It's a Don's Life (20 page)
Authors: Mary Beard
28 May 2008
I mentioned in passing last week that Cambridge Classics students had been honing their language skills by translating Milan
Kundera and Barack Obama into Latin and Greek.
It didn’t create quite the surge of interest that the Cambridge English practical critical question has – asking students
to compare Walter Ralegh and Amy Winehouse. Bob Dylan and Billie Holiday were in the question, too, but no one got so steamed
up about them. Perhaps the ‘Dylan is the greatest poet since Shakespeare’ campaign, by the eminent Christopher Ricks, has
made him fair game for an exam.
But it is all part of the same phenomenon – which,
pace
the
Daily Mail
, is nothing to do with dumbing down.
When you teach a load of very bright students at Cambridge, one thing you want them to do is to be able to make connections,
to think – cliché coming up, folks – ‘out of the box’. That can sometimes mean encouraging them to use the critical rigour
they have learned reading Tacitus, Shakespeare or whatever, in thinking about analogous, but unexpected phenomena of the here
and now.
One of the most successful courses I ever ran was over fifteen years ago now. It was for third year classicists and historians
in Cambridge, and was called ‘The Roman Emperor: Construction and Deconstruction of an Image’. This was about the time of
the protracted break-up of the marriage of Charles and Diana, enlivened for the world by the Squidgy- and Camilla-gate tapes.
Remember?
The students read the tabloids, and the transcripts of the tapes, and the various biographies as they emerged. In at least
one of the exams (the course ran for 3 years), a section of the paper was a gobbet test on part of the Camilla-gate tapes
(all very carefully labelled ‘An extract from the alleged conversation between HRH the Prince of Wales and Mrs Andrew Parker-Bowles
...’)
No one from the
Daily Mail
complained (or noticed, I imagine). But some of the more staid members of the History Faculty were a bit dubious about getting
their brightest-and-best to read Andrew Morton’s biography of Di, let alone having a pirated phone conversation reprinted
in the exam paper ... The staid classicists were more broad-minded, I should say.
But the result was explosive ... and enlightening.
There turned out to be all kinds of trade-offs in thinking about the tittle-tattle of ancient and modern monarchies. Why,
we asked, was there such general interest in the eating (or non-eating) habits of the monarchs and royals? To what extent
is that cross-cultural ... to what extent a narrowly particular Western tradition? Could thinking harder about our own obsessions
throw light on antiquity, or not?
Then again, what counts as the words of the monarch, and how do we judge them? If we eavesdrop on a king/emperor, do we expect
him to sound like us – or different? What are the conventions of royal speech? When (the alleged) ‘Charles’ used the word
‘calumny’ almost next to the word ‘Tampax’ (the only man in the history of the world ever to do so, I imagine), what did that
tell us about the rhetoric of autocrats? How did Tacitus decide to invent the speech of emperors?
And, more to the point, could we explain how and why the internal goings on of a royal court actually mattered.
It wasn’t dumbing down. There were no good marks for those who just squealed about Charles and Di. This was a course about
putting together the ancient and modern. You needed to know your Tacitus and your Suetonius and your
Scriptores Historiae Augustae
backwards – and then to ask if there was any useful connection between them and the representation of the Windsors. One possible
answer was ‘no’.
As for that question in the English Tripos. It looks like a tough one to me:
The Oxford English Dictionary
defines ‘lyric’ as ‘Of or pertaining to the lyre; adapted to the lyre, meant to be sung’. It also quotes Ruskin’s maxim ‘Lyric
poetry is the expression by the poet of his own feelings’. Compare poem (a) on the separate sheet [a lyric by Sir Walter Ralegh,
written 1592] with one or two of the song-lyrics (b)–(d) with reference to these diverse senses of ‘lyric’.
‘b–d’ were lyrics by Winehouse (‘Love is a Losing Game’), by Billie Holiday (‘Fine and Mellow’) and Bob Dylan (‘Boots of Spanish
Leather’).
If anyone can imagine that this was a dumbed-down question, they should think again. Marks were not going to be given here
for ranting on about AW and her troubles. This was about ‘lyric’, Ruskin, Ralegh ... and whichever modern star you chose.
The kind of question that weak students know to avoid.
And if anyone thinks that Ms Winehouse is the most disreputable of the lot, they should go and take a closer look at the life
of Sir Walter.
Comments
I know what they have in common: Walter Ralegh didn’t give up his coke for anyone and Amy Winehouse didn’t give up her cloak
for anyone.
MICHAEL BULLEY
This is all very good news for the University of Oxford.
GEORGE
That paper isn’t so much about what you ‘study’ as what you pick up along the way. It doesn’t matter a jot if people were
familiar with the passages or not – indeed, some of those who have read it all before (by some strange fluke) will have performed
worse than people seeing them for the first time. And
vice versa
. And it really isn’t that unusual for a practical criticism question, by all accounts.
NEWN1
Just because someone may be a ‘drug-addled artist’ doesn’t mean they have nothing worthwhile to say.
STEVE KIMBERLEY
To paraphrase Porson on Robert Southey: ‘Winehouse will be read – when Homer and Virgil are forgotten.’
SHAWCROSS
I was asked (in an exam) to translate into Latin a passage including the sentence ‘in discourse he was stiff, awkward and
angular’ (Mommsen on Mark Antony, translated from German into English).
Nasty.
RICHARD
Examiners citing this person is really just another example of the present desperate attempts to get ‘with it’ (old slang)
and reduce the apparent elitist view of Oxbridge.
You yourself make heroic efforts in this area endlessly referring to the seamier side of ancient life, and giving the impression
that you are a semi drunk chain smoking old female lecher more suited to running a fifties bar in soho than gracing High Table.
Of course we all realise that blogging is a relaxation from the intellectual pressures of ceaseless research, yet I notice
that you carefully avoid anything that truly turns the stomach.
LORD TRUTH
To Richard: maybe ‘in discourse he was stiff, awkward and angular’ could be ‘
sermo autem horridus et rudis et impexus
’.
Impexus
(uncombed) may not quite get ‘angular’, but Tacitus uses it of speech, and I suppose that hair that hasn’t been combed will
be sticking out at all angles.
MICHAEL BULLEY
5 June 2008
My next gig is in Paris – at a conference on ruins.
As almost always, two days in Paris in early June seemed a very nice idea when I agreed to give a paper last year. Whether
the 6.30 a.m. Eurostar on Thursday seems quite such an attractive prospect now is another question.
It wasn’t just Paris in the spring that made me say yes to the invitation. I’ve been brewing up a somewhat deviant view on
ruins (academically deviant, that is) for some time.
Which is to say, I want to think a bit harder about why most ruins are – let’s face it – disappointing.
I don’t mean all ruins, of course. I challenge anyone to find Pompeii or the Parthenon or the Colosseum disappointing or boring
(though, according to Peter Green, William Golding did mount the Athenian Acropolis, muttering, ‘The bloody Parthenon again’
and sat down firmly with his back to the monument gazing out at the Eleusis cement works). I mean those ivy clad mouldering
walls of some third rate English abbey or the pile of stray stones outside some jolly Cretan village which claim to be the
remains of a Minoan rural settlement.
To most people in the world, this disappointment will not seem a great revelation, but to archaeologists and cultural theorists
ruins are an object of intense interest (and so they are to me when I am wearing one of those hats). Archaeologists will bang
on for hours about the minute significance of the position of one stone against the next. Cultural theorists will bang on
even longer about ruins as a metaphor for the past, the fragility of human success, the melancholy of contemplating the death
of the past, and so on.
The voice that most academics refuse to hear is that of most other people in the world who do not share this enthusiasm. In
fact, not to appreciate ruins or ‘fragmentarity’ is seen as a mark of boorish lack of comprehension. So, for example, when
Benjamin Haydon overheard an ordinary member of the public say in front of the newly on-show Elgin Marbles, ‘How broken down
they are, a’ant they’, he and most critics (me included) ever after have treated this as an example of naive ignorance.
In fact, not only is it absolutely true that they are very broken down (and disappointed many when they first arrived), but
there was also a considerable move at the time to have them restored.
Even élite travellers could chime in to this effect (although we tend to prefer to linger over their enthusiasm for ruins).
A friend put me on to a great passage of the nineteenth-century traveller William Forsyth, moaning about how difficult it
was to make anything out of Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli: ‘This villa was at first so diffuse, so deficient in symmetry or connexion,
and is now so ruined, so torn by excavation, that its original plan is become an object extremely difficult for a stranger
to recover.’ And he goes on in the same vein with several paragraphs of complaint.
My point is going to be that we need to think harder about those on the anti ruin side – and to see them not as being indifferent
to, or ignorant of, the past, but having a different way of engaging with it.
That might be helped by looking at those non-Western cultures who haven’t bought into the romantic idea of ruins. Japan is
an obvious example, where traditionally the ‘oldest’ temples were entirely rebuilt every 20 years or so (suggesting a view
of history as process rather than material).
China is instructive, too, especially the recent debates about the restoration and rebuilding (or not) of the Garden of the
Old Summer Palace (brutally destroyed in 1860 by the French and British, under the command of Lord Elgin, none other than
the son of Lord ‘Parthenon’ Elgin). In this, we don’t hear of the picturesque value of the ‘garden as ruin’ (and a very rundown
ruin it is indeed). If there is a value in the ruin for the Chinese debaters, it is the ruin as ‘evidence of Western atrocities
... the scene of a crime’.
Not exactly how we see old Coventry cathedral?
Comments
I can never decide which is worse: my guilt as a lapsed Catholic walking past a church or my guilt as a former archaeology
student lying by the pool in Crete and not visiting the ruins.
JAY
Surely if ruins are disappointing they are successful? If ruins actually fulfilled somebody’s expectations, that would be
a real disaster ...
SW FOSKA
Yer can’t get off on ruins in nice weather. What you are looking for in effect is to be moved in some ethereal way by the
local environs and what you see. You need few people, you need grey skies and rain or snow, and you need to be in a thoroughly
miserable and introverted state of mind to start with.
After all, you don’t really enjoy sex unless you feel up for it, so why would you enjoy ruins unless you are totally emotionally
receptive?
STEVE THE NEIGHBOUR
11 July 2008
In the Cambridge University Library there’s one predictable route to the unpredictable. It was the library’s nineteenth-century
practice to bind up short books and pamphlets together, perhaps as many as ten or twenty in a single volume. So you order
up the thing you’re wanting, and you get a load of what you weren’t expecting, too.
The chances are that it’s one of the other things that takes your fancy.
At least, that’s what happened to me the other day. I was on the hunt for a short book called
The Comic History of Rome, and the Rumuns
, published in about 1847. When I do my lectures on laughter in Berkeley this autumn, I’m wanting to explore not just why
the Romans laughed, but also why we laugh at the Romans. So this was obvious material.
But when the book arrived, it came bound up with nine others, two of which were just as interesting. One was a book I’m sure
I ought to have known already, but didn’t. It was called
Facetiae Cantabrigienses
, an 1820s collection of jokes and
bons mots
about Cambridge. What particularly caught my attention were not the anecdotes about Richard Porson, but the spoof exam papers,
which were obviously the ancestors of the famous one in
1066 and All That
(‘Do not write on both sides of the paper at once’).
The questions went like this:
‘Are you anywhere informed by Herodotus, which were the thickest, the heads of the Egyptians or the Persians?’
‘Oxford must, from all antiquity, have been either somewhere or nowhere. Where was it in the time of Tarquinius Priscus ...?’
‘Mention any instances that occur to you of ancients visiting any part of the United States ...’
‘State logically how many tails a cat has.’ (This one had a model answer, too. ‘Cats have three tails – no cat has two tails
– every cat has one tail more than no cat –
ergo
, every cat has three tails.’)
OK – not side-splitting, I grant you. But it’s hard to get much of an idea about how the takers thought about exams (classical
or not) in the early nineteenth century. This kind of stuff is one way into their ‘exam culture’.
The other was a satiric Lancashire dialect account of a visit to the Great Exhibition ...
O Full True un Pertikler Okeqwnt o wat me un maw mistris un yerd wi’ gooin to th’Greyte Eggshibishun e’Lundun
. Satiric it may have been, but still a way of thinking differently about that extraordinary mid-Victorian spectacular.
There is another joke here. Both these rare books are available on Google Books. So I could have got them on my screen all
along, without bothering to arm myself with a pencil (no pens in the Rare Books Room) and hoof off to the University Library.
But the fact is that I wouldn’t have known about this if I hadn’t ordered up the
Comic History
and flipped through the rest of the volume. That’s where the UL and its funny nineteenth-century habits is always likely to
score over Google Books.
Comments
When starting out in my career as an archaeologist, I started a research paper thus: ‘Serendipity often plays a role in research.
By sheer chance some piece of evidence turns up that fills a lacuna in current understanding.’
Perhaps not my finest opening two sentences, but I was accused of not taking the research process ‘seriously enough’. When
I asked my senior colleague whether he believed what I said to be true or downright nonsense, he said it might very well be
true but that that was not the sort of statement to be making in a ‘serious academic publication’.
THOMAS, LONDON