All in a Don's Day (6 page)

11. ‘Exile makes good historians.' Is this true of Greek historians? Why?

12. Do Cicero's letters help us to understand his ‘real' feelings and motivations?

13. ‘Inscribed documents are particularly valuable because, unlike literary texts, they are free from bias.' Discuss.

14. ‘It is very rare that a individual inscription has made much of a difference to our understanding of any aspect of Greek or Roman history.' Is this too gloomy an assessment of the value of epigraphy?

15. Can you ever reach a good understanding of an inscription without knowing its physical context and setting?

Remember: this exam is sat not by finalists, but by students at the end of their second year of a Classics degree (or, for those without Latin or Greek A level, at the end of their third year).

What do you think?

O please, Prof., don′t tease …

What was the Cimon fruit tree anecdote? I didn′t find it in the Wiki article (though I am now close to examining the lower half of the wine bottle – maybe I missed it?)

Indulge, do, just once, a lazy student …

PETER ADAMS

… aaah the Fruit Trees. As I remember it, the question was ‘Unlike Rome, Classical Athens had no such thing as a system of patronage between rich and poor′ … or something like that, but rather better expressed. The anecdote, again as I remember from Plutarch′s
Life of Cimon
(I′m doing this without looking up!), said that Cimon used to keep his gardens open so that people could come and pick the fruit from his trees. Almost every damn candidate came out with this story and said (as I assume Dr Millett had in his lectures) that this was a passive form of patronage.

MARY BEARD

When I mark stuff, I usually divvy up the examinees into safe bets, teeterers and awkward buggers. I go through the safe bets to get an idea of the ‘standard′ and to allow for historical deviations, so to speak. Then I give the teeterers a real going-over and put the
worst ones aside with a tentative plus or minus. Then I spend most of my time on the awkward buggers. The ones who bend the rules but might be right to do so. Or just plain twisted. Then back to the teeterers, who often seem a lot more rational and amenable after the awkward buggers. Then maybe back to the safe bets for a quick check if I′ve got time.

I′ve found that it usually takes about a paragraph or two to gauge the general standard of a candidate. And most are consistent. It′s the inconsistent ones that bother me. And the consistently schizophrenic – the quintessential teeterers – the ones who write nice sentences (often a good sign), frinstance, but have little to say although they′re often good at disguising this – having often learned the skill from their lecturers ;-). Or the less common wild and woolly writers who actually know what they′re on about, but go barefoot to lectures and eat raw cabbage in the street (though these are usually the awkward buggers).

XJY

Wasn′t it Arthur Lionel Smith – historian, Classicist, Master of Balliol – who got his wife to read scripts, interrupted by his calls for her to ‘skip! skip!′ once he thought he′d heard enough to judge each candidate?

These days examiners are required to complete a sheet for each script, outlining the reasons for the marks allocated. I′ve never heard of spouses helping.

DAVID MARTIN

This is my sort of advice for essay-writers: DO WRITE: ‘Umberto Eco has argued that … ′, ′This makes me think that … ′, ′You will understand it better if you know the mythology′ and ′Odysseus is crafty′ DON′T WRITE: ′It has been argued that … ′, ′Therefore
it can be said that … ′, ′An understanding of the mythology is of benefit to the reader′ and ′Thus it can be seen that the quality of craftiness could, to a certain extent, be applied at times to the character of Odysseus′.

MICHAEL BULLEY

I had a first-year student write to me once claiming to have been told at school that one ought, in essays, to preface statements with ′It might be argued that … ′ or similar, and asking whether one ought to do the same at university. I suspect that this does sometimes happen, and explains why students sometimes write the equivalent of ′it could be argued that an elephant is larger than a mouse.

RICHARD

There was actually a certain amount of culture shock involved in transferring from the English regime of weekly-essay-and-tutorial to the large lecture classes of a vast Middle Western campus a few years later. My first lecture class was on the Roman Republic and my TA a graduate student with a shiny new BA from a cut-glass women′s college on the East Coast. I said to her that I had no idea how much the 80-odd students in the lecture class were taking in. ′That′s easy′, she said, ′set a pop quiz′ The morning I announced this was the nadir of my popularity as a lecturer. Fortunately one student saw the funny side. One of the questions was ′Who taught the Romans to foretell the future from the entrails of birds?′ (expecting the answer ′The Etruscans′). The most memorable answer was ′Colonel Sanders′. My apologies if I have told this story before.

OLIVER NICHOLSON

An anecdote about Leofranc Holford-Strevens, now Classics editor at the OUP and a distinguished writer on ancient literature. Faced with an exam question whose rubric said, ′Translate the following … ′, he elected to translate it into Serbo-Croat. There was no one in Oxford who could mark it, but they found someone at the University of London, who awarded an alpha. Since then, the rubric has read, ′Translate the following into English. I suggest that someone now try a translation into Geordie English and see what happens.

The other concerns a student who spent the entire three hours on one question. He was given an alpha/gamma, and the alpha on the viva voce. Well, try it, chaps.

PAUL POTTS

I can answer A4.

a. Trousers haven′t been invented.

b. Chesters Fort is freezing.

STEVE THE NEIGHBOUR

29 June 2009

Our students graduated on Saturday. In Cambridge graduation lasts three days, from Thursday till Saturday. They go to pick up their degrees by college, in order of the date of foundation of the college (which means that Newnham, in 1871, comes at the beginning of the last day).

I never go to the ceremony itself. In fact I have never been to a graduation ceremony at all, not even my own – for any of my degrees (I just got the certificate through the post,
in absentia
as the phrase is). When I was first graduating with my BA, I just couldn't face all the rituals – the dressing up in the fur-lined hood, the clasping the fingers of the ‘praelector', the Latin and the hand-clasping with the vice-chancellor (or the VC's deputy – the top dog understandably doesn't sit in the Senate House for three days presiding over this).

I also couldn't face organising the whole show for a pair of divorced parents (they weren't technically divorced, as it turned out – my Dad had lost interest in the whole proceedings after the decree nisi and had never bothered to apply for the decree absolute, despite reminders from his solicitors … but they were divorced in spirit). I told both of them a real whopper: graduation wasn't any longer what most people did, it was just for the blazer brigade.

It is now one of my biggest regrets. At the cost of a little embarrassment to MB and some deft negotiation of parental squabbling, I could have given them a really proud and memorable day. So now when any student says to me that they
don't fancy it, I try my hardest to persuade them to go through with it.

And I always try to go to the party that Newnham lays on for every one after the ceremony itself.

It is, I guess, much as it always has been – loads of young women in fur-lined hoods, loads of beaming mums and dads (who have a capacity to be delighted even when the offspring didn't do quite as well as they might secretly have hoped) and lashings of bubbly. (Don't tell the
Telegraph
: I'm pretty sure the students pay anyway!) My pleasant job – and it really is fun – is to track down my students and to meet their parents, usually for the first time.

Only once in 25 years has any parent complained about anything. They are mostly very grateful and impressed for what we offer (especially for the personal attention that senior academics give to their daughters) – and they are only too happy to share unbloggable insights into their offspring, which one is glad one hadn't known before!

It could all have been a ceremony taking place 50 years ago. Except for a few things. We now have a stall selling the college merchandise to the graduands and their relations. (Anyone for a teddy with a Newnham scarf or jumper?) And the fur hoods are now not real but safely synthetic. Indeed the programme of the ceremony in the senate house explicitly reassures the worried audience that no animals have been killed in the making of this graduation ceremony.

Well, not quite. One of my students had got hold of an old hood, which indeed had been made out of real bunny (or whatever). And I have to say that it looked much more elegant. It was a soft dusky cream, not the bright polyester-feel white of the synthetic versions, which moult all over the place and get full of static.

OK, to kit them all out with the real version could not possibly be worth a mass cull of the rabbit population (even supposing the animal-friendly students would tolerate it) – but it would certainly be an aesthetic improvement.

The order in which colleges present their candidates for degrees is: King′s (founded 1441), Trinity (founded 1546), St John′s (founded 1511), followed by the other colleges in order of their foundation, from Peterhouse (founded 1284) onwards (Ordinances of the University of Cambridge,
Chapter 2
, Section 10.12).

Yours pedantically, Nick Denyer, Praelector and Father of Trinity College

NICHOLAS DENYER

As a prole who did two degrees at Oxford, and reluctantly attended one degree ceremony belatedly to please my parents (as I am the first of my family to go on in education beyond the age of 14, they had been disappointed when I didn′t take the first one), I could not bear the kowtowing and obsequiousness before the reactionary etc. I surfed through my ceremony on a wave of class hatred for a system which was invented so that people like me couldn′t get in, by and large.

I hoped it meant something that the daughter of a binman and a cleaner was being hectored in Latin in the Sheldonian, but, realistically, probably not a lot.

E LONGLEY

You lot have had it easy! Try taking a degree while working full-time, running a home, and in many cases, bringing up children. Your moment in the sun is priceless. A degree ceremony, dressed in that hard-won robe, and without the ‘silly hat′ (a much debated issue!) is the culmination of many years study, often in isolation, and not to be missed. You are surrounded by people who have been through the same experiences, and who are, to a man/ woman, raising the roof with their clapping and cheering. My BA ceremony was presided over by our Chancellor, ′our Betty′, the wonderful Betty Boothroyd. I wouldn′t have missed it for the world.

JACKIE

3 July 2009

This is a row I really don't get. Over the last few years FYROM (the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) has been investing heavily in Alexander the Great. FYROM's main airport is now called ‘Alexander the Great Airport' (better than ‘John Lennon' or ‘Bob Hope' airports, you might think). A vast statue of Alexander (eight storeys high, apparently) is planned for the centre of Skopje. And the word on the street is that Alexander was a Slav.

This seems to me to be, at best, rather touching. It's nice to think that there is still enough symbolic life in this drunken juvenile thug that someone
wants
him for their nation. At worst, it is faintly silly. The antecedents of Alexander are a bit murky, but in truth there isn't a cat in hell's chance that he was a Slav. I can see also that it could be a bit annoying to some Greeks who might want to try to claim Alexander for themselves (this is a better claim than the Slavic one, but not exactly cast-iron).

But what on earth has persuaded over 300 Classical scholars (several of whom are good friends of mine) to sign a letter to President Obama (copy to Mrs Clinton et al.) asking him to intervene personally to clear up this FYROM historical travesty.

I hope Obama has got some more important wrongs to right. But supposing that he has had a minute to look at this missive, I trust that he won't be won over by the outraged arguments.

The territory of FYROM, they point out, is more strictly that of ancient Paionia, not Macedonia. (Fair enough, but so what – we don't stop Northern Ireland calling itself part of Great Britain, even though it wasn't part of ancient Britannia.) The other arguments in the letter are decidedly dodgier, and not the kind of thing that the learned signatories would (I hope) give high marks to in an undergraduate essay.

There is the usual stuff about how Alexander's ancestors must have been Greek as they competed in the Olympic Games. (In fact there was originally some dispute at the time about whether they were, or were not, Greek enough to qualify.) But the worst argument is the claim that ‘the Macedonians traced their ancestry to Argos', and so were bona fide, not FYROM-style, Greeks. Well, of course the Macedonians said that. It was a convenient and self-serving
myth
, no truer than the Athenians' claim that they were born from the soil of Athens.

By putting their names to this rubbish, I can't help feeling that my friends are stooping to exactly the kind of nationalism that they are trying to oppose. If you really wanted to undermine the Macedonian claims, wouldn't it be better (and academically more credible) simply to laugh at them and just refuse to take them seriously?