All in a Don's Day

by Mary Beard

  It could all have been a ceremony taking place 50 years ago. Except for a few things. We now have a stall selling the college merchandise to the graduands and their relations. (Anyone for a teddy with a Newnham scarf or jumper?) And the fur hoods are now not real but safely synthetic. Indeed the programme of the ceremony in the senate house explicitly reassures the worried audience that no animals have been killed in the making of this graduation ceremony.

  Well, not quite. One of my students had got hold of an old hood, which indeed had been made out of real bunny (or whatever). And I have to say that it looked much more elegant. It was a soft dusky cream, not the bright polyester-feel white of the synthetic versions, which moult all over the place and get full of static.

  OK, to kit them all out with the real version could not possibly be worth a mass cull of the rabbit population (even supposing the animal-friendly students would tolerate it) – but it would certainly be an aesthetic improvement.

  Comments

  The order in which colleges present their candidates for degrees is: King′s (founded 1441), Trinity (founded 1546), St John′s (founded 1511), followed by the other colleges in order of their foundation, from Peterhouse (founded 1284) onwards (Ordinances of the University of Cambridge, Chapter 2, Section 10.12).

  Yours pedantically, Nick Denyer, Praelector and Father of Trinity College

  NICHOLAS DENYER

  As a prole who did two degrees at Oxford, and reluctantly attended one degree ceremony belatedly to please my parents (as I am the first of my family to go on in education beyond the age of 14, they had been disappointed when I didn′t take the first one), I could not bear the kowtowing and obsequiousness before the reactionary etc. I surfed through my ceremony on a wave of class hatred for a system which was invented so that people like me couldn′t get in, by and large.

  I hoped it meant something that the daughter of a binman and a cleaner was being hectored in Latin in the Sheldonian, but, realistically, probably not a lot.

  E LONGLEY

  You lot have had it easy! Try taking a degree while working full-time, running a home, and in many cases, bringing up children. Your moment in the sun is priceless. A degree ceremony, dressed in that hard-won robe, and without the ‘silly hat′ (a much debated issue!) is the culmination of many years study, often in isolation, and not to be missed. You are surrounded by people who have been through the same experiences, and who are, to a man/ woman, raising the roof with their clapping and cheering. My BA ceremony was presided over by our Chancellor, ′our Betty′, the wonderful Betty Boothroyd. I wouldn′t have missed it for the world.

  JACKIE

  Was Alexander the Great a Slav?

  3 July 2009

  This is a row I really don’t get. Over the last few years FYROM (the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) has been investing heavily in Alexander the Great. FYROM’s main airport is now called ‘Alexander the Great Airport’ (better than ‘John Lennon’ or ‘Bob Hope’ airports, you might think). A vast statue of Alexander (eight storeys high, apparently) is planned for the centre of Skopje. And the word on the street is that Alexander was a Slav.

  This seems to me to be, at best, rather touching. It’s nice to think that there is still enough symbolic life in this drunken juvenile thug that someone wants him for their nation. At worst, it is faintly silly. The antecedents of Alexander are a bit murky, but in truth there isn’t a cat in hell’s chance that he was a Slav. I can see also that it could be a bit annoying to some Greeks who might want to try to claim Alexander for themselves (this is a better claim than the Slavic one, but not exactly cast-iron).

  But what on earth has persuaded over 300 Classical scholars (several of whom are good friends of mine) to sign a letter to President Obama (copy to Mrs Clinton et al.) asking him to intervene personally to clear up this FYROM historical travesty.

  I hope Obama has got some more important wrongs to right. But supposing that he has had a minute to look at this missive, I trust that he won’t be won over by the outraged arguments.

  The territory of FYROM, they point out, is more strictly that of ancient Paionia, not Macedonia. (Fair enough, but so what – we don’t stop Northern Ireland calling itself part of Great Britain, even though it wasn’t part of ancient Britannia.) The other arguments in the letter are decidedly dodgier, and not the kind of thing that the learned signatories would (I hope) give high marks to in an undergraduate essay.

  There is the usual stuff about how Alexander’s ancestors must have been Greek as they competed in the Olympic Games. (In fact there was originally some dispute at the time about whether they were, or were not, Greek enough to qualify.) But the worst argument is the claim that ‘the Macedonians traced their ancestry to Argos’, and so were bona fide, not FYROM-style, Greeks. Well, of course the Macedonians said that. It was a convenient and self-serving myth, no truer than the Athenians’ claim that they were born from the soil of Athens.

  By putting their names to this rubbish, I can’t help feeling that my friends are stooping to exactly the kind of nationalism that they are trying to oppose. If you really wanted to undermine the Macedonian claims, wouldn’t it be better (and academically more credible) simply to laugh at them and just refuse to take them seriously?

  Comments

  This post attracted more comments than any other, most berating me for being pro-Greek or anti-Greek, pro-FYROM or anti-FYROM: ′I am amazed that a professor at Cambridge can try to promote her views without any proof′; ′Mary Beard has been drinking too much ouzo as her pro-Greek stance is quite pathetic′. And so on. A few struck a different note:

  Unless I remember wrongly, it was clearly established that the Ptolemies and the Macedonian royal family were in fact American: hence their invasion of the whole Middle East, and the large number of Philadelphias, Pellas etc. in the USA.

  The point that Philip must have been Greek because of his activities at Delphi is particularly laughable: since he had established himself as the strongest military power in Greece at the time, there was little enough the other Greeks could do about it, and his keenness to gain a prominent role at the sanctuary reflects his only-dubiously-Greek status.

  It′s quite alarming how many distinguished scholars are willing to sign up to this crap. However, since President Obama′s personal background combines elements from Kenya, Hawaii, Indonesia and he is nevertheless quite clearly an American, I don′t imagine he will take this ′because of what happened in the fourth century BC′ model of ethnicity very seriously.

  RICHARD

  Alexander′s father was a snake (Plut. Alex. ii,4; Justin xi.11.3; Q.Curt. I)

  PL

  The contrast between the impressive list of names and the buffoonishness of the sentiments expressed therein is indeed striking. This is a question of contemporary politonymy, and none of the signatories seems to have addressed the question from this point of view, assuming wrongly as they do that their Alexanderological expertise gives them authority to pontificate on modern geopolitics. But the problem is not ′was Alexander a Slav?′ or ′were ancient Macedonians Greeks?′, but ′how are modern state names authorized?′ Are there other cases of states assuming a name previously given to a province of another country? And the answer is yes. Luxembourg is the name both of a province of Belgium and an independent state, Moldova a region of Romania and a contiguous independent republic. Nobody has any problem figuring that an older region turned into two units.

  SW FOSKA

  Ten Latin quotes for the underground

  5 July 2009

  Last week it was reported that the drivers on the Piccadilly line would be adding some well-chosen quotes to their announcements on the underground: ‘Hell is other people’, ‘Beauty will save the world’ and other appropriate thoughts for a commuting journey.

  Surely, with Boris Johnson as mayor, there ought to be some real Latin among the anglophone platitudes. Indeed, a surprising number of the best-known Latin quotes turn out to be surprisingly appropriate for
the journey to work. In no particular order:

  1. ‘perfer et obdura! dolor hic tibi proderit olim’ – or ‘Be patient and put up with it; one day this pain will pay dividends.’ That’s Ovid (Amores III, XIa) reflecting on the insults of his mistress – but fits well enough for the rush-hour commute.

  2. ‘quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra’ – or ‘How long, Catiline, will you abuse our patience?’. The famous first line of Cicero’s first speech against Catiline, attacking the would-be revolutionary (or innocent stooge) Catiline. But you can substitute any adversary for Catiline. ‘quousque tandem abutere, Boris, patientia nostra?’

  3. ‘arma virumque cano’ – or ‘Arms and the man I sing’. The most famous line in the whole of Latin poetry, the first line of the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid. Though Virgil didn’t exactly mean the arms of the man digging into your side, as you’re stuck in the tunnel between Covent Garden and Leicester Square.

  4. ‘amantium irae amoris integratio est’ – or ‘Lovers’ quarrels are the renewal of love’ (that’s from Terence’s comedy The Woman of Andros, 555). Something to cheer you up after a bad night.

  5. ‘medio tutissimus ibis’ – or ‘You’ll go safest in the middle’, from Ovid, Metamorphoses II, 137. Advice to Phaethon, who was about – disastrously – to drive the chariot of the sun. Probably not much better advice on the underground.

  6. ‘audacibus annue coeptis’ – or ‘Look with favour on a bold start’ (as in Virgil, Georgics 1, 40). You could translate as – make for the tube door first, and don’t worry about the elderly, disabled or women with buggies.

  7. ‘nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanus’ – or ‘No one dances sober, unless maybe he’s mad’ (Cicero, Pro Murena 6, 13). More memories of last night.

  8. ‘nil desperandum’ – or ‘don’t despair about anything’ (Horace, Odes I, 7, 27). Self-explanatory for the rush-hour journey, but hard advice to follow.

  9. Better perhaps would be ‘nunc est bibendum’ – or ‘Now is the time to drink’ (Horace, Odes I, 37, 1 – in the original celebrating the death of Cleopatra).

  10. ‘capax imperii nisi imperavisset’ – or ‘capable of ruling if he hadn’t ruled’ (or roughly, ‘he had a great future behind him’). This is what Tacitus had to say of the emperor Galba after his speedy assassination.

  Too soon to tell if Boris has a great future behind him!

  Comments

  More Virgil: The encouraging ′Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit′ – ′Perhaps even all this will one day be a happy memory′ (Aeneas cheering up his companions after their shipwreck on a forbidding coast). Or ′Hic labor, hic opus est′ – ′This the labour, here the work to be achieved′ (the Cumaean Sibyl telling Aeneas that it′s the coming back alive from the world of the dead, not the going down there, that is the hard part).

  PL

  For those who have to use the Northern line:

  ′Nox est perpetua una dormienda′… (Catullus)

  [′An eternal night – all you can do is sleep through it′]

  ANNA

  It would be enough if the announcements were intelligible. I was once on the tube with a French person whose English was quite good and I persuaded him, the French being gullible, that the announcement that had just been made was in Hungarian and was an example of London Transport′s commitment to multiculturalism.

  MICHAEL BULLEY

  How about ′cave hiatum′ – mind the gap!

  ANDYC

  ′Odi profanum vulgus et arceo′. Horace. I′m surprised no one else has come up with this. ′I hate the common mob and keep them at arm′s length′.

  MICHAEL BENNETT

  Why is that the subject of Latin brings out the Radio 4 in people?

  ANTHONY ALCOCK

  There′s the old anecdote of a graffiti written when Boston Latin High School was closed because a severe snowstorm had closed the subway. ′Sick Transit. Glorious Monday!′

  NICK NUSSBAUM

  What were job references like in the old days?

  20 July 2009

  Anyone who has been involved in academic job interviews and selection – especially for early career posts – knows how important the references are. The candidates in question probably have very few publications that you can read; you need a supportive but honest assessment of strengths and weaknesses from someone who knows them.

  Anyone who has recently been involved will also know how difficult it is to get a supportive but honest assessment. The current rhetoric is of unadulterated praise, sometimes (I fear) laughably dishonest. It’s worse among American referees, but the Brits are fast catching up. In writing the instructions to referees for our college research fellowship competition a few years ago, I added some phrase to the effect of ‘an unadulterated eulogy will not help your candidate’. I can’t say that it had much effect among the persistent offenders.

  I always vow to write to these with a few simple queries. ‘Could you please compare Dr Y, whom you rate this year as ‘the most brilliant student you have ever taught’, with Dr Z, of whom you said the same last year. It would help the committee to know which in your view was absolutely the most brilliant.’ But I never quite get round to it.

  Anyway, clearing out my study, I found some references for a Cambridge job, advertised and appointed well over 20 years ago.

  They were both better and worse than their modern equivalent.

  As they are so old, and as some of the candidates – let alone the referees – are long dead, I think it is OK to give you some anonymised quotes from these. (I have changed anything that could possibly, even at this distance, lead to identification – including gender.)

  For a start, what was worse than now?

  That’s simple: the sexism. For almost every married woman in the pack, the referee felt bound to say that she was ‘happily married’ (how did they know – and would we have looked worse on an imminent divorcee, anyway?), and that the husband was very happy for his wife to have a job. A few launched into the childcare arrangements, while suggesting that we would obviously want to talk more about this at the interview. Thank God that’s now illegal.

  But these references were mostly a lot more helpful than today’s; they were prepared to talk about the weaknesses of the candidates and occasionally ventured a joke or two.

  Try this for an alert to a weakness: ‘First a criticism. Repetitiveness – no, rather verbosity. On a random sample of pages I thought that I could cut about 10% merely by verbal pruning. But X is well aware of this and is at the moment practising a little discipline.’

  Or this for a comment on the candidate’s match to the job description: ‘He is not the first person that I would have thought of for this particular post … although he would be competent to discharge it.’

  Or this: ‘I do not think he has done much, if any, teaching, and I suspect he is not particularly gifted as a teacher. I have found him rather diffident and unforthcoming in conversation. I would advise an interviewing committee, and I believe he deserves to be interviewed, to concentrate its attention on this area.’

  Or this for a warning note: ‘As an undergraduate she showed a tendency to indulge a taste for slightly eccentric philological speculation. I have no doubt … that this tendency is now well under control.’

  Then again, try this for a compliment: ‘I’ve never had any reason to suspect him of bluff or one-upmanship even in the sort of conversation where relatively sober scholars are liable to overbid their hands.’

  Or this: ‘If he were a bit flashier at interview, he would have got some kind of job by now, I feel.’

  And how about this for support, but not yet: ‘She sometimes has so many ideas at once, that she is not quite sure which to talk about first … I am convinced that she will be successful soon when she applies for a research fellowship. I am not at all sure that she should at this stage of her career take a teaching post.’

  True, you might say that all this was old school pre
judice, or unsupported assertion, or self-promoting cleverness on the part of the referee. But compared to the sewers of praise you find now, it was jolly helpful.

  Comments

  The Chichele Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford in the 1980s sent a handwritten reference for a friend applying for posts in the USA. It read in full: ′He is a sound man.′ It did not result in any interviews. The Chichele Professor rightly admired my friend′s work.

  I am sorry that Mary believes that anonymity is a virtue in these stories.

  QH FLACK

  ′He is a sound man′. Perhaps the Americans thought that ′he′ worked in a recording studio.

  ANTHONY ALCOCK

  It occurs to me, Mary, that, in fact, you are breaching the Data Protection Act by retaining information relating to candidates long after a reasonable length of time has elapsed from the date of the recruitment exercise.

  Pedant heaven, here.

  JANE

  Jane. Is that so – given that these documents had no electronic form and so are not and never have been ′data′ within the terms of the act?? If it WERE the case, I would count it another reason to feel suspicious of the act (or the way it is applied).

  MARY BEARD

  The data doesn′t have to be in electronic form. It can be part of ′a relevant filing system′ defined as data held ′in such a way that specific information relating to a particular individual is readily accessible′. Pedant heaven, as Jane says! But as far as I understand it, it′s not illegal to retain the data, so long as the ′data subject′ has access to it.

  SW FOSKA

  On data protection, I′m OK then. To be lingering in the bottom of an old box in a carrier bag, in which they must have been carried to and from the shortlisting meeting … doesn′t really count as ′a relevant filing system′!