Boris

It’s not often that someone’s first name is also their nickname, but Boris Johnson has managed to reach that level of fame. The new Mayor of London (God help us) has always been very keen on Classics - I think he’s still the president of the Joint Association of Classics Teachers. His dad said last week that people who are good at Greek and Latin can do anything, including sort out London. My lecturers tend to complain that it’s only a buffoon who’s promoting Classics in the papers… but at least it’s someone, I suppose.

The BBC has run quite a funny article entitled What can Boris learn from the classics?. I rather like their summary: 1) watch your back, 2) watch what you say (not, let’s say, what Boris has been known for up to this point), 3) pretend to be stupid (much more what Boris is known for), 4) watch out for biographers, 5) buildings make a good legacy. Perhaps a rather random collection, but there you go!

This is the best story they’ve got:

But the masters of classical pithiness were the Spartans of Greece. It is said Philip of Macedon once sent a hostile message to the Spartans saying something along the lines of “if I bring my army down to Sparta, I will knock down the walls and kill everybody”. The Spartan oligarchs reportedly sent back the one-word reply “if”.

Those Spartans, eh?

(As an aside, why on earth does the first commenter say this article is stupid because Boris went to Oxford, not “Oxbridge”? That’s a fairly standard abbreviation, surely?)

 

Monstrum

Lack of regular blogging is a result of revision eating all my time… only three weeks to go!

But in the midst of all the stress, interesting things definitely emerge. I wanted to share this article with you, on disability in the ancient world. I stumbled across it through a strange sequence of events that have nothing to do with revision - my boyfriend is thinking of doing something on 1968 for his dissertation next year, so he bought the New Statesman which was having an anniversary edition, and I noticed that Victoria Brignell is one of their online columnists. I knew the name immediately - she was the daughter of my RE teacher, and went to my school about ten years before me. I knew she’d done Classics at Cambridge (like me) and then went on to become a journalist, so seeing something she’d written was quite exciting. Do check it out.

I find this particularly interesting:

We can tell a lot about a culture’s values by the language it uses. Neither the Greeks or the Romans had a word equivalent to ‘disabled’ but the term that they often use is ‘teras’ (for the Greeks) and ‘monstrum’ (for the Romans). These are the same words they use to describe mythological monsters, such as the Gorgon Medusa. The Latin ‘mutus’ referred to both somebody who couldn’t speak and someone who is stupid. No one could accuse the Roman of being too politically correct, as you can see.

…

Roman religion also encouraged parents to ‘expose’ their offspring. Just as physical fitness and health were believed to be signs of the gods’ favour, so disability was a mark of the gods’ displeasure. For this reason, a disabled child was often seen as a form of divine punishment upon its parents. Romans tended to interpret unusual natural occurrences as signs of impending disaster and this increased their suspicion of disabled people. Abnormal births were an indication that a catastrophe might be around the corner. It’s revealing that the noun ‘monstrum’ is related to the verb ‘monere’ meaning ‘to warn’.

Beneath the article, someone has commented “What a fantastic article and the first time I’ve heard a good argument for learning Latin!”.

Revising ancient warfare, I discovered that - if you’ve seen 300, you’ll know what I’m talking about - the thing about each Spartan warrior in a phalanx protecting the one to his left with his shield is probably wrong. Recent experimental archaeology (an excellent profession, where they make stuff like armour the ancient way, put it on and try to fight someone) suggests that the hoplite phalanx was more spaced out than is usually thought, simply because of the room you need to use a sword effectively. So the character who betrays them because he’s too disabled to fight needn’t have after all! (And that bit was made up for the film anyway - traditionally, they were betrayed by a local.)

 

Choices

Technical problems are all fixed, and the internet has returned to my room! Whether this is actually a good thing for my revision schedule remains to be seen…

Last week we had to choose our options for the momentously named Part II - I was so excited about it. As always (A levels, degree, specialisation within degree…) I love finding out what the people around me are interested in. In any case, I’ve gone for a very Philology and Linguistics based Part II - one paper on Historical Linguistics, one on Latin/Greek bilingualism in the Roman Empire (very fashionable topic, I’m told) and one interdisciplinary on Death. This is what I’m most excited about, I think, because the lecturers were so energetic - but it looks like it’s going to be a very popular course.

In honour of Paper X1: Death, then, here are some quotes from Seneca the Younger’s letters, which I was revising yesterday (the translation is from this book, which I recommend).

“I shall die” : What you mean is this -  I shall cease to be liable to illness, I shall cease to be liable to bonds, I shall cease to be liable to death… Every day we die, for every day part of our life is lost… the final hour when we actually die does not alone bring our death but simply completes the process. (Letter 24)

“So,” I said, “is death making all these trials of me? Let him: I made trial of him long ago.” “When?” you ask. Before I was born. Death is non-existence. I already know what it is like, and it will be the same after me as it was before me. If there is any torment in the after state in must have been present in the state before we came to birth; yet we felt no distress then. I ask you, wouldn’t you call anyone an utter idiot who thought that a lamp was worse off when it was extinguished than before it was lit? We too are lit and extinguished. (Letter 54)

Puts exams in perspective a bit… some find it all rather morbid, but I find it very comforting. Maybe I’ve watched a bit too much Six Feet Under. All the same, I think that my Desert Island Discs book would be a massive book of Seneca the Younger’s complete works. Maybe even in Latin - that would take me a good few years.

 

Technical difficulties…

Really frustrated that I haven’t been able to post for the last few weeks - I’m back at college and the internet in my room is completely broken. I’m hoping it’ll be fixed in the next couple of days… but then, that is also what I was promised last Tuesday. Ah well, I’ll get there!

I was amused by Mary Beard’s post about the new doors at the Classics faculty - felt it was bizarre that people from around the world were commenting on doors I use most days. Having seen them, I don’t think they’re really ugly; but also, I can’t really remember how they look different from the previous doors. Ah well. They do, however, make opening the door manually really difficult.

Also annoyed at college internet for making me miss the Pompeii episode of Dr Who. I saw about the first twelve minutes. Not actually the internet’s fault, as I could have remembered to watch it when it was on real TV. Anyone see it?

I’ve also been very pleased in the last few days to realise that Amazon booksellers use the fact that postage is set at a flat £2.75 for books to charge just 1p for all Very Short Introductions. I’m planning to buy up the Classical ones and learn them off by heart for my exams. The first one to arrive, and very much recommended (as is the speedy bookseller Speedy Tortoise) is “A Very Short Introduction to Ancient Warfare”. May post a review when my internet works - it’s not at all how it sounds.

 

The value of teachers

Just read this on the BBC website. The irritatingly-named “credit crunch” is going to affect us all, I think - and if it goes on for long, then I worry about how people of my generation will be able to buy a house at all, especially as many of us are setting out into the adult world already weighed down by the student debt we were so encouraged to take on.

What surprised me more about this article, though, was not that hardship grants to teachers have increased recently, nor that they have risen by 70% in the first three months of this year. What I find incredible is that we need a charitable foundation to keep teachers afloat. Surely it’s just bizarre that a country like the UK can value its teachers so little? I know this is true of many public-sector workers - nursing springs to mind as a forever underpaid job. But these are people who all have a minimum of four years at university (while nursing did not used to require a degree) - in the future, that will be four years of student debt. Can the government really continue to allow teachers, and everyone else on public salaries, to struggle to afford the cost of living?

I’m used to people saying that Classics teachers are unnecessary, or a luxury, or not really for the public sector. It’s valued hugely by some, and not at all by plenty of others. But it seems that even the “core” subject teachers are not being treated as they should be - as intelligent graduates, with skills they could easily take elsewhere.

 

What to do?

I realise I’m starting most of my posts with questions at the moment, but that’s sort of how I feel. Not only am I packing to go back into scary scary exam term, but there’s the business of summer jobs to sort out. And then what to do next year. And then what to do when I graduate. Argh.

In all this uncertainty, I’ve developed quite a love of the Cambridge Careers Service. It has excellent vacancy listings, which is the part I like. It’s general advice is, well, very general - I fear it wouldn’t be much help to people in a genuine career crisis. But then maybe that’s what the face-to-face service is for.

I also wish their subject-specific section had Classics. There’s only English, Maths, Music and History - are these perhaps the students with the least direction in their lives? The History section is moderately useful for ideas, I suppose. Gives a nice list of skills which a Cambridge degree gives you, for use on CVs. They should probably update their “destinations of History graduates” - the latest ones are from 2001.

Ah well. Maybe I should stop this general moaning now - it’s not even really Classics-based. It’s just one of those subjects where people tell you that you can do anything you want when you leave - which sometimes feels like no help at all!

Onward to exams.

 

Who?

Ok, not normally that into Dr Who, but may have to watch Saturday’s episode, “The Fires of Pompeii”, at 6.45pm. Apparently, “Donna wants to warn Pompeii’s citizens that they are in immediate peril from Mount Vesuvius, while the Doctor is adamant - he doesn’t interfere with the course of history”. Good good. And, you know, David Tennant is pretty cool.

My non-British friends should all catch this on BBC iplayer - I expect I’ll be doing the same, from Cambridge. It’ll be good for a laugh at the very least. No one listed as playing Pliny the Elder/Younger, but you can’t have everything.

 

Roman politics

Silvio Berlusconi has been boasting about the quality of his Latin - I’m pleased that the BBC thought this was worth an article! He was asked the typical question about which historical figure he would most like to meet, and chose Julius Caesar.

Anyone else thought about this question? From the ancient world, I think Seneca (the younger) would be a good choice. Not only a great and varied writer, but a really complex person - a Stoic philosopher who believed in the simple life, while being a central advisor in Nero’s opulent court. I’ve been doing his tragedies this year, and I’d really love to get to know the man who wrote those tortured works. I’d love to hear everyone else’s historical dinner party guests.

Berlusconi evened out the amount of respect he deserves, though, by saying this. Ah well.

 

Summer

It’s that time of year when we all start avoiding revision by a) applying for jobs and b) planning a holiday. I thought I might not have anyone to go with, because so many people have long internships and things, but I’ve lucked out - two of my friends want to go the exact place I do: Tunisia.

With eight World Heritage sites, quite a few of them Rome-related, I didn’t realise just how rich in ancient culture Tunisia was. I’m so excited.

Ancient Carthage is actually pretty much a suburb of the modern capital, Tunis. Always nice when ruins are easy to get to!

Here’s some Roman ruins…

And even more excitingly, the ruins of Punic buildings.

The ruins at Dougga looks even better.

This is going to be such a great experience, with two amazing friends. We will be going during Ramadan, though, which I hope isn’t going to be to inconvenient. Now I need to go and find those travel grant forms from college…

 

Grammar police

I used to be a real freak about grammar (I enjoyed the approval I got from my GCSE English teacher), but since doing a lot of specialising in Linguistics, I’ve realised how made up it all is. Mostly I still do stick to the “correct” version, especially in essays and formal writing, if only to avoid the scorn of supervisors/potential employers. But I no longer believe that pedantry should have some kind of privileged status.

I was reminded of all this by Language Hat discussing an article on National Grammar Day, and replies to that article by both him and Z.D. Smith. Language Hat refers to a great bit of Smith’s reply that I just have to reproduce here:

“Sometimes it makes a body really want to rap these critics on the head; don’t you see that people are speaking here? Do you really imagine that people who say ‘between you and I’ don’t have anything better to do with their words than see that they conform to some superficial notion of grammar? Can you allow in your worldview the possibility that the greengrocer or urban youth has his own sense of language, and is actively wielding it, rather than simply trying and failing to follow all the rules?”

Very true.

One of the greatest things I have learned at university is that language change is almost always bottom-up: all the Romance languages would still be Latin if it wasn’t for the “incorrect” speech variations of the lower classes.

A great example from English is a change in the passive voice system around the 17th century. Instead of saying “I saw a body being carried,” Samuel Pepys writes in his diary “I saw a body carrying.” Similarly, one would say “my house is painting” rather than “my house is being painted.” Seems madly unclear to us - but this was the standard construction. When the new (”being”) construction came into use by the lower classes, grammarians were up in arms. They said it was unclear, incorrect, degenerate… any number of things. But changes happen, and they are neither good nor bad - they are just change.

 

Pushy parents

Not much time for blogging of late - I’ve been having interviews for summer jobs, which I think have been going well!

A friend mentioned an article in the Telegraph to me - it mentions one Lucius Orbilius Pupillus, who apparently “identified pushy parents as an occupational hazard in the classrooms of ancient Rome”. Now, I can’t work out where this piece of info has come from! The most complete account of Orbilius I can find is on the Latin version of Wikipedia (Vikipaedia), but that gives no hint that we actually have any of his writings. Neither does it seem to say that anyone mentions him being against pushy parenting.

This is when I wish newspaper articles had footnotes…

 

What a good hat

I’ve falled slightly in love with Language Hat. I’m going to end up studying an awful lot of Classical linguistics next year (making my options in a few weeks!), and it’s so nice to stumble across a blog on exactly the kind of thing which fascinates me most.

The first thing I read there was about the Indo-Europeans - this is something I will be doing a whole paper on next year. Basically, comparative historical linguistics involves comparing the Indo-European languages of the world (from Scandinavia to India) in such a way that we can reconstruct the “original” language which spread and changed, creating the languages we know today.

So, for example, in the easiest case, every single Indo-European language has a word for “mother” which begins with the letter m - so we reconstruct a word beginning with *m (the asterisk is for hypothetical reconstruction) in the Proto-Indo-European language. Obviously, it gets a lot more complicated than that, but that’s the basic idea.

People believe in the concreteness of this to varying degrees. Some think reconstructing whole words and morphologies is just a handy code which helps us to understand how language develops; others think we can reconstruct a real language which real people once spoke, albeit with some inevitable mistakes.

I don’t know all that much about it as yet, but I think I lean more towards the realist point of view. I think it throws up some really interesting possibilities, more so than if it is entirely hypothetical. For example, there’s a “native” word for things like snow and pine tree, but not for olive tree. This kind of thing has let people guess the original location of the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

All the same, Language Hat’s news of a book on the use of horses by the Proto-Indo-Europeans seems a bit far-fetched for me. I guess I’d have to read it to really find out for sure. But as much as we can know about their language, in-depth study of their culture seems to be a bit beyond us for the moment.

 

Cycladic statues

I was reading this on so-called “orphaned” artifacts today, and it made me remember how much I fell in love with Cycladic art when I was trawling round museums in Greece. Now, I know next to nothing about art - particularly ancient art - but I really want some of these for my room.

No  one really knows if they’re  supposed to represent goddesses or women or what, but I think they’re great - so evocative, somehow. And so modern-looking, I think. Even the process was more scientific than you might think: their proportions were probably carefully planned with a pair of compasses. I love when something 5000 years old can really jump out at you and surprise you. It makes me want to meet these people who we know so little about and understand their culture. Mysterious female statues tend to get the response “fertility cult” - but is that what they’re for? Did these people worship the female form? Or is their image of their goddess? Or is it something else entirely?

Again, though, I might be putting an anachronistic spin on things. Research shows that these statues would have been painted (like Classical Greek statues), which rather diminishes their status as a realisation of an ultra-modern vision of clean lines and simplicity. But I find them beautiful all the same.

 

Online democracy

I’m a bit annoyed today, having been called a fascist and undemocratic - all for deleting comments from my blog.

The main problem has been my post on Macedonia. It was daft of me, of course, not to realise that something I saw as an academic debate has caused a lot of strong feelings on both sides. I was pleased, though, to get well-thought-out posts supporting both Greece and the Republic of Macedonia. I deleted quite a few posts which were racially abusive, because that’s not the kind of thing I want to be seen to approve of. (And, frankly, it is illegal in this country to abuse people on the basis of race or religion.)

Sadly, I wasn’t called a fascist for deleting a racist post - that would have been excellent irony. Rather, it was for deleting the inane comments of one guy who - having posted something which I approved - came back the next day and the day after that merely to say “Why hasn’t anyone replied to my post yet???”. (I hadn’t deleted the responses - there hadn’t been any. Not that many people read this every day!) When I started deleting these one-liners, he began to insult and threaten me. His defense was that it was undemocratic of me to have done this.

Now, I don’t know when this habit started, but it annoys me hugely - people name-drop “democracy” to support any ridiculous thing they feel like doing, including posting pointless, illiterate comments on a website. What does that even mean? There’s no “ruling” going on here; nor do I claim somehow to post only the majority opinion. So, is “undemocratic” just a sort of general insult, thrown at those who prevent people doing exactly what they feel like every minute of the day? What a poor, watered-down term it has become, then.

Just to make this post at least partly classical: it also annoys me when people hark back to the classical origins of their democracy. Firstly, the Athenians would have condemned almost all modern “democracies” as elected oligarchies, ruled by a wealthy few. Elections always favour the rich, nowhere more so than in America, where candidates throw huge amounts of their own money into seemingly endless campaigns. The Athenians knew this, and so disapproved of election as undemocratic.

Secondly, most of the famous Greeks whose works we read were against democracy in any case. Unsurprisingly, it was the poor majority who were most in favour of the system which allowed them power. Plato, in particular, couldn’t understand why ruling was the only occupation for which men were not expected to be trained. That he would probably approve of modern democracies for their level of specialism shows just how much the word has changed in meaning over all that time.

I’ve discovered there’s no real definition of what “democracy” means - it’s more a term that countries use of themselves to try to gain a certain respectability, and then we all have to find our own various criteria with which to measure them. This map illustrates pretty well that it’s by no means a black-and-white classification. As an outsider, I often find the United States hideously undemocratic, but I would certainly admit that there are many worse places.

Even if we can’t decide what it means exactly, democratic/undemocratic shouldn’t be reduced to the level of a general term for praise or blame - if it is, then surely it can’t still be something meaningful for people. I’d heard that blogging was supposed to be this new, “democratic” form of communication - but will anyone actually take it seriously for long if it’s so much of it is so mindless and petty?

Now I shall go to bed, steeling myself for the accusations of fascism which are bound to come my way…

 

There’s always time for random Googling

So, we’ve had our first snowfall of the year around here - a white Easter rather than a white Christmas, but never mind. In honour of the weather, I did a quick Google of “Latin” and “snow” and came up with a few interesting things:

“A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow.” George Bernard Shaw; full quote is here. He’s being mean about Latin, but a nice quotation all the same.

“Niguat, niguat, niguat.” - an excellent use of the jussive subjunctive. Full lyrics here.

The Romans had a kind of ice cream made of snow (but mixed with fruit and honey rather than with milk), but no one knows quite how they came up with this idea. Particularly as it involved going up a mountain to get the snow in the first place! I’m not sure where that site gets its story - Suetonius maybe?