It's a Don's Life (13 page)
Authors: Mary Beard
11 September 2007
I am now in Naples for seven days doing some serious hard graft at Pompeii: my last good look at the site before I write my
book on it.
One of the Pompeian places that is sure to feature somewhere in this book is the Brothel. Now that the famous House of the
Vettii is closed to the public, it is this that is the tour guides’ hot spot, nicely restored with Danish money a few years
ago. On the ground floor, it consists of five little rooms, each with a fitted stone bed – plus a single loo, though no running
water.
What makes it 100% certain that it is a brothel rather than (say) a cheap lodging house is the decoration (a lot of more or
less unimaginative bits of painted erotica above the doors to the ‘cells’). And, of course, the graffiti: all over the walls
are scrawled boasts and confessions, along the lines of ‘I fucked Glyce/I want to fuck Glyce/I fucked Glyce for tuppence’.
Hardly surprising, I guess, that it attracts streams of visitors. And hardly surprising that the site authorities enter into
the spirit of it a bit. Some wag, no doubt worried about the effect of light on the paintings, has posted ‘No Flash’ on the
notice outside.
But what I’ve always wanted to know is what happened upstairs.
The Brothel is a two-storey building, and the upstairs is shut to the public. Some books tell you that there were more rooms
for sex workers there. Others claim that it was where the girls slept or took a break between clients. Until this week I hadn’t
had permission to go and see for myself.
What you actually find is a neat stairway (with a loo at the bottom) plus five more rooms. One is a rather nice, and nicely
decorated, large saloon; the others smallish chambers of some sort. There were no obvious cooking facilities. So if anyone
lived here, beyond fruit and bread, etc., and some hot snacks and the ancient equivalent of a cup of tea cooked up on a portable
brazier (lots of those are found in the city), they would have eaten out.
So what was this suite for? Well, it could hardly have been more ‘working’ rooms. At least, there was not an erotic painting
in sight and no graffiti at all, so far as I could see.
So what then?
Well, maybe the girls’ quarters, with four bedrooms (for how many workers?) plus a recreation area. But it was hard to resist
the idea that the nice big room was where that stock villain of Roman comedy, the pimp or ‘
leno
’, hung out and counted his takings, and lived in some style (even if minus a kitchen).
Or maybe, as one of our party pointed out, we were still being too fanciful. Given the multiple use and multiple occupancy
of most domestic space in Pompeii, this could equally well have been the flat of someone who just happened to have the address
‘Above the Brothel’.
And as for the girls? Just as likely that they slept on (or off) the job.
How many academics does it take to buy a coffee maker?
21 September 2007
Are academics hopelessly incompetent boffins who couldn’t run a chip shop?
I usually get very cross about this silly myth. In fact, I have a US bumper sticker on my office window which says (words
to the effect of): ‘The trouble is that the people who ought to be running the country are too busy teaching school.’ If nothing
else, it amuses the passing tourists.
But just occasionally, we (or, let’s be honest, I) do seem to live up to the myth.
Take, for example, the idea that the hard-working Fellows of Newnham might have a coffee machine that would make good coffee
24 hours a day in their Senior Combination Room (that’s what we call our ‘common room’) – replacing the Thermos jugs that
are now put out three times a day, and quickly lose their freshness, taste and heat.
This subversive idea was first mooted about three years ago. Specifically, some super-brain came up with the idea that we
might have one of those Flavia machines, which makes you a very nice cup of coffee from a little foil sachet.
But there were closely argued objections from two sides.
First there was the eco lobby. Some of the Fellows were far from happy with the environmental wastage caused by all those
sachets. Then there were the taste police, who thought that this bulky modern machine was an inappropriate intrusion into
our lovely Victorian Combination Room.
I had some sympathy with both of these. I cannot imagine who could possibly have invented a coffee system that left such a
large quantity of foil and plastic behind. Nor do I think that the machine matched our Combination Room very well, which is
by far the prettiest in Cambridge. (I’m biased, but most of the others are in men’s club style, whereas ours is ‘ladylike’
and is kitted out with lots of delicate ‘ladylike’ chairs – not made for bulky blokes, who tend to look a bit silly in them.)
But neither of these objections seemed to me to outweigh the need for 24-hour coffee on line.
These arguments rumbled on for a couple of years (sic). But when I became the President of the SCR in March (an entirely honorific
post, aimed exclusively at making the Fellows’ lives better, sending them flowers when ill and improving books to their newborns),
I decided to get some action, with the valiant help of the Catering Manager and the Domestic Bursar. The good news was that
most people agreed that we could put the machine in an interconnecting room next to the SCR, which didn’t have the same aesthetic
qualities. Even better, we had found a slightly different machine that did Fair Trade coffee.
A perfect compromise. And the new machine was duly installed in the cupboard in the interconnecting room, our consciences
safe in the knowledge that we were helping the producers in the Third World.
Problem solved, until we tasted it.
It was indeed Fair Trade, but it was also
instant
coffee. At which point a different wing of the taste police came out of the woodwork: their perfectly reasonable point was
that when they said they wanted ‘good’ coffee, they didn’t mean instant.
So what do you do with a newly installed (expensive) coffee machine that makes coffee that no one wants to drink? Well, the
first answer was to find another group in the college who did and go back to the first idea of the environmentally unsound
Flavia machine (the eco warriors having admitted defeat).
The only trouble is that the Flavia machine is about an inch too big to fit into the space, which means that either we have
to have the maintenance department alter the cupboard, or we have to swap our new machine with the Bursar’s older, and slightly
narrower one. For he of course – one of those bulky blokes who look faintly silly in the little chairs – has had an environmentally
unsound Flavia machine in his office for years.
An everyday story of academic folk.
(Before everyone writes in to complain about what a waste of public money we are, etc. etc. ... let me assure you that this
is only what we do in our ‘spare time’.)
Comments
Three years to buy a coffee maker? Would that you academics had been in charge of the British government the last three hundred
years. You might just now be contemplating pillaging half the world and you would not all be suffering from post-colonial
angst. I never had an actually drinkable cup of coffee in Cambridgeshire, due largely to too much roasting of inferior beans,
and too much heat during and after brewing.
DON S
Elegiacally:
Quae tibi, Barba, bonum profundet machina potum? Flavia non est, nec Gaggia, sed Magimix!
[‘What machine produces a good drink for you, Beard? It’s not Flavia nor Gaggia – but Magimix?’]
MICHAEL BULLEY
Thanks for bearing with this little story. There is a happy ending – for we now have a Flavia machine successfully installed,
to the pleasure of all concerned. I am told (happily) that the Junior Combination Room has now got a Flavia too. The housekeeping
dept put in a bid for the Fair Trade and everyone seems delighted.
MARY
At another SCR in Cambridge not far from Newnham, we have a delightful, and small, machine which grinds fresh beans on demand
and effortlessly produces perfect Italian coffee in various sizes depending on the user’s preference. Occasionally cryptic
messages appear on its display asking to be cleaned, or descaled, or for more fresh coffee beans to be added, but for the
most part it does its thing extremely well all on its own at the simple push of a button, and the coffee is the best I’ve
ever had in an SCR in Cambridge. I thoroughly recommend it ... you will have to make a tour of Cambridge colleges to find
it!
ANON
Why does your Bursar have a coffee machine all to himself? Just take his!
DEX TORRICKE-BARTON
25 September 2007
A friend e-mailed me at the weekend on the subject of Kennedy’s
Latin Primer
. He had come across an old article in the
Guardian
by the no less distinguished Valentine Cunningham, suggesting that the ‘Memorial Lines on the Gender of Latin Substantives’,
which form an appendix to the
Primer
, were a ‘camp semaphore’ – in other words, a cover for a series of steamy references to pederasty. It was an argument about
Kennedy I had missed.
For those who do not number Kennedy among their bedtime books, these ‘Memorial Lines’ are a series of jingles to help the
young learner remember which Latin nouns are masculine, which feminine and which neuter. (‘To nouns that cannot be declined/The
neuter gender is assigned ...’, as one of the more memorable examples goes.) To judge from my father’s memory up to his deathbed,
they were once drilled into the heads of the young. Already in my day they seemed a bit quaint.
Cunningham was really interested in the re-use of the jingles by Benjamin Britten in his version of
The Turn of the Screw
(no problem with the camp there). What caught my attention was his claim that, by a very careful choice of examples, old Kennedy
himself – whose
Revised Primer
came out in 1888 and is still going strong (even if we don’t do the jingles much any longer) – encoded a very similar message.
My first instinct was to scoff. But after a bit of work, I wasn’t so sure.
The particular example Cunningham, and Britten, were interested in was this (you’ll have to say it out loud to get the flavour):
Many Nouns in
is
we find
to the Masculine assigned:
amnis, axis, caulis, collis,
clunis, crinis, fascis, follis,
fustis, ignis, orbis, ensis,
panis, piscis, postis, mensis,
torris, unguis
and
canalis,
vectis, vermis
and
natalis,
sanguis, pulvis, cucumis,
lapis, casses, Manes, glis
.
Kennedy translates all the Latin words he uses here in a sober fashion: ‘river, axle, stalk, hill, hindleg, hair ...’ Cunningham
points out that a surprising number of them had other meanings.
Clunis
(‘hindleg’ for Kennedy) is anus;
caulis
(‘cabbagestalk’) can also mean prick;
follis
(‘bellows’) is slang for scrotum. And so on.
For Cunningham, this was ‘school-master funnies’ for ‘other Latin masters in the linguistic know’. I checked all this out
with the
vade mecum
of Latin smut, J. N. Adams’s
Latin Sexual Vocabulary
(which is what I imagine Cunningham had done) and found myself agreeing that an awful lot of this Latin did have a decidedly
sexual second meaning.
A bit more work brought to light an article replying to Cunningham – by Christopher Stray, who knows more about Benjamin Hall
Kennedy (Head of Shrewsbury School and Regius Professor of Greek in Cambridge) than any man alive. Stray poured cold water
on the whole idea. For a start, Kennedy was born more than a century before Adams investigated Latin sexual slang – and the
dictionary he would have used (Lewis and Short) – also still going strong) doesn’t register many of these
doubles entendres
. Besides, Kennedy was a productively married man, with a son and four daughters (two of whom, Marion and Julia, effectively
wrote the
Primer
that goes under their father’s name – as Stray himself has shown). If he translated raunchy terms into bland euphemism (‘hind
leg’ for ‘anus’), that was just Victorian prudishness.
Fair enough, and I am loath to take a different line from Stray. But I still have a feeling that there is here no smoke without
fire. Kennedy’s Lewis and Short dictionary may have turned its back on quite a lot of smut, but it still recognises
caulis
as ‘
membrum virile
’ (and, in any case, I bet that the acute Latinists of the late nineteenth century knew more than what was in their dictionaries).
And the fact that Kennedy was married with kids is no proof at all that he wasn’t well into the pederastic culture of the
period.
Besides, the more you look at it, the queerer it gets. It doesn’t take much to see another word lying behind Kennedy’s ‘
panis
’. And – taking a look through the other ‘memorial lines’ – it is strange, to say the least, that all the dodgy words seem
to cluster in this particular verse on ‘the Masculine’.
But don’t let on, else they’ll try to ban it.
Comments
In the
Classical Association News
(June, 2004), there is a letter from one of Kennedy’s great-great grand-daughters, who underlines the fact that the rhymes
were written, not by Kennedy, but by his daughters, Julia and Marian. She adds that the idea that these ladies might engage
in paedophile innuendo via a grammar book is ludicrous. The balance of probability makes you think she is right.
MICHAEL BULLEY
‘What is this that roareth thus?/Can it be a motor bus?/Yes, the noise and hideous hum/
indicat motorem bum
’ was frequently recited by our retired Indian Civil Service headmaster (Indian in this context refers to location rather
than nationality).
DR VENABLES PRELLER
Apropos bawdry and Latin grammar, do you know the epigram, attributed to Janus Secundus (1511–36), which is repeated by Casanova
in
Memoirs, Vol. I,
Ch. 2?
Dicite, grammatici, cur mascula nomina cunnus, Et cur femineum mentula nomen habet.
(Say, O grammarians, why c**t is a masculine noun and p**ck feminine.)
Casanova claims it was posed to him as an 11-year-old boy by a quizzical Englishman, to whom he wittily replied:
‘
Disce quod a dominis nomina servus habet.
’
(‘Learn that the slave takes the name of the master’.)
PL
