It's a Don's Life (15 page)
Authors: Mary Beard
My five favourite Roman classics ... that we have lost
29 October 2007
Classicists can be a miserable lot. When such a rich array of ancient Greek and Roman writing has survived, you’ll still find
them lamenting about what has been lost.
Most of the ancient literature we still have, we owe to the efforts of medieval monks who eagerly copied and preserved it.
They didn’t do a bad job. True, there are some oddities. Has it ever struck you how many of the plays of Euripides have a
title beginning with ‘i’ or ‘e’ (or, what is much the same in Greek, ‘
hi
’ or ‘
he
’):
Iphigeneia
,
Hippolytus
,
Electra
,
Helen
,
Hecuba
etc. ...? It looks as if somehow, at some date, a single alphabetically arranged volume of the master’s complete works managed
to escape, when others were lost in fire, flood or whatever.
And just occasionally there is a dramatic find in the ancient papyri from the sands of Egypt. Most of the works of the Greek
comic dramatist Menander reached us that way. So too (if you think that the monks maybe had it right in not bothering with
Menander) did Aristotle’s
Constitution of the Athenians
– actually probably the work of one of Aristotle’s research assistants, but still a good find for anyone interested in Athenian
history.
But what would I like to come up from any new excavation of the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, where eighteenth-century
diggers found loads of papyri rolls, the vast majority of which (apologies now to my philosophical colleagues) were rather
dreary treatises from an also-ran Epicurean philosopher by the name of Philodemus?
I confess that I am not a tremendous enthusiast for more excavation on the Villa site. Various reasons. First, my feeling
is that – if you have millions of euros to spend – you’d be better off preserving the parts of the ancient town of Herculaneum
that have already been dug up, but are so badly crumbling that they won’t make it to the next century. Second, I’m not honestly
sure that we are desperate for much more classical literature, when we haven’t really studied very hard vast tracts of what
we already possess. Third, when most of what has come up from the Villa so far has been Philodemus, I don’t see much reason
to be optimistic about finding a more varied selection if we only dig deeper. (This place was obviously the bolt-hole of an
obsessive Philodemus fan.)
But if I had to pick my 5 favourite lost classics to find in the lava, what would they be?
First
off (and I’m scrupulously sticking to Latin – and written before the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 ad here) would be the
Autobiography of Agrippina
, Nero’s mum.
We know she wrote one, and quite what she had to say about the death of her husband Claudius (those mushrooms?) would be fascinating
to discover. Besides, we need some more women’s literature from the ancient world.
Second
, I’d have Ovid’s play
Medea
. This is partly on the principle that you couldn’t ever have enough of Ovid – than whom none was ever cleverer and funnier.
And it would be good to see what he did with the story of a jealous child-murderer.
Third
, I’d like the complete poetical works of Cicero. Poor old orator Cicero has had a really bad press for his poetry. Not helped
by the 70 odd lines he himself quoted in one of his essays from his own epic poem
On His Own Consulship
(this included, as we know from other sources, the memorable bit of doggerel ‘
O fortunatam natam me consule Romam
’ = ‘Rome was born a lucky city,/when I as consul wrote this ditty’, or sort of ...). I’d like to see what it looked like
when we saw the lot.
The
fourth
is going to play it safe. I’ll take Ennius’
Annales
– his multi-volume epic on the history of Rome from the fall of Troy to the second century BC. Before Virgil, this was the
national epic of Rome. And although some fragments survive, they’re not really enough to see how the whole thing works.
Fifth
, the wild card. The
Handbooks on Divination
by Umbricius Melior. Melior was the favourite
haruspex
(Etruscan diviner) of the short-lived emperor Galba (who followed Nero, 68/69 ad) and he’s known to have written handbooks
on his skill. This would be an insider’s view on reading the omens in livers and the flights of bird ... which might just
help us see how this bit of ancient religion worked (there speaks the historian of religion!).
Does anyone have better ideas? And remember, not after 79 ad please.
Comments
Commenters did indeed have other ideas:
The rest of Cornelius Nepos
The emperor Claudius’
Etruscan Histories
Calvus and Cinna the Poet
The first two books of Curtius Rufus
Suetonius’
Lives of the Whores
Clodia’s account of the liaison with Catullus
Varro’s
Three-headed Monster
(on the First Triumvirate)
The rest of Sulpicia
The
Amores
of Gallus
The collected letters of Atticus ...
But some had more to say:
A cute idea on the transmission of Euripides ... Seeing as some of the Euripides plays in your list begin with Eta and others
Epsilon, does this mean that a corollary of your hypothesis is that there were no plays whose title began with Zeta or Theta?
I’ll let the digs against Philodemus go for now ... Great literature it might not be, but I’m not sure Cicero’s poetry would
be a better bet. And have you ever looked at Philodemus’ poetry? You might like that.
JAMES
This correspondence recalls a conversation years ago at a conference when folk started enumerating books written on the principle
of the solitary Highland lass’s thoughts about Wordsworth which they would like to read. Someone suggested, ‘The Justice of
Lloyd Jones by Zeus’, someone else ‘Syme, by Tacitus’. ‘What about Syme by the author of the
Historia Augusta
?’ asked a wit. ‘They could not find anyone to sign the contract’ came the reply.
[Untranslatable classical joke: ed.]
OLIVER NICHOLSON
Why didn’t the Athenians give the women the vote?
8 November 2007
I have had a dreary cold, so I can’t claim I was particularly looking forward to the three consecutive hours on the Critics
(ancient and modern) of Athenian Democracy, but the students – pairs of my college first years – got me engaged. (If they
didn’t, this job would be a lot less worth doing.)
One of the issues we skirted round was, of course, the Woman Question. Why didn’t those lovely democratic fifth-century Athenians
give women political rights? And do we think worse of them for not doing so?
It’s easy enough to toe the party line here. You can’t apply modern criteria to ancient Athens. Within Athenian culture women
were assumed to be unpolitical animals. Their job was to bear citizen children. They were, almost by definition, incapable
of taking the responsible, informed decisions demanded of the (male) citizen body. Different from us, of course; but that’s
how the ancients, not just the Athenians, were.
So far, so good. But the problem is trying to imagine what it would actually be like to think of women in those terms. What
would it feel like to feel that women were, by definition, excluded from political power, that it would be simply bonkers
to include them (a question, needless to say, that applies to many cultures other than fifth-century Athens).
The analogy we tried was children. If someone were now to suggest that the under-tens should have the vote, we would bring
out all those arguments that the Athenians would have brought out against women. They can’t understand the decisions they
would have to make. They still need the protection of their parents. It would be irresponsible to entrust major decisions
of state or finance to them. In short, it would be bonkers.
Yet could we imagine a world in the far distant future where children had the vote? Could we imagine a world which derided
our twenty-first-century ‘folly’ in depriving a clever nine-year-old of her citizenly rights, while driving the frail 95-year-old
to the polling station to put her cross by whoever happened to take her fancy on the morning?
Maybe we almost could? And maybe in the process we were beginning to empathise a bit better with the assumptions of the Athenian
misogynists – and so understand the ancient world in a different way. And maybe in the process we were beginning to understand
something more about ‘the invention of childhood’, too.
And maybe my sore throat was receding in the fun of it all.
26 November 2007
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a society in search of a slogan must be in need of Latin – which usually puts
things snappier and shorter and cleverer than the poor old English vernacular. I mean, could you ever capture
‘Per Ardua ad Astra’
quite so neatly in our mother tongue? ‘Through struggles to the stars’ seems horribly cumbersome. It’s actually only one word
more, it feels more like three times as long. I’ve seen some nice parodies, as it happens ... ‘
Per ardua ad nauseam
’ – or ‘
Per ardua ad Robin Reliant
(
can’t afford an Astra
)’
I
know
this truth to be fairly universally acknowledged, as my Faculty in Cambridge gets so many requests from rugby clubs, charities,
WIs, etc., to turn some reassuring platitude into a Latin slogan that we have a specially designated motto-writer. Professor
X (I’m not going to reveal his name for fear of increasing the work load beyond what is manageable) is kept pretty busy.
The recent competition for devising a new British motto had Latin entries that fell into two camps: a few who picked up an
existing Latin slogan and redeployed it more or less appropriately; and most, who tried their hand at their own bit of Latin.
The results of this were what my older colleagues would call ‘
alpha/gamma
’ – that is, occasionally brilliant but let down by some awful Latin grammar (or, alternatively, disappointing in their grip
on the Latin language but enlivened by flashes of genius).
Playing safe with
bona fide
Latin was ‘
O tempora O mores
’ (‘What times, what customs!’) This is a quote from Cicero in 63 BCE railing in the senate against the standards of his own
day and at the terrorist Catiline, who was supposed to be bringing down civilisation as Cicero knew it and planning to nuke
Rome. The only trouble is, it is just as likely that Catiline was a relatively innocent stooge, set up by Cicero looking for
reds under the bed, and for an excuse for a brutal campaign of summary executions (or, in our nicer days, detention without
trial) ... not a dangerous ‘terrorist’ at all. So all the more appropriate, then?
The trouble with inventing your own Latin is quite how to make it sound clever rather than ‘dog’. Not many succeeded. A few
admitted their ignorance. One thought that ‘National mottoes are for wimps’ might sound better in Latin, but didn’t risk it.
Another asked for the Latin for ‘Keep a stiff upper lip’.
What would that be?
Well, here we must go back to what our teachers taught us. The way you translate Latin is not ‘word for word’ – but going
for the nugget of sense (that’s why, they said, translating Churchill’s speeches into Latin – a task on which I spent many
days of my youth – was such a good training in understanding).
So, to take the earlier case, we won’t be going for ‘
Tene labrum rigidum
’ (literally ‘Keep a stiff lip’ – a phrase no Roman would have even begun to understand). But something more like ‘
Vincit qui se vincit
’ (‘He conquers who conquers himself ’ – the motto of self-control). It’s a bit of a cheat actually, because the slogan was
already a Latin one, included in an under-rated proverb collection of the first century BC.
As for the ‘wimps’, it would certainly involve the Latin
molles
(‘softies’), but I’m not quite sure yet how I’d render ‘national slogans’. Any ideas?
For the rest there was an awful lot of very funny ‘dog’ Latin (and don’t forget that most ‘dog’ is actually meant to be funny).
Sorry, it was a nice try with ‘
Perdisimus homines sumus
’ – but some more mugging up is needed here on noun and adjective endings (‘
Perdidissimi homines sumus
’, if you must – ‘What wretches we are’)! And much as I liked ‘
Magnus frater spectat te
’ (‘Big brother is watching you’), I would have to opt for ‘
Omnes videantur
’ (‘Let all be seen’). The same principles are at work here as with the Churchill: go for the nugget of sense, not for the
words.
But what would I choose as my own motto? Well, I’m going back to real Latin and I’ve got a clear favourite:
‘Capax imperii
’ (‘Capable of ruling’).
That sounds grimly self-satisfied on its own, but you need to know what comes next. For those two words are part of what the
historian Tacitus says, summing up the career of the elderly, few-month emperor Galba (68–9 ad). What follows is key. He had
looked promising before he came to the throne, says Tacitus, but proved hopeless: he was ‘
capax imperii nisi imperasset
’. He was capable of ruling, if only he hadn’t ruled. Or, as one smart translator put it, ‘He had a great future behind him.’
That’s Britain really:
capax imperii ... nisi ...
(and don’t forget the
nisi
).
Labouring classicists – and New Year resolutions
1 January 2008
It’s New Year’s day and my birthday (OK ... 53). And my devotion to study on days that might in other circumstances be devoted
to jollity is, I am afraid, getting to be a habit.
Today, I’ve been writing a paper for a big Classics conference in Chicago, where I’m going on Thursday. I promised a talk
on ‘working-class engagement in Classics’ in the nineteenth century. I’ve been fed up for a long time with the usual line
that Classics has always been an exclusively élite subject, designed only to shore up such dubious notions as British imperialism
and the uncontestable superiority of the British élite.
The idea in proposing this paper was to try to get some flesh on those doubts. It turns out that I only have to talk for 20
minutes, into which you can hardly squeeze much of an argument. But even so I’ve left it a bit to the last minute. Hence full
steam ahead today.
Actually – never mind the argument of the paper – I’ve found some tremendous characters. My particular favourite is Alfred
Williams, born 1877, and author of
Life in a Railway Factory
, who taught himself Greek and Latin, partly by chalking up his irregular verbs on the casing of his forge.
Needless to say, this was a little trick which (however innocent) didn’t appeal to the foreman. To stop Williams using the
side of his forge as an
aide memoire
for the nastier parts of the ‘—
mi
verbs’ (classicists will understand and sympathise), he had it covered with oil. Even this didn’t stop Williams. As his first
biographer explained, ‘With characteristic determination Alf dared to clean off the oil thoroughly – in his own time of course,
for he was always careful to avoid placing a weapon in the hand of his oppressor – and rewrote the Greek.’
There was a celebrity element in all this. The
Daily Mirror
in 1910 carried a picture of Alf composing a sonnet in his lunch break, in front of an audience which apparently included
‘Mr Swinburne’ (it can’t have been the poet
Swinburne,
who died in 1909 – but it still makes me wonder how far the cultural establishment had taken over this autodidact).
A close second for me comes a woman poet, whom I should have known before – as she’s a great symbol for all us female classicists.
This is Ann Yearsley, a late eighteenth-century milkmaid, who penned a wonderful satire entitled
Addressed to Ignorance: occasioned by a Gentleman’s desiring the Author never to assume a Knowledge of the Ancients
. In it, the great heroes of antiquity have been turned into animas or homely British labourers. (‘Stout Ajax, the form of
a butcher now takes ...’ and so on). Up yours is, I think, the message.
Comments
A great-uncle of mine, who would have been roughly contemporary with Alfred Williams, taught himself Latin and Greek while
carting books to and fro in the behind-the-scenes recesses of the Bodleian for the learned men to read. But that’s as much
as I know and I had that from my mother, who has gone where no further enquiry is possible, so he’s not a suitable candidate
for inclusion in your paper.
DAVID KIRWAN
Obituaries of library staff in the Bodleian Library Record until recently sometimes recorded that the librarian (often a distinguished
figure) had started life as a ‘Bodley boy’ – a young man (or woman) who had come to the Library on leaving school at 14 or
so and after some years’ work there was able to do an Oxford degree at the Library’s expense. Did Cambridge have such a scheme?
OLIVER NICHOLSON
