All in a Don's Day (10 page)

Not a bit of it, says our poet. You can't tell a man from his verses. And ‘pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo' for saying you can. But the joke is (or rather one of the jokes in this complicated little poem) – if you can't infer from his kiss-y verses that he is effeminate, then neither can you infer from his poetic threats of violent penetration that he is capable of that either.

Get it?

That would have been a much better defence for Mr Lowe.

First rule for undergraduates: always check where the quote actually comes from!

As JN Adams wrote in what, but for the unfortunate overtones, might be called his seminal work,
The Latin Sexual Vocabulary
, ′Catullus′ “pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo” scarcely indicates a real intention on Catullus′ part, but is verbal aggression.′ Should we take the ′verbal aggression′ as a threat? I don′t think so. The verbal aggression in English for ′pedicabo′ would be ′Bugger you!′, but if you say that, you are not threatening to bugger the other person and, of course, a woman can say it, who would not be physically able to.

MICHAEL BULLEY

Without wanting to lower the tone too much, I think the modern English might have finally furnished a fairly exact translation for
′irrumare′: ′to face-fuck′. I′ve certainly overheard it down the pub. The word that is, not the process.

TOM

Oh my, I do lead a sheltered life!

KIRSTY MILLS

′Arse-about-face′ is probably the
mot juste
here.

SW FOSKA

I am very impressed. Mark Lowe managed in a swift move to liven up not only the debate on Catullus translation but also an otherwise dead language. He used Latin in daily context, without bothering to offer a translation, assuming that he would be perfectly understood. He must be an inspiration to our students and a shiny example to Classicists. Therefore, I was wondering if we should send him a collective congratulatory letter thanking him for his contribution.

CONSTANTINA KATSARI

I′ve just remembered another controversy involving Catullus 16 and I′ve now checked the references. The London Examination Board had prescribed, for the A level Latin exams to be taken in the summer of 1989, a selection of Catullus′s poems, including poems 15, 16 and 25. Then, in March of 1989, the Board, acting on objections whose source was never revealed, declared that those three poems would not form the basis of any of the questions in the literature exam. A sad day.

MICHAEL BULLEY

11 December 2009

What is the best-selling postcard in the British Museum?

The last time I inquired – admittedly more than a decade ago, but was told that it was the permanent ‘Number 1' – it was a rather dreary image of the Rosetta Stone. That outsold its major rivals by several thousand. If you are interested, the main postcard rivals were: various views of the Museum itself, the (also Egyptian) bronze ‘Gayer Anderson' cat (displayed on the card plus or minus a real live tabby cat) and an original drawing of Beatrix Potter's
Flopsy Bunnies
.

There is no doubt that the Rosetta Stone is a major icon of the British Museum – and in fact, its postcard celebrity is backed up by its presence on best-selling umbrellas, duvet covers and mouse mats (remember them?), all especially popular, I am told, in Japan.

I was once very puzzled about all this. After all, it is a rather uninspiring lump of black basalt, inscribed at the beginning of the second century
BC
, recording an agreement between the Greek king of Egypt and a group of Egyptian priests, concerned, among other things, with tax breaks for the said priests. It came to London, as spoils of war in the early nineteenth century, captured from the French.

So why so charismatic?

Presumably because it was the key to decoding Egyptian hieroglyphs, as the inscription was trilingual – in hieroglyphs,
Greek and Egyptian demotic. Whether you think that the key work was done by Thomas Young (British) or Jean-François Champollion (French) depends partly on your national prejudice.

And now, again, Zahi Hawass (Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt) wants it ‘back'? Does he have a point?

In my view, no – not at all. And I am not just talking here about the British Museum's claims to be a centre of world culture, symbolically (at least) owned by the whole world. (The current Director is very fluent and convincing on this subject.) On this Egyptian issue I feel a bit more jingoistic than usual.

For a start, let's be honest, if this boring lump of basalt has become an icon, it was because of the linguistic work of either a Brit or a Frenchman. It wasn't
born
an icon, it
became
an icon by a lot of hard academic grind (with huge ‘impact' if we are going to talk HEFCE – that's ‘Higher Education Funding Council for England' – talk). At that time, the state of Egypt did not exist, and ‘Egyptians' had nothing to do with its decipherment. Sad but true.

If it should go back anywhere, it should be to France (as it seems pretty clear to me that, national prejudices apart, Champollion was the key figure here).

But more than that, I find myself suffering from an increasingly severe allergy to Zawi Hawass. He might once have been a good archaeologist, but he has become a nationalist media showman (complete with mad theories about famous ancient Egyptian graves, and a TV crew, plus a book signing, always at his back). He appears to have a checklist of some icons he wants ‘back' to Egypt – as if they had been stolen.

I remember him on the
Today
programme a few years ago in discussion with some female descendant of Howard Carter (excavator of Tutankhamun). He was in full flow complaining about how the Brits had ripped everything off, when she politely pointed out that actually the whole Tut treasure had been left in Egypt (which did by then exist).

Today you can go and visit his fiefdom in the Antiquities Service of Egypt. It is truly amazing stuff, and no one is remotely suggesting removing it. But an awful lot in the marvellous Egyptian museum in Cairo is in a truly dreadful conservation state. (Take a look at the Fayum portraits disintegrating there.) Now the truth is that, in a global culture, we should all be paying to preserve this material for all of us, the world over, for the next few centuries. But that can only happen if Hawass stops making a media splash by demanding the Rosetta Stone and stops ignoring the much more exciting treasures crumbling on his watch.

The highlight of my visit to England in the summer of 1971 was the time I got to spend in the British Museum, and second only to the Elgin Marbles was the Rosetta Stone.

I was a newly graduated Classics major and just back from Italy and Greece, and I was once again in the presence of a piece of antiquity that I had read about since grade school. At the time I found it, no one else was around. It wasn′t enclosed back then, so I double-checked to make sure I was alone, then reached out and touched it. I ran my fingertips over the hieroglyphs, the demotic text and the Greek, then read the Greek aloud, just to myself.

I went home to America a few days later, happy with that memory.

AL SCHLAF

There′s a sarsen stone in our village churchyard; nobody knows its origin, but we are all ready to truckle as soon as somebody comes out of the woodwork demanding its return.

Give Stonehenge back to Wales, I say.

ANNA

Hawass is a bloviating fool.

But, that doesn′t change the fact that Prof. Beard is making the classic orientalist argument here: ′WE interpreted and gave meaning to YOUR culture, therefore we reserve the right to appropriate it as we see fit.′

If you really think that the stone should stay here (and I do), you really need to offer a much better argument.

ORS

For people who want to get really close to the Rosetta Stone, there′s always the charming Musée des Écritures in Champollion′s home town of Figeac. Behind the museum there′s a little square entirely covered by a very large replica of the stone that you can run around on. It′s great fun, and would no doubt be able to accommodate an entire Egyptian department of Egyptology, with camera team.

SABINE

13 January 2010

I went into work about 8.15 this morning, just when Michael Arthur, the chair of the Russell Group of universities, was on the
Today
programme complaining about government cuts in higher education.

He was right, of course. Compare France and Germany, whose response to the recession has been to increase university funding. (Even if that funding is more PR than real, it still says something that Sarkozy and Merkel think that more money into higher education will be a popular move.) And he didn't do badly, but he didn't do that well either. You would have thought that he would have prepared some kind of answer to the obvious question: ‘So if we are not going to save money on universities, where should the savings come from?' I suppose it would have been hard for him to say what many of us think: ID cards, Trident, Afghanistan. But he might have had some clever riposte up his sleeve. In fact, he was floored.

And I didn't take too well to all that jargon about ‘the knowledge economy' and ‘the sector': the former is a bureaucrat's word for what I do (teaching and research), the latter a bureaucrat's word for universities. But overall for me Arthur was on the side of the angels, compared with many of the commenters on the
Guardian
's website – who posted in response to the paper's article on university cuts (the article which had prompted the
Today
interview).

OK, some of them had some good words to say for us. But a large number were of the opinion that universities were a
waste of time, that degrees could well be done in two years because we didn't bother to teach the kids anyway, and that Oxbridge dons were an especially lazy load of tossers. As one put it, there were ‘plenty of people doing “useless” degrees, usually at Oxbridge with names like Classics and three 8-week terms with the final term dedicated to exams (yes that's 16 weeks per year for a degree level education and perhaps 3 tutorial hours per week)'.

I wish he (or she) could have seen my, pretty ordinary, term-time day – which went something like this:

I was at work at home at 7.30 in the morning – emailing students, about things that had come in over night. I went to the Classics Faculty at 8.15, to get some essay and lecture bibliographies together. At 10.00 I had a meeting about promotions in another faculty (I'm the internal ‘external' rep) … I was back in Classics again at about 11.45 in time to see five graduate students in a row and get to my college, my other place of work, by 2.30.

After five minutes with my assistant (yes I know I am very lucky on that score …), who had done some industrial quantities of xeroxing, I saw each of the Newnham Classics third-years for 15 minutes, to discuss their work schedule for the term (cutting it fine, and I got behind, but they are all coming to my home on Sunday evening, when the loose ends can be picked up). After that I saw groups of first- and second-years, a second-year historian from another college who will be taking ancient history with me this term, and a third-year whose dissertation I'm supervising … then a graduate I hadn't met before, who is going to be doing some work on Jane Harrison.

I got home by about 7.00. The husband had done supper, so that I could start going through draft exam papers. I'm an
exam board chair, and I needed to read over all the papers submitted for an examiners meeting tomorrow, looking for errors, duplications, typos etc. That took until 12.30 … which I reckon is a 17-hour day, minus a half-hour for supper.

The knowledge economy on overtime.

So where might we save money in ‘the sector'? Well, the husband had a bright idea during our brief supper. Given these times of stringency, shouldn't we be abolishing the REF? (That's the Research Excellence Framework for those of you not in the ‘sector'.) It isn't going to tell us anything we didn't know anyway … and it must cost millions. At least enough to save a few hard-working academics and departments from the axe. In other walks of life, this would be called pruning the bureaucrats and channelling resources to the front line (i.e., the teachers …).

I think part of the problem is the fetish for working hard. I′d say that, in a country like Britain at least, society would be better if people did less and did it more slowly. The cabbages are going to grow at the same rate.

MICHAEL BULLEY

I think your daily diary may play into the hands of the nay-sayers, because you don′t address the fact that this sort of day is only typical of less than half your year. One of the politicians could make the same sort of claim of long days, but we don′t therefore claim they are doing a good job …

I am worried about the lack of lunch!

SEBASTIAN RAHTZ

′More money′ spent on German universities means ′finally some′.

ANTHONY ALCOCK

The eighteenth-century Dean Gaisford of Christ Church, Oxford, is to be recommended. He propounded a philosophy of ′systematic lethargy′. There′s a lot to be said for that. He also encouraged the study of Greek because ′it not infrequently leads to positions of considerable emolument′ – though he probably had in mind the Church of England rather than the more general economy.

PAUL POTTS

I wonder if the need to justify our contribution based on our busy SCHEDULES means the bureaucrats are clearly winning and learning no longer speaks for itself. I would like to see A Don′s Day which talks more about the lessons which were imparted, the mysteries that were revealed and the passions that were awakened.

ROGER DAVIS