All in a Don's Day (18 page)

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?

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

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 this 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.

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

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'.)

The son and daughter are worried that it will be wasted on me, as I won't recognise enough people to make it worthwhile. (I haven't even been watching much
Casualty
lately, which used to be my regular weekly hospital soap.)

But if our experience at the Emmys is anything to go by, it will be fun anyway. We got invited to their awards ceremony a couple of years ago by a friend who organises it … and apart
from Mary Tyler Moore and Tina Fey and
The Late Show
, the hundreds of names and the faces and the shows getting awards were an almost complete mystery to us.

It lasted for hours, and I was particularly worried that the husband, whose tolerance of soaps (particularly those set in American suburbs) is rather less than mine, would not enjoy it a bit. Quite the reverse, though. We were both absolutely gripped by the choreography of it and the whole razzmatazz … and that was before the gala dinner.

So I have high hopes for the BAFTAs, win or no-win.

SPEECH! SPEECH!
Gosh! I′m so
Shocked, My
Heart′s almost
Stopped,
My legs are
Like jelly,
My voice has
Near flopped,
But thank you
So kindly,
So warmly…
God Blimey,
With praise,
To ′the husband′
The crew, and
Almighty.
A DENNIS

19 May 2011

The most depressing thing about the most recent version of the ‘rape debate' is the way it has come down to how long the rapist should be banged up for. The worse we think the crime, the longer they should spend in clink. For what?

On the
Today
programme this morning Vera Baird was attacking the proposal that rapists who pleaded guilty should have a 50% sentence reduction. The argument was that if the average sentence for a rapist was 5 years, then a 50 % reduction meant 2.5 years, which with remission for good behaviour would mean 15 months. Just 15 months, she said … for rape?

Well, there are all kind of factors to weigh up here. As Ken Clarke has pointed out, the ‘average' sentence includes those sentenced for ‘statutory rape', for any sexual encounter with those aged under 16, however consensual. So the 5-year average is already an odd, and far from ‘average', figure.

But leaving those figures aside, and assuming the 15-months sentence, is that a fair punishment?

That's where the ‘bang 'em up' mentality seems hopelessly misguided. Most websites today have deplored the idea that a rapist should be let out in under 2 years. WOT 15 months for rape?

No one stopped to say … well 15 months in the nick, that means total loss of job, probable mess of any family relationship, disintegration of family itself (i.e., punishment for them), plus the conversion of a wrongdoer into a hardened criminal (that's what prisons do). Well done, judicial system.
Can't we think of something more humane and better and more designed to stop them doing it again? Isn't there something we can do better for the victim as well as the perpetrator?

Now before you say: you wouldn't say that if you had been raped … let me say I have been raped – an unwilling encounter on an Italian train that I wrote about years ago in the
London Review of Books
. On the Clarke scheme, it was slightly less than the most serious, but not at the bottom of the heap. I have to say that I agree with him that there are gradations in this crime. I didn't think of going to the police but, if I had, I would have thought that my rapist deserved far less a penalty than if he had jumped at me with a knife or a gun. (I never felt in mortal danger.)

And if I had pressed charges, I don't actually think that I would have wanted the guy banged up. I really, really would like him not to have done it again, and I would have liked to have got the chance to tell him what a tosser he was … but I don't think I would have wanted to have ruined his life, as he didn't – in the end – ruin mine.

I know I may be tougher in all sorts of ways that other victims of rape; but that doesn't mean that my views shouldn't be heard too. The thought that he would have been in a jail for years would not have been my dream or desire. I would much have much preferred that he spent a long series of weekends picking up rubbish in a seedy Italian town, or using his skills (he was an architect) for free, in the city planning of Italy. Or actually just saying sorry. (If that biscuit factory architect is reading this, he still can say sorry …)