)

The presentation of the cheque was at the annual Classical Association conference dinner, a delightfully boozy occasion brilliantly hosted in Reading this year, marred for me only by the thought that over the course of the evening I would lose the cheque. (The good news is that I didn't and that it is now on the kitchen scales waiting to be paid in.)

I did get the chance to say a "few words" in my "acceptance speech".. and what I wanted to hammer home was that "classical outreach" was a communal operation. Classics has a great public engagement record stretching back more than a hundred years -- and it's grounded in the fact that it has something to reach out with. (To put it in basic terms, if you don't have a strong research base and new things to say, you might as well forget "outreach"... because it will be built on sand.)

The example I plucked out of the air was the popularity (and commercial success) of Greek drama on the West End stage. This is partly down to those who inspire directors, or write reviews, or appear on tv explaining why this or that play is so importantly interesting.

What I did at the holiday: up the tower and down the mill!

I've got used to thinking of bank holidays as a chance to catch up on work.Boring eh?  But having someone to stay (over the last three days it's been Samuel -- our South Sudanese friend) does make you get out and actually DO something.  And the anxiety about the work left undone soon becomes outweighed by rewards of a bit of local tourism.

On this occasion we did a cathedral and a watermill: Ely Cathedral and Houghton Mill.

We'd been to Ely before of course (it would be difficult to live in Cambridge for nigh on 30 years and not have got to Ely), but ended up finding plenty new.The first thing was a tomb memorial that we'd simply never spotted -- to the architect George Basevi, who died in the cathedral in 1845, falling off/through the West Tower (always a cautionary tale for young architects). He has a rather smart faux-medieval brass, but what struck me most was that he is holding in his hands (you can just about see it in this picture) a plan of the Fitzwilliam Museum that he had designed but never finished.

So he was immortalised with what was to become (after it had been completed by C R Cockerell) his masterpiece.

The next thing was to go up the tower -- not the West Tower from which poor old Basevi fell, but the Octagon Tower over the crossing.

I'm not usually a great fan of church towers. Usually it seems that you pay through the nose to climb a lot of steps and -- if there is a guide -- he tends to drone on with inconsequential stories of mad vicars. And after all towers are pretty similar, seen one, seen them all.

But, because we had Samuel with us (who hasnt done church towers in South Sudan), we thought we'd better do it. It certainly was pricey (Ely cathedral isnt a cheap touristic option), but it was worth every penny.

Reviewing the reviews

People occasionally ask me if they should reply to some published review of their book which they think is wrong, unfair, unprofessional . . .  or downright outrageous. I'm usually a bit ambivalent. The best advice to a friend always has to be "No, don't write an outraged letter of complaint to the editor, setting the record straight". The reason is simple, it will only draw attention to the offending review, which most people in the world will not have noticed anyway (who ever scrutinises a review as carefully as the author of the book concerned?). "If you must write, then make it witty, not hurt. But it's better to claim the highground in other ways, like inviting the reviewer to lunch to talk about it, all nice as pie..." 

Yet wearing my more journalistic hat, I must confess that I do rather like to see a good dispute between the reviewed and the reviewer in the letters pages, with the battalions of supporters drawn up on either side. And there is a sense that if someone has said something simply wrong in a review, then they should be called to account.

The more general question that this raises, though, is what makes a "good" review from the point of view of the person being reviewed anyway -- as I've had a cause to reflect over the last few weeks with the reviews of my Confronting the Classics. All the more so,  as it is a book that is actually grounded in a series of reviews. 

(Fear not, this isn't going to turn into a gripe; overall I'm pretty damn happy.) 

Opening Pompeii

I went last night to the opening of the Pompeii show at the BM. Boris J did the main speech, addressing us as docti and doctissimae (maybe something of a comedown after his opening of the Hadrian show, when he did the whole thing in both Latin and English). He was extremely funny, though in truth 12 hours later I have entirely forgotten the jokes (which may I suspect be indicative about BoJo's staying power).

The exhibition is really excellent and worth the visit -- partly because of the greatest hits it includes (like the picture above) but partly it has such a lot of the stuff that is not on display in Italy. That's to say, if you have been lucky enough to visit Pompeii a few times, there is still plenty here that you wont have seen.

Can you undo "damnatio memoriae"?

For as long as I can remember, I've taken students and friends in Rome, to see a great example of modern "damnatio memoriae". That's to say when an unpopular Roman emperor finally died or was disposed of, it was not uncommon for people to take a chisel to the inscriptions that bore his name and hack it out.

It was an ambivalent exercise -- because, of course, as you see on this stone from which the name of Geta has been removed, it both removed the name and drew attention to its removal.

Anyway, I have often had fun using the modern inscription at the top as a great example of the practice of "damnatio" still going on in the mid twentieth century. It's the inscription from the square in Rome that Mussolini erected around his reconstructed Mausoleum of Augustus. And it orginally read, in Latin "This place, where the spirit of Augustus flits through the air, after the emperor's Mausoleum had been excavated from the darkness of the ages and the scattered fragments of the Altar of Peace had been restored, Mussolini il Duce had the old narrow lanes demolished, and ordained that it <ie the place> should be embellished with more splendid streets, building and monuments suitable to the character of humanity. 1940, 18th year of the Fascist Republic."

But as you can just see at the top, after the fall of il Duce, someone came along and defaced the thing, removing the letters "..lini dux", to leave only "Musso" which is Italian slang for donkey. A nice "damnatio" joke.

New pope? New Roman emperor?

 

A comment from Roy Lewis on the last post reminded us that the claims that Pope John Paul I had been "eliminated" were not unlike all the rumours about the suspicious deaths of Roman emperors. They may have died (like John Paul I) in the their beds, but that didnt stop the rumours of murder by smothering or poisoned mushrooms or whatever taking hold.

It made me think that the first weeks of a new Pope were much more like the first weeks of a new Roman emperor than the first weeks of a new Prime Minister or President are.  It is not a question of going off and making your mark in parliament, winning votes or whatever. It's a question of establishing a relationship with the people/worshippers -- and of balancing that with making the right impression with the elite of the Catholic hieracrchy.

I am right now in Italy. And many people I have met have been dead keen on Papa Francesco. They have loved the idea that he appeared on the balcony of St Peter's and said "have a good lunch". It has also gone down well that he talked to his fellow cardinals as "brother cardinals", and that he rejected the papal limo and went almost incognito to visit a friend in hospital.

My first instinct was to think: what a nice guy. My second instinct was to think: what an excellent PR machine.

The "King of Nemi": how long does it take the penny to drop?

I am about to go off to Italy (on a recce for a possible tv programme, and for more honourable reasons). And I have been thinking about the about the story of the Rex Nemorensis, which memorably starts Frazer's Golden Bough. This was the priest of Diana at Nemi (just outside Rome, nicely imaged above) whose succession was distinctively violent. You could only become the priest of Diana at that particular site if you killed the previous incumbent.

The story was that Caligula (the "mad" emperor Gaius) insisted on a change of regime at Nemi, and hired an adversry to unseat the reigning king. And this was what Frazer had fixed onto in thinking about the primitive divine kingship with which he was so preoccupied.

But isnt there another way of seeing this?