It's a Don's Life (8 page)

Exams are getting harder – shock

16 January 2007

Yesterday I was sent an intriguing present. It was the exam papers taken by a Newnham Classics student in 1901–1902. I’d seen
these before, in their pristine, bound volumes in the University Library. But actually fingering the ones that come direct
from the exam room, still marked with the blood, sweat and tears of the poor student (well, almost) makes a more powerful
impression.

It’s hard not to ask yourself the obvious question: are these degree exams really more difficult than what our students do,
like the gloomy commentators claim?

Well, put aside any romantic nostalgia for the glory days of rigorous classical education at the turn of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. The good news is that what our undergraduates face at the beginning of the twenty-first is actually rather
more challenging.

My favourite is the one that asked for ‘a short description, showing where possible its evolution in classical times’ of the
‘lock and key’.

Now maybe it’s charming to think of generations of students mugging up the workings of the ancient equivalent of a Yale lock.
But our kids have more thinking to do. The question from last year’s paper ‘What role did religion play in policing sexual
practice?’ would have floored most of the class of 1901–1902 for more than the obvious reason. So too the tricky: ‘Did physical
beauty have moral value in classical Greece?’

But, you might be wondering, what about the more specialist linguistic tests? It’s one thing to deal with this modern style
of ‘think question’, but surely the students of a hundred years ago were asked to undertake much more difficult exercises
translating from Latin and Greek.

Again, I’m not so sure. There was certainly a lot of it in the old papers, and they must have had to work at a cracking pace.
But the passages from ancient authors they were asked to translate are not so very different from now. In fact, something
very close to one passage from Cicero in 1901–1902 was set just last year.

The funniest comparison, though, is between what those students were asked to translate into Latin and Greek, and what ours
do. Turning English into classical prose and poetry was one of the mainstays of a Classics degree a hundred years ago. It
no longer has that central position, but it’s an option that many of our students still choose (particularly translation into
prose – verse is rather more arcane).

The papers of 1901–1902 are full of passages from Bishop Berkeley and the like to be rendered in Latin; plus some choice extracts
from Tennyson and Dryden to go into verse. Last year our students had more fun. They had some Seamus Heaney and David Bowie
to turn into Greek and Latin poetry.

Of course, it’s a dangerous business comparing exams across the decades, especially when (in the case of 1901–1902) we only
have the questions and no idea what the answers looked like. (Maybe those answers on the lock and key would have surprised
me.) But there’s not much ammunition here for those who think classical, or university, standards have dramatically slipped.

Racism in Greece and Rome

22 January 2007

I didn’t actually watch Jade Goody and friends attack Shilpa Shetty. But it’s been impossible to avoid the endless follow-up
wrangling about what was really going on. Was this appalling racism? An episode in the class war? Brutal bullying? Or just
plain hatred of foreigners (which, though unpleasant enough, is not necessarily racist)?

It all reminded me uncannily of the debates about whether racism existed in the Greek and Roman world.

There is no doubt at all that they often treated outsiders badly. The idea of the ‘barbarian’ (someone whose speech is just
an incomprehensible ‘ba ba’) is a well known Greek invention. But the cultural identity of both societies was even more pervasively
based on what we would now see as an unhealthy distrust of anyone different from themselves. Xenophobia, in other words.

The list of unnatural things that foreigners were supposed to get up to is a long one. It ranged from peculiar eating habits
(not just frogs legs or poppadoms, but at its worst cannibalism) to strange régimes of hygiene (women standing up to piss
was a notable source of wonderment and/or disdain) and topsy-turvy ideas of sex and gender (women in charge).

The Greeks painted a contemptuous picture of the Persians as trousered, decadent softies who wore far too much perfume. Then
the Romans came along and, minus the trousers, said much the same about the Greeks: a nice example of being given a taste
of your own medicine.

But, strikingly, it’s usually claimed that neither Greeks nor Romans bothered very much about skin colour. This was a time
‘before colour prejudice’.

It’s certainly the case that there seems to have been no general idea of social, cultural or intellectual inferiority based
on the colour of a person’s skin. There was no homogeneous slave class, of a different race and colour from their masters.
And, in fact, exactly what skin colours were represented, and in what numbers, in the multicultural population of the Roman
empire is something of a puzzle. The second-century ad emperor Septimius Severus, who came from modern Libya, may not have
been black (even though that is sometimes argued); but then he probably wasn’t as white as some of his marble busts make him
seem either.

I’m not sure I wholly buy this line. But if just some of the sophistication of these debates about the ancient world, and
about what racism might be, had been in evidence in all the huffing and puffing about Jade Goody and her faults, more sense
might have been spoken.

Comments

The Jade Goody business had absolutely nothing to do with racism however interpreted (unless one accepts the Norman Mailer
idea – which I do – that class in Britain is merely a form of racism). Essentially it was a superb classic example of pure
British bullying produced by a tragic sense of low physical, intellectual and class esteem (irrespective of personal riches)
in the bullier. Indeed, this was so clear that the ‘racism’ outcry was essentially an attempt by an embarrassed nation to
divert this painful social fact of British life into the safer limited world of race.

LORD TRUTH

Paganism without the blood

26 January 2007

One of the good things about working on ancient ‘pagan’ religion is that no one actually believes in it any more. (‘Pagan’
here is in inverted commas, of course, because it wasn’t a term people ever used of themselves: it was a term of semi-abuse
from the Christian camp, and probably meant something like ‘hick’ or ‘hillbilly’.)

It’s easy to debate paganism because you’re not always looking over your shoulder at a community of contemporary believers.
Whenever I try to teach the ‘rise of Christianity’ with a group of undergraduates – did economics underlie it? the institutional
support of the emperor Constantine? – I’m always horribly aware that part of the group doesn’t really think it’s a question
worth asking. For them the obvious reason that Christians won out against the pagans was that their religion was true. Simple
as that.

In contrast, paganism is a teacher’s joy. You can dissect it as fiercely as you like. You can even claim that Zeus, Aphrodite
and co. did not actually exist, without fear of being arraigned on a charge of incitement to religious hatred.

Or so I thought. But last week a group of modern Athenians, dressed in ancient Greek costume (so they claimed), descended
on the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens, prayed to Zeus to bring about world peace and held a ceremony to celebrate the marriage
of Zeus and Hera. A few months before they had gained official recognition as a religious organisation from the Greek government.

At first sight not good news for me. But on closer inspection I needn’t have worried.

More crucial, though, is what’s missing from this religious revival. True, the worshippers last week poured a libation of
wine and incense over a copper tripod. But where was the animal sacrifice?

As almost everyone who studies ancient Greek religion insists, the key centre of the whole religious system was sacrifice:
it was the ritual of killing and sharing the animal that was, if anything, the ‘article of faith’ that defined the ancient
community of worshippers. And it was through sacrifice (rather than ecology) that ancient Greeks conceptualised their own
place in the world – distinct from animals on the one hand and the superhuman gods on the other.

Until these eager neo-pagans get real and slaughter a bull or two in central Athens, I shan’t worry that they have much to
do with ancient religion at all. At the moment, this is paganism lite.

Comments

JAMES

You sound like you rather hanker after a good old-fashioned hecatomb ...

And as for ‘Ellenais’, my favourite thing about the whole story was the alliteration from the Greek Orthodox spokesman, who
labelled them ‘a handful of miserable resuscitators of a degenerate dead religion who wish to return to the monstrous dark
delusions of the past’.

After a lot of the stuff with which the C-of-E comes out, I just like hearing clergymen who aren’t mealy-mouthed ...

POSTBLOGGER

Does Mary realise that she is paraphrasing a remark of G. K. Chesterton’s originally made, I suppose, about a century ago?
I can’t at the moment lay my hands on the original quotation, but he made a remark in one of his essays to the effect that
‘some people say that paganism is returning: when Parliament is opened by the sacrifice of a white bull on the steps of Westminster
Palace, then I shall believe that paganism has returned’.

DAVID KIRWAN

Where’s the loo?

20 March 2007

Imagine it. You’re sitting in the SCR – that’s the Fellows’ common room – after dinner. You casually ask for the Ladies. The
chances are that there will be a bit of a flap, while the equivalent of an AA route map and a compass is produced. It usually
involves going out into the courtyard, through the rain, into the next court, up a staircase three doors on the left – only
to discover a set of facilities which you know to be decidedly inferior to whatever is laid on for the men, and much less
‘convenient’ in almost every way.

Some colleges, to be fair, are a bit better organised; and my own, I confess, treats male needs with almost equal disdain.
But the general rule seems to be that women’s ablutions are lower down the pecking order than men’s.

I have never really understood why single sex loos are necessary, anyway, in a place like a university (King’s Cross station
late at night is probably another matter).

Why can’t we just share?

In my more paranoid moments, I strongly suspect that the answer has to do with men’s urinals being one of the few remaining
sites of exclusively male wheeling and dealing. Men will disappear for a pee in the middle of a meeting and come back, after
a cosy chat in the loo, with the business fixed.

Women can’t do that. Female toilets are strangely discreet places, for the simple reason that you never know who is locked
in the cubicles – invisible, but capable of overhearing every word that’s said. There can hardly be a woman in the land who
hasn’t learned her lesson on this one: bitching in colourful terms about a woman who two minutes later emerges to wash her
hands.

This was something that repeatedly got Ally McBeal into trouble in that wonderful old television series. As the joke used
to go: How do you know if you’re an Ally McBeal fan? Answer: If you look under the toilet stalls to see who’s using them before
you start talking.

Surely it would be easier, and an imaginative blow for female power and equality, just to make urinals a thing of the past
and put everyone in the same facilities. It’s already common enough in the USA (in fact, Ally’s loo was a ‘unisex’, as I recall).
It’s we Brits who have this illogical obsession with urinary segregation – to the extent that we are even known to make students
use separate toilets from the staff.

... So what did the Romans do? you’ll be wondering.

Well, domestic loos were something of a rarity. But the evidence from Pompeii suggests that, if they were present at all,
the usual location was in the kitchen. There was convenient water supply and Roman assumptions about hygiene were rather different
from our own. Better not to think too hard about the consequences.

Outside, and in places such as baths, they had an excellent line in splendid multi-seaters. Though whether these were also
mixed sex we don’t, I think, know.

I’d like to imagine that they were.

Comments

I don’t think you need to worry, Mary. It’s usually the case that men’s loos are a very silent place. Engaging a fellow pee-er
in conversation mid-stream is something of a taboo.

JAMES

James, I am delighted to hear it! Obviously, by definition, we cannot know the conventions of the loos of the other sex. But
I’m still not wholly convinced that they don’t exchange the odd ‘I really do think Dr X is the best candidate’ – return to
the meeting and hey presto!

MARY

I am not sure what Mary means about male privilege in Oxbridge colleges. In my first year rooms at Oxford, I had to cross
one quad for the loo and two for a bath.

OLIVER NICHOLSON

This reminds me of the famous riposte of Sir Winston’s: when asked by his successor PM at the loo of the House of Commons
why was he rather stand-offish, his reply was ‘because you will nationalise anything big you see’. So much for the wheeling
and dealing in the loo.

ARINDAM BANDYOPADHAYA

Anyone claiming it’s taboo for men to talk at urinals must not spend much time in pubs.

MAX

FRED O’HANLON