It's a Don's Life (10 page)
Authors: Mary Beard
18 June 2007
My new project is to write a book on Pompeii which captures something about life in the ancient city. Books on daily life
in the Roman world, with one or two honourable exceptions, tend to be disappointing (‘Romans rose early and took a light breakfast’
– you know the kind of thing). So why not try to go in through the one city we know best?
Besides, there is a huge amount of specialised new work on Pompeii that hasn’t much impacted on books for a wider audience.
They tend to make more of the vulcanology and its horrors (‘their brains boiled’) than life pre-eruption. In my book, Vesuvius
will definitely not have the starring role.
The problem I have is not getting together some marvellously evocative material. I had, for example, no idea that a monkey’s
skeleton had been found among the bones at Pompeii. And I’m still curious about the cart ruts. The problem is being able simply
to picture the street scene. I haven’t been able to close my eyes and conjure up the living city.
That is, until I went to Mexico on a quick holiday from the Getty Research Institute in LA. As we drove from the airport on
the first day through the backstreets of Oaxaca, I said straightaway: ‘This is Pompeii.’ There were narrow, paved main(ish)
roads – intersected by unpaved, dirt-track cross streets. Low-rise shops and workshops, with wide doorways, line the streets;
sometimes they have an upper storey, sometimes not. Every now and then, a larger and grander residential property emerged,
with an impressive portal but an otherwise off-putting blank exterior. On the more populous streets, there were political
slogans, too – not on posters or bills, but painted directly on the walls by obviously professional sign writers (and there
were a good few old ones, which had clearly been painted over). Just like those Pompeian electoral ‘
dipinti
’.
When we got to the ex-village, now suburb, where we were staying, it was much the same. Grand houses, with peristyle gardens,
lurking behind curtain walls, cheek by jowl with the local internet café or hardware store. The husband aptly compared our
hotel to the House of the Faun.
The point, I reflected, was not that this place looked like Pompeii might have done. It was more that it seemed to share with
the ancient world an idea of what (to put it in the jargon) ‘urban space’ was for, and the acceptable collocations between
poverty and wealth, luxury and squalor. In London (or Los Angeles), the very rich tend not to live next to hardware stores.
The irony was, I discovered, that one of the painted wall slogans had already made a link to the Roman world. Not far from
the hotel was the local library, with its name and an improving message painted on its façade. That message ran (in Spanish):
‘Science and letters are the nourishment of youth and the diversion of old age.’
It’s a quote from Cicero’s speech
Pro Archia
(the defence of a poet): ‘
haec studia adulescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant
’.
Is David Cameron a Narcissus (... Or, was John Prescott right?)
21 June 2007
Classical allusions have been flying in Parliament. David Cameron has likened John Prescott to the combination of Bevin and
Demosthenes (a truly horrific mixture, even if it was meant as a kind of back-handed compliment), and Prezza has fought back
with some Greek mythology: ‘The Leader of the Opposition reminds me of someone, too. When I read Classics and Greek mythology
at the Ellesmere Port secondary modern school, we learnt about Narcissus. He died because he could only love his own image.
Yes, he was all image and no substance!’
The trouble is that the message of the Narcissus story isn’t exactly about being all image and no substance. It’s far nastier
than that.
The version of the story we know best is from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
. It starts with one of those mysteriously dark predictions given, on his birth, to Narcissus’ mother by the blind and gender-bending
seer Tiresias. Narcissus, he said, would live a long life, provided that he did not get ‘to know himself ’ (a puzzling reversal
of the famous slogan displayed at Delphi which says that ‘knowing yourself ’ is exactly what you should aim at).
Of course, the prediction comes horribly true. Narcissus grows up to be a real stunner, but far too proud to reciprocate any
of the many advances made to him. That’s where Echo comes in: she, poor nymph, wasted away to just a voice, pining for his
affections. But another rejected lover had a more spirited response, and begged the goddess Nemesis for vengeance in a particularly
ingenious form: let her make Narcissus fall in love with himself.
And so, drinking from a pool, he spots his own reflection and becomes instantly infatuated with what he sees. Unable to have
his desire (for it was only a reflection), he too pined and died (and the narcissus flower grew up in that very spot).
But there’s an earlier version of the story, too, which turned up on an Egyptian papyrus in Oxford a few years ago. Some of
the basics are the same, but here it is men who are in love with Narcissus, not women. And instead of just pining away, Narcissus
kills himself – and from his blood the flower grows.
My first instinct was to think that the Deputy Prime Minister was just plain confused with his Greek mythology. It’s not that
Narcissus simply is ‘all image’. The sharper point is that he is in love with (the image of) himself.
But then I wondered if we shouldn’t be giving Prezza’s classical learning the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he was cleverly
hinting at the theme of self-love – and even (supposing that he’s kept up with Oxford version) a tinge of homo-eroticism.
After all, there was no trick that ancient orators enjoyed playing more than accusing their rivals of effeminacy.
‘La Clemenza di Tito’: Mozart, the Colosseum and Yugoslavia?
25 June 2007
Just back from the fleshpots of Los Angeles (the hard-working fleshpots, I should say), I had the treat of a night at the
opera – the final reward for some programme notes I wrote for the English National Opera sixth months ago. The chosen gig
was Mozart’s
La Clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus)
at the London Coliseum.
I hadn’t actually seen it or heard it before – and really chose it because I inferred (correctly but blindly) that it was
about the Roman emperor Titus (79–81 ad, son of Vespasian and honorand of the famous arch in the Forum). It proved to be intriguingly
weird in all kinds of way. The singers did a wonderful job, but a lot of the music sounded to us more like ‘School of Mozart’
than ‘Mozart.’ And the storyline was about as implausibly convoluted as
opera seria
can get.
It featured, on the one hand, a scheming Vitellia, daughter of the short-lived emperor Vitellius, who wants to become empress
of Rome – to avenge her father’s fall from power (marriage to Titus being the quickest route). And, on the other, the emperor
himself, wanting a consort to replace his beloved Jewish Berenice, whom he has just sent away to assuage popular Roman opinion
which would only accept a native Roman wife for their emperor. The search is predictably dogged by rival suitors, covert plots
and outright rebellion in the city. To all of these adversities Titus responds by blessing his rivals and pardoning the disloyal.
Hence the title.
But the fascination for a classicist was the set – on either side of the curtain. The performance was a revival of a David
McVicar production which turned Titus’ court into an austere, if somewhat chilling, amalgam of the Ottoman and the Japanese
palace (Topkapi meets the Chrysanthemum Throne). We couldn’t decide if the long-skirted, broad-belted imperial bodyguard were
meant to evoke janissaries or samurai. It was in this elegant, uncluttered imperial surrounding that Titus repeatedly forgave
his various enemies and rivals.
But I wondered if McVicar had ever reflected on the ambience in which the Coliseum audience would be watching the show. For
the Coliseum, built early in the twentieth century, beats any theatre in London for its extravagantly Roman design. Taking
its cue from what we generally now call the Colosseum, the interior is festooned with references to Rome and the Roman arena
– chariots of lions, laurel wreaths, gladiatorial weapons.
Look up from the auditorium and you’ll even spot a painted version of the
velarium
, or canvas sun shade, which used to keep the worst of the heat off the audience at the Roman games.
And who was responsible for building and opening the (original) Colosseum? None other than Titus, of course. So, on either
side of the curtain, we had two very different versions of Titus’ image. On the stage, the calm and forgiving ruler – too
forgiving for his own good. On the audience side, the bloodthirsty monarch, who presided over those murderous games (take
a look at Martial’s book of verses commemorating its opening if you want to know how murderous) without so far as we know
a jot of clemency.
But what was it all about?
An excellent essay in the programme did very well in trying to relate it to eighteenth-century debates on kingship and ‘enlightened
despotism’. Was the emperor above the law? Was Titus right or wrong to pardon a conspirator who had actually been formally
convicted by due process of law?
I couldn’t help thinking that there was a very obvious target in one of the most famous (in Mozart’s day) works of Roman philosophy
– Seneca’s
On Clemency
, a quotation from which featured in the programme. Seneca was the tutor of the emperor Nero and wrote this treatise to his
pupil advocating the use of clemency and forgiveness in imperial policy (strikingly unsuccessful in its short-term objectives,
it must be said). The whole plot of
La Clemenza
could be seen as a riposte to this. For here Titus’ only weapon is forgiveness – and it leads to one disaster after another
(from personal unhappiness to the burning of the city). Maybe, we were being asked to reflect, Titus just once should have
said, ‘No pardons today.’ A total capacity to forgive is, in other words, no less destructive than the reverse.
Quite what the rest of a largely enthusiastic audience made of it, I’m not sure. Things weren’t helped by the fact that for
most of us over 40 the Italian form of Titus – that is, Tito – has a whole set of other political resonances.
In the men’s loo, my husband overheard an unsettling snippet of conversation: ‘I don’t quite see how this fits into the rest
of the history of Yugoslavia.’
He thinks it was a joke.
4 July 2007
I should have known better. But when my publishers asked me if I wanted to prepare the index of my new book myself, or have
them get a professional, I instantly said that I would do it myself.
The main reason was that I have, in the past, seen some really dreadful, so-called ‘professional’ indexes (the kind where
you are enticed by an entry to – say – Virginia Woolf, only to find, on looking it up, some such phrase as ‘Born in the same
year as Virginia Woolf, our hero ...’). I also self-importantly thought that only I, as author, would be able quickly to identify
the underlying themes that were most worth signalling (so making the kind of index that transcends the simple computer word
search and, at its best, gives a parallel intellectual structure to the book for an attentive index reader).
There was a hopelessly optimistic side to this, too. I thought that at this last stage I would positively enjoy reading the
whole typescript through, post-partally, for one last time, then sitting back to reflect on the main index-able themes. I
was going to create an index-to-die-for.
I should have known better. For a start, I’ve done this before – and should know that those days of leisurely re-reading in
an armchair never quite materialise; it’s always a rush. I had also read the long correspondence in the
TLS
at the end of last year, all about the pitfalls of indexing. That should have reminded me.
As it turns out, I’ve spent five days on it (for 440 pages of book), and actually I am not unpleased with the result. But
it hasn’t been remotely fun doing it.
First of all, there’s the re-inventing the wheel problem. If I was a (good) professional indexer, I’d already be up-to-speed
on this. But in my apprentice-like state, I have to think through the basic questions of categorisation from the bottom up.
My book is about the Roman Triumph. So do I have hundreds of entries saying things like, ‘Triumph, origins of ’, ‘Triumph
of Lucius Aemilius Paullus’, or ‘Lucius Aemilius Paullus, triumph of ’ ... or what? (Actually what I decided was to have a
big subheading in the index in bold caps, saying
TRIUMPH
... and all those subheadings underneath, ‘origin of ’, ‘chariot in’, ‘deification and’ ... and so on. Hope it works.)
But just as tricky was what to leave out. This is the Virginia Woolf problem. There are references all over the book to (for
example) the historian Dio Cassius. Does each one need an index link? (‘As Dio emphasises, the triumph was ...’) Well, no
– but how do you decide? The principle has to be: would any reader looking up a reference to Dio through my index actually
want to arrive at this page? Which is fine in theory, but I can tell you that at midnight, and half a bottle of wine later,
it can prove hard to make up your mind.
Then there are the jokes. I’ve loved index jokes ever since my friend Keith Hopkins slipped one into the index of his
Death and Renewal
. It ran, ‘Methods, authentication from fragmentary evidence,
passim
’ – with other entries for ‘speculation’, ‘tautology’ and ‘deviants, punished’. I flirted with a few (‘Ancient historical
study, self-indulgent futility of,
passim
’; ‘Triumph, Roman, fun to study’) but rejected them – mostly on the grounds that I couldn’t imagine enjoying them in two
months’ time – let alone ten years’ time, when I hope the book will still be around. So I settled for a parody of, and homage
to, my much missed friend, ‘Facts, fragility of,
passim
’.
Which just happens to be true as well.
Comments
From Isaac Casaubon’s diary, 2 February 1614 (OS):
Hodie ab instituta cogitatione rejectus sum ad curandos indices, quos ille corruperat, qui onus in se susceperat.
[‘Today I was diverted from the inquiry I had begun to preparing my indexes – which the man who had taken on the job had ruined.’]
And 5 February:
Et illiberales istae curae de indicibus me plane occupant ... Tu, Domine, miserere. Amen. Hodie absolvi indicem auctorum et
descripsi inter varias curas et impedimenta insigni usus diligentia.
[‘Indeed those vulgar concerns with indexes are altogether distracting me ... Have pity on me Lord, Amen. Today I finished
the index of authors and transcribed it among various concerns and hindrances, taking tremendous care about the process.’]
There are some continuities in the lives of serious scholars ...
TONY GRAFTON
When you & that Grafton chap get to edit the
Oxford Book of Grumpy Scholars Complaining about Indexes
, don’t forget Syme’s preface to his
Tacitus
monograph: ‘The task has been long and laborious (for all that ostensible drudgery can be sheer delight). It has been hampered
by various delays and vexations. Nor, in making the written text fit for publication and compiling the vast index, can aid
or alleviation be recorded from any academic body, from any fund or foundation dedicated to the promotion of research in history
and letters.’
SW FOSKA
You’ve had it now, M. Beard. You will get SUCKED IN. I’ve indexed two of my own books – largely because I thought it would
(a) be fun and (b) gave me an excuse to buy the brilliant Cindex indexing software – and then did a friend’s book (Louise
Foxcroft,
The Making of Addiction
) & in each case it was a bit like doing one of those join-the-dots puzzles: what emerged at the end was a delightful meta-text
revealing themes that neither I nor Dr Foxcroft had seen in the main body of the book. I discovered, for example, that for
an avowed atheist I was remarkably engaged with God ... And I think the highlight (and Triumph) of my life was being invited
to give the keynote speech at the American Society of Indexers conference in Pasadena ...
The comparison between computer-generated and your own indexes will be fascinating. Indexing is a cognitive and critical enterprise
& scope for fun. Bet you’re importuning friends and colleagues to let you index their books before the year’s out. ‘Go on.
Let me. Pleeease. Just one, then I’ll quit ...’
But doing your own index isn’t without pitfalls, even if, like me, you’re allowed to make slightly surreal entries. I find
on my current book I am writing some passages thinking, ‘Gosh, this is going to come up well in the index’, which may indicate
a cart/horse category error ... but it’s fun all the same.
MICHAEL BYWATER
Foska, I couldn’t quite get the tone of the Syme. Is he pissed off that he hasn’t benefited from any fund or foundation? Or
is he proud not to have had anything to do with that new-fangled rubbish? Or, I guess, both?
And by the way, the excellent Prof. Grafton and I are about the least grumpy scholars I know!!
As for Bywater ... I do recommend him as a nobel laureate of the genre. (And his is the only index in which I’ve ever seen
an explicitly flattering reference to myself ... as in ‘Beard, Mary, better scholar than I’ll ever be ...’ ... or do I misremember?)
MARY
Mary, I think you are right about Syme, he is being both grumpy and smug. But careful – Foska was proposing you and Grafton
as editors, not contributors.
SW FOSKA