All in a Don's Day (24 page)

So it's hardly surprising that you tend to run over time. OK, you could just double the time you thought you would need at each location, but that would end you up with big gaps, and wasted time and money … and you'd probably annoy people just as much, for different reasons.

And it's hardly surprising that it's as exhausting as it is adrenalin-generating. We regularly leave the hotel at 7.30 in the morning and get back at 7.30 at night, before a couple of hours final prep for the next day has to be done (by me), and hitches with equipment, locations, permissions sorted out and tomorrow's shots planned (by the others).

It all makes me feel a tiny bit guilty about how fierce I was with the hapless, over-running film crews in our Museum.

I′m sure you are doing a brilliant job, but the man with the road drill has my sympathy. When we lived in the Cotswolds, trying to get on with some forestry, we were interrupted by the Beeb′s natural history unit doing a programme on newts. No prior contact or agreement. We were chain-sawing 300 yards away and suddenly the crew started waving and shouting ′Shhh …′ It was slightly inane.

PETER WOOD

As a TV director, I read this with great interest – and Mary′s got the day in the life of a film crew pretty much spot-on. Added to the list of distractions and delays she describes, if you throw into the mix autograph hunters / well-meaning well-wishers / people who absolutely have to wave at the camera (meaning a retake) / a presenter who absolutely has to have their sushi from a certain place the other side of the city and any number of other things that could occur, it′s rare that a day can go exactly to schedule, no matter how well prepared and professional a crew is. (Incidentally – the only people in the country who were happy about the volcanic ash cloud last year were sound recordists; with no planes overhead it was quite incredible how much smoother a day′s filming went!)

A DIRECTOR

26 September 2011

Let's get this quite straight: the BBC has not banned the use of
BC
and
AD
, in favour of the religiously neutral
BCE
and
CE
. Though that is what a quick glance at a few of this week's newspapers would suggest.

‘The Corporation has replaced the familiar ‘Anno Domini' (the year of Our Lord) and ‘Before Christ' with the obscure terms ‘Common Era' and ‘Before Common Era' intoned the
Daily Mail
, while giving a hearty pat on the back to the almost unknown medieval monk, Dionysius Exiguus (‘Little Dennis'), who invented the
BC
/
AD
system. If some people find the
BCE
/
CE
terminology a bit obscure, that is nothing compared with the obscurity of Dionysius Exiguus – who has been enjoying a totally unexpected five minutes of fame.

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.

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

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 bibliography (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
).

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.