As I started to think about the topic to plan a general outline, I was struck by how many issues I had to take a position on to pitch the tone of the talk. First of all, I can’t assume any prior knowledge of classical film, and certainly not of reception theory. Second, I can’t expect to cover the whole range of classical film that has been produced in the history of film. The films produced by, for instance, Italian and French national cinema are going to have to go by the wayside, because I can’t do them justice in 45 minutes, and mentioning Maciste for the sake of mentioning Maciste doesn’t feel right. This means focussing on the cinema produced by American and English studios, which is a shame but probably makes the information more accessible to the audience and can be done respectably within the time limit.

Then there’s the question of how to structure your talk. I thought a bit about whether to do a survey of Film From The Beginning of Time or whether to look exclusively at the three latest franchises (Clash/Wrath of the Titans, The Immortals and Percy Jackson). I’m I’ve decided to aim for a speed survey that finishes with a bit more discussion about the franchises, as one thing I want the sixth formers to get out of the talk is an idea that films continue to exist after they have been shown in cinemas – mainly because it took me quite a while to get this and begin to watch things that weren’t current cinema or that I hadn’t been shown as a child by my parents. That said, I also want students to get some critique of the cultural productions they’re expected to consume, and thankfully the Harryhausen article has given me some good ideas about what to say about that.

However, in thinking about the survey aspect of this, I’ve run up against a very interesting mental block that I hadn’t anticipated. Trying to get my thoughts together, I asked Twitter and Facebook what films they would include if they were doing this kind of thing. The replies came back – 300! Ben-Hur, with the heavy queer subtext of the scene between Ben-Hur and Messala! The oysters and snails scene from Spartacus! And I found myself thinking ‘wait a minute… can I say that in front of sixth formers?’

I wouldn’t have a moment’s hesitation about using this material in front of a first year undergraduate class – in fact, I’d consider it almost essential that they be aware of the various ways in which gender and sexuality are portrayed and manipulated in film. But sixth formers are a different case. It’s not that I’m worried about them – they know sex exists, they can cope. But I am worried about what happens if I’m in loco parentis at the point of speaking, and the problems of discussing that material with those who are not legally adults. It feels like a cop-out, I know. But given the huge amount of material that I could cover, and the fact I only have 45 minutes to do it, and the fact that explaining the construction of sex and gender to an audience who hasn’t come across it before is complicated and needs to be done properly… leaving out that material from a talk for this particular audience feels like a sensible thing to do. If I’m going to talk about it, I want to talk about it well.

Which is making me think I should find people who would want to hear a general-interest talk about the queer element of ancient film, just to balance out the CV…

The program was very interesting, and I did get a different perspective on the Vindolanda evidence, especially from David’s progression to more modern examples. This episode’s focus was on the supply chain – so how you keep troops fed and watered, and generally in healthy conditions. The comparanda in question were Henry V’s French campaign; Wellington’s campaign against Napoleon; and the trenches of the First World War. (And also a communications disaster which I have completely forgotten the name of.)  There were two things that particularly jumped out at me that I thought deserved comment.

The first is the difference between Vindolanda and the rest of David’s case studies. Vindolanda was a settled camp, with a fixed location. That’s part of the pleasure of Vindolanda, being able to see the footprint of the permanent camp and get some solid evidence about the infrastructure of military installations on the provincial border. Getting a sense of how big rooms are, for instance, tells you a lot about the kind of living conditions the number of people billeted there would have endured (something David did not mention, despite praise of Roman glass windows).  However, all the other case studies were about armies on the move, shifting their location through enemy countryside, and how you would get provisions to them in good order. Dealing with supplies for a fixed spot would be a very different operation and, as my colleague Simon Esmonde-Cleary pointed out to me when we discussed the program earlier this week, meant that legions could send soldiers out on requisitioning missions all over the empire and have supplies brought back to them rather than vice versa.

The second point that wasn’t mentioned was about class issues and the professionalisation of the military over the time period that the case studies covered. In Roman society, there is a high expectation that men of the senatorial and equestrian classes will do military service at some point before entering political life – you had to be thirty before you could stand for election to the most junior political post of quaestor. A good proportion of those officers would have found themselves in the unpleasant provinces, on the front lines, and (pertinent for this subject) at the far end of the supply chain. This shifts over the time David covered. Under Henry V, the provincial barons would certainly have been leading their men into battle, but it was more of a one-off as-required duty than part of a career path. By the time you get to Wellington, you’re dealing with career generals who are not particularly concerned with political careers; by the first world war, although conscription changes the profile of the men on the front line, career senior officers again are a subset of the aristocracy who can often stay away from the nastiest points of engagement (think of the Battle of the Somme). And when you look at the modern army, we are dealing with an entirely self-contained career.

I don’t claim to have an answer, but it struck me that this change in profile raised an interesting question. When you have an army which will always have some of the state’s potential political leaders on the front lines, does that change the way you think about supply chains? Do class issues change your priorities and your methods? David demonstrated the difference that the invention of the tin can made to getting food to the first world war trenches; however, he pointed out that the innovation was more about delivering calories than nourishment, and mentioned men’s complaints that they often only got one variety of vegetable, and sometimes no vegetable at all, to go with their meat. The men in the trenches were, in the main, not from the highest echelons of society. I wonder what approach the supply chain would have taken if aspiring politicians had been expected to routinely serve alongside them.

I should start by pointing out that for Woolf to write an essay on not knowing Greek was actually rather pointed in 1925, when the piece was first published. At that stage, in terms of the education of women, while Newnham and Girton were now well established at Cambridge, and Jane Harrison, Eugenie Strong and their successors had amply demonstrated women’s competence in the field of classics, women still were not being given access to the same educational tools as men. Prep schools still put little boys into Latin at five or six, and Greek not long after, meaning that the girls who first encountered the languages later in the schoolroom were already many years behind their male peers. (This still happens – I first started Latin at age twelve, and then at Cambridge found myself in the company of young men who had started at six or seven, and even that difference created a confidence gap. Let’s not mention my Greek, which I first began during my gap year, meaning I lagged behind anyone who had had the chance to do GCSE, let alone A-level.)  For a female writer in the 1920s to talk about not knowing Greek was a markedly deliberate act, a spikier version of which appears in A Room of One’s Own. It’s a statement about privilege, about opportunity, about social status, about gender and about class.

That said, Woolf doesn’t follow the point that the title implicitly makes (and arguably she doesn’t need to). In fact, her implicit dialogue with her title continues since she demonstrates that she actually knows Greek well enough to pick apart the language and comment on “useless” translations. The ‘not knowing’ to which her title refers is instead the inability to know how the Greeks thought, to pick up the resonances that the original reader would have heard – the foreign language holds us in thrall, but we cannot fully grasp its power. The only way to get anywhere close is to get back to Greek in the original, and Woolf devotes several paragraphs at the end of the essay expounding on the inherent beauty of the language.

Her overall point fastens on a central tenet of early twentieth century ways of thinking about antiquity – that the Greeks reflect something somehow pure. The characters of plays who have since become familiar types, like the King and the Queen, have a freshness: “here we meet them before their emotions have been worn into uniformity”.  The Greeks become archetypal, even down to the language itself – “then, spare and bare as it is, no language can move more quickly, dancing, shaking, all alive, but controlled”. This balance of vitality and restraint is what draws Woolf to Greek, as does the sense of the Greeks’ paradoxical innocence: “their actions seem laden with beauty because they do not know that they are beautiful, have been born to their possessions, are no more self-conscious than children, and yet, all those thousands of years ago, in their little islands, know all that is to be known”.

The academic in me is, of course, brimming over with comments about unhelpful attitudes to the purity of Greece and how that fits into a cultural contruct of Greece vs. Rome and general ideas of moral and artistic integrity associated with Greek and how that fits into wider social interpretations of the classical world. But all of that scholarly background noise doesn’t detract from the beauty of Woolf’s own writing – her own sparseness of expression, her own engagement with the texts, and her own very deliberate proof that, actually, she does know Greek.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQaa7setfDk

Below the jump is my liveblog commentary on the video, second by second, because my internal monologue was so loud that I had to share it… (Sorry, I don’t seem to be able to get video embedding working, so you’ll have to click through.)

0.11: oh, well, we aren’t pulling any punches here! Full military gear, wee Roman helmets, pulling some kind of massive float-like thing, all very Cleopatra (1963). 

 0.23: close-up on a lad in some more stylized Roman army gear, including a nice plume and a decent sword and breastplate. Does look a bit like he belongs in a Versace ad, mind. Oooh, more processing military Roman types… who appear to be led by women in diaphanous robes carrying basket-like objects. Roman religious procession imagery ahoy.

0.28: men with trumpets? And a lad with a harp sitting on the floor? (He will become more important in a moment.) Some kind of god-style pantheon visual here, I suspect.

0.37: and the wings that had been covered whatever the Roman lads were drawing are removed, to reveal Madonna in full glory, on a throne, being pulled in procession. Yes, definitely someone spent some time with Cleopatra to generate creative ideas for this. Note the subtle ‘MADS’ graffiti on the back of the throne.

0.46: Oooh, costume close-up. You can just see the Egyptian hieroglyphics on the throne, in case you thought this wasn’t a sufficiently obvious homage. The head-dress is very Hollywood, as is the golden floor-ength gown – it is very much like the outfit Taylor wore as Cleo enteringe city of Rome. Oh, and can I just say how appropriate it is that this particular sequence is to accompany the song Vogue, which refers to the style of dance that originated in the Harlem gay scene in the 1970s, and is all about presentation and image? The whole Cleopatra thing is also all about presentation and image. It doesn’t take a genius to spot that this is Madonna saying ‘I’m the queen!’ (see also, queer cultural pun, oh how witty we are). But at the classical reception level, the whole issue of Cleopatra revolves around image and image presentation, and the success of Octavian’s propaganda campaign against her – indeed, the mythos surrounding her death (asps and all) may be the result of his early attempts to manage the news of her suicide back in Rome to his advantage.

Also, this is all very reminiscent of Kylie Minogue’s outfit in her Aphrodite – Les Folies tour last year. Are we seeing a come-back of classical reception in the world of pop?

0.56: mmm, more stylized male body moves. This is all supposed to look a bit like a temple pediment with gods on, I take it? It’s certainly got that feel to it, given the slowness and angularity of movement (and now I come to think of it, voguing actually mimics statuary poses quite nicely).

1.02: we’re back to Madonna in her throne, she’s removed the golden cloak and… is wearing some skirt overlay that looks like a Roman soldier’s cingulum. So we’re going for the military aesthetic here, then, as if the boots left us in any doubt. She’s keeping the headdress, though. And the leopard skin cape thing. Which has Roman military pedigree, since the standard bearers of the legions would wear animal skins, but still. 

1.21: she’s onto the big podium now, and doing a bit of a procession with those dancers from earlier, who we can now see a bit better – not quite sure what’s going on with the chap with the curly horns on the left.

1.26: wait, what, this is a Hermes-type coming out from the bottom of the screen? With lyre and wings? And sparkly trainers with wings on? Passing Madonna the lyre to strum? Pop musicians are invoking the god of music now? Kind of awesome, also kind of concerning as I’m not sure how I feel about Hermes as an extra to Madonna. There should be a sacrificed chicken in there somewhere. Also, it’s interesting that they’ve gone for Hermes, inventor of the lyre, and not Apollo, more commonly known as god of music – but also a god very strongly associated with Augustus, Cleopatra’s nemesis.

1.43: zoom-out to what I am going to call the Madonna Pantheon having a good old dance. The more I look at them, the more I think the costumes are meant to evoke the classical and military aesthetic without necessarily going beyond the basics of classical semiotics. Which is – well, it plays on the idea that we know what the classical world is meant to look like, and thus we’re happy when we see it, which is why classical films all adhere to the same set of visual conventions. Given the probable audience demographic of the Superbowl, it’s not surprising the designers have gone for the lowest visual common denominator, but it’s still a tad disappointing.

 1.48: alright, the lad in the leather harness and the gold neckpiece owes more to Immortals than to anything actually related to the classical world o_O

2.10: as the Madonna pantheon get on with their voguing, listen to the soundtrack – I don’t remember those sounds of swords being unsheathed and bodies crashing to the ground being part of the original! Very Gladiator and Spartacus: Blood and Sand.

2.19: Madonna is sitting on someone. Given the general Cleopatra as dominator of men topos, this isn’t surprising. Actually, come to think of it, given the whole ‘Cleopatra hangs around with a bunch of men who have disturbing sexual tastes’ thread of polemic that survives in our sources (see, for instance, Horace’s Actium ode), the whole bondage imagery thing is starting to make sense.

2.55: not strictly classical, but this scene of processing to the front of the stage, posing and moving off seems to owe a lot to the drag pageant style, which would be appropriate given the origins of the term vogue and the fact that these costumes are not a little campy. (Yes, I spent too much time in the last year of my PhD watching Ru Paul’s Drag Race, so sue me.)

3.05: that very deliberate camera vignette does nothing to undermine my drag pageant theory. A minion now helps Madonna remove the headdress (but we’re keeping the cingulum). Transition into next song… with some of the Madonna Pantheon doing interesting jumping things over benches. Goodo.

3.25: …thanks, camera angle. I really didn’t need to know that Madonna’s stage knickers have a star on them. Although I suspect that Cleopatra would have approved.

3.33: these lads in white jumpsuits have nothing to say to classical reception, really, but I quite like the fact they’ve got musical notations all over them. Gymnastics now ensue, and I thought the classical reception angle was all over until…

4.21: …the camera zooms out to a lad in a toga on a tightrope! For no readily apparent reason! As far as I know, there is no ancient Roman tradition of tightrope walking, although they were quite good on acrobats. Oooh, he has shiny gold sneakers too. How you can tell he is classical – he is wearing white and gold and a skirt. Sigh. And is bouncing up and down like a loon on this wire thing. I have no idea to what purpose he is dressed in this Greco-Roman get-up, unless it’s a stab at conceptual unity. I wouldn’t have thought a tunic was particularly practical for this sort of thing anyway.

4.53: oh, we have some DJs on stage! They are wearing animal skins. Erm, they are wearing Roman army kilts too. They are, in fact, clubbing Roman centurion DJs with afros. And proper lace-up boots. And, erm, big glasses, but I understand that’s the trend among the young people these days. I have to say that the sight of techno Roman centurion DJs bopping about with Madonna cheered me up no end, although I do wish that at 5.25 the lad in the skin-tight white leopard skin shorts had thought better of coming out from behind the turntable.

5.32: a dancy bouncy sort of electro techno sequence with Mads and the two techno-Centurions. In which, it has to be said, the flapping bits of various cingulum-style belts do not add a particular dignity to the scene.

5.48: ah, a mildly comic interaction between the techno-Centurions and Madonna to make it clear just how attractive Madonna remains. Jolly good. And not unreasonable to point out physical fitness whilst wearing the costumes of men who would have had to be unbelievably fit in order to participate in the gruelling requirements of the Roman army.

6.06: wait, what? Where are the techno-Centurions going? And why are there all these Cleopatra cheerleaders? Bring back the techno-Centurions!

More seriously – what on earth? The costumes are clearly designed to be evocative of both Cleopatra and the cheerleader image, what with the circlets around the heads, the short skirts, the fact the song we’re now accompanying has a cheerleading-style chorus, and the two ‘guest performers’ are in gear which mimics and echoes that of Madonna herself when she entered a la Cleopatra. The problem here? As far as I can see, and I admit that I’m watching this on Youtube and the quality isn’t great, Madonna is now the only white person on stage. With a bunch of Cleopatra cheerleaders of colour. Which wouldn’t mean anything if it wasn’t for the fact that Cleopatra’s racial background is a huge, huge minefield. Now, I’m going to be charitable here and assume that Madonna and her designers were not planning to make their contribution to scholarship via the medium of the Superbowl halftime show and will not now be seeking peer review, but really. I will admit I just stared at this segment in a flabberghasted way.

(Madonna has also now lost the cingulum. It must have been getting in the way.)

9.00: ah, we’re getting soldiers back again. Is it the nice buff Roman lads? …wait, no, it’s a marching band, complete with drum marshal. I had a bit of a moment with this – but it’s a nice transformation of the military theme that’s been going through the show so far, beginning with our Roman lads and continuing through the techno-Centurions. The Cleo-cheerleaders provided the segue into the American and the classical, and now we switch from the classical to the American military. It’s actually all quite cleverly designed and structured in terms of thematics once you start looking at it closely.

9.52: and we’re into Like A Prayer, the final number, delivered in full Gospel style. A convenient black-out has allowed Mads to don a more suitably reverent outfit for this number, something slinky in black, which her backing singers are in rather minimalist black and white robes – but even here, I can’t help but have a classical reception moment. Those simple black and white robes are making me think of the sort of things that Christians wear in films set in the Roman empire. A quick Google isn’t showing anything up, so I might have a false sense-memory here, but that was my immediate thought when I saw this.

And as this half-time show draws to an end, I want to highlight a performative difference that strikes me. In the Roman period, spectacles were for the ruling class – the emperor enjoyed the extravagant performances put on for his pleasure, and it was his approval that was sought. Here, the Queen becomes the object of spectacle, the performer – she’s at the mercy of the crowd’s approval, not the one in control. The choice of the classical themes shows an awareness of one part of Madonna’s self-image – but reveals another side of it that perhaps she would rather not dwell on.

So, what’s next on the agenda for me research-wise, now that that’s off the table for the time being? Well, this coming week is looking absolutely hectic, as I’ve got not only my normal teaching load, but also a two hour grad seminar and an hour of first year lit survey (it will be good teaching, but it’s time consuming), so I think research might be going to the side this week. Then I need to write the talk I’ll be giving at the Birmingham CA’s sixth form conference in March, which won’t be too taxing but will probably need a bit of research to get clips and write something with a decent structure.

After that – well, I might actually be able to start thinking about doing some of those revisions to the thesis…

The working criteria that interest me are those for Panel D, which covers the subpanels of Modern Languages and Linguistics; English Language and Literature; History; Classics; Philosophy; Theology and Religious Studies; Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory; Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts; and Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management. So it’s sort of a broad church humanities panel. Each subject has its own specialist subpanel (so a ballerina won’t have to deal with the work of an Egyptologist, for instance); the central panel is, as far as I can tell, responsible for doing overview work and coordinating everything, which is reasonable enough.

One very important change from the original proposals not included in the Panel D guidelines, which I feel particularly strongly about, is that the REF have now decided that researchers may submit one fewer output per period of maternity leave taken – so basically, as opposed to having to submit four outputs (articles, books, chapters in books, etc.), if you’ve had a baby you only need to submit three. This is a vast improvement on the original proposal, which suggested that in order for an output to be waived, a researcher would need to have taken fourteen months off. As numerous researchers pointed out, that’s enough for two pregnancies, and very few academics take that amount of leave or are able to do so. I have to say, as one of the people who wrote in to point out the problems with the latter approach, I’m really pleased that common sense has won out here, given the opportunity it had to go horribly wrong. It’s nice to have something to be optimistic about.

So – to the panel D guidelines. The definition of what the Classics subpanel will look at seems fairly sensible – my work easily falls within its boundaries, as does the work of colleagues likely to be in the sort of department I inhabit (Byzantinists, Egyptologists and so forth). By the look of it, not only do panels have to submit topics, but also definitions of topics, which means that we are told that within the panel’s boundaries fall “comparative literature and such literature, literary theory, philosophy, political thought, material culture, art, film, performance, music, and such political, archaeological and other cultural activity as exploits in any way the history or cultural products of the Greek, Roman and Byzantine world” – which strikes me as a rather verbose way of definining classical reception, but it’s better that it shoud be on broad rather than the narrow side.

Also within the panel’s remit falls “the pedagogy associated with learning and teaching in the subjects listed here”, and I have to say that this and the later section specifically addressing pedagogical research came as a pleasant surprise to me. One of the problems with the REF is that it completely centralises research as the only important thing a university does, and so to perform well in the REF you have to prioritise your research above all else. To do so, however, means you fall into the trap of not prioritising your teaching above all else, and thus become the victim of the National Student Survey scores. These two competing and conflicting behemoths ultimately make balancing priorities and time management in academic life really quite tricky. I have long been of the opinion that it would be much healthier to have an assessment that acknowledged teaching and research as equally important parts of a university’s function. While explicitly acknowledging pedagogical research isn’t quite the same thing, at least it’s a way to get teaching into the REF, if only by a sneaky back door.

I will admit that I sniggered at point 53, “No output will be privileged or disadvantaged on the basis of the publisher, where it is published or the medium of its publication.” That’ll be why we’re all being told to go for the A-rated journals and nothing else because it’ll damage our REF performance, then.  I know we don’t have it as bad as the sciences with their citation references (note the recent case of the journal which accepted an article on the proviso that it incorporated more citations of articles from said journal). But journal names and publishers still carry weight, and optimistic statements that they don’t are, I’m afraid, not particularly credible – although at least point 74 says “the sub-panels within Main Panel D will neither receive nor make use of any citation or bibliometric data to inform their judgements”. I think my scepticism on this one is just going to have to wait and see how things not published in the A journals do, as I’m a cynical old soul.

There does seem to be a push to enable works that somehow ‘deviate’ from the scholarly norm, whether that’s because they cross over multiple interdisciplinary boundaries or because they have multiple authors. This is surely a good thing, because scholarship is healthier if it can incorporate all models of writing and working, not just the lone-genius pattern; that said, I’ll be interested to see how the guidance is applied in practice.

I’m quite glad to see the introduction of the double-weighted submission, if only because it acknowledges that writing a book is bloody hard work and takes a lot of effort. The problem with the REF is that it rewards churning out articles – not that articles are a bad thing. A good article is much, much better than a bad book, as the article form is the perfect shape for communicating one neat, concise idea. But sometimes you need to spread out your argument a bit, which is why you need a book – and it’s good that that work can be recognised. Oh, and that the guidelines for the double-weighting don’t say it can only happen if you’ve worked on a book! They include possible reasons like “the collection and analysis of a considerable body of material” and “the use of primary sources which were especially extensive, complex or difficult to access”. So you can argue the case for doing something Really Bloody Tricky and Time Consuming, which seems to me like the sort of thing people doing, for instance, archaeology should be able to do. (And they let you submit back-ups in case the panel doesn’t think something counts double, which is surely just the sensible and humane thing to do anyway.)

Ah, and now we get to the question of what the criteria actually are – apparently outputs will be judged on originality, significance and rigour. Using the terms “world-leading”, “international” and “national”. Jolly good. There are then a lot of definitions about what makes work four, three, two and one star standard. Which, frankly, are a bit unnerving, although they do reward cutting edge work rather than derivative work, which is surely fair given the supposed goal of research. But this was all a feature of the RAE, and the arguments get frequently rehearsed, so while seeing it in print is giving me a bit of a wobbly moment, and I do wonder whether even classicists can judge whether my work will be an important or a recognised point of reference given the specialisation involved, I’m going to take deep breaths and move on.

Section 3D deals with the Dreaded Impact Factor. Oh, Impact, you have come a long way since the days when you seemed to be all about whether money could be made out of one’s research, but I am still cagey. Not to mention that for the early career scholar in the humanities, the potential for impact is limited because of the lack of influence over infrastructure and curriculum that more established scholars might use. (I’m hoping very much that Penelope Goodman will soon post over at her blog about her fantastic project researching popular perceptions of the emperor Augustus, which is a great example of what a scholar in a full-time position can do on this front.) What I will say is that I’m glad to see so much on potential examples of impact beyond the economic, particularly in a document which will be scoured by those panicking about what this new term means for them.

I’m skimming over the rest of the impact stuff, because it looks like the case study material needs to be prepared by the academic unit rather than the individual. Most academic units I know are already thinking hard about what their case studies are going to be. I’m fairly sure that if I do end up being part of the headcount for the REF, I won’t be an impact case study, because I’ve had neither the time nor the embeddedness to do that, so I will leave this aside for now and concentrate on it more when the next cycle comes around and I might be able to think about it strategically.

The last section looks at ‘research environment’ – which again looks like it’s a bigger management ‘how do you look after your researchers’ question. Which personally I can’t do anything about, and indeed am highly unlikely to be in a sufficiently senior position to affect by the next REF cycle. But I will say that’s it’s nice to see that the REF doesn’t want its researchers being put into the academic equivalent of the research sweatshop (at least allegedly). After reading through all of this, and all the expectations, I have to say that I’m grasping rather gratefully at that straw.

I don’t think this document has told me anything new. It’s clarified a few things, the criteria and guidelines are now clearly set out, and I can see how this will be incredibly useful for those people working on the impact side of things. But for me? It’s just telling me more or less what I already knew, which is that I need to think strategically about making sure I look like I can contribute to the REF at an appropriately high level if I want to have even a sniff of a chance at a permanent academic career. After all, if even very senior researchers find their plans being dictated by the REF requirements, what choice do us beginners have but to fall into line?

However, I have just finished translating Seneca’s Epistulae Morales 27 in preparation for teaching it to the Latin IV class (who, I am glad to report, appear to be finding Seneca quite good fun, thus reinforcing my firm belief that he’s a brilliant author and more people should read him earlier). Letter 27 is about the the process of improving oneself and attempting to acknowledge and cure the faults in one’s character; Seneca tells his addressee, Lucilius, to think of him as a patient in the same ward rather than as a doctor with the infallible cure. However, the second half of the letter is about the impossibility of getting someone else to do this sort of work for you.

With typical Senecan verve, the letter recounts the story of the freedman Calvisius Sabinus, who had a lot of money but not much sense; he got Achilles, Odysseus and Priam mixed up, he couldn’t remember his literary references, and generally had a really rotten memory. (In a nice touch of class snobbishness, Seneca comments that he is “not like us, who knew these names along with those of our school-slaves” – ignoring the fact that Sabinus might well have been a school-slave himself, never mind that he would not have had the educational opportunities afforded to the sons of Roman knights and senators). Seneca’s disdain, however, truly comes to the fore when he reports Sabinus’ solution. Rather than put in the time and effort to actually read Homer and get to grips with the basics, Sabinus used some of his extraordinary wealth to order some very specialised slaves – one who knew Homer, one who knew Hesiod, and one for each of the nine lyric poets. Having the slaves in the house, Sabinus claimed, was as good as knowing the material himself, since anything a member of his household knew, he knew too.

As Seneca dryly observes, there are no shortcuts to learning. Sabinus still got his quotations mixed up despite having his human library on hand, since he would ask for a quote and then forget it as he repeated it. Attempts to create short-cuts to knowledge and true mastery of a subject simply don’t work. Some of you may have spotted why I thought this was a particularly good letter to give to my undergraduates to translate (a timely moral as well as a good story) – but I think the point goes a bit wider than that in the current conversation about what the higher education sector is going to face in the future. One of the big concerns raised about the White Paper, the basis for the bill, was the entry of for-profit providers into the higher education market, and the problems that could cause in terms of regulation and quality of teaching provision. I am, of course, not saying that money isn’t important to higher education – lecturers need their wages paid, buildings need to be heated and maintained, new equipment and books need to be bought. But I do wonder what the story of Calvisius Sabinus might say about a higher ed environment in which money, rather than the individual’s own pursuit of intellectual development, becomes the primary driver.

During that training session, one of the books we were pointed to as a further resource was The Good Supervisor, which deals in the main with how to deal with Masters and doctoral students, although there is some discussion of how to transfer the concepts to undergraduate students (namely, remembering that the average undergraduate thesis is not going to be considered for publication and is thus allowed to be a little less ambitious and more directed than would be expected of graduate-level work). The contents page certainly promises a comprehensive survey of the issues a supervisor will experience, from managing your first contact with a student to how to provide after-viva care.

Sadly, I found the book slightly disappointing. On the technical level, there are too many typographical errors for a publication that has a whole section on the importance of proper proof-reading. This really started to irritate me, especially when sentences abruptly ended mid-flow. On a conceptual level, the book tries to encompass all academic fields and thus have something to say to everyone; sadly, for me this aspiration to inclusivity meant that often the advice felt platitudinously obvious. There was also the inevitable ‘and how does this work for a classicist?’ problem, not least because of the dreaded section on ‘how to talk to your research students about methodology’ (which in my limited experience so far has involved emphasising the importance of close reading of texts and wide reading around the subject rather than debating the values of qualitative versus quantitative research,  how to properly deploy interviews and questionnaires, or the ethics of action research). I’m fully aware that these are live questions in other humanities and social science fields (half an hour skimming through the #phdchat archives will tell you that), and that classics students dealing with issues of museology or public perception of classics might well run up against these questions. However, they are not currently issues that are relevant to me or my students.

Despite attempts to acknowledge different forms of theses, I also felt that the standard textual analysis thesis got rather short shrift. The book was, however, much better on more avant-garde options, like the thesis by publication or the performing arts thesis, and ways in which these things might be successfully managed and brought to fruition. There was also a lot of good material on thinking about privilege and potential clashes of supervisor/supervisee on the grounds of culture and gender, and the ways in which those problems might be avoided in advance by a little careful preparation. I would say that portion was the book’s most valuable contribution, and probably the useful section for me. But I am once more struck by how difficult it is to write a book about these issues that is not discipline-specific, and how easy it is for generalist books to elide what seems to me to be a core research strategy within the humanities.

Now, because I’m a classicist and a a bit strange, my mind immediately made a connection with Roman slave law. Bear with me here, this will shortly make sense. You see, there is in Tacitus’ Annals an account of what happened in precisely this sort of group situation:

Soon afterwards one of his own slaves murdered the city-prefect, Pedanius Secundus, either because he had been refused his freedom, for which he had made a bargain, or in the jealousy of a love in which he could not brook his master’s rivalry. Ancient custom required that the whole slave-establishment which had dwelt under the same roof should be dragged to execution, when a sudden gathering of the populace, which was for saving so many innocent lives, brought matters to actual insurrection. Even in the Senate there was a strong feeling on the part of those who shrank from extreme rigour, though the majority were opposed to any innovation.

The principle here is much the same. If one slave murders their master, then it was customary for all the slaves of the household to die. However, much like the recent review, the Roman people felt this was unreasonably harsh. Not all the slaves had been responsible, they had not all been allies of the murderer,and thus they did not think the slaves deserved their fate. They even had some of the senate on their side, although I find it interesting to note that some crusty hardliners thought this sort of thing was the thin end of the wedge.

Tacitus goes on to report the speech made by Caius Cassius in support of enforcing the traditional penalty, which in sum says that if the senate shows leniency, the Romans won’t be able to control their slaves by fear of punishment any longer. His party win the vote:

Still, the party which voted for their execution prevailed. But the sentence could not be obeyed in the face of a dense and threatening mob, with stones and firebrands. Then the emperor reprimanded the people by edict, and lined with a force of soldiers the entire route by which the condemned had to be dragged to execution. Cingonius Varro had proposed that even all the freedmen under the same roof should be transported from Italy. This the emperor forbade, as he did not wish an ancient custom, which mercy had not relaxed, to be strained with cruel rigour.

The emperor wants to be rigorous – but not too harsh. He won’t bring freedmen into the arena too, just the slaves of the household, as custom dictates. You can read Tacitus’ full account of the event here, in chapters 42-45 of Annals 14.

For a classicist, the interesting thing is how this fits into a picture of Roman slavery and social attitudes to it. The fear of death by slave was a live issue, one which created fear and which needed negotiation. The story is reminiscent of another discussion that came before the Senate, about whether slaves should be made to wear a certain type of uniform – which was dismissed as soon as people realised that the slaves would then be able to tell how many of them there were, and thus consider revolt. It’s a kind of social control, of maintaining the status quo, and the enforcement of the law ends up being not only a message to the slave population, but to Rome’s general population (the ones without the money to sit in the senate) as well - this is the way we do things, and we will be sticking with it. The rule of clemency and mercy has no place here, and it is better to be strict than soft. But, as the emperor says, not too strict. After all, there are some limits. I’ll be interested to see how a review of the joint enterprise guidelines negotiates between these two extremes. We may be applying the rules in a very different context, but the underlying question of principle remains the same.

The panel and paper came out of a conversation at Feminism and Classics V about how we deal with the topic of rape in our classrooms, both as a social phenomenon and something that’s normalised in the texts we teach. If you have ever read any Greek New Comedy or the works of the Roman comic playwrights Plautus and Terence, you’ll know that rape is an almost ubiquitous plot device, and that the problems it causes are often resolved by the rapist marrying his victim (a state of affairs which is normally accepted as a perfectly sensible solution). Dealing with this sort of thing by anachronistically reading modern interpretations of rape onto ancient texts is not the way to go, but it seems to me that there’s a place for thinking about how we approach and present this material in way that is both historically appropriate and socially responsible.

The article that I’m tweaking at the moment is about a class I taught during my time at Rutgers-Newark that aimed to do just that. I tried to use a single class meeting as a properly researched and well-planned experiment in whether it was possible to deal with this material responsibly in such a short period of time. I think I found a way of creating discussion and awareness that actually worked, although it was far from perfect. But what seems to me to be the central point is that when this sort of material turns up in our classrooms, we can’t turn a blind eye to it and its impact on our classroom community. The usual statistic invoked in these circumstances is that at least one in four American college women have experienced rape or attempted rape. Those statistics may not transfer to a UK classroom, but I’m willing to bet that the numbers aren’t so very different. The responsibility remains ours to work out how to talk about this  material in a way that’s productive and open about the unacceptable behaviour it represents.

If you’re interested in reading a bit more on this topic, the first issue of EuGeStA includes an article by Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz titled “Greek Tragedy: A Rape Culture?”, which is freely available and well worth a read.