Authors: Mary Beard
It's a Don's Life (21 page)
Heard the one about the Roman and the barber?
10 August 2008
I’m now full steam ahead on my Berkeley lectures about Roman laughter. And to be precise, off to spend the rest of Sunday
in the library (thank heavens that our Faculty gives us access 24/7), for a side-splitting afternoon with some Roman jokes.
I’ve already given you some choice examples. But just for laughs, here’s another favourite, from the collection known as the
Philogelos
(or ‘Laughter-lover’):
A man goes to get his hair cut by a talkative barber.
‘How would you like your hair done?’ asks the barber.
‘In silence,’ replies the man.
Not bad?
A good old-fashioned 2.1 is better than a Higher Education Achievement Record
27 October 2008
University examiners are an extremely conscientious crowd and, in my experience, degree marking is as fair as it could be,
given human frailty (and far better that than a computer). All the same, I’ve often thought that we might be better off without
the fixed degree class boundaries of first, 2.1, etc. As with all these linear classifications, it’s hard to feel entirely
happy about lumping together the person who just missed a first with the one who just scraped a 2.1, and so on. So I’ve always
had a certain sympathy with the idea of introducing a more nuanced record of a university degree.
Until I saw what was being piloted as the ‘Higher Education Achievement Record’ (
Hear
, for short – of course), trumpeted in several papers this week. It is apparently being test run in several UK universities
right now.
Reading about it, I was sent rushing back into the arms of the old conventional nineteenth-century system of ‘classes’, for
all their faults. ‘
Hear
’ has been developed by the kind of people who refer to what I call ‘universities’ as ‘the sector’ (that is, I guess, ‘higher
education sector’). Its well-meaning, market-oriented approach to grading represents another nail in the coffin of academic
and intellectual values in the universities.
Why do they want to change?
Well, one reason, according to Bob Burgess (referring, proprietorially, to the work of ‘my committee’), is that employers
want more information than just a simple degree class (or projected one). Fine, but isn’t that what references are for? I
think of it as part of my job to write references for my students, written specially for the particular post they have in
mind. The best way of ensuring potential employers (‘stakeholders’ in Burgess-speak) get useful input from me is simple. First,
make sure the references I write are confidential; second, make sure that employers take them up before short-listing the
candidates, not after. There is no record of achievement that can be as helpful as two conscientious references.
Another is the idea that the final degree class doesn’t reflect the strengths and weaknesses shown by a student throughout
the course. Thank heavens it doesn’t, I think. I am privileged to teach some of the very brightest students in the UK. I want
them to develop their potential in all kinds of ways – so that, in whatever walk of life, they can go on to be stunning citizens
(cliché but true). That often means taking apart their preconceptions. It means watching them take intellectual risks, make
intellectual mistakes, even do badly before they do really well. The last thing I want is every course they have done listed
and graded. That’s a recipe for the US climate, where the students are knocking on your door complaining if you don’t give
them an A. For there every mark counts. Some of my best students in Cambridge have got deltas on the way to alphas, and have
learnt in the process about how not to be yes-women, when and how to take risks. Isn’t that what UK employers need?
The worst bit of this is the spectre of the extra-curricular activities that may get included on the report. The very last
thing we need is every student rushing off to be president of a society to get it on their transcript. For a start, who is
to say whether they have been a GOOD president or not? I’ve been through enough UCAS interviews (and yes, interviews ARE useful)
where I’ve said to a potential student: ‘Oh I see you’re president of your school Tibetan society, what does that involve?’
‘Well, we haven’t actually met yet,’ comes the answer. But the more important point is that students learn to become good
citizens (they learn to grow up, in other words) in many different ways. Some do it by beavering around running societies;
others do it by lying on their beds for long hours listening to Bob Dylan and thinking. No one, believe me, can predict which
has the better outcome. But I do know that among the best contributors to the twenty first century are some on-the-bed Bob
Dylan listeners.
We don’t need
Hear
s, sectors, or Burgess reports. We need university teachers with the space to get to know their students and to write for
them honestly, supportively and appropriately, whatever their degree result.
Comments
I hope that a few robust vice-chancellors will point out that, just as it is not the job of universities to do social engineering,
it is not their job to serve employers. Can we club together to send copies of Matthew Arnold’s
Culture and Anarchy
and John Henry Newman’s
The Idea of a University
(specifically part 1, discourse 5) to a few government ministers?
RICHARD BARON
‘But I do know that among the best contributors to the twenty-first century are some on-the-bed Bob Dylan listeners.’
Hear, hear! I finally have an advocate.
JOHN T
I think Cambridge should close any student society that advertises itself by putting ‘IT WILL LOOK GOOD ON YOUR CV’ anywhere
whatsoever on their promotional material!
STEFAN
2 November 2008
I was contacted last week by a
Telegraph
journalist. The
Telegraph
had uncovered, he said, the fact that local councils were banning Latin words from all official documents and in their dealings
with the public more generally. This was information the paper had obtained using the Freedom of Information Act. (Hang on
... do you really need the FOI Act to find out about this, or did the horrid truth emerge during a trawl for something even
more sinister?)
What was my reaction? Well, at first thought, it was a bit mixed. It looked like another of those pseudo-populist gestures
that councils and government are in the habit of making. They make you fill in a form 20 pages long to claim some tiny benefit
you are entitled to ... then they congratulate themselves for the whole document being entirely ‘Latin-free’. Humbug. On the
other hand, there are some Latin phrases I don’t have too much affection for. I wouldn’t shed many tears for ‘
nil obstat
’, for example.
But when I discovered what the offending words were, the only conclusion was that the whole scheme was bonkers – and ignorant.
The list of words for the chop included not only
ad hoc
and
prima facie
, but e.g.,
vice versa
, i.e. and NB.
As I huffed to the
Telegraph
man, this is a dreadful example of ethnic cleansing applied to language. And, what is more, it totally misunderstands the
nature of the English language which is ‘English’ precisely by virtue of it being very mixed indeed, as much ‘foreign’ as
it is ‘native’, indeed more so. ‘NB’ is now as much English as it was ever Latin. In fact, it has much wider currency and
usage in modern English than it ever did in antiquity.
What will be left, I wonder, when they turn their attention to other ‘foreign’ words No RSVP, or bungalow, rendezvous or karaoke.
The list is endless.
Meanwhile, the overworked functionaries at benighted Bournemouth Council are busy thinking up clunky English equivalents for
all this nasty Latin. The neat adjectival ‘
ad hoc
’ is to be replaced by ‘for this special purpose’. Similar time is being wasted in Fife (where ‘
ex officio
’ has bit the dust) and Salisbury.
Oh well, I expect they will have a bit of fun when they get on to ‘
flagrante delicto
’ (and they might at the same time then realise that this kind of English had its points).
Comments
That’d be the end of nineteenth century English Lit. for a start.
Maybe they should try banning French and German imports, and the people using them: ‘
Honi soit qui mal y pense
’ and ‘
Ich dien
’.
XJY
Well done, Bournemouth.
Progress cannot wait.
Give us proper English
For those Latin words we hate.
Do you need translators?
For Latin’s what I know.
But I can’t do it for nothing.
What’s the thing of roughly the same value that I’d get in return?
MICHAEL BULLEY
No doubt the Bournemouth Council think ‘
vis-a-vis
’ is Latin for ‘strength from strength’.
JAY DILLON
Barack Obama – and the first ‘African-Roman’ emperor of Rome
18 November 2008
I’m surprised that no one seems to have spotted an obvious Roman parallel for the success of Barack Obama. Or have I missed
it? In the second century ad, Lucius Septimus Severus became the first ‘African-Roman’ emperor of Rome. Like Obama he was
of mixed race – his father from Libya, his mother of European descent. He too had an outspoken and determined wife, from Syria.
And his first task on coming to the throne in 193 ad was to deal with a military disaster in Iraq (‘Parthia’, as it was then
known). The success of his surge was commemorated in the great arch, which remains to this day one of the most impressive
monuments in the Forum at Rome.
The two little children he took with him to the palace did not fare so well. In fact they grew up to be murderous thugs –
even if the elder, Caracalla, did go on to initiate the most daring extension of civil rights in the whole of world history.
Once he had got rid of his brother (nastily murdered on his mother’s lap), he gave full Roman citizenship, and the legal privileges
and protection that went with it, to all the free male inhabitants of the empire.
Did the success of Septimius Severus show that race no longer mattered in Roman politics? And is there a message in his story
for the new president-elect?
If so, the message is a double-edged one. A few more African-Romans did make it to the higher echelons of the imperial government
(in many cases members of the emperor’s own family, or his wife’s friends). But on the wider view, it was not so much that
his race did not matter, but that the Roman upper class and the Roman media made sure that it simply was not seen.
We do not know for certain whether or not Septimius Severus was black. That is itself significant. One historian writing three
hundred years after his lifetime claimed that he was ‘dark’, and one or two portrait statues appear to show him with African
features. But the vast majority of images that survive make him look like any other Roman emperor before him – his whiteness
over-emphasised by the shiny white marble in which he was so often portrayed. This was not a black man claiming the imperial
throne for himself. This was the Roman imperial machine turning a man of colour into an emperor more or less indistinguishable
from all his predecessors. The machine was making sure that race did not show.
No one is suggesting, of course, that Obama’s publicity team will attempt, literally, to whiten the image of the forty-fourth
president. But the ‘Septimius Severus problem’ is already clear enough. Obama’s understandable decision not to mention his
own ethnic identity, or anything else about race, in his acceptance speech had decided echoes of Septimius Severus’ image
as a white emperor. The more you present Obama as any other president, and peddle the self-congratulatory clichés about the
end of a racial divide at the highest pinnacle of American politics, the more you are simply refusing to see that for most
people in the US and the rest of the world race does still matter...
Most British women will recognise a much more recent political analogy. For ethnicity, read gender. Margaret Thatcher did
almost nothing to advance the chances of other women in British public life, quite the reverse. By making it look as if the
gender wars were a conflict now decisively won – when for millions of British women the battle had hardly begun – the effect
of Thatcher’s victory was to put back the cause of women for a generation at least. Let’s hope the same is not true for Obama
– and that he doesn’t take the Septimius Severus route towards the same old orthodoxy of power. If race (or gender) is really
not to matter it needs to be visible to us.
Comments
If Severus’ father was a Libyan (and not, as I had always assumed, descended from Romans who had settled in Libya), then he
would have been half Berber (possibly with some Greek mixed in). As such, he would not really have been all that dark, a bit
swarthy perhaps, and his features would not really have demonstrated what we think of as African (i.e. sub-Saharan) characteristics.
In any case, he would not have been black as Americans understand the term. (I believe the British use the word somewhat more
broadly.) Still, it would be interesting to know how the Romans painted his statues.
DEMETRIOSX
Is this a troll? Can a Professor in Classics at Cambridge seriously attempt to offer such twisted pseudo-logic, half-truths,
speculation and personal desire as fact?
This laughable conspiracy theory that Mary Beard puts forth: that some seemingly vast number of Romans were engaged in a racist
cover-up of their emperor’s very appearance is an example of the worst sort of revisionist drivel.
MARK
Suggesting that a Roman emperor’s image (as represented in statues, etc.) was carefully manipulated is not a ‘laughable conspiracy
theory’: it is a statement of the bleeding obvious ... I have no idea whether Septimius was or was not ‘black’ (the word’s
connotations in any case obviously different then from now, regardless of what kind of skin pigmentation is being described);
but it isn’t a silly question whether this was emphasised, ignored or suppressed.
RICHARD
Don’t forget that painted wooden tondo of Septimius and his family. If this circular panel was produced in Egypt (as Hiesinger
thinks), then the colouring of the figures may not tell you very much. If you look at a random selection of paintings on tomb
walls, you will see men and women both dark and light. I have often wondered if this has to do with the paint available at
the time of painting.
Your (not very seriously meant, I take it) point highlights the pitfall of trying to match up the modern world with the ancient
world. An example of this came to my attention several years ago when I heard a geographer on Laurie Taylor’s programme claiming
that Jesus was born on the West Bank. Even though it was radio, you could hear the capital letters. He was born in an area
which was then and still is on the west bank of the Jordan river.
ANTHONY ALCOCK