I was at first a reluctant blogger and, indeed, had a dim view of the blogosphere (full of dumbed-down journalism and ranting commenters, I thought). Asked to start a blog for The Times Literary Supplement in 2006, I agreed to give it a go, confidently expecting that, within a few weeks, it would all be quietly forgotten and I would be safely back to paper and print.
In fact, I was an almost instant convert. Far from dumbing down, the blog let me write about all kinds of intriguing corners of the classical world that would never make it into a newspaper. And it let me put out instant corrections to those silly stories about Greeks and Romans that journalists so love. “Cleopatra was ugly — shock”, “Socrates was gay”, “Cave of Romulus discovered”. Steady on, I could say, let’s have a closer look at the facts.
Then I discovered that I could use the blog to give people a glimpse of what academic life is really like, and dispel a few myths. No, we don’t spend the long vacation on the golf course or on the beach (unless we’re working on sea-shore beetles). It was also great to find that some sixth-formers were reading my account of an Oxbridge interview, rather than all the scare stories. No, we don’t set out to trip up state school kids with weird questions about whether they can imagine what it would be like to be a cow, or a light bulb.
And then there were the commenters. These turned out not to be the ranting crowd that I had feared, but a wonderful range of thoughtful, witty respondents from all over the world.
But why make a book of the blog? Aren’t they very different animals? Yes, they are. And something is bound to be lost in turning an online post into print (mostly the links taking readers on journeys through cyberspace). But something is gained, too. There is life in the old-fashioned book yet. You can flip, and browse more easily. And you can take it to places still largely out of bounds to laptops. I’m thinking of bed — and the loo.
timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life
THEY MAKE A DESERT AND CALL IT PEACE
I am usually suspicious of claims that understanding the history of the ancient world helps you to understand the history of our own. When people tell me that antiquity was so like today, I tend to object that it was very different in almost every respect. But two of the topics in Roman history that I teach have come to seem almost uncomfortably topical — and raw.
The first is the whole theme of “native” resistance to the Roman Empire. If you didn’t have the military resources, how could you stand up against the ancient world’s only superpower? Between the 3rd century BC and the 1st century AD, Rome extended its control over the world from the Sahara to Scotland. As with most empires, it was not without advantages for at least some of the conquered. I’m not just talking about consumer goods, literacy, water and drains (which didn’t impact on as much of the Roman world as we often imagine). Rome’s imperial strategy was first to incorporate the local elites and then spread citizenship, with all its advantages, throughout its territory. It was generosity, even if sprung from self-interest.That said, what could you do if you didn’t fancy being taken over by Rome ? The Roman legions represented an insuperable military force. They might occasionally be delayed but, while their power was at its height, they could not be defeated. Barbarians were not stupid. They did not waste their men’s lives in formal battle lines against the superpower. Instead, they did what the disadvantaged will always do against overwhelming military odds: they ignored the rules of war and resorted to guerrilla tactics, trickery and terrorism.
Much of this was ghastly and cruel. Our image of plucky little Asterix with his Boy Scout-like japes against the Roman occupation is about as true to life as a cartoon strip would be that made suicide bombing seem like fun. Boudicca’s scythed chariots (if they existed) were the ancient equivalent of car bombs. In terrorising the occupying forces, she was said to have had the breasts slashed off the Roman civilian women and sewn into their mouths. Roman writers were outraged at barbarians’ tactics in war, decried their illegal weapons and their flouting of military law (“terrorist” sometimes captures the Roman sense of the Latin word barbarus better than the more obvious “barbarian”). But in the face of invincible imperialism, they must have felt they were using the only option they had. Does it sound familiar?
My second teaching topic is the account by the Roman historian Tacitus of the career of his father-in-law, Agricola, who was governor of Britain in the late 1st century and extended Roman power north into Scotland. On one occasion, the barbarians were foolish enough to risk a pitched battle — and, just before it, Tacitus puts into the mouth of the British leader, Calgacus, a rousing speech denouncing not only Roman rule but the corruption of language that follows imperial domination. Slaughter and robbery go under the name of “power”. And, in a now famous phrase, he says: “They make a desert and call it peace.” This is often treated, and quoted, as a barbarian denunciation of Roman rule. It is nothing of the sort. No real words of Calgacus or of any British “barbarians” have survived. As with many imperial powers, the most acute critiques often came from within the Roman system. This is an analysis by Tacitus himself, a leading member of the Roman elite, observing the consequences of Roman expansion and daring to put himself into the place of the conquered. As such, it makes an even more appropriate message for us. Whatever forms our “deserts” take — whether it is the poppy fields of Afghanistan or the ruins that will be left of Beirut when Israel and Hezbollah (and our own culpable inactivity) have finished — we are still making them and calling them “peace”.
WHAT DID THE ROMANS WEAR UNDER THEIR TOGAS?
If you teach at Oxford or Cambridge, you get used to the regular bursts of outrage about “the Oxbridge interview”. I posted a few months back about the myth that we are all a load of upper-class twits who use the interview to pick students just like ourselves. Wrong on both counts.
Just recently, a different variant was doing the rounds: the one about all those weird, donnish and — this is the subtext — unfair questions we ask at the interviews. Just to make sure the poor squirming candidate never feels at ease. A whole list of them were reeled off in the press and even on the Today programme. “What percentage of the world’s water is contained in a cow?” (veterinary medicine, Cambridge). “Are you cool?” (philosophy, politics and economics, Oxford). “Why can’t you light a candle in a spaceship?” (physics, Oxford). The Evening Standard even dredged up some celebs to have a go at answering them — not very well. What did not get headlined was that the survey that had brought these questions to light had been commissioned, and then hyped, by a company that specialises in helping potential students prepare for their Oxbridge interview — for a fee. There’s nothing like a bit of media panic to send frightened kids (and their parents) rushing off with their chequebooks to get some “specialist” advice. My thoughts on this will, I hope, be reassuring. More than that, they are free. The first thing that any student going to an interview needs to remember is that we want to let people in, not keep them out. Of course, it may not feel like that to the kid on the receiving end. And, of course, we have many more applicants than there are places. Not everyone can be successful. That said, we are trying to get each candidate to show themselves at their very best. We want to see how good they are, not how bad.
Sometimes this takes surprising forms, as with those odd questions. Everyone who conducts these interviews will tell you that over-preparation is as damaging to a candidate’s chances as under-preparation. I have often sat and listened to some hopeful reeling off, unstoppably, a prepared speech on the perfection of the Virgilian hexameter or why the Spartans won the Peloponnesian War. Bowling them a googly (“So what do you think the Romans wore under their togas?”) is sometimes the only way of throwing them a lifeline — of giving them the opportunity to show that they can think independently, not only from the prepared script.
So if I was giving one piece of advice to those preparing for an interview in my subject? Much cheaper than being professionally “groomed” — I would go out to buy (or borrow) a book about any aspect of the ancient world that interests you and one that is not a mainline part of your school syllabus, or takes you beyond it. Read it; know its title (you’d be surprised how many interviewees can remember only the colour of the dust jacket of their favourite reading matter); and be prepared to talk about it if you are asked — but no prepared speeches, remember.
Happily, this is not entirely inconsistent with another aspect of the interview survey that did not get so much media coverage. Apparently almost 40 per cent of the philosophy candidates who had read Mill’s Utilitarianism got a place ... as well as the impressive 75 per cent of all candidates (for any subject, apparently) who regularly read The Economist.
So please don’t wastetime trying to find out what Romans did wear under their togas. Anyway, tempted as I have been, I have never asked the question. In fact, I don’t think we know the answer. But if I were to ask it, the point of the question (apart from stopping the prepared script) would be to see if the candidate could begin to think through the limits of our ignorance about antiquity, as well as imagine how you might go about filling in the gaps. It wouldn’t be a “trick” at all.
SEX IN THE SCULPTURE GARDEN
The traces were undeniable. We were peering at one of the most famous Roman portrait sculptures in the world, discussing with art-historical intensity the provenance, the marble and the tooling.
Then someone had the nerve to point out that on its cheek and its chin were the faint but clear marks of two bright-red lipstick kisses. The sculpture in question was the colossal head, known as the Mondragone Head, of Antinous, the young lover of the emperor Hadrian who died mysteriously in AD130 after falling into the river Nile. So distraught was the bereaved emperor, he flooded the Roman world with statues of his beloved, made him a god and named a city after him. There are more surviving statues of Antinous than of almost any other character in antiquity. They all share the same sultry sensuousness and the luscious pouting lips that characterise the Mondragone. His usual home is in the Louvre, where he ended up in 1808, courtesy of Napoleon. But we were in Leeds, where he has come to be star of a show at the Henry Moore Institute. This drew together 14 of the many Antinous images, a little gallery of beautiful boys who have travelled from Dresden, Athens, Rome, Cambridge and elsewhere. One of the show’s themes was the question of what makes a statue, or a body, desirable. What is it to “want” a work of art? The erotic charm of sculpture has a long literary history. In the 2nd century, the Greek satirist Lucian told of one young obsessive who contrived to get locked up at night with Praxiteles’ statue of Aphrodite at Cnidus. The young man went mad; but the indelible stain on the statue’s thigh was proof of what had gone on. Oscar Wilde picked up the theme in his Charmides, an engaging piece of doggerel in which the hero smuggles himself into the Parthenon and “paddles” up to Athena’s statue.
I had never quite imagined that this was anything other than a literary conceit. But the evidence was before my eyes. At some point between Paris and its unpacking at the Henry Moore, some latter-day Hadrian — man or woman — had given it a couple of real red smackers. In jest, in irony or in passion, we shall probably never know. It couldn’t have happened to a more appropriate work of art than this surrogate of imperial desire. Presumably it’s much what the emperor Hadrian had in mind.
WHERE’S THE LOO?
Most Cambridge colleges “went mixed” some 20 years ago. But they still preserve unexpected corners of male power and privilege. None of these corners is more irritating than the location of the female loos. Imagine it. You’re sitting in the SCR — that’s the Fellows’ common room — after dinner. You 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 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 . There can hardly be a woman who hasn’t learnt 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 the 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 US. 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 a 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.
© Mary Beard, 2009 Extracted from It’s a Don’s Life by Mary Beard, published by Profile Books, £8.99. To buy it for £8.54 call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
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