All in a Don's Day

by Mary Beard

So thanks to the semi-anonymous donor (Patrick x x x x x x what a star you are!), and to all who have helped out (especially Jo and Andrew).

  On other fronts, Christmas set to go … we even have a little tree in the new bathroom!

  What’s wrong with government by petition?

  28 December 2010

  There was huffing and puffing round the breakfast table this morning as we listened to the government’s new gimmick – that successful on-line petitions should get a parliamentary debate, and even made into a bill. The Labour MP (Paul Flynn) had some sensible things to say about the idea … but as the husband pointed out, it’s a pity the Labour Party hadn’t been more sensible when they started this whole e-petition idea. It was, after all, their gimmick in the first place.

  So what is the matter with the idea?

  Well, for a start, it is a veneer of popular power, a substitute touted as the real thing. Mass e-petitioning looks as if it is putting power back into the people’s court. But actually it is more likely to give an outlet to the computer-literate, with time on their hands and an axe to grind (which is a decidedly skewed sub-category of ‘the people’). Remember how the Today programme had to stop its annual ‘person of the year’ competition because all kinds of maverick campaigns launched all kinds of very odd people into the top of the list.

  Second, it is taking us in the wrong direction in terms of legislative activity. What we need is less legislation, fewer white papers – not more. That is to say, we need a bit more sense that the solution to every problem is not a new law. This e-petition idea risks turning us all into amateur lawmakers.

  And finally, it turns the complexity of politics into a competition between single-issue interest groups (and that in the long term has the effect of taking power away from ‘the people’, not giving it back). Of course we would all like to save the sparrows and the bees, stop rape and have a better public transport system … and no doubt you could get hundreds of thousands of people to sign up for those causes. But the real politics is not about signing up to some obvious good causes, it’s about balancing and prioritising a competing selection of good causes. That’s what, for us, the parliamentary process is all about. And anyone who wants to see the fatuity of the petition mode could well study the fruitless Californian system of ‘propositions’, which serve to paralyse more than enhance government.

  So far, I guess, so obvious.

  But a quick look at the Downing Street ‘petition’ site only makes one even gloomier – if for rather different reasons.

  For a start, it’s not clear that in practice this government gimmick is offering very much. Unless the site was having a hiccough over Christmas, there appear to be no current, open petitions at all (maybe people are fed up with the Labour gimmick already).

  And of the closed petitions, I reckoned that since 2007 only eight got over the magic figure of 100,000 that would give them any parliamentary time. Three were about fuel and other motoring issues (and I don’t think that these were being neglected, even without a petition … MPs aren’t that unrepresentative!), one was about creating a military hospital, another about having a Remembrance Day public holiday and another about letting the Red Arrows fly past at the 2012 Olympics. The other two were asking for the abolition of inheritance tax (128,622 signatures) and the abolition of plans to build a ‘Mega Mosque’ (281,882).

  Now some of this amply confirms the arguments I sketched in the first part of this post. I have no idea what campaign was driving the more than half a million signatories who wanted to see the Red Arrows at the Olympics, but as a rather pained government response makes clear, they hadn’t been banned from appearing anyway:

  This allegation is not true. The Government has not banned the Red Arrows from the London 2012 Olympic Games. The organising committee of London 2012 will decide what to include in the Opening Ceremony and other celebrations – but with almost five years to go, decisions are yet to be made on what these will look like.

  And, as for the inheritance tax lobby, this is exactly the kind of single-issue campaigning that gets in the way of joined-up financial thinking. (So where do they want to find the money that is ‘lost’ to the public purse?)

  But a closer look at the website gives a different slant. The whole thing is so monitored that it is only the ‘voice of the people’ in a terribly sanitised way. The most depressing part is the list of ‘rejected petitions’ – those that have been deemed off-limits, not qualifying for a response. There are more than 38,000 of these – more than the total of those allowed through the system.

  And what have they done wrong? In some cases they have talked about things that people really care about, but are sub judice or outside the Prime Minister’s remit. (‘It is not appropriate to petition the PM regarding legal cases over which he has no jurisdiction.’) Or they have written rather too frankly. A whole host get the chop because they ‘contained language which is offensive, intemperate, or provocative’. (Well, offensive is one thing … but are we not allowed to be provocative in a petition?) Others are banned because they contained links to websites (so much for new technology), were funny, or because they ‘contained party political material’ … err isn’t this part of the political process?

  So much for letting the people have their say. I can’t stand this gimmicky idea anyway, but if I did think that it gave us, the public, some direct influence over the political process, a good look at the website would make me think I’d been shortchanged.

  Comments

  According to the BBC website, one of Paul Flynn’s comments was: ‘The blogosphere is not an area that is open to sensible debate; it is dominated by the obsessed and the fanatical, and we will get crazy ideas coming forward′ It is a great comfort to know that Government and Parliament are not at all like that.

  RICHARD BARON

  The Classical precedents for popular power in politics are not encouraging: was it not popular power that exiled Anaxagoras on a charge of heresy (for saying that the sun was a red-hot rock somewhat bigger than the Peloponnese) and condemned Socrates to drink hemlock?

  DAVID KIRWAN

  Petitions may not be a good idea, but good old Ostracism might be worth giving a try …

  TOM TILLEY

  To tweet or not to tweet?

  8 January 2011

  I have just signed up to a Twitter account. Many people (including some commenters) had urged me in this direction. But, in the end, the reason I took the plunge was very simple. Fiona Maddocks had given me a bit of much-needed support on Twitter in the face of AA Gill’s review of my Pompeii programme and his ‘How could someone from Newnham understand a willy?’ line. (Let him come to Newnham, I say … There’s an invitation, Mr Gill!) I couldn’t find her email address to say thanks, so I signed up to Twitter to do it that way.

  Soon enough I found had some good friends ‘following’ me.

  So what now?

  I haven’t quite managed to tweet ever since. That’s partly because I haven’t worked out how to do it from my phone.

  But it’s partly because I haven’t worked out what to say. The world might be interested in whether S Fry is at that minute intending to drop by Starbucks, but sure as anything they are not remotely interested in M Beard’s coffee-drinking habits.

  I have speculated on a more academic approach … ‘just read a great article on the Quindecimviri Sacris Faciundis in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, but wasn’t sure how that would go down. I am tempted by the ‘message from the front line of the lecture’ – which Charlotte Higgins has done very nicely … ‘here I am sitting in Nottingham and Prof X has just said that the Romans didn’t cut their toenails’. But I haven’t been to any lectures lately.

  So what? I am shortly to decamp from Cairo to visit some Roman sites in Egypt (on the hunt for images of Roman emperors). If you would like to give me some suggestions on what to tweet and how to do it, I will try my best.

  Comments

  I’ll keep following as long
as you don′t boast or tell us you′ve just cleaned your teeth and cut your toenails.

  SUSANNAH CLAPP

  I′m giggling about the notion of the Romans and their toenails. (I′d certainly tweet that if someone said it!) The key thing is reciprocity – I use it as a way of disseminating information, picking up information and making contact with a bunch of people I don′t see a lot (or indeed have never met). It′s a great way to pass on, or find, interesting reading material via links. It′s like being at a crowded cocktail party set in a library (and as such, distracting). Don′t tweet that you′re making an omelette for lunch is my only advice, unless you have something so devastatingly cool to say about it that it′s unmissable.

  CHARLOTTE HIGGINS

  Tweeted to her

  Twitty ways

  Has left me

  In a baffled daze

  With wits like

  That I tweet you too,

  A little line

  From twit to you.

  A DENNIS

  The Colossi of Memnon? When are graffiti not graffiti?

  12 January 2011

  I have wanted to see the Colossi of Memnon for ages. These are two huge statues of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III which have stood since the fourteenth century BC outside the remains of his ‘mortuary temple’ not far from Luxor in southern Egypt. It isn’t their Egyptological history that interests me particularly. (In fact, even after a few days in Egypt, I’m just as bad as I ever was at telling my Nefertaris from my Nefertitis … or my Amenhoteps from my Akhenatens; and indeed I have been known to glaze over when having them explained.)

  For me these statues are important because they were a Roman tourist attraction – and it is fun to be gawping at monuments that Germanicus or Hadrian gawped at a couple of thousand years ago. Not exactly for the same reasons, it must be allowed. One of the colossi was especially renowned in the early Roman empire because, thanks to some damage (possibly in an earthquake in the first century BC), the effect of the stone warming up in the morning made the statue emit a strange sound like singing. The Romans said that it was not Amenhotep at all, but an image of the hero Memnon, son of Dawn … who miraculously sang to greet his mother each morning. Or, he sang most mornings; there were some unlucky visitors who didn’t hear the singing.

  The Romans loved the sound and also finished it off. The statue was repaired in the second century and never sang again.

  Predictably, perhaps, the tourist guides here (who have never heard of Memnon) tell a brave new version of the story … that they were believed to be statues of AGAmemnon, who wept at dawn. In such ways new myths are born.

  Anyway, I had long known that the upmarket Roman visitors did not just admire the sound; they scratched their appreciation in the stone of the figure’s huge leg. There are some notable verses: for example, by a lady in Hadrian’s party (Julia Balbilla) recording her appreciation in several lines of vaguely Sapphic verses.

  I have always called these ‘graffiti’ before. But a visit has shown that that is quite the wrong way of looking at them. For a start, Julia Balbilla could hardly have improvised her careful Sapphic lines when she arrived and heard the statue perform. She almost certainly came with them already up her sleeve (nothing spontaneous here). But just looking at the texts all over the statue’s leg suggested that these texts were a very professional operation. They were mostly very neat (not an amateur scrawl at all, and must have taken a good day to complete even for a trained inscriber); and several of them, even allowing for the changing ground level, were so high up that you would require more than a chair to stand on … something more like a mini-scaffold.

  This was not graffiti in the usual sense of the term at all. It was public display writing commissioned by a set of highranking Romans, writing themselves on to a famous, semi-mythical Egyptian monument (or, alternatively, an attempt by the locals to commemorate visits by famous foreign dignitaries).

  It was funny that we then went on to the temple at Luxor (much of which was also built by Amenhotep III) and saw graffiti of a different sort there … also of a ‘more than meets the eye’ kind. The guidebook was very keen on the signature of (Arthur) Rimbaud, the poet and gun-runner, very high up on the wall of one of the furthest chambers … indicating how much higher the ground level was in the 1880s, at the time of Rimbaud’s visit.

  What the guidebook didn’t say was that there was another Rimbaud signature on another column a few feet away. This aroused a bit of suspicion. Did Rimbaud ever actually go to Luxor? Well, so far as I can tell from web research, he was certainly in Egypt, but only known in the north. Enid Starkie (who appears to have believed that Luxor is near Alexandria) knew of no other evidence than his ‘signature’ on the temple.

  We have ended up with the distinct impression that once Byron had started the tradition of poets carving their signatures into ancient temples, that was not only an encouragement for any old poet to do the same – it was an encouragement for any fan to forge the name of their favourite poet on to an appropriately grand antiquity.

  Or does someone have some clear, independent evidence that Rimbaud did make it as far as Luxor?

  Comments

  In his biography of Rimbaud (2000) Graham Robb suggests that AR could have seen Luxor in 1888, but the style of the inscription suggests an earlier date – perhaps a soldier on Napoleon′s 1798 expedition. There were at least two other Rimbauds, one of them a looter of shipwrecks. (AR was good at Classics – prizes at the Institut Rossat etc.)

  PETER WOOD

  A good source of information on graffiti throughout Egypt and the Sudan is Roger De Keersmaecker′s Travellers′ Graffiti series (ten volumes and counting): www.egypt-sudan-graffiti.be

  MARIE E BRYAN

  Universities, despots and plagiarism

  7 March 2011

  I have been in Washington DC, and have only seen the obvious bits of reportage about the resignation of Howard Davies after the row about Gaddafi junior’s funding of the LSE.

  I have to say that, nasty as Gaddafi senior is now proving himself (again?) to be, I feel rather sorry for Davies. Every government, for the last 30 years at least, has urged universities to chase outside funding; the chances were always going to be that some of it would come from dubious (or worse) sources.

  For the fact is that people who make a very, very great deal of money (the kind of money that would significantly fund a university) are often not particularly nice. There are exceptions, but you know what I mean.

  Sure, the spectrum is a wide one, and it runs from the criminal to the merely ruthless. At one end there are the Gaddafis, the arms dealers and fraudsters (as well, if you like, as the tobacco companies). At the other are those who had a brilliant idea or a timely patented invention plus the drive to market and exploit it. Clever ideas on their own don’t make people rich; it’s clever ideas combined with a capacity to corner the market that does it.

  Send universities (or museums, or whoever) chasing those multi-billionaires – licensed begging, the husband calls it – and sooner or later you will find they have been tapping into a Gaddafi. It’s hypocritical, when that happens, to point the finger. (I’m not sure if ethical fund-raising is any more feasible than an ethical foreign policy.)

  I feel conflicted on this one. Half of me wants nothing to do with it and thinks that we should fund universities etc. properly from the public purse (however ethically tainted that may or may not be). The other half thinks that getting money from the bad and turning it to good ends might be a positive thing to do. I certainly suspect that many of the founders of Cambridge colleges acquired their cash in decidedly dubious ways, but we have been doing good with their ill-gotten gains for centuries. In a way, that counts as a moral transformation.

  The other issue has been the spotlight on Gaddafi junior’s PhD: plagiarised or not? I certainly haven’t seen enough to know, but I was taken aback by an article by Lord Desai in the Guardian on Friday. He was one of the PhD examiners and he wrote: ‘No one at th
is stage [i.e., when he examined it] had said there were problems of authorship or plagiarism with the thesis.’

  I had always thought that determining authorship and originality was one of the jobs of the PhD examiner.

  Comments

  From you of all people, Mary, I would have expected a reference to Vespasian here: ′Pecunia non olet′ (′Money doesn′t smell′).

  MARION DIAMOND

  The most contemptible thing about the plagiarism aspect is that no one cared a rat′s behind about it when it was expedient to be on good terms with Gaddafi. But when it was suddenly all right to denounce him, people raised their hands in sanctimonious horror at the dishonesty of his son.

  BOB

  BAFTAs and Emmys

  12 May 2011

  My good news is that the Pompeii programme I was involved with (made by Brave New Media, Lion TV, with the BBC) has been short-listed for a BAFTA (Specialist Factual category). Whatever happens at the next stage, that is jolly good news for all of us involved. And it’s a reassuring confirmation that people can really appreciate programmes about Pompeii that do not feature CGI versions of exploding volcanoes or B-grade actresses dressed up in revealing Roman kit pouring out the Falernian from a reconstructed Roman bar.

  No; instead it was me and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill down a real ancient sewer talking about the real ancient shit and the historical secrets it could divulge. The ancient world up close and personal, and without the distracting frills.

  Anyway this means that I will probably get to go along to the ceremony later in the month, where the final winners are announced; and to act the star-struck academic in the midst of the celebrity soap stars, the leading actors from Downton Abbey, plus Stephen Fry. (‘Specialist factual’, I have quickly realised, is a bit of a minnow of a category compared with ‘comedy’.)