It's a Don's Life (9 page)
Authors: Mary Beard
27 March 2007
Death tends to play a big part in a Classics degree. Ancient poetry and drama is full of murder, suicide, assassination, contested
burials. Archaeologists love nothing better than a cemetery to dig up. At Cambridge we have a whole third year course on the
topic, which covers death from every possible angle – from Socrates to Trajan’s column (which, of course, to return to this
contested subject, contained Trajan’s ashes in its base).
One of the first things the students learn is that, with the exception of emperors, a few other dignitaries and the occasional
new-born babies, Romans were always buried outside the city. Hence those roads like the Appian Way outside Rome, lined with
tombs.
With a nostalgic image of an English village in mind (graveyard nestling next to the village green ... ), we tend to treat
this as a slightly odd, unfamiliar practice. In fact, arrangements in modern Cambridge are strikingly similar. The crematorium
is located outside the city limits, on the main A14 road towards Huntingdon.
Once upon a time this may have been a peaceful greenfield site. Now the grieving friends and relatives are forced to negotiate
one of the most accident-prone highways in the country (perhaps not all that different from the Appian Way in that respect).
I dread to think how, on exit, they tearfully weave their way into the speeding lanes of trucks.
Black humour would suggest that this was a way of the crem drumming up its own trade.
When you hit 50, you find yourself at more funerals than weddings (or, to put it frankly, more of your co-evals are dying
than getting hitched). Last Monday, I made my way up the A14 to the ceremony for an old friend who had died in her 80s. In
fact, even though I know the route perfectly well, I actually missed the exit off the dual carriageway and had to take the
next one and double back. So I didn’t arrive in the chapel till the coffin had already been carried in.
As always, once I was there, I found myself thinking about the logistics of the whole operation (displacement activity, I
guess). It’s hard not to admire the seamless organisation – and the timing – which lets one grieving party out of the side
door as another one enters through the front. Someone must spend their life planning other people’s funerals with split second
care – and just occasionally it must go embarrassingly wrong, with the wrong audience around the wrong coffin.
As for the clerics in charge, I’m a bit more ambivalent. On the one hand, I’m full of admiration again for anyone who can
turn up and even begin to choreograph a fitting funeral ceremony in front of a group of people they don’t know, many of whom
are feeling more upset than they have ever been before.
On the other, I’m none too keen on some of the packaging. I don’t just mean the impersonality that creeps out from time to
time (‘I never actually met Harry ...’, as the standard admission from the pulpit goes). It’s more a question of the default
Christianity that takes over unless you work very hard to stop it. Under this régime, even the most questioning agnostic is
likely to be dispatched with a chorus of claims about their future bliss in paradise on the other side of the pearly gates.
Given half a chance, the well-meaning cleric will even hint at deathbed conversion. ‘I know that Sarah was not a church goer,
but when I saw her in her last illness, I sensed a new spirituality ...’ Of course, a Christian ceremony is just fine for
Christians – but not when it scoops up everyone else who can’t actually claim another religion, or whose relatives don’t have
the instant presence of mind to explain exactly where their granny actually stood on the God question.
I’m pleased that I was canny enough to see this coming when my irreligious mother died. In a fit of bravery, overconfidence
or pride looking for a fall, I decided to conduct the committal myself. The undertakers and the staff at Shrewsbury crematorium
were a bit taken aback to start with. But funerals are not like weddings: anyone is allowed to do them, and say what they
like. Once they saw I wasn’t to be dissuaded, they gave me every help (right down to insider tips on how and when to push
the button to start the coffin on its way).
I wish more people would take funerals into their own hands.
Comments
At least you have the option of being burnt in this country. In Greece it’s been considered ‘unchristian’, so it was only
after pressure from the EU and religious freedom groups that they passed a law this week to allow cremations.
However the crematoria have to be built and operated by town councils, so in the face of local (i.e. Christian) opposition
I don’t see one operating soon.
JOHN M
David Beckham’s new tattoo – a classicist writes
18 April 2007
Becks has apparently decided that a move to Los Angeles demands a new tattoo or two. Not a feeling that the prospect of LA
induced in me, but therein I suppose lies the difference between us.
Amongst the many designs now decorating the celebrity right forearm is what was originally a Latin slogan, here rendered in
English: ‘Let them hate [me] as long as they fear [me].’ The idea is, or so I have read, to express something of Becks’s anxieties
about the transatlantic move, and his determination not to be battered by any adverse publicity.
I don’t mind if they don’t actually like me, so the message runs, but don’t let them mess with me. Or, to quote ‘a source’:
‘David ... believes his tattoos can ward off negativity and help him battle adversity.’
The original reads in Latin:
‘Oderint dum metuant’
(a nice example for you Latinists of the use of ‘
dum
as proviso, plus the subjunctive’). According to the
Daily Mail
, Becks first of all wanted the real Latin, but it was the word
dum
(‘provided that/as long as’) that caused the problem. Could it be taken as a reflection of the mental agility of Mr Beckham?
Better perhaps to play safe by avoiding it entirely?
In fact, as any classicist must know, the word
dum
is only part of the reason why having
‘oderint dum metuant’
or its English equivalent might be an own goal.
So far as we can tell, the slogan goes back to the second-century BC Roman tragedian Accius. Almost all of Accius’ work is
lost, but it is pretty certain that this phrase came from his play
Atreus
, and from the mouth of the title role itself. In ancient mythology and culture, this King Atreus was the limit case of tyranny
and monstrosity – in fact, so much the limit case that he was the man who, so the story went, chopped up the children of his
brother Thyestes, and then served them up to him in a stew (minus the hands and feet).
From then on, it became a catchword for the kind of ethics that a proper constitutional Roman deplored in a tyrant. Cicero
and Seneca both regarded the sentiment as beyond the pale (hardly surprising, Seneca acerbically observed, that Accius’ play
was written during the dictatorship of the bloodthirsty dictator Sulla).
According to Suetonius, it was a favourite saying of the bonkers and wicked emperor Caligula – enough said? It was so well
known that the wily emperor Tiberius seems to have parodied the phrase, pointedly. Confronted with some nasty popular squibs,
he apparently responded, ‘Let them hate me, provided that they respect what I am doing.’ No rule of terror here was the (somewhat
disingenuous) message.
So our celebrity hero is sporting a slogan that, for the Romans, its originators, was the instant identifier of the excesses
of tyranny? Enough said?
Comments
Where’s he got
‘Pecunia non olet’
[‘money doesn’t stink’] tattooed?
XJY
It is strange that this quotation should have become corrupt so early, so that even Cicero and Seneca got the wrong end of
the stick. Recent research into the writings of the mediaeval Alsatian scholar, Hucbald the One-legged makes it fairly clear
that the quotation does not come from Accius’
Atreus
at all, but from his work on agriculture, the
Praxidica
. In the opening to the second section, Accius is talking about poppies and says
‘odorant tum metuntur’
[untranslatable Latin pun: ed.] – they give off a sweet smell and then they are reaped ...
MICHAEL BULLEY
Don’t blame Hadrian for Bush’s wall
30 April 2007
President Bush has a strange enthusiasm for walls (strange, because that mother of walls in Berlin isn’t exactly regarded
as a stunning success). He would like to put, if not a wall, then at least a barbed wire fence along the almost 3,500 kilometre
frontier between the USA and Mexico. And, unless Nouri al-Maliki manages to put the brakes on, there will soon be concrete
walls between Sunni and Shia areas of Baghdad, to keep car-bombers out (or in).
Bush isn’t the only one, of course. Israel is busy constructing its West Bank barrier, parts of which are 8 metres high, in
concrete. Less well known is a wall put up in Padua in north Italy, as a ‘crime fighting measure’, around the high-rise Anelli
estate. In fact the
Guardian
last week came up with almost thirty modern security walls, either built or under construction. One, the electric fence between
South Africa and Mozambique, has apparently killed more people than were killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall.
The Great Wall of China may be one ancestor here. But the usual Western approach is to point the finger back, way beyond Berlin,
to the emperor Hadrian. Regret these awful barriers though we do, is the line, there is a fine classical precedent in the
second century ad with Hadrian’s attempt to keep the nasty barbarians out of the Roman empire. That is, ‘Hadrian’s Wall’.
Another misuse of the classical past, I’m afraid.
Sure, the popular image of Hadrian’s Wall is just that: cold, wet, Roman squaddies constantly patrolling the bastions, and
periodically attacked by the native hordes trying to penetrate the homeland – unsuccessfully, of course, as the Wall was such
an effective barrier.
It can’t, in fact, have been anything like that, and archaeologists have been debating for decades exactly what Hadrian’s
Wall was for. The one relevant reference in classical literature (‘he was the first to build a wall to separate Romans and
barbarians’) may look as if it supports the popular line. But it’s written by a flagrantly unreliable late Roman biographer
of Hadrian, who probably had no better idea than we do of what was going on in the second century ad.
And there are all kinds of problems with that approach. For a start, the Wall isn’t anything like as powerful a defensive
line as we tend to imagine. There are one or two spots where it looks very impressive (and those are where the publicity photos
are usually taken). But when it was first built most of the western part was not that great masonry structure, but a simple
turf rampart, which wouldn’t have deterred most self-respecting barbarians. Besides, there are an improbably large number
of gates (80) for a serious defensive barrier.
Some modern archaeologists think that we are dealing with a mechanism of surveillance, or with a means to control movement
between territories, rather than an attempt to prevent incursions (maybe there was a cash levy on goods crossing the line
...?) Others think that it was more a way of establishing a line of communications from east to west, rather than blocking
invasions from the north. Still others think that the main purpose was symbolic: Hadrian was one of those unwarlike Roman
emperors who needed some military street cred; what better than a few miles of military masonry in the rugged province of
Britannia?
But the bottom line is the way the Romans generally thought about frontiers and frontier regions. Despite the impression given
by Hadrian’s Wall (and by a few other places, largely in Germany) that they saw a linear divide between the empire and the
barbarian world, the Roman image of the frontier was usually much more subtly nuanced. The empire shaded into ‘foreign’ territory
across many kilometres that were a melting pot of cultural difference and often a hot-spot of trading and commercial activity.
It was a question of frontier zones, rather than frontiers – governed partly by Rome, partly by a whole variety of non-Roman
powers. Hadrian’s Wall, whatever its function, was an exception.
President Bush and our other wall-crazy political leaders might learn from that.
Comments
Rome had all those soldiers up there in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to do. Someone came up with the idea: Why not
build a wall? – just to keep them busy. After all, the Romans were always building something.
TONY FRANCIS
If the purpose of Hadrian’s Wall was at least as much symbolic as practical (and I think there’s a strong case for that),
then it is a precedent for Bush’s fence along the Mexican border, which is surely as much about being seen to be Doing Something
as actually having any practical effect.
TONY KEEN
I’d go for a phrase like ‘conspicuous demarcation’. Mary mentioned a lot of uses, and Tony adds the ‘devil-finds-work-for-idle-hands’
one, but of course the reason for all the soldiers being there in the first place is to demonstrate the presence of enormous
numbers of troops available just to garrison a god-forsaken corner of the world like this. Hinting at thousands more to be
mustered when needed.
XJY
Seminar power and willy-waving
5 June 2007
When I go to a lecture or seminar paper, I expect it to end on time. If it is billed for 30 minutes, and Professor X is still
talking at 45, I feel very itchy. Likewise if what Professor X says is plain wrong, then I expect to say so (politely enough)
in the discussion session that follows.
All this seems to me to be quite ‘natural’. But actually, I’ve learnt, these reactions are distinctively British. Although
at first glance academic seminars look much the same anywhere in the world (a group of people banging on about subjects that
would leave most of humanity quite cold), they are in fact governed by all kinds of culturally specific rules.
When I first went to such gatherings in Italy, for example, I couldn’t understand why the chair didn’t just shut a speaker
up when he (or occasionally she) was still in full flood 30 minutes after he should have stopped. And I couldn’t understand
why the rest of the audience tolerated rambling responses from the audience lasting almost as long as the paper, and often
on a quite different subject.
It took me years to see that in Italian terms this was the whole point of the occasion. For here academic power was calibrated
precisely according to how much of the audience’s time you could grab for yourself. If your junior colleague spoke for 8 minutes,
then you were losing out in status very publicly if you didn’t take at least 10 for yourself. And so on. Aggressive chairing
and timekeeping would not only be breaking the implicit rules of the seminar; it would be disrupting the very roots of the
academic power structure which the seminar supported.
In the UK (or at least in Cambridge, which may be a particularly extreme version of the British case), things are much briefer
and – to put it politely – more punchy. How often have I heard my colleagues coming out of a seminar, one saying to the other
‘I thought you made a good point’? What ‘good’ means in this context is ‘a comment that in two witty sentences completely
demolished the whole paper of the poor visiting speaker and showed how much cleverer you were than her’.
I confess that I am becoming increasingly ambivalent about this kind of display. On the one hand, I grew up with it and am
still half attached to its style. I remember as a young lecturer thrilling to the displays of wit and smartness which the
then Professor of Ancient History, Keith Hopkins, would put into his responses to dull papers given by speakers. ‘I have three
reactions to your talk and the first is boredom’ is a direct, memorable and (as I now think) memorably nasty quote. And I
am sure that I am sometimes guilty of playing such lines myself.
On the other, it’s fairly obvious that what’s driving this kind of discussion is not an engagement with the topic of the lecture
or paper delivered, but peacock-like preening. It’s a very male set of responses (even when done by women). It is, as one
of my female colleagues has aptly put it, an exercise in ‘willy-waving’. Power games in a non-Italian form.
That said, the seminar style in the States leaves me feeling rather at sea, too. There are (as I found at Stanford) some examples
of the British mode, but by and large everyone is seamlessly polite. It’s not that they don’t have strong views about the
quality of the lectures they hear (as you discover when you talk about it afterwards), but round the seminar table, it’s flattery
all the way: ‘Thank you so much for that masterly performance ...’/‘I learned an enormous amount from your excellent paper
...’
To start with, it makes you feel very warm. But then you think: How would I know if I had done a really lousy lecture? Would
my best friend tell me? Or is there a subtle code among all this eulogy that I just haven’t mastered yet?
Comments
A colleague has a wonderful account of a Department Meeting where a woman faculty member said; ‘OK chaps, dicks on the table’,
which may be what Mary is referring to. But there is a serious problem here: how does one react to a lousy paper? The UK ‘interesting’
is a helpful usage, and I once got mileage from confusing
Merkwurdig
with
Bemerkenswert
in German, though I lost all standing. Can we invent an international gesture (probably already to be found on Greek vases
and in Terence mss.) for ‘Could do better?’ ... Or, in a democracy ruled by the RAE and its collaborators, must all seminar
papers be equal?
Q. H. FLACK
Italians asking questions: ... Gilbert and George turned up one lunchtime at the British School at Rome to actually talk.
At the end a guy from the
Messagero
made a longish rambling point (
c
.10 minutes), more or less in the form of a question. At the end George murmured, ‘Interesting.’ The first seminar I went
to (in the late sixties) was given by Peter Brown, who even then was grooming himself to be a guru. There was no discussion
or questions (how could there be ?). Since I did not know what a seminar was, I assumed that it was simply a lecture with
a smaller audience.
ANTHONY ALCOCK
I have noticed expressions of power in who chooses to sit where.
In a small format seminar where 10–12 people are seated around the usual configuration of tables the person who sits to the
first left or right of the speaker often wishes to dominate the event. Interestingly, in a graduate student seminar setting,
it is often the weakest student in the room who also will choose to sit next to the professor. I guess you could call it power
siphoning ...
The person who sits the farthest away from the speaker, at the opposite end of the table, wishes to establish a rival center
of power as he or she considers himself to be a higher authority than the speaker and will, of course, talk incessantly ...
EILEEN
Howard Mohr’s essential study ‘How to Talk Minnesotan’ shows that the good people of Lake Wobegon have the true word Q. H.
FLack wants for disposing of such phenomena as inferior seminar papers. It is: ‘That’s different’, with appropriately Scandinavian
pitch accent on the initial word.
OLIVER NICHOLSON
It is very hard to generalise accurately about the US. At Cornell, where I had my first post, Lisa Jardine and I were scolded
for asking sharp questions of a distinguished visitor who had given a shoddy lecture. At Princeton, the Davis Center under
Lawrence Stone was the scene of many a public disemboweling. At Chicago, where I studied, there is also a tradition of critical
questions, but quite different in style from those at Princeton. I’m sure the UK shows similar variations.
TONY GRAFTON
Presumably if you are the speaker and you suspect your host/ audience of flattery, you can then start grilling them on precisely
how they think your paper improves on the existing state of knowledge. Or is that to be eschewed for fear of being labelled
a c*nt-flasher?
SW FOSKA
My ex-husband, a surgeon, goes to many international congresses. He told me how, in the US, going over your allotted time
was not tolerated, and the chairperson would just switch off the microphone.
SARAH HAGUE
Resident in the US for near 30 years but having been educated in the UK, and growing up there in an ‘academic’ family, I agree
completely; I grew up understanding that a concise dry wit was to be sought after – expressions of politesse that required
parsing like UN resolutions were thought of as waffling hypocrisies. Having said that, intellectual disagreement was very
rarely taken personally – which I find in the US, sadly, almost inevitable, however ‘diplomatically’ phrased.
Alas, in my experience there are few like the late Columbia don Sidney Morgenbesser: ‘A famous Morgenbesser anecdote arose
during a lecture by J. L. Austin in Oxford. Austin said it was peculiar that, although there are many languages in which a
double negative makes a positive, no example existed where two positives expressed a negative. In a dismissive voice, Morgenbesser
replied from the audience, “Yeah, yeah ...”’
MICHAEL ROBINSON
While at the American Academy in Rome I had the opportunity to observe several national seminar styles at work, and at odds.
The American scholars were particularly wary of audiences with a large German contingent ... it opened the possibility of
what they termed a ‘shark attack.’ They even coined a phrase –
tristedescophobia
– fear of three or more Germans in the room.
ROY
It has not been unknown for an overlong sermon to have an assisted termination from a cipher discovered on a pedal stop by
an organist in readiness for the final hymn.
DR VENABLES PRELLER