Insula Thula

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.

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.

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…

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?

I’ve woken up this morning with a strangely strong allergic reaction to something or other - this happened to me once before, and we never did find out what it was that caused it. But it got me thinking - did the ancients have allergic reactions?

Unfortunately, the only website which refers to the history of allergies is this one (others on the same thing are copied or paraphrased from here), which doesn’t state its references at all. It makes reference to a “King Menses of Egypt” (should actually be Menes) who died of an insect sting, and Britannicus who was allergic to horses. I can’t find a source for either of these statements, though the one about Britannicus seems to be quoting from somewhere. Richard III was, apparently, allergic to strawberries according to Thomas More - but again, I’ve no idea if this is true.

The next reference, I know is inaccurate. It says that Lucretius refers to allergies, saying “what is food for some may be fierce poisons for others”. I had a go at checking this, which made much easier by the fact that Lucretius only wrote the De Rerum Natura, and only really talks about food and taste in one section of Book 4.  What they are referring to is nothing to do with allergies at all. It reads (in the Loeb translation by W.H.D. Rouse and revised by M.F. Smith) as follows:

Next I will explain and enable us to see how different food is suited to different creatures, and why what is sour and bitter for some may yet seem very delicious to others. Indeed, there is so great a difference and distinction in these things that what is food to some creatures, is to others rank poison. Thus there is even a serpent, which when touched by man’s spittle perishes and gnaws itself to death. Besides, hellebore is rank poison to us, but given to goats and quails makes them fat. (4.633-641)

So, it seems allergies really weren’t mentioned much until the nineteenth century. In a way, that’s to be expected - if it were mild, like a rash, then it would be ignored; if someone went into anaphylactic shock, then it would just be another sudden death in the days when disease was mysterious. But it seems strange to me that things which might be noticeable, such as an allergy to pepper or a particular animal, would go so unmentioned.

Perhaps it is as modern a disease as it always seems to be, with incidence rates rising even in the last five years. Any references to the contrary would be appreciated. After all, if allergies came to be recognised in the nineteenth century, then I’m sure they were going on before that.

News came this week that Cambridge intend to remove the requirement for applicants in all subjects to have studied a modern foreign language to GCSE standard. This is in response to a strange situation which arose a few years ago: until recently, all pupils were required to study a foreign language from age 11-16 by law, so Cambridge’s requirement didn’t matter at all. But around 2004 (I’m not sure of the exact date), the requirement to study a language GCSE was dropped by the government - some say cynically, to improve results by marginalising the “hard” subjects.

After pupils were no longer required to study languages, a great number, of course, stopped doing so. Around half of pupils now take a language GCSE, which still makes them one of the most popular optional subjects, along with History and Art. Cambridge changed its website to say that it would consider students without a language if they had exceptional circumstances - but UK students did not qualify for this, as schools were still required to offer languages. (By the way, the BBC’s statistic that “only 17% of state schools offer” languages at GCSE must be wrong - I think they mean only 17% of state schools require all their students to take a language GCSE. Languages are still an entitlement which schools are required to offer, and they get in trouble when they don’t.)

The situation, then, was that future physicists would have to know at the age of 14, when they chose their GCSEs, that some top universities require a foreign language. Now, I was an extremely forward-thinking 14-year-old, but I doubt most would be looking in detail at the Cambridge entrace requirements at that age, even me. Access was limited to those who were lucky or those whose schools made them study a language anyway.

Mary Beard has brought up how similar the situation is to “the Greek question” - a hundred-year-old argument over whether Cambridge should require ancient Greek for all subjects (and then, in the 1960s, whether Latin should be required). Now, the removal of Latin and Greek from the university entrance requirements saw their serious decline in schools in response - as one Classics teacher explained to me, you’d always have your Oxbridge class, even if no one else wanted to take it. Languages might well go the same way - but then, say others, it is not Cambridge’s job to police what the school curriculum does, nor can it.

Plenty of people were shocked when the requirement to learn languages was removed from the 14-16 age group. In our already monoglot country, even more pupils were turning away from any competence in a foreign language. The government piloted entitlement to languages in primary schools (though requirements for this are very low, and more often than not it seems to be taught by the French lady who lives across the road rather than by a trained teacher).

From my own experience and talking to modern language teachers, I can’t say that removing the requirement was a bad thing. My mum, a French and Spanish teacher, has said that removing the requirement may well save the subject. After all, history is non-compulsory, and we don’t see that dying out. Other language teachers I have worked with, at a much tougher school than my mum’s, brought up the madness of forcing children who can barely read to spend an hour a week on “Core French” (ie, with no thought of putting them in for a GCSE) rather than letting them work on their English or maths in that time.

But those are not, of course, the students Cambridge is worried about. They are worried that intelligent 14-year-olds will inadvertantly make choices which cut them off from the best education - and I think it is right that they drop the requirement. Some say that it is a move to meet their government Access targets: maybe so, but what is so wrong in that? All this changes is that people, predominantly from state schools, who would have got in  otherwise are not going to be kept out on a technicality. Promotion of the university language classes could be better, and languages in schools could be better - but as much as it harmed Classics in schools, I don’t think the entrance requirements to Cambridge are the place to try to improve on the Anglocentricity of our culture.

I’d like to advertise my love of the computer programme Diogenes, which I think is completely genius. It’s completely free, available on the Durham University website, and allows you to search all of Latin and Greek literature for phrases and words; once you have the bit you want, you can search other occurences of any word and its definition. It makes my Latin homework so quick, and I know I’m going to use it all the time for revising my set texts.

You have to have a CD of all the literature in order to use it - if you’re at Cambridge, someone in the department should be able to get hold of this for you. It does end up slightly depressing, though, as all of Latin literature is around 10mb. How much information are we going to leave behind for the future? How long is it going to take them to sort through it all?

As it’s the end of term, I’ve been indulging in the Series 2 box set of Rome I got for Christmas. I’m sure you can imagine how much I love this programme. It takes me back to Upper Sixth Latin lessons on a Thursday morning, when we would update our tally of who had slept with the most people based on the previous night’s episode (poor old Octavia came out top, I think).

There are many reasons why I like it so much - even its inaccuracies are well-though-out, I find. And after all, we can’t prove that some of these things didn’t happen. But I was thinking the other day as Cicero met his end that David Bamber’s portrayal of the mighty man is absolutely excellent.

It’s the kind of thing they ask you at university a lot - why did Cicero, that powerful and intelligent politician, not make it through the end of the republic? Why did was he neither a triumvir nor an assassin of Caesar? Rome provides plenty of answers, I think.

David Bamber’s Cicero is an intelligent, influential man - a bit slimy, perhaps, but even that fits. The key thing is that he is a man of words: he makes and breaks deals, he exercises influence in the Senate, he writes letters. He is decidedly not a military man. Rome’s Cicero may seem spineless, but gradually that is just how he would have appeared beside the likes of Pompey, Caesar, Antony and Octavian, all equipped with armies. He is a tragic figure, who realises too late that the words he has so perfected over the years are no longer enough to keep power and order. In his last few episodes, he struggles to make the alliances which will keep him alive, but without the military might to back him up, he is doomed. I think it’s absolutely spot on - it’s a characterisation which reads between the lines of Cicero’s (sometimes arrogant) self-portrayal and sums up exactly why someone like him could not have been a Caesar.

I was trying to work out the other day what is going on with the Macedonian naming dispute. I remember last year when I went to Greece that the guidebook said never to mention the Republic of Macedonia to a Greek person under any circumstances, and I couldn’t understand what made them so angry. Now, it seems, Greece will veto Macedonian accession to the EU and NATO if it doesn’t change its name.

I remember a lecturer of mine saying that ancient Macedonia is mostly in the Greek province of Macedonia, but a little bit in the Republic of Macedonia. I’ve been looking through maps on Wikipedia, and I really can’t make head nor tail of it. First of all - which “ancient Macedonia” are we talking about? The kingdom of Philip of Macedon? Before or after he invaded Greece? Or the Roman province of Macedonia? Or the satrapy of Macedonia? All of these are very different in size - the Roman province, for example, looks massive. Then there’s also, apparently, a loosely-defined “geographical area of Macedonia” (as though it were, say, the Balkans), which is different again.

My opinion, really, is that Greece should calm down. They say that the name shows that Macedonia has plans to invade Greek territory - in response, Macedonia have changed their constitution to specify no territorial aspiration against any neighbour; they have also changed their flag in order to try to placate Greece. Greece, however, claims that the slavic Macedonia are making claims to another country’s cultural heritage to which they have no right.

Now, it may just be me, but I think that Greece has an awful lot more cultural heritage available than Macedonia - can they not share a little bit? All Macedonia seems to have left is a name which connects them with a glorious figure in history, and I don’t think there’s anything really threatening in that.

From a Classics point of view, I find it quite funny that Greece is so insistent that Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great were Greek historical figures, and are part of the Greek cultural history. Although the ancient Macedonians spoke a form of Greek, they were not considered truly Greek by other Greek-speakers. Philip himself was called a philhellene by the Athenians, that is, a foreign lover of Greekness. When he took over the other states and cities, he was treated as a foreign invading power, not a great kind uniting the Greek peoples. Now that he is a great figure of history, of course, Greece won’t share him with anyone else.

Edited 04/04/08: I’ve closed comments on this post now, because sorting through the abusive comments was getting pretty annoying. My apologies to those who have sensible input to make - please let me know if you write about it elsewhere.

Some beautiful images have just been released to the public as the Italian authorities have finished their fifty-year restoration of the house of the emperor Augustus, overlooking the Forum.

The colours are absolutely beautiful - I love the perspective in this trompe l’oeil particularly, made to look like a theatre (although what’s up with the people in the boxes?).

We do not associate the Classical world with painting at all, I think - only with statues (which would themselves have been painted rather than the pure, white marble we’re used to). Sometimes in texts, authors talk about paintings, and I always feel rather surprised - as though painting should only have been invented in the mediaeval period, and beautiful perspective like that above only after the Renaissance. I suppose the whole point of the Renaissance is that ancient knowledge is rediscovered, but I always forget about that.

The frescoes found at the house of Augustus are absolutely beautiful - but still nothing, I think, to those at the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii (shown below), which is so rich and has wonderfully lifelike human figures.

There is one particular image from the Villa of Mysteries which I have a detail from on the front of my Penguin copy of Seneca, and I find it so evocative and weirdly modern that I was suprised it was from Pompeii at all.

The woman on the left is on my book. It’s the sort of geometricness of her body which seems so modern to me, and it’s a great image for the tragedies of Seneca.

More pictures of Augustus’ house here.

I’ve been so busy with a play I’m producing this week that I haven’t had much blogging time. I’d like to share another Cavafy poem with you, which I think is one of his most famous.

Waiting for the Barbarians

I was reading Plutarch’s Advice on Marriage (Γαμικά παραγγέλματα) today, which is a really interesting text. It’s addressed to a bridge and groom on their wedding day as a philosophy of marriage. On one level, it assumes a high level of female education - he writes to them both as people who have been brought up on philosophy, not just the husband. It also encourages the further education of women after they are married.

It’s not quite as radical as it sounds, though. Any philosophy a wife learns, it says, must come to her through her husband; otherwise, her ideas will be ugly and misshapen. Other advice is what you might expect, I suppose: husband and wife should decide things jointly but the final decision is the husband’s; women should not have friends of their own but share their husband’s friends; women should only really be visible to the world in the presence of their husband. Some of it is advanced for its time, in that it sees marriage as a partnership, albeit a very unequal one, where the wife has more than just childbearing to bring to the relationship. Women are spoken of as being able to take part in philosophy, and the very first piece of advice is about the pleasure which comes from a wife’s words.

My favourite piece of advice, though, says “most women will stay inside if you take away their shoes”. Can’t argue with that!

I had a great experience a few weeks ago when I was taking some sixth formers around Cambridge town centre. One of them (a prospective English student) got very keen on the maze-like Heffers bookshop and we lost her in there for about quarter of an hour. I brosed the Oxford World Classics, and picked up The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy, with parallel Greek text. I expected, of course, modern Greek - but was amazed when not only was the accentuation done the ancient way but I could understand plenty of the text.

So I bought it. I now realise that the modern system of accents was only introduced in 1982, and that Cavafy (in the early part of the 20th century) wrote partly in katharevousa, a hybrid of ancient and modern Greek, rather than in pure demotic; so I can’t understand as much as I thought I could.

All the same, he is a fascinating author. K.P. Kavafis, as he was in his own language, was an Alexandrian Greek; he wrote a great deal on Classical themes, although he only visited Greece itself four times; he was one of the first poets to write openly about homosexuality, and the vast majority of the characters of his poems set in the modern day are male. E.M. Forster described him as “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe”.

I thought I’d share one of his Classical poems with you, then, as I think it is a beautiful reaction to an ancient tradition. Translated by Evangelos Sachperoglou.

Perfidy

Something really interesting we’ve been talking about recently (and I’m trying to write part of an essay on some time this week) is the change in perceptions of sexuality in Greek culture during the 2nd and 3rd century CE. This period is known as the Second Sophistic - so called because of the revival of 5th century rhetoric and education, although the name is applied more widely than just in the field of rhetoric.

This period was flagged up by Foucault as a turning point in sexuality in his History of Sexuality (which I haven’t read yet, but will try to soon), sparking renewed interest in the field. What he found was that the texts of the Second Sophistic - particularly the novels - privilege and eroticise a “symmetrical and reciprocal” relationship between a man and a woman which leads to marriage, placing a high value on virginity. Never before had marriage been eroticised - the Classical Athenians had privileged pederasty alongside various relationships with women (wives, prostitutes and mistresses). The “symmetrical and reciprocal” bit refers to the fact that female characters were now portrayed as desiring (feeling eros) while still being “good” women. The female characters of the 5th century who felt desire - Clytemnestra, Phaedra - came to rather unfortunate ends. Later critics have disagreed with the “symmetrical” tag: men were still dominant in marriage, and the imagery of violence against women is pretty strong in the novels. But reciprocal is fair enough, and the novels are symmetrical at least in the amount of time they spend on female and male desire.

You also get love of a boy versus love of a woman as an either/or choice - no longer does it seem to be socially normal for a man to carry on several relationships with both genders simultaneously. Often, a set-piece debate is included in a text: who makes a better lover, a boy or a woman? Sometimes one wins, sometimes the other, sometimes neither. But “normal” male sexuality was clearly going through a reassesment.

There’s obviously a bit of a social agenda in promoting marriage, which may tie in with the influence of Roman rule - the Leges Juliae of Augustus had the same agenda. In some of the novels, the male-male couple ends as happily as the male-female couple; in others, like Leucippe and Clitophon, no male-male relationship ends well.

As far as the high value of virginity goes, the interesting thing is that this is going on at the same time as the rise of Christianity and its martyr texts. In fact, the Greek novels, explicit as they are, use a great deal of the same imagery of the body (particularly the female body) resisting intruders as we are used to from martyr stories. An example from Leucippe and Clitophon (Book 6.21), a novel by Achilles Tatius:

“You had better listen to Sosthenes,” said Leucippe, “he gives you admirable advice. Set out your tortures, bring up the wheel. Here are my arms, stretch them out. Bring your scourges too: here is my back, strike it. Bring your fire: here is my body, burn it. Bring also the sword: here is my neck, pierce it. Feast your eyes with a new sight; one woman contends against all manner of tortures, and overcomes all her trials.”

I really like the idea that what we think of as so Christian - the value of virginity and marriage - is also in these romantic, sexually explicit, ridiculous stories of pirate abductions and faked death. Any literature is really a product of its time.