All in a Don's Day

by Mary Beard

  No, the BBC hasn’t banned BC and AD. So far as I can see, various departments within the organisation have advised that BCE and CE may sometimes be more appropriate for a multicultural/multi-faith audience. It has done not much more than draw the issue to the attention of its editorial staff.

  I’m actually surprised that it needed much drawing. In my world CE and BCE have been around for years, and often used instead of BC and AD. I would say that some 50% of academic articles in Ancient History now use CE and BCE, more in the USA. And it hasn’t brought the Christian church down – and certainly not in America.

  The issues here are both clear and tricky. First BC and AD are certainly totally embedded in a Christian world view, though that may be conveniently and usefully concealed beneath the standard abbreviations. In fact, Dionysius did not invent the shorthand BC and AD in the shortened form, he invented the whole principle of arranging time around the birth of Jesus Christ.

  Imagine if every newsreader spelled it out in full ‘England’s World cup victory, in the year of our Lord 1966….’ or whatever. Then there really would be howls of protest, some of them from the very same people who are now objecting to the rumoured demise of BC and AD.

  There is no doubt that this is a Christian system. The problem is that the CE/BCE replacement doesn’t exactly un-Christianise it. Dionysius was super-successful to the extent that in most circumstances in the West it is now impossible to imagine unpicking the Christian calendar. (Geologists have done it up to a point with BP, ‘Before Present’ – because with the time periods they are dealing with the line drawn 2,000 years ago doesn’t matter very much.) So you might say ‘Why Bother?’ … wouldn’t it just be better to make people a bit more aware of the Christian framework built into our calendar?

  My particular problem with CE and BCE is rather different though. It’s an oral one. If you lecture, then BC and AD are great, as it is so easy for your audience to ‘hear’ the difference. If you use CE and BCE when you are speaking, you are always having to over-enunciate to make sure they get the point and the difference. And even then, many a hapless undergraduate fails to register, and gets Nero before Julius Caesar.

  So if there is a reason that the BBC should generally stick to the old usage, for me it is that it is simply easier to ‘hear’. Which is quite different from the BBC bashing, ‘I-don’t-pay-my-licence-fee-to-have-the-Lefty-BBC undermine-Christianity’ kind of drivel that has come flooding out, even from people who should know better – like Boris Johnson.

  Comments

  As someone who′s hopeless at dates, I′d prefer more inexactitude. So, how about something like this: NSLA – not so long ago, AGWS – a good while since, Y – yonks, AH – ancient history, BTA – before the Ark.

  MICHAEL BULLEY

  I once suggested DE, which stands for ′Dennis′s Era′, as the guy who established the number of years after Christ′s birth was called Dennis. That seems to me to leave the religion more out of it, and name the guy who set up the system.

  SW FOSKA

  The whole point of political correctness is to make people think, get them out of the cultural groove for a moment. I′d hold my hand up as a silly leftie, because I think slightly outrageous proposals do move the debate on, making certain default presuppositions visible and up for argument. I′m currently reading a very silly German translation of the Bible (Bibel in Gerechte Sprache), which puts back women everywhere, e.g. ′Propheten and Prophetinnen′ where we′d normally just read ′prophets′. I′m doubtful about how many female prophets there were (yes, some, but in every situation??), but when it comes to disciples of Jesus, it′s great to see ′die Jünger und Jüngerinnen′, because the women who followed Jesus are made so often invisible in the Gospels. So I′m all for that kind of silliness.

  NICK JOWETT

  May I quote (without permission) from David Abulafia in the preface to his history of the Mediterranean The Great Sea: ′Those who are uncomfortable with ′Before Christ′ and ′Anno Domini′ are free to decide that BC and AD stand for some other combination of words, such as ′Backward chronology′ and ′Accepted date.′

  By the way, ′Weedy Dionysius′ (a little joke courtesy of an RC priest I used to know) got it wrong, and the best date for the birth of Jesus of Nazareth is in the range 8–6 BC, making him perhaps the only person in history to have been born at the age of minus 8, or at any rate minus 6. At any rate, if you follow Matthew, then he had to be born before Herod the Great died in 4 BC(E).

  DAVID KIRWAN

  First-year Ancient History at Newnham. What do we do?

  19 October 2011

  Every year one of my favourite bits of teaching is with my Newnham first-year students (technically, I mean, Part 1A – because a few of them have already done our Prelim course, designed for those without A level Latin, or equivalent, and so are in their second year at Cambridge). First-year teaching is fun (and hard) because you are trying to educate (in the technical sense: i.e., not cram) a highly intelligent group of students, but they are being asked to make a very quick transition between school and university. To put it crudely, and a bit unfairly to A levels, they have quickly to become independent learners (with support and guidance); they have to discover what it is to explore a historical topic without knowing that there is a checklist of criteria whose boxes they have to tick in order to get a first, 2.1 or whatever; and they have to discover that intellectual inquiry is open-ended, exciting, difficult if you do it well, and that it matters.

  So what do I get them to do for their first piece of supervision (i.e., tutorial) work?

  Well, 15 years ago, I used just to set a ‘straight’ essay … something like a ‘How useful is the evidence of Lysias 1 for the position of women in Classical Athens?’, appending a bibliography which gave them (albeit indirectly) the answer. There were, in fact, some good lessons here. Lysias 1 – a speech given c. 400 BC about the murder of a certain Erastosthenes, allegedly killed after being caught in flagrante with another man’s wife – was a first-year set text. And in the process of writing the essay they learned a lot about it and about the position of women in Classical Athens. Not bad.

  But they didn’t learn much about exploring for themselves (they followed the bibliography I had given, rather overdutifully, despite exhortations to follow up other stuff they came across), and they didn’t learn much about the overall picture. Ask them about Lysias and his speeches and they would know a huge amount. Ask them about Solon, who lived 200 years earlier, and they were likely to look blank. OK, they had lectures which covered Solon and his democratic reforms, but (so far as I have observed) attending lectures conscientiously never quite hits the spot in the brain that writing an essay (vel sim.) does.

  So I starting trying something rather different for their first piece of university work in ancient history. For a few years, I would ask them to go away and write me a history of the ancient world (eighth century BC to fifth century AD) in 1,500 words. This was great for a bit. They learned quite a lot, and produced mostly rather conservative stuff. But you could really open it up in the supervision – pointing out that half of them had not mentioned a single woman or slave, or that their view of ‘the ancient world’ had been entirely Graeco-Roman etc etc.

  The trouble was that this assignment got to be part of the student mythology, so by the time the new first-years arrived in my room, the second-years had already tipped them off about what I was likely to ask. So this year I rang the changes, I gave them all a short essay to write on why the Old Oligarch (another set text) might be the best guide to fifth-century Athenian democracy that we have. (They had a decent bibliography and I gave them a 30-minute supervision, one to one, on what they each had written.) But for our communal class, all together, I set a rather different exercise.

  I gave them two inscriptions from the Athenian fifth century, in Greek (and with a translation), and I asked them to come back prepared to say what these texts were and why they were interesting. I gave them no bibl
iography (though if they looked carefully at the introduction to the translation they would have seen a few hints). I said I didn’t mind how they found out about them … asking mates, Googling, discussing together, reference books … but I wasn’t going to help. The inscriptions, by the way, were the records of the Hermokopidae (the ‘mutilators of the herms’ and the ‘profaners of the Eleusinian mysteries’) auctioned after their trial (IG I/3, 426 and 30) and the Athenian regulations for the town of Chalcis, imposed after its attempted revolt from the Athenian empire (Meiggs/Lewis 52.)

  To be honest, they looked a bit horrified when I explained this task. Most of them had never seen a Greek inscription before – didn’t even know they existed, I guess. And, in fact, when I explained to my own old Director of Studies (Joyce Reynolds, now in her 90s) what I had set for the first-years, she said that she thought it was rather a ‘stiff’ exercise. (Frankly, I thought this was a bit rich. Back in the mid-1970s we had learned huge amounts from her by being given much more impossible tasks.)

  Anyway, a week later they came to their joint supervision, brilliantly prepared to talk about these texts. They had got together, they had shared their knowledge, they had Googled and explored the library … and they could really talk about what these utterly unfamiliar inscriptions had to say. And they had learned a little bit about what research was really like, and they hadn’t just followed the bibliography (because they didn’t have one!). I was delighted, and they were really launched I think.

  So next year I shall do something similar – though I shall have to shake up the texts, otherwise these kids will just pass on their expertise to the new girls next year. ‘Ah yes, we did that … what you need to say is … ’

  Anyone who wants to explore the task I set will find an English translation of these texts in Charles W. Fornara, Archaic Times to the End of the Peloponnesian War (Cambridge UP, paperback, 1983).

  Comments

  A 1,500-word history of the ancient world (eighth century BC to fifth century AD) with no mention of a woman or a slave or of what the Chinese were doing during those 1,300 years – tsk, tsk! And no mention of blacks or the disabled or, heaven help us! the gay and transgendered. Clearly those neophyte Classicists need their consciousness raised.

  PL

  Actually PL, it wasn′t China that was uppermost in my mind … it was more the neighbours of ′Greece′ and ′Rome′ around the Mediterranean … Egypt, Lycia, Macedon.

  MARY BEARD

  Can I say without offence, Professor Beard, that you have, for me, just now entered Dante′s Lower than Lowest Circle of Hell, which is populated by Those Who Set Wide-Ranging Essay Topics With A Minuscule Word Limit.

  Low word-limits are appropriate for limited topics only.

  ANNA

  I′m tempted to suggest that ′Did the Trojan War Actually Happen?′ could be satisfactorily answered in three words (plus a footnote or two, and bibliography, I suppose): ′Yes. So what?′

  RICHARD

  Did the Trojan War actually happen? Yes, it all started with an apple.

  ANTHONY ALCOCK

  Unde malum? A malo.

  OLIVER NICHOLSON

  de malo bonus est iocus hic quem scripsit Oliver

  nam malus peperit mala tulitque mala.

  Prose translation for the non-Latinists: ′This joke about the apple,

  that Oliver wrote, is a good one, for the apple tree produced

  apples and brought evils.′

  [It′s a pun on ′malum′ = evil and ′malum′ = apple]

  MICHAEL BULLEY

  Bold and malicious, a Golden Delicious.

  ANTHONY ALCOCK

  About essay-writing. When I was in year 3, I moaned to my Greek History tutor that I no longer knew what I was doing when I wrote an essay. He said, ′Mr Potts, if you can write an essay by the time you leave this place, we shall consider your education to have been a success.′

  It occurs to me that Ludwig Wittgenstein never wrote an essay in his life. Why is it so important to be able to do so?

  PAUL POTTS

  Who gives a stuff about the Act of Settlement?

  28 October 2011

  I have to confess that I have always thought it was to the great good fortune of the female members of the royal family that they didn’t have to face the awful prospect of the throne, unless they were unusually deficient in the brother department. Just occasionally discrimination can work, inadvertently, to our favour.

  For me, it’s rather like not being able to go to Mount Athos. Of course, I tend to protest publicly that it is ‘men-only’, but secretly I feel a twinge of relief that I don’t have to go there, or have a view on the place, or join in those dreary conversations about old Father Demetrios … and so forth.

  But since getting called twice by radio journalists in the last 24 hours to say something about changing the Act of Settlement etc., and about girls getting an equal chance to get to be monarch as men, I’ve found I have rather stronger views.

  For a start, what is the point with tinkering with the monarchy – as if a tiny bit of political correctness could bring it up to date? You don’t make a medieval/Victorian institution ‘fair’ by rearranging the deckchairs like this. The whole institution is unfair, like it or lump it. That I think was more or less Alexander Chancellor’s view in the paper this morning. ‘The daughters of monarchs are obviously as qualified (or unqualified) to succeed them as their sons, but the only way to deal with something as illogical as hereditary monarchy is to abolish it or accept it in all its weirdness.’

  In fact, I suspect that in 200 years’ time, we’ll look back to this reform as the beginning of the end of the whole institution – as its much more serious inequities, its mad fantasies, get seen in even more clear relief, once this little bit of discrimination is removed.

  But more to the point, fretting about the monarchy is almost always a political displacement activity.

  Just reflect on the hours of parliamentary time that are going to go down this particular drain, when our MPs might actually be devoting their time and attention to banks, jobs, universities or whatever.

  And just reflect on the effort and interest, across the Commonwealth, that will be devoted to the possibility that Kate and Wills’s baby Princess might succeed to the throne, when there are millions of women in those territories who are still waiting for a proper education, or a proper job … Priorities, priorities, priorities?

  Anyway, when I ranted along these lines to the said journalists, I found that I didn’t get invited to share these views with the listeners! Funny that.

  Comments

  Three cheers for Clovis.

  The Swedes seem to have managed the transition, fairly painlessly, from agnatism to equal primogeniture a couple of decades ago.

  ANTHONY ALCOCK

  So a monarch’s first-born will no longer be deprived of the throne because of the accident of her sex. Only the monarch’s second-born will be deprived of the throne because of his or her accidental place in the birth order. And 99.9999999% of British citizens will be deprived of the throne because of the accident (not their fault) that neither of their parents happens to be the monarch. The idiocy of this is staggering.

  PL

  Quick, to Pseuds’ Corner!

  LUIS A NAVARRO

  When you think of Royalty’s habit of passing itself around, any of us with roots in Britain going back more than a generation or two are likely to be Royal Family without knowing it. I once saw a family tree on my mother’s mother’s side; it went back, partly on the legitimate and partly on the illegitimate side, to a bastard of Lionel of Antwerp, a younger son of Edward III. That presumably makes me 20-millionth or so in the line of succession. Some of you can doubtless do better.

  TIM WEAKLEY

  Better a dictator than a technocrat

  16 November 2011

  You can see the problem for Italy and Greece. But were Mario Monti and Lucas Papademos really the only feasible solutions? To go from
the mad excesses of (what turned out to be) foolish democracy to the de facto imposition of an entirely unelected leader (approved, no doubt, by the Eurocrats) seems a bit of a ‘frying-pan-into-the-fire’ situation.

  Sure, sensible political systems have some fall-back position for how to cope in a crisis, when the usual democratic arrangements are in danger of simply not managing. The Republican Romans had the institution of ‘dictatorship’, which on balance seems a better option than these technocrats (a term which is not far short of a euphemism for ‘banker’).

  The trouble about ‘dictator’ is that the institution got nastily tainted in the first century BC by Lucius Cornelius Sulla and Julius Caesar – both of whom, in their different ways, hijacked the office for long-term, autocratic one-man rule, and radical political reform (ultimately to the benefit of themselves and/or their faction). That’s the sense that ‘dictatorship’ still has.

  But before that, it really was a short-term emergency office; certainly not sinister.

  One of the basic principles of politics in Republican Rome was that political office was always shared. No one held political office independently, but always with a colleague. So even the very highest office, the consulship, was shared between two men. (This was largely an attempt to safeguard the political system against anyone making himself a king.) Sometimes, however, for the most part when the Romans were facing a particularly tough military opponent, there was a feeling that ‘joint command’ (for the consuls acted as military generals as well as civilian politicians) wasn’t going to bring off victory, that one man was needed to make the big decisions on his own, not in committee. On those occasions a ‘dictator’ was nominated by the senate or consuls themselves. They were to serve for an absolute maximum of six months, and were supposed to lay down the office anyway once the crisis had passed.