Neville Morley's Blog, page 10

Popular

It’s a clear sign of the parlous state of the British economy that even the Prime Minister cannot afford an umbrella. Either that, or yesterday’s announcement was somehow intended to communicate that only woke elitists bother with such things, whereas true men of the people will get their expensive suits soaking wet to demonstrate their authenticity and representativeness. True, the acquisition of genuine empathy with the people of Britain would involve being soaked in substances other than rainwater, but it’s the thought that counts.

At least the announcement was made yesterday about ten minutes before my train disappeared into the Channel Tunnel, so I didn’t have to endure any great suspense and could enjoy the spectacle in real time. But it might have been so much better a day earlier, when I was in Zürich discussing the theme of populism ancient and modern with colleagues from the Zürich Centre for Ancient Studies (ZAZH), and it didn’t occur to me or anyone else to discuss the present UK government when there are so much better examples on offer.

The question would be – now I think of this – whether one might learn more from the study of successful populism (certainly it’s the rise of populist parties that’s stoked anxiety about the health of global democracy) or from failed attempts at populism. Does P.G. Wodehouse’s Roderick Spode in fact reveal as much about mid-C20 populism as Mussolini or Hitler? Rather than debate whether populism should be understood as a tactic or a thin ideology or a moralising conception of politics, should we rather recognise that actually all these things might be encountered, on a spectrum from heartfelt, instinctive loathing of those who act like they’re better than us to the cynical adoption of divisive rhetoric about woke lanyards in the hope it might win a few extra votes? Rather than attempt to determine whether Kleon, say, was actually a populist (and if ‘populism’ is a concept that remotely makes sense in the context of C5 Athenian democracy), we could simply label him a Johnson rather than a Braverman.

Obviously Zürich would have been the ideal place to discuss this. One of the things I especially liked about the volume that we were launching and discussing (Riedweg, Schmid & Walter, Hgg., Demokratie und Populismus in der griechischen Antike und heute, De Gruyter 2024) was its flexible engagement with contested concepts. Attempts at applying modern social-scientific ideas in ancient history are often bedevilled or hobbled by the problem of finding a balance between acknowledging the complexity and disputed nature of most modern theoretical concepts and dealing with the inevitable Well what’s the point of it, then? reaction. In this case, the very process of exploring whether different versions of ‘populism’ had more or less purchase on the ancient polis, and if not why not, yielded the most interesting insights, simply by raising new questions about e.g. the nature of ‘the people’ and the sovereignty of the demos or the actual role of demagogues in this context.

So, the haplessness and patent inauthenticity of Sunak’s gestures at populism don’t contradict the idea that we remain within a ‘populist moment’ – yes, it’s gone on for much too long to be labelled a moment. The genuine/shameless/natural/committed (delete according to taste) populists have shifted the terms of political discourse so that something like their style, the performance of ‘authenticity’, and indeed their content (hey, Labour Party on the subject of immigration), is expected of anyone who wants to play politics seriously. They’re just not necessarily very good at it. As the joke has it: Just be yourself. No, not like that.

Anyway, despite the terrifying cost of a cup of a coffee and the remarkable flatness of Switzerland (Alps? I didn’t see any Alps anywhere…), I had a marvellous and intellectually stimulating time in Zürich, with excellent and hospitable colleagues. Having given my talk (to time, and without rushing the last couple of points, which hasn’t happened for at least a decade…) and thought through responses to a couple of really good questions, I now have a clearer idea what I should have talked about – but thankfully also an obvious place to talk about it, as I am just about to move onto the Mytilene Debate chapter in my Thucydides book-in-progress, just as soon as I’ve got through the email backlog and piles of marking.

In the meantime, I enthusiastically recommend the volume, which is a really excellent example of the power of collaboration (different approaches to Altertumswissenschaft meeting political theory and political science around a common, stimulating and sufficiently flexible theme) – and which seems to epitomise the general approach of the ZAZH; certainly I’m going to be watching out for future events there. And maybe next time the Alps will show up.

Burn!

No, there hasn’t been much activity on this blog lately; since getting back from holiday at the end of last month, I’ve been reaping the consequences of managing more or less to stay off work email during the holiday, namely a terrifying backlog of things to do and respond to at the same time as doing All The Essay-Marking, or at least an awful lot of it. Plus, I somehow find myself giving two public lectures in as many weeks, both new, on different topics, with a fair amount of associated travelling. Everything that doesn’t have to be done immediately is therefore on hold, and I want to give Past Neville a good kicking for various unwise life choices.

The positive aspect of all this is that the essay marking has been at times a joy: the work of many of my final-year students, especially in the Thucydides seminar, responding to feedback on their drafts by producing original, persuasive, thoroughly researched analyses that frankly would put quite a lot of doctoral students in the shade has almost made me cry. It’s quite difficult to come to terms with the fact that I’m now not going to be doing any serious teaching for two years – certainly not reprising a year-long immersion in Thucydides and his reception – but perhaps that’s for the best, as it would be really unfair to judge future cohorts for not being as wonderful as this lot have been.

And it has been extremely interesting, if sometimes a bit frustrating, seeing how students in Greek Historiography have responded to the opportunity to integrate the analysis of gAI into their assessments. In the case of the second years, the answer was: not a lot. But the first years were either a bit less risk-averse and conservative, or more used to the idea of using gAI for stuff, giving me a decent amount of data to consider.

The results will be written up properly when I’ve had time to analyse and reflect on them properly. But one of the striking unexpected outcomes, which wasn’t part of the original plan at all, was that having a bunch of students promoting LLMs fo write 500 words on topics like ‘Herodotus and myth’ and ‘speeches in Thucydides’ so that they can analyse them offered a very clear sense of the recurrent patterns of LLM output on those topics – which were then visible in a significant proportion of the essays written for the non-gAI option…

My sense is that none of them has got ChatGPT to write their essay; rather, they’ve used it to produce a summary of key points which they’ve then researched, or to suggest a structure for their discussion. So, while technically this is a breach of the university rules on acknowledging any use of gAI (none of them did), it felt to me that not only would this be astonishingly difficult to demonstrate (the key evidence being the structural similarity to lots of other essays, rather than duplication of words), but also no significant advantage was gained. ChatGPT produced a compilation of clichés; they reproduced those clichés, sometimes supported by evidence and references but never questioning them; the result is mediocre at best, and certainly no better than reproducing the key points of Encyclopedia Britannica articles in the old-fashioned manner.

However, it did seem worth pointing this out to them – both that gAI use can remain under the radar only if they’re the only people in the class doing it, but not if the numbers are significant, but also that this is far less helpful than they might think. Having written a page and a half of discussion and guidance, it then occurred to me that I needed a snappier, memorable version…

Thinking of exposing yourself to LLMs? Don’t neglect your SPF.

STYLE: confident, authoritative, bullshitting. Designed to make you accept

PLATITUDES: a distillation of what everyone always says, but with added

FAKES: fake references, fake quotes, fake facts.

Remember your SPF, or you’ll get burned…

The Style Council

Henry Farrell – who has been on a storming run of insights so far this year, and if you don’t already follow his Substack you need to start forthwith – posted an especially interesting piece at the beginning of last month, considering the relationship between developments in contemporary SF (Hari Kunzru’s account of the Apocalyptic Systems Thriller such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry of the Future) and non-fiction accounts of complex systems such as Farrell’s own Underground Empire (with Abraham Newman).

We live in an enormously, terrifyingly complex world. We need new narrative techniques to make sense of it, and even more importantly to begin to articulate ways in which human beings can collectively respond to it… Rather than emphasizing the one-way passage from non-fiction to fiction, we should think of fiction and non-fiction as intertwined like twin helices, generating and regenerating new possibilities.

Non-fictional accounts of economic systems, climate science etc. supply this new (sub-)genre of SF both with raw material and with the rhetorical/literary techniques that help to convey ‘epistemological authority’. In turn, non-fiction authors ought to think a lot more about how they write and the effects of different rhetorical choices, learning from the best examples of this new branch of literature.

The epistemological authority of the non-fiction trade book sometimes needs the anchor of chases and explosions. Or a little more mundanely – it needs to trace the relationship between agency and system through the whole of the narrative, rather than suddenly and awkwardly reversing toward it at the end.

Given the importance of this point, it’s a little frustrating that there is a tendency in the post to conflate all of the different aspects of ‘form’ as opposed to content in this field. Most of the piece (and Kunzru’s original article) focuses on subject matter – the choice to talk about complex systems – with only limited discussion of the different means with which one might evoke/dissect them. ‘Epistemological authority’ – truth, or truthiness? (For some reason, what I immediately thought of here was (1) 1970s-vintage Ballard, especially his shorter works, and (2) the accumulation of very specific detail, brands of gin and guns and so forth, in Fleming and other old-fashioned thriller writers; is the crucial difference just that the subject matter is the economy rather than cigarettes?). Refusal of a ‘single window’ onto the narrative – but presumably not the abandonment of a single impersonal, omniscient narrator? Is the idea of a narrative conveying agency primarily about focalisation? All this could certainly do with unpacking.

More interestingly, there seems to be a tension in Henry’s piece – I can’t decide how far it might rather be described as a two-step – between (a) the idea that certain stylistic or narrative techniques are especially appropriate or useful for particular subject matter (a claim that the rise of the apocalyptic systems thriller mirrors, or is indeed determined by, the post-2008 disenchantment of triumphalist globalisation, just as flat, frictionless location-hopping and brief-decontextualised-episodic narrative fitted the era of globalisation’s triumphalism) and (b) the idea that certain techniques are especially appropriate for generating particular emotional or psychological responses to the subject matter (the idea that narratives need to promote a sense of agency in the face of apparently inexorable systems and processes).

The conventional response would be that neither of these ideas is really relevant to non-fiction: its key goal (it might be said) should be clarity of exposition, regardless of subject matter, and the same basic means of exposition can be applied to pretty well any subject matter. But the second idea looks especially problematic; writing in a manner intended to convey the nature of the object, even if this breaks the usual norms of non-fictional prose style, can be defended as an alternative means to the same end of developing the reader’s understanding, but writing in a manner intended to shape the reader’s response starts to look manipulative. Even if, as Henry notes, the ‘Where do we go from here?’ concluding chapter is something of a cliché in popular political economy, and that is clearly an attempt to persuade the reader in a certain direction of thinking, conventionally that is taken to be a gloss on or extrapolation from the solid, objective exposition that has come before, rather than determining the shape of the entire enterprise.

Now, of course I’m entirely on board with claims about the rhetorical nature of all writing, including non-fiction; of course it is always aiming to persuade, through different means and according to different conventions. In other words, I’d reject both the conventional responses I’ve just imagined. Rather, I am quibbling about what looks like an attempt at smuggling in one idea (it’s fine to play on the emotional responses of your readers in a good cause) under the cover of a more widely acceptable one (it’s good to tailor your rhetoric to your subject matter for the sake of exposition).

Perhaps this is very much a historian’s reaction to the argument; on the one hand, we’re saddled with a history that often involves an uncomfortably close relationship to story-telling, sometimes of the most banal kind, and on the other we’re repeatedly enjoined, or expected, to confine ourselves to the supposedly plain facts rather than indulging in excessive moralising.

But it’s certainly a very personal reaction, as I continue to think about getting my book on Thucydides and politics finished at last, with the aspiration – which I think I’ve mentioned before – that it should be not just written but well written. Given that it is trespassing on the territory of political science, albeit in a highly idiosyncratic manner, perhaps I do have more licence to consider literary flourishes. For example, do I present Thucydides himself, and the fragmentary, conflicting and unreliable ancient testimonies on his life, in a solid exposition of the evidence? Or, in the manner of Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter, as a somewhat mysterious foreign intellectual, encountered in cafes and libraries in different cities where he offers gnomic remarks about world affairs, about whom different rumours circulate?

Put another way; how much of a problem is it that, while Henry seeks to echo the achievements of the best contemporary Anglo-American science fiction – including chases and explosions – I want to write some kind of arty European novel..?

Twelve Days in the Year: 27th April 2024

Woke around half six; a reasonably good night with only mildly peculiar dreams, but as we’d been up past eleven the previous evening experiencing a Plovdiv jazz club and then walking back over the river to the flat we’re renting, still feeling rather tired. A. hasn’t slept at all well, so is immediately disturbed when I reach for my glass of water, and puts on Radio 4 via the iPad. Time difference means a lot of World Service for an hour, a rather banal science-y programme but with some amiable-sounding contributors, followed by the shipping forecast and the news. Summary of the headlines in the papers suggests that the entire UK is thinking of nothing but the health of the King.

This, combined with the appalling behaviour of a bunch of middle-aged Brits (possibly the Billericay Gavin & Stacey Re-enactment Society) in the club yesterday, does nothing to lift the feeling of slight despondency that the holiday is coming to an end. But we have missed the cats (and can now start planning in earnest for the need to mollify them for being abandoned in time to start mollifying them for a possible addition to the family). And we do have a day and a half in Sofia to look forward to – now crossing our fingers that the quota of pasty Essex stereotypes enjoying cheap Bulgarian booze on a Ryanair weekend break has been filled. Yes, that’s a very Deplorables sort of comment, but if you want to get pissed and laugh uproariously at your own jokes, YOU DON’T DO IT IN A FUCKING JAZZ CLUB.

Even if it’s a synthesiser-drums duo playing something like a cross between late-period Esbjörn Svensson Trio and early Tangerine Dream. And especially when my Bulgarian is inadequate either to apologise for my compatriots or to explain that I will willingly return to testify in the keyboard player’s defence if he snaps and starts punching them.

Breakfast (trying to finish as much as possible of the nice food that it makes no sense to take with us, especially the cheese), packing, tidying flat and trying to write the most legible note I can manage to explain that I bought the wrong sort of pods for the coffee machine – silly me, going with a brand name – and I hope they can find someone who can use them. We go down the stairs, not trusting the lift (the contrast between the gloriously modernised appartment and a central stairwell that is apparently being preserved as a set for a gritty ‘life under socialism’ film is remarkable) and walk to the bus stop just in time to miss both the buses we could have taken to the station. The next ones aren’t for another half an hour, plenty of time to catch our train but potentially boring, so as it’s a lovely morning we decide to walk; pretty view as we cross the Maritsa river, then Russian Boulevard, a very long, straight road lined with trees that are unfortunately suffering from serious dieback. A good view of the statue of the Known Soldier – a depiction of a heroic Russian liberator, generously donated by the Russian liberators, and apparently still standing – having at various times had to be protected from would-be topplers – simply because no one can agree what to replace it with, plus it offers good shade.

The stately boulevard ends in a building site with no clear route to the station on the other side. Once we find our way across through trial and error and buy our tickets, we find a similar theme with the station; signs to Platform 8 bring one to Platform 10 (but this is evident only if you find one of the two small A4 sheets announcing this) and to the gradual realisation that the flimsy-looking metal gangway on the other side of the tracks is Platform 8. They could actually sell this experience to Brits – ‘Passengers MUST cross the lines’. We time our move carefully, minimising exposure to blazing sunshine over on the gangway but early enough that we can make our way to the anticipated location of our reserved seats rather than getting stuck in the scrum that develops at the end by the designated crossing (younger and more enterprising locals simply jump down from Platform 10 and walk straight across), which gets much worse when the train arrives and other people want to disembark.

First class was sold out – but since second class passengers also get reserved seats in a compartment, it would seem that the only real difference is that first-class passengers get heating, and since it’s a glorious sunny day this is not a problem. The compartment for seats 71-76 is fully occupied – indeed, the husband of the woman opposite, who has a Jane Austen-themed handbag, has been sold a reservation for Seat 77, which either doesn’t exist (the next compartment is 81-6, the one before 61-6) or entitles him to stand in the corridor. This occasions general hilarity and much gesticulation, some of which gets translated for our benefit as it turns out that they had lived in east London for over a decade. It’s striking – okay, this is me being very English – how often everyone in the compartment starts chatting, though when that couple get out an hour or so into the journey, it’s entirely in Bulgarian and we just have to enjoy the sounds.

They’re replaced by a teenage couple; he slightly pudgy with ginger-brown curls, she dark-haired and made up to the nines, including an elaborate job around the mouth that is either enhancing lip filler or creating the illusion of it. I blame some Kardashian or other, and will now find a cloud to yell at. Superficially, she is several magnitudes out of his league, but that’s not what the body language suggests – yes, a bit of social observation helps fill the bits of the remaining two hours that don’t offer either scenic wooded hills or striking examples of post-industrial decay.

We trundle along, with very occasional bursts of acceleration accompanied by noises suggesting that the engines really canna take it, cap’n. This is the express service; it’s quite difficult to imagine how the slower trains manage to take even longer. There are some signs of work to develop a second line, or possibly a rest station for the donkeys, but it doesn’t look as if it will be operational any time soon.

Things start to get entertaining when we reach Sofia: a small group of Levski Sofia fans had been on the train from before Plovdiv, and were generally quiet and well behaved – from the sound of her occasional interventions in other compartments, no one would want to cross the formidable ticket collector – but when they’re met at the station by a group of very good-humoured police with a dog, they clearly feel need to start chanting a bit. Even more so on the Metro, with added pogoing, which we had to enjoy for two stops before they changed for the stadium. We carried on to our hotel, and from our room – we’re staying this time on the top floor with two balconies and a glorious view of Mount Vitosha’s snow-covered peak over the rooftops – we can hear cheering from the stadium as the match starts.

It turns out – the Internet tells me – to be a derby between Levski Sofia and CSKA Sofia, as part of the championship round in which the top six in the league at the end of the main season play another mini-league amongst themselves. The history of Bulgarian football looks rather interesting; a number of clubs founded early in the 20th century (with a penchant for naming themselves after national heroes – Levski Sofia, Botev Plovdiv) and then assorted post-WWII teams with familiar Warsaw Pact names: Lokomotiv, CSKA (the army team). (One wonders whether the championship round was once, in the communist era, a cunning means of ensuring that the ‘correct’ team won – it surely would have been in the DDR…).

We relax for a couple of hours over a cup of tea – walking tour of the city planned for tomorrow morning, so need to conserve energy – then head out to find some food, since various restaurants have all ignored our attempts at booking a table by online form or email. The first place we try has all its tables reserved, but we book for the following night; the second likewise, but in fact they’re happy to accommodate us if we promise to eat up in an hour and a half. Superb food, yet again – we’ve had only one disappointing meal over the entire holiday. Bulgarian cuisine seems to be equally prepared for summer and winter; on the one hand the emphasis on fresh salads (with cheese) and lightly grilled vegetables (with cheese), on the other hand cabbage leaves stuffed with spiced mince and rice reminiscent of Poland or Hungary (A.’s choice) and kapama, layers of pickled cabbage, chicken, pork and sausage baked under a thin pastry crust that might as well be the final output of a working group tasked with devising a dish to appeal to me specifically.

We waddle onwards to explore a couple of Sofia’s craft beer bars/shops. One is entirely full of young men and playing hard rock, the other is called Nosferatu and explicitly advertises itself as a heavy metal bar; both actually feel perfectly friendly, but I can completely understand why A. doesn’t feel entirely comfortable, and so I grab a couple of imperial stouts from each and we head back to the hotel. I do worry slightly about how much 10-12% ABV beer I’m now going to have to drink to get my suitcase under the weight limit, but they looked so appealing (okay, apart from the one called Beef Juice that A. insisted I must buy). I’m most struck by the fact that one Bulgarian brewery has started selling imperial stouts in 250ml cans, which is a brilliant idea for really strong beers and I now can’t imagine why more breweries don’t do this.

Back at the hotel we enjoy some leisurely drinks and conversation – mostly about food and beer, but a minor excursion into the possible reception history of Thucydides in Bulgaria that I’m sure A. found fascinating. This is interspersed with a bit of bat detecting; not as good as Thessaloniki, where we were above a busy street full of traffic but still got a wide range of exotic species – but a couple of very energetic pipistrelles, one fairly unusual in the UK and one not found at all, plus a European Free-Tailed Bat. Then off to bed, relatively early after the previous night. Read a few more chapters of Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter, picked up on a whim for the holiday (a friend mentioned it on social media) simply because it’s Bulgarian, and now elevated to the status of one of my twenty favourite books before I’ve even finished it. I suppose that status could be withdrawn if the ending is a car-crash, but the first 85% is the literary equivalent of kapama, insofar as it could have been written to push my buttons – playful, ironic, profound, reflecting on personal and national histories and identities and the influence of the past on the present. Perec, Durrell, Erpenbeck, Calvino – you have a new friend; please play nice. Off to sleep thinking of how I’m going to write more about this at some point.

Holidays in the Sun

It is not actually the case that I cannot think of anything more ghastly than going on a holiday tour with a group; spending any time on board one of those gigantic cruise ships would be substantially worse. But it is very much not my thing for multiple reasons. However, that doesn’t mean I can’t understand their attractions for some people who are not me, and I can certainly admire the business thinking behind them.

After yesterday’s experience in Philippi, I looked at the website for one of the expressly Christian (specifically, in this case, Catholic) companies running Footsteps of St Paul tours. They turn out to offer a wide range of European experiences, always with some expressly religious stops, but by no means exclusively; their tour of England, for example, ends in Walsingham (fine), having taken in Bath (okay), Glastonbury (Hmm. Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Grail?), Birmingham (curry?) and Southampton (den of iniquity?!?). Clearly the point is to have a sufficient amount of religion for plausible deniability but not overdoing it, spending time together with one’s own sort of people, the whole thing presumably heavily advertised in the USAnian equivalent of The Tablet, and that’ll be $5000, thank you kindly.

Naturally one starts idly to imagine alternative itineraries for touring Greece, rather than following St Paul’s rather eclectic choice of overnight stops. Herodotus and the Persian Invasions: start at the Hellespont, travel all along the coast to Thermopylae, then Plataea, Marathon and Salamis before ending in Athens. Even better, the Peloponnesian War tour; okay, you can’t really do it in chronological order without a lot of doubling-back on yourself, but an itinerary of Athens, Corinth, Sparta, Pylos, Melos, Samos, Lesbos (for Mytilene) and Amphipolis makes sense – of course you have to go to Amphipolis – and maybe then fly over to Corfu (Corcyra) and take the boat over to Syracuse…

Far too obvious an idea for no one to have thought of it, but I note, with a sense of smug superiority, that the Advanced Battlefield Studies Pel War Tour sticks to Attica and the Peloponnese, while the only Persian Wars tour I could find does Thermopylae, Marathon and Plataea in a single day, and nothing else. Pathetic.

No More Drama

I’ve spent the weekend in Krinides in northern Greece (south of Drama, to explain the particularly tenuous post title), next to the site of ancient Philippi and the plains on which the Roman Republic was finally euthanased. Actually staying here, rather than being bussed in for a couple of hours like 97%+ of the other people touring the ancient remains, has been wonderful, and not just for the magnificent breakfast (shout-out to the Hotel Philippeio); a chance for some close observation of local horticultural practice, fascinating wild flowers and a lot of wildlife – a surprising shortage of bats, given the numbers I detected in the streets of Thessaloniki last week, but lots of strange nocturnal noises (Scops owls among them, I think), and fireflies, and today a hoopoe as well as stork, swallows, Western Rock nuthatch, calandra larks and a lot of things I haven’t firmly identified yet.

The plains of Philippi. The camp of Cassius was supposedly on that hill.

The ancient site was both amazing and frustrating – in an interesting way. My grasp of archaeology has always been tilted more towards (1) survey and (2) theory. I can tell the difference between, say, fourth-century BCE stonework, first-century CE opus reticulatum and late Roman mixed construction, but not with much more precision than that, and when it comes to the interpretation of a complex site with multiple construction phases my ability to comment in the abstract on post-processualism is of little use. What I really want is a nice information board or a guidebook; the museum kiosk offered us a QR code to download the site guide, which was illegible on a phone and lacking in any detail anyway. We asked the nearest attendant, who explained that she was trained as a guard, not a guide (she was equally unforthcoming when it came to trying to identify a bird we’d seen).

That’s fine; lots of wonderful sites could do with a lot more money to produce up-to-date information boards (and hire better translators; the museum has some quite funny literal renditions of the Greek. “Today, few survive from the city of Philip…”). What was interesting – and I must stress that this was my superficial impression from the experience, with no knowledge of any background – was a sense that the classical was almost an afterthought. This isn’t so true of the museum, which has a nice selection of coins, sculpture and inscriptions – although the contrast between the very descriptive captions for those, and the detailed, sophisticated and theoretically-/methodologically-informed information panels for the Neolithic section did rather give the impression that the prehistorians were casting some hefty side-eye.

No, it was out in the main archaeological site that I really felt the aporia: with the exception of the theatre, the (few) panels focused almost entirely on the Christian elements. Basilica, basilica, St Paul’s prison cell, basilica, Octagon that was the first church dedicated to St Paul. In the case of one basilica, even I could see that it was constructed on the platform of a ?Hellenistic? temple, but not a peep in the information provided. The description of the Octagon grudgingly admitted to the presence of a cist tomb at the same location and to the pre-Christian use of the site, but with an air of having to explain the fact that the mosaics didn’t have any obvious religious significance.

The explanation is rather obvious: the site management knows which side its bread is buttered, as at least four of the various tour groups we passed (or rather, stepped out of the way of as they charged through), the majority of the ones that weren’t sulky/distracted Greek teenagers, were expressly following in the footsteps of St Paul, indicated by the company names on their name badges or lanyards, the tendency of guides to declaim extensively from the relevant passage of Acts and the Letter to the Philippians, or both. As we heard a guide saying to a group that clearly wasn’t on a Christian tour: “Of course it’s not the prison of St Paul. But they always ask us to show them the prison cell, and so we found somewhere to show them.” I wonder if she says that to every group…

It’s an ironic contrast to the days when only the classical Roman and Greek stuff mattered, and archaeologists would merrily dig through Byzantine and late antique layers to get at it. At Philippi, at least, what matters is buildings with a clear Christian connection, so the Roman forum and Greek agora are to large extent simply spaces you pass through to get to the next fifth-century CE basilica.

But it’s still a wonderful place. I did especially love this sarcophagus lid carved as a tiled roof – not judged deserving of any label…

Eclipse

Thucydides knows everything about everything, Part 1283. It’s not enough that he recorded eclipses of both sun and moon, without directly attributing them to divine action – okay, he does claim an increased number of eclipses as grounds for recognising the unprecedented greatness of the Peloponnesian War, but he also notes that the eclipse of 431 occurred in the moon’s first phase, implying a natural event. No, he has to have anticipated all our modern concerns as well:

Where does this stuff come from? It can’t be anyone who has actually read the relevant sections of Thucydides, as obviously he doesn’t say anything about blindness and doesn’t offer advice either way. It’s actually an interesting question as to when people started trying to observe eclipses closely and whether they suffered adverse consequences, but Thucydides is not the place to look for an answer. I wonder f there is some sort of bleed-over from the ‘Thucydides invented the theory of post-viral immunity’ stuff that’s been popular since COVID.

A Different Point of View

I was never entirely convinced by Douglas Adams’ Total Perspective Vortex. The idea – I’m taking this from the original radio series, which I could once recite by heart, so variations in the books are non-canonical and therefore irrelevant – is that every piece of matter is connected to every other piece of matter, and therefore it is possible to extrapolate the entire universe from a small fairy cake. One scientist used this principle to annoy his wife; “Have some sense of proportion”, she would say to him constantly, and so he plugged her into the extrapolated universe so that she saw herself in relation to the entirety of creation, an invisible dot on an invisible dot, and it annihilated her brain. In a minor rewrite of Eliot’s “humankind cannot bear too much reality”, The Book concludes that “if life is going to exist in a universe this size, the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense for proportion.”

Matter extrapolation, fine. Problematic nature of a sense of proportion, fine. What never really made sense was the idea that people are *so* solipsistic that they imagine themselves to be big cheeses in relation to the universe. Honestly, the idea that I am small and insignificant in relation to the vastness of the cosmos is not going to come as a shock. Okay, when I was young I used to worry about the fact that the earth would some day be consumed by the sun and the universe would succumb to ultimate heat-death, but I don’t think I imagined I would be there to see it, or that this makes any difference to anything.

It’s a matter of scale, in a quite different manner from that envisaged by the Total Perspective Vortex. Most people do not live, or think of themselves, in relation to the entire majesty of creation. The truly terrifying prospect is the Embarrassingly Parochial Perspective Vortex, which extrapolates only a small part of the universe – a village community, a regional society, a sub-field of a minor academic discipline, a section of national cultural discourse – and provides a helpful label for “this is where you really stand”. Think of the truly tragic-comic figures, and what would destroy their sense of self: Captain Mainwaring simply wants the respect of his platoon, Father Ted just needs to be cleverer than anyone else in his parish, Dean Pelton wants a small community college in Colorado to take him seriously. Annihilating their brains by revealing their true insignificance does not take the entire universe.

Having had this thought earlier in the week, reality then helpfully delivered a bit too much of itself to serve as an example; someone quote-tweeted a remark I made about a poorly-researched new book – I might post on this at some point – with words to the effect of “You’re not so clever – you last published a book in 2018, but pretend that your 2014 book was published in 2020 to make yourself look better”. Okay, gratuitous rudeness from someone with a petty grudge – and the 2020 thing is not my fault, it’s the university’s semi-automatic research data system pulling in the date of the ebook and daring me to say I had nothing to do with the publication – but this is how people see me? Washed up, no publications worth speaking of in the last decade, massaging my cv to fend off thoughts of the abyss… You gotta hand it to those cupcakes, this is what really gives one a sense of insignificance.

Something else this week also brought to mind questions of perspective – though rather more the Mitchell and Webb “Hans, are we the baddies?” sketch. Major shareholders of Thames Water, responsible for siphoning off hefty dividends while loading the company with unsustainable debt and dumping sewage into rivers rather than actually investing properly in the infrastructure: at 20%, the Universities Superannuation Scheme, whose investment successes we academics have tended to celebrate in the basis that it might fund our retirements at a reasonable level.

This news doesn’t alter my firm belief that the water companies should be renationalised forthwith with no compensation for shareholders – but I can imagine the sorts of arguments that some may now be formulating in the name of realism and pragmatism. More significantly, we have no actual agency or influence here, just complicity. It’s similar to the ongoing “Are we the baddies?” aspect of working in a Russell Group university, knowing that institution-level policies are harming the institutions of friends and colleagues elsewhere. The fact that we can’t bear too much reality, can’t admit the truth of our actual circumstances, doesn’t excuse our obliviousness.

Twelve Days in the Year: 27th March 2024

Woken by a powerful, disturbing dream, in which I have had to organise some sort of awayday for graduate students, arrive at the venue to unpack everything and take over the room from the previous group punctually at half past six ready for dinner – only for the leader of that group, unmistakeably Prof. Pat Porter of the University of Birmingham, to say “Thanks for the food, Nev, we’ll see you at six thirty tomorrow morning.” I am positive that I haven’t misbooked this session, but there’s nothing I can do; A. is now berating me for letting everyone down – I have no idea what she’s doing here – and so I rush downstairs to catch up with everyone to apologise, and can’t find anyone. The strangest thing is that the logo for the Porter group is a dove of peace, which doesn’t seem very Realist at all…

I can reconstruct elements of this – that is, identify things from the day before that are probably being worked through: meeting about an edited volume, recommending one of Pat’s articles to a student in a consultation yesterday, sense that I’m not actually on top of anything and probably deserve to be shouted at. I feel absolutely dreadful; tired, aching all over, swollen throat, thick head and headache as if I’m thoroughly hung over despite it being several days since I had any alcohol. Very much the symptoms that come out at the moment whenever I get run down, and the obvious explanation is two long, quite hard days at work at the end of a couple of weeks in which I’ve been barely clinging on by my fingernails, getting by on caffeine, cake and adrenalin. And more cake. I can very much empathise with my stressed and exhausted final-year students and their pile-ups of deadlines, and in normal circumstances I would be firing myself up for one final seminar (rescheduled from Friday) without a strong expectation that anyone will actually turn up.

Except that these are not normal circumstances. Shower, shave, hasty breakfast being yelled at by cats who want to go outside in the rain, and then into the car to drive to my parents’ house on the other side of the country… This is one of the times when writing a journal entry to be published in thirty years’ time if ever is an awful lot easier than writing one for immediate public consumption. In the interests of privacy in this culture of obsessive over-exposure, let’s just say that there has been a sudden crisis, and I have to be on hand to keep an eye on my father while A. accompanies my mother elsewhere. At this point in the day, my colleagues are maintaining excellent work/life balance with respect to email hygiene, so I don’t actually have official endorsement for taking a day’s leave of absence; I’ve emailed my students to say that the seminar this morning is cancelled, and I’m trusting that the few who might have turned up on a cold, damp Wednesday in the final week of term in the midst of coursework deadlines probably like me enough to put up with this. It’s not that they need the class for their assessments, and I’ll be happy to give them extra sessions on the reception and influence of Roman political thought next term – and do more baking, as they’ll be missing out on the surplus chocolate & raspberry brownies I made for my Thucydides class.

The drive eastwards on the A303 is as fun as ever; a bit less traffic than usual, compensated for by the sleet (at the end of March!) and extensive puddles. Neither of us is filled with delight at the excursion – three and a bit hours there on a good run, that gets extended because of a road closure that sends us off to experience Guildford’s one-way system. This does produce a new view across the Surrey Hills before we descend into the valley of the River Mole, which compensates for the inevitable argument over styles of navigation – “Stop looking at the map and your phone and help me find the right road” versus “Looking at the map and the phone is how we find the right road”…

Finally reaching our destination, there’s time for a brief family chat before A. heads off with my mother; my father and I have lunch, and the problem of conversation is solved by him wanting to know the background to stories in the press about the crisis of universities; two hours later… My mother had prepared a list of tasks for me, on the basis that I could usefully be put to work, most of which were then rendered impossible by the miserable weather, but we headed off to a garden centre to collect compost and vermiculite. I then set about repairing the porch light, requiring a brief trip into the centre of town to buy a couple of screwdrivers and some screws, as finding anything serviceable in the innumerable boxes and drawers labelled ‘Miscellaneous Bits’ and ‘Stuff?’ was clearly likely to take hours. Cup of tea, chat about my father’s competitive rowing days, which gave me a chance to ask about the prevalence of pewter tankards in pubs in Ye Olden Dayes, given the number he’d accumulated as rowing trophies; I can’t remember why I had wanted to ask about this, but now I feel slightly better informed.

A. and mother return just before six, having had a reasonably positive day. Given the three and a half hours journey ahead of us, I would have been all in favour of setting off immediately, but A. wants to set her up on Instagram so she can view videos of her granddaughter’s (my niece’s) football team. Given that my mother doesn’t remember any of her passwords, may or may not have a working email and can’t get the fingerprint recognition software to recognise her fingerprint (actually thumbprint), and her iPad refuses to contemplate installing the software until it’s been updated, this is a laborious and not entirely successful operation, which we then squabble about for the first twenty minutes of the drive.

Weather and traffic could be worse, and the road is no longer closed, but around Basingstoke the sky to the west is suddenly illuminated by dramatic lightning; the lightning maps website confirms that there’s a band of thunderstorms running from the Dorset coast to just north of Chippenham, right across our path. By the time we get to the area the lightning has cleared, but we hit torrential rain instead, and the final twenty miles are slow and nerve-racking with the start of flooding.

At home, the cats are predictably furious that we’ve been out all day, and are scarcely mollified by a plate of chicken and a new catnip toy (perhaps that realise that it’s just a freebie from my parents’ cat’s cat litter). Despite the late hour and the prospect of the usual 5.30 start tomorrow, we have a drink to wind down. I now have email approval for bunking off, and one email from a student in the cancelled class – and another barrowload of stuff I am going to have to deal with at some point, but not now. It has been a very long day…

Second Coming

I wouldn’t say that it’s been the highlight of this academic year – that would be my lovely Thucydides seminar, for whose final class I spent yesterday morning baking shortbread and brownies – but the most unexpectedly memorable thing, both exhausting and rewarding, has been teaching Greek Historiography to first and second years. It’s not a new module, even if it’s the first time that I’ve taught it, so there hasn’t been a lot of extra time for preparing new material – but the previous lecturer had a unique style (hi, Irene!) that doesn’t suit me at all, so I’ve had to start from scratch anyway. Above all, this has involved revisiting the range of authors covered…

When I say that this isn’t a new module, I think in fact I mean that it’s clearly a pretty old module. The official title is Greek Historiography in the Fifth Century, but clearly Xenophon has been on the reading list since time immemorial, and for some reason Arrian also seems to be very well established. As a stickler for accuracy, I have submitted a module change proposal to ditch the ‘Fifth Century’ from the rubric – and in the meantime, if we’re bringing in Arrian, why not Polybius? (If my colleague Emma Nicholson ever has to teach this module, she will thank me…). It’s not just that I can’t imagine doing two lectures on Arrian; if we’re talking about ideas and development of historiography, P. surely has a lot more to offer. Actually, I think there’s a plausible case for having two lectures on P and then I have to do only one on Xenophon – having to lecture on the Hellenica, rather than his more interesting works, has not improved my opinion of it.

And then, with a spare lecture at the end, how could I miss the chance to do a bit of Procopius? (It was either that or Lucian, and I’d used him in the first class). This was absolutely the right decision. I was thinking just in terms of the awkward relationship between the History of the Wars and the Anekdota – how can we trust either author, let alone if they’re the same person? – and a powerful memory of how much I enjoyed Averil Cameron’s book on Procopius and the Sixth Century. But doing the actual research for the lecture revealed what a good choice this was. Consider the opening:

Procopius of Caesarea has written the history of the wars which Justinian. Emperor of the Romans, waged against the barbarians of the East and the West, relating separately the events of each one, so that the long course of time may not overwhelm deeds of singular importance through lack of a record, and thus abandon them to oblivion and utterly obliterate them. The memory of these events he deemed would be a great thing and most helpful to men of the present time, and to future generations as well, in case time should ever again place men under a similar stress. For men who purpose to enter upon a war or are preparing themselves for any kind of struggle may derive some benefit from a narrative of a similar situation in history, inasmuch as this discloses the final result attained by men of an earlier day in a struggle of the same sort, and foreshadows, at least for those who are most prudent in planning, what outcome present events will probably have. Furthermore he had assurance that he was especially competent to write the history of these events, if for no other reason, because it fell to his lot… to be an eye-witness.(History of the Wars, 1.1.1-3)

If you told Chat-GPT to think of itself as a well-educated Greek author of the mid-sixth century, well-versed in the classical historiographical tradition, and then gave it a prompt to write the opening of its history of the wars of Justinian, you would get something remarkably similar. I know this because, having had this thought, I actually tried it.

I, Procopius of Caesarea, with a deep sense of duty and reverence for the traditions of historiography, undertake the task of chronicling the wars of Justinian. In the footsteps of Herodotus, the Father of History, and Thucydides, the master of political and military narrative, I endeavour to present a comprehensive and impartial account of the tumultuous events that shaped the reign of Emperor Justinian. My intention is not only to recount the sequence of battles and sieges, but to delve into the intricate web of alliances, betrayals, and aspirations that defined the era. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, both written and oral, I pledge to offer a truthful and insightful portrayal of the conflicts that ravaged the Mediterranean world. Just as Herodotus sought to “prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time,” and Thucydides aimed to provide “a possession for all time,” so too do I aspire for my work to stand as a testament to the enduring importance of understanding the past for the guidance of present and future generations.

Procopius reminds me of sone of the brighter elements of Britpop: a heartfelt, overly knowing tribute to past greatness, that aspires to match it through creating something that is half pastiche, half collage. Whereas Arrian, say, spends too much time telling you that he’s the new Xenophon (as if that’s going to impress anyone) and is the Alexander of historiography who will be Alexander’s Homer – I have powerful, and unintelligible-to-anyone-who-wasn’t-a-regular-NME-reader-in-1994, flashbacks to some old Menswear interviews – Procopius is perhaps better compared to Denim or The Auteurs, something that makes sense in its own slightly hyperbolic terms but is packed to the gunnels with references and allusions. It is, if nothing else, a fascinating insight into the reception of the original classics – what Greek historiography and/or 1960s rock/pop come to mean for later generations, the aspects they idolise and the awkward edges they conveniently forget. And the Secret History is perhaps Pulp’s This Is Hardcore...

Look, it’s week 11 of a very long term, on a day when I’ve done four hours of lectures and three hours of student consultations on four and a half hours’ sleep; you don’t get to demand coherence in my vague musical analogies.