It's a Don's Life (4 page)
Authors: Mary Beard
They make a desert and call it peace
24 July 2006
I am usually suspicious of claims that understanding the history of the ancient world helps you understand the history of
our own. When people tell me that antiquity was so like today, I tend to object that it was actually very different in almost
every possible respect.
But two of the topics in Roman history that I regularly teach have recently come to seem almost uncomfortably topical – and
raw.
The first is the whole theme of ‘native’ resistance to the Roman empire. If you didn’t have the military resources, how could
you stand up against the ancient world’s only superpower?
Between the third century BC and the first century ad, Rome systematically extended its control over the world from the Sahara
to Scotland. As with most empires, it was not without its advantages for at least some of the conquered. I’m not just talking
about consumer goods, literacy, water and drains (which didn’t impact on as much of the Roman world as we often fondly imagine).
Rome’s imperial strategy was first to incorporate the local élites and then gradually spread citizenship, with all its advantages,
throughout its whole territory. It was generosity, even if sprung from self-interest.
That said, what could you do if you didn’t fancy being taken over by Rome, having your self-determination removed and being
forced to sing to the Roman tune (as well as pay Roman taxes)? The Roman legions represented an insuperable military force.
In pitched battle they might occasionally be delayed (if you could muster vast numbers of forces while the Romans themselves
were off guard), but while their power was at its height they could not be defeated.
Barbarians were not stupid. They did not pointlessly waste their men’s lives in formal battle lines against the superpower.
Instead they did what the disadvantaged will always do against overwhelming military odds: they ignored the rules of war and
resorted to guerrilla tactics, trickery and terrorism.
Much of this was ghastly and cruel. Our image of plucky little Asterix with his boy-scoutish japes against the Roman occupation
is about as true to life as a cartoon strip would be that made suicide bombing seem like fun. Boudicca’s scythed chariots
(if they ever existed) were the ancient equivalent of car bombs. In terrorising the occupying forces she was said to have
had the breasts slashed off the Roman civilian women and sewn into their mouths.
Roman writers were outraged at barbarian tactics in war, decried their illegal weapons and their flouting of military law.
(In fact ‘terrorist’ sometimes captures the Roman sense of the Latin word
barbarus
better than the more obvious ‘barbarian’.) But in the face of invincible imperialism, they must have felt they were using
the only option they had. Does it sound familiar?
My second teaching topic is the famous account by the Roman historian Tacitus of the career of his father-in-law, Agricola,
who was governor of Britain in the late first century ad and extended Roman power north into Scotland. On one occasion the
barbarians were foolish enough to risk a pitched battle – and, just before it, Tacitus puts into the mouth of the British
leader, Calgacus, a rousing speech denouncing not only Roman rule but the corruption of language that follows imperial domination.
Slaughter and robbery go under the name of ‘power’ (we make much the same point about ‘collateral damage’). And, in a now
famous phrase, he says, ‘They make a desert and call it peace.’
This is often treated, and quoted, as a barbarian denunciation of Roman rule. Of course, it is nothing of the sort. No real
words of Calgacus or of any British ‘barbarians’ have survived. As with many imperial powers, the most acute critiques often
came from within the Roman system, not from outside it. This is an analysis by Tacitus himself, a leading member of the Roman
élite, observing the consequences of Roman expansion and daring to put himself into the place of the conquered.
As such, it makes an even more appropriate message for us. Whatever forms our ‘deserts’ take – whether it is the poppy fields
of Afghanistan, or the ruins that will be left of Beirut, when Israel and Hezbollah (and our own culpable inactivity) have
finished – we are still making them and calling them ‘peace’.
28 July 2006
There has been disappointing news about university entrants. The number of kids from state schools going to university has
fallen. So has the number from the poorest families going to what are called ‘leading universities’. So too (though no one
seems quite so bothered about this one) has the number of boys.
News like this tends to provoke another round in the favourite national sport of Oxbridge bashing. The general line is that
we sit round after dinner, quaffing our claret and plotting to let in thick privately educated toffs, and keep out the brightest
and best from ordinary schools. Just occasionally this is backed up by a
cause célèbre
: an unlucky applicant with 15 A stars at GCSE and a raft of perfect A levels who was rejected, in favour (so the implication
is) of a less qualified bloke who knew how to hold his knife and fork.
Everyone (apart from us) likes this kind of stuff. Tabloids push the hard luck story. The broadsheets play to the anxieties
of a middle-class readership wondering if their children or grandchildren are going to make it. And for the Labour front bench,
deploring the wickedness of élitist academics is a cheap way of reassuring the back bench rebels that they still have some
kind of concern for social justice.
Of course, it’s not like that at all. One problem with the
causes célèbres
is that rules of confidentiality stop us from telling our side of the story. The unsuccessful candidate’s head teacher or
parents can leak all they like about the unfortunate line of questioning (‘You mean you’ve never been to the United States?’)
or the general bad treatment (‘The interviewer was two hours late and then turned up in a dinner jacket’).
We, by contrast, have to resort to general platitudes about the intensity of the competition and our 1000s of excellent applications
with equally stellar paper qualifications. Sometimes that is the only explanation for rejection. But sometimes, I can assure
you, there are other reasons why the apparently brilliant Miss X didn’t get a place. And on those we must keep quiet.
But the more general point is that it is absolutely preposterous to imagine that people like me would choose to teach the
stupid rich in preference to the bright poor. Of course, we make mistakes occasionally or we say things in interviews (usually
quite inadvertently) that irritate or even upset a candidate. But for as long as I have been doing Cambridge interviews (over
20 years now) we have been pursuing intellectual potential, not social and cultural advantage.
The trouble is that the pursuit of potential is an inexact science. Let me give you an (entirely imaginary) example. On the
one hand: Candidate A – a girl living with an unemployed grandmother in bed and breakfast accommodation, and attending a school
from which only 5% of the pupils proceed to higher education, who has got 4 As at A level. On the other hand: Candidate B
– a boy from an extremely expensive public school, whose Mum and Dad met at Cambridge before proceeding to lucrative legal
careers, who also has 4 As. It is obvious that it has taken a lot more for Candidate A to get to this point than Candidate
B and her potential may well be greater (and I’m as sure as I could be that she would get a place). But that does not mean
that Candidate B does not deserve a place, too – and you couldn’t rule out the possibility that he was actually cleverer.
After all, geniuses come from posh homes as well as poor ones.
So we do our best. We get trained how to interview more fairly (no knife and fork tests or class-specific questioning). We
visit schools to encourage the best to apply (and not to be put off by what they read in the paper). And we get all the data
that we can. Despite some recent fuss about such an initiative at Oxford, for years we have been given ‘adjusted A level scores’
(which take account of their school’s overall performance) for all our candidates. But frankly we are not helped by the fact
that school references are now open to the applicant, so we get a lot less straight talking from head teachers than we used
to.
The bottom line is that it is politically naïve (as well as unfair) for a government to underfund the state education system
and to take little effective action on social justice, and then to blame ‘leading universities’ for not righting the wrongs
they have perpetuated.
Keeping sex out of scholarship
1 August 2006
Sometimes I feel that people read what I write in a surprisingly perverse way. To put that more kindly, there is an odd mismatch
in journalism (even the most cerebral literary kind of journalism) between the attention given to the writing and the attention
given to the reading. I slave for hours trying to capture exactly the right nuance – then someone takes the
TLS
on the train or to the loo, gives it five minutes and goes away with a very odd impression of what I was trying to say.
Not that I blame the reader. After all, I probably give much the same 5-minute treatment to what other people write. And you
might argue that it is the writer’s job to make their point clear to all-comers. All the same, when someone completely misrepresents
you, it is peculiarly irritating.
Last week, the
Independent
newspaper published a ‘question and answer’ article with the excellent Mary Warnock. One question was: ‘Professor Mary Beard
has suggested that Eduard Fraenkel’s status as a classical scholar is diminished by his inappropriate conduct towards women
in his Oxford classes ... As a former student of Fraenkel’s, do you agree?’
Warnock’s reply: ‘I think, alas, Professor Beard is talking nonsense.’
I would have been tempted to agree with Warnock myself, if that had been even remotely what I wrote.
What the questioner (whom I shall not name and shame) was referring to was a review I wrote in the
TLS
of a new
Dictionary of British Classicists
. In this I pointed out that it was very odd that the entry on Fraenkel (Professor of Latin in Oxford from 1935–53) made no
mention of his notorious ‘wandering hand’ – clearly documented by (
inter alias
) Warnock herself in her autobiography.
I did not for a minute suggest that this diminished his status as a classicist. Classical scholars come equipped with all
manner of sexual virtues and vices. And, by and large (there are, of course, some limitations), sex can be separated from
scholarship. In fact I stuck my neck out to say that most women over their mid-40s (e.g. me) were likely to feel ambivalent
about Fraenkel’s behaviour. One can’t help deploring the abuse of male power. But one also – honestly – can’t help feeling
a bit nostalgic for that, now outlawed, erotic dimension to (adult) pedagogy.
What I objected to was the bowdlerisation of the biographical tradition. When it is relatively widely known how Fraenkel spent
his evenings with his female students, why does that have to be blotted out from the authorised version of his life? Why bother
with the pretence that he was devoted solely to his wife? Or why not, at least, be prepared to see that devotion as part of
a more complicated set of relationships? Don’t we need to remember our intellectual giants warts and all?
That is not the same thing at all as questioning his scholarly status.
It could, of course, be worse. The status of Fraenkel is a decidedly minority interest. But a few years ago I wrote what I
hoped was a similarly nuanced piece on reactions to 9/11. And ever after I’ve been that foolish/callous/dangerous don who
thought that ‘the United States had it coming’. Being traduced on Fraenkel isn’t quite so bad.
But maybe I should have learnt my lesson.
Comments
I recall a heated University of London debate as to whether Blunt should be stripped of his Emeritus title after the revelations
about his spying career. Only if it were proved that he had falsified data in his catalogue
raisonné
of Poussin was the most rational response.
DEIRDRE
I was fortunate enough to be a pupil of Colin Macleod, who studied under Fraenkel. On one occasion Colin confided: ‘The problem
is, John, that some fine scholars discover too late that what they are really interested in is golf, women or whatever.’ Fraenkel,
along with others who shall remain nameless, fell into the second group.
In passing, I should mention that Colin was in a different class from Fraenkel, who, like most Teutons, was encyclopaedic
rather than insightful. Colin’s premature demise through suicide was one of the greatest losses suffered by classical studies
in Britain, and indeed the world.
JOHN
Congratulations for being honest and understanding the powerful link between learning and eroticism. I, a vehemently non-gay
male, once spent a whole night drinking with a notorious but brilliant Cambridge don who tried to grope me; but the knowledge
and information I gained was immensely useful and could not have been provided publicly (it concerned spying in a foreign
country). I knew what I was doing – although friends of mine were shocked at breakfast in the morning to see me bleary-eyed
with him at the high table – and had no regrets.
EDWARD
11 August 2006
I have never been to Istanbul before. So on my first visit, after some serious work on the antiquities, I made straight for
the Topkapi Palace – HQ of the Ottoman rulers and the tourist high-spot of the city.
It was a nicely multicultural kind of tourism. Grubby backpackers in shorts rubbed shoulders with parties of headscarved (and
gratifyingly badly behaved) Muslim school girls. Elderly guidebook-readers shared benches with elderly Muslim pilgrims – there
to see the numerous relics of Mohammed himself that the Sultans had acquired.
I left the relics till last. And once I’d paid the money and passed the security check (liquids, thank heavens, were still
allowed), I made straight for the harem.
You have to pay extra to visit the harem and technically speaking you can only go round with a guide (parties leave every
half hour). But despite fierce notices about not getting separated from your group, none of the guards seemed too much bothered
if you hired an individual ‘audio guide’ and wandered pretty much at will.
It’s an extraordinary place, wonderfully decorated, with some of the best views in the whole palace – and its intricate social
and sexual hierarchies, and mechanisms of surveillance, are built into the architecture. It was hard to work out exactly how
everything fitted together (that was presumably part of the Sultan’s point). But the basic principles were clear enough. The
favourite women had better accommodation and were closer to the Sultan than the less favourite; the eunuch guards could watch
everyone coming and going, with the help, if necessary, of some very big mirrors.
It is the politics of the place that poses more problems. The old orientalist image of decadent and luxurious sexuality seems
completely out of fashion (except on the postcards and Turkish Delight tins on sale outside the palace). My guidebook had
replaced this with an image of sheer terror. The harem, it stressed, was ‘a cut-throat environment ... the women manouevred,
plotted, poisoned and knifed their way up the harem hierarchy’. And if the jealousies of the other women weren’t enough, there
was the murderous whim of the Sultan and his eunuchs. ‘Some of them got their kicks stuffing girls in sacks, loading them
into a boat and dumping them overboard in the Bosporus.’ Two sultans apparently disposed of their whole harems that way.
So it came as a bit of a shock to find that the audio guide took a very different line. According to that commentator, the
harem was a rather cultured kind of place. It was one of the few contexts in which a woman could learn the liberal arts –
and from time to time the soundtrack played music that, we were assured, was actually written by a harem resident. Many of
the girls apparently went on to make happy marriages with members of the Sultan’s court. (‘A bit like an Oxbridge woman’s
college’, I kept thinking it was going to say – but it didn’t.)
There is not much point trying to get to the bottom of this. For it’s actually a classic example of how difficult we find
it, from the outside, to understand what actually goes on inside all-woman institutions. In fact, it reminded me of all those
dilemmas classicists face in working out how to make sense of the Greek poetess Sappho and her community of girls. Should
we see her as a school mistress with a crush on her favourite pupils? Or was she more like a brothel-keeper? Or leader of
a louche lesbian coven?
Who knows?
