Neville Morley's Blog, page 23

Peter Singer’s Guide to the Classics

Homer’s Iliad: perhaps the most grotesquely over-valued work of human culture after Shakespeare; entire books pass by without even the implied presence of a horse pulling a chariot, and the famous critique of the manufacture of artficial animals for destructive ends turns out not even to be in the poem. Marginally relieved by its embrace of the principle that superior healthy beings should end the lives of others.

Homer’s Odyssey: there are at least some more animals here, but their subjective experience is ignored – they exist as threats, foodstuffs or sources of blind devotion for the self-obsessed central character.

Herodotus: a pioneering survey of the animal life of different regions of the Near East, albeit with an excessive emphasis on the exotic, regularly interrupted by tedious narrative of human events.

Aristophanes: why have I never heard of this author before? Why are his plays not being performed in every major theatre so that small children of sufficient intelligence to be worth nurturing can be forced to watch them? As I read these neglected texts with growing fascination, I realised that it was Aristophanes’ inexplicable habit of constantly digressing from his brilliant exploration of the way the world appears from the perspective of birds, frogs and wasps to indulge in pointless wordplay, slapstick and political commentary.

Xenophon: does at least recognise the importance of animals for global wellbeing, but dedicates himself to providing instruction for their subordination and exploitation.

Livy: a short story about elephants.

Vergil: interesting discussion of the utilitarian social utopia of the beehive as a model for reforming human society and culling the weak, surrounded by lots of aimless waffle.

Catullus: amateurish ornithology.

Horace: brilliantly prescient dramatisation of the consequences of animal migration between different ecosystems.

Tacitus: like Livy, but no elephants.

A History of Classical Greece from So Long to I Guess, Potami

Recent end-of-year discussions of the experience of online teaching, combined with contemplation of what next year might be like, reminded me that I meant to post a summary of the best of autocaptioning. Maybe this can be a permanent replacement for the annual festival of exam errors that some academics are so fond of celebrating; these are so much stupider, and create far more work…

Our knowledge of early Greek history is fragmentary and uncertain. We hear of Craig Owen the legendary king of the city of Thieves, Polite Critiques the tyrant of Samos, the Museum of Halley call and assess, and the early Athenian lawgiver Bronco. Our Auditors recounts the story of the Athenian Tyrannosaur, Hahm odious Nowrasteh Gaitan, and the Persian Wars, including the heroic warriors of Spot on at Thumb up apply. 

We then come to the Pelican Museum War, the causes of which Through Sedatives dramatises in the speeches of the Coarse Sirens and the Currant Films, and the demand of the Cartoons that Parrot please should drive out the cars of the Alchemy Only to I from Athens. Unenthused cities contrasts the ideal of Pirate Lee’s fuel operation with the impact of the plague (including the death of Pyrrhic Lives), the Middle Indian Revolt and the Mr Lini Debate featuring Clive Owen and Di Auditors, and the terrible Call Syrian Sassy’s. 

The events of the war include Athenian victory at pea blossoms bacteria, led by DeMoss the Knees, and the activities of General Brexit US in France. Then comes the piece of thinking arse, during which the Athenians attacked Meat Loaf and then launched an attack on Surrey cruise, but this was undermined by the scandal around the the Aleuts Indian mystery and the mutilation of the homes, which remined everyone of the Torana science. After the end of Theroux’s editor’s account, Athens was eventually defeated at the battle of I guess, Potami… 

Other versions of Pericles: PEMRA cleaves. Parallelise. Prickliness. Paraphilias. 

Other versions of Thucydides – and this is why doing the captions for a year-long module on Thucydides was such fun: Through Siddata. Through CDC’s. Few Cities. Cincinnati’s. Things editors. Subsidiaries. Things that it is. Stupidities. Thanks Ed Years. Health facilities. Sioux City. Suzerainty. Yes, teaching a course on Thucydides was SO much fun…

Oh! You Pretty Things

I am feeling tired and useless and miserable, and my nose hurts. The latter is due to being swiped by Olga, who took exception to being removed from the study windowsill where she was happily watching birds; the rest is seriously over-determined, but at least one contributing factor is the effort of trying to take on board the feedback on my latest bit of jazz composition. All this term we’ve been working on a piece based, however loosely, on rhythm changes [note for non-jazz people: the basic structure of George Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm, which formed the basis for numerous other compositions, especially in the bebop era, and interminable jam sessions]. I’ve been struggling to develop something that doesn’t just sound like a pastiche of Charlie Parker or Duke Ellington – there simply don’t seem to be many models for more contemporary rhythm changes, apart from Thelonius Monk, and if you follow that you just sound like second-rate Monk – but had written something that I thought was actually interesting and with a strong melody line. So it was a little disheartening – getting close attention from the tutor is always a double-edged sword – to be told that, while the rhythm is interesting and the bass line is good, and the melody has a good rhythm, my note choices are much too nice and safe, and by implication boring.

This is not an entirely unfamiliar comment; I got something very similar last year, when I first started these courses. I did actually think I’d got a bit better – and I’d followed all the advice about trying to sing the melody line, testing every note to see if it really is the right one rather than just falling into conventional patterns, not feeling restricted by conventional tonality etc. And what sounds right to me after all this is something that my admittedly very Monkish tutor thinks is much too conventional.

It’s not that I am a sworn devotee of diatonic harmony; on the contrary, the Peter Brötzmann Octet’s Machine Gun is one of my Desert Island Discs, I worship at the shrine of Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock and Miles’ early 1960s quintet and Ornette Coleman, and my wife refuses to listen to a good 85% of my record collection. But Charles Mingus is another of my gods, with his powerful rhythms and blues-influenced riffs – maybe it’s something about being a bass player, always grounded in the harmonic structure even as the saxophone players squawk and grunt in random keys – and actually Shorter was all about the melody as well as the harmony. And frankly who chooses rhythm changes as the basis for something avant-garde?

Anyway, I diligently noted down all the suggestions for changing notes to make them sound more interesting, and tried them out this morning – and they all sound rubbish as far as I’m concerned; I genuinely cannot see how my original note choices are not clearly better. Possibility A: I’m just too attached to the first version of the tune to be properly objective. Possibility B: I am simply irredeemably square.

Possibility C: I’m in a big black hole this morning anyway, so am simply craving the warm duvet and chocolate brownie of nice, mostly diatonic melody rather than the bracing cold shower of experimental dissonance, and will see this all differently at some point in the future.

I could, as usual, try to relate this to teaching more generally, but it’s not terribly heartening; I am currently the student who just doesn’t get what’s wrong with his work, in however many different ways this is explained, and was clearly secretly expecting a much better mark. I’m always reminded in such situations of the late lamented Radio Active repertory company, and their rehearsal for an adaptation of, I think it was, Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit. “The thing is, Peter, you are acting badly. What you need to do is act better. Remember when we went to see Gielgud? Gielgud is what we in the profession call a good actor. He acted well. You, Peter, are a bad actor.”

Or maybe I’m the student who just wants to write conventional narrative military history, despite all my attempts at persuading him that it’s boring and pointless however well it’s done. In which case this may be some sort of karmic judgement, and the tutor is playing my usual role of saying, well, if you insist on being so conservative could you at least try to be interesting about it, and my response is that I find Alexander the Great’s battles interesting. What if I just like pretty melodies?

Reckoning

About twenty years ago, I would guess, I started writing Theories, Models and Concepts in Ancient History. I had two main motives – or three, if you count the fact that I was supposed to be writing a book about ancient trade and had absolutely no idea what to say about it. Firstly, I wanted to write it for my students; I’d by now been teaching an ‘Approaches to Ancient History’ course for five years, which I’d stealthily reorientated in directions that suited my interests and intellectual commitments, and I was somewhat conscious of the lack of accessible introductory reading. Writing a suitable book myself seemed preferable to changing the module topics back to the previous version – and it offered the possibility of a kind of primitive flipped classroom, insofar as if everyone read the relevant sections of the book we could focus on debates, issues and freeform discussion, rather than having to devote lots of class time to covering the basics of the topic.

My second main motive was of course the overweening arrogance and polemical bloody-mindedness of youth – the discipline should be theoretically sophisticated and methodologically self-conscious, and what better way of trying to force it down my preferred path then to attempt to subvert the as yet unformed minds of students, even the ones I couldn’t influence directly? It was undoubtedly ambitious to try to cover all the different topics, from class and status to cultural anthropology via feminism – there’s a good reason why similar books in historical studies tend to be multi-author collections – but I was already doing that in the classes, offering a broad introduction to key issues and debates and a synthesis of some recent research rather than claiming to be comprehensive. No, the really over-ambitious bit was the idea that the whole book could subtly convey the importance, necessity and even joy of taking a theoretical approach to historical studies, so that even if a reader rejected one or all of the theories discussed they were still nevertheless having to engage with theoretical issues, and this might rub off on them despite themselves.

This reflected my typical teaching experience, that a student who absolutely hated the course but was willing to articulate this and engage in discussion could be enormously useful for the overall success of the class, and might well come to look back on it as useful a few years later – the problem students were the ones who went for silent resistance. I’m sure my biases are obvious, but with a few exceptions (the section on feminism being the stand-out example) I wasn’t setting out to promote a particular theory or ideology but to draw students/readers into thinking about the issues and asking their own questions – and reading around in more recent, more specialised scholarship. That, at least in theory, would also stop the book from dating too badly too quickly: the basic problems and dilemmas in making sense of human social organisation or comparing modern and pre-modern economies or thinking about ‘human nature’ would remain, even as the attempts at answering them changed with the times, so there would still be a need for an introduction to those problems and dilemmas.

And so, until very recently, I’ve been quite happy not to think about TMC, except on the rare but welcome occasions when someone mentions that it made an impression on them as a student. It might not sell any more as libraries all have their copies, it might be sliding into irrelevance as the discipline has generally become much more hospitable to theoretical and social-science approaches than it was back in the theory wars of the 1990s – and perhaps I could even imagine that I had some small part in that – but it was out there on shelves if anyone did want to read it, and it wouldn’t do them any harm if they did.

Well, that was then. Two events in short succession have changed my mind about this complacent attitude. The first was the recent event on Race: antiquity and its legacy organised by the Roman Society, with Zena Kamash, Denise McCoskey and Dan-el Padilla Peralta, which powerfully brought home how inadequate my discussion of race theory is by contemporary standards. This inadequacy is above all because the topic is not just about the past, but about the present, and the dialectic between the two; okay, I would make that claim about pretty well any aspect of ancient history, but whereas the implications of, say, the critique of modernity via antiquity were broadly established a century and a half ago, understanding of the relationship between classical studies and race is a much more recent development, still not universally accepted in the discipline, and a failure to address it properly in a book like mine starts to feel like a sin of commission rather than mere omission.

And then, barely a week later, we had the Twitter row about insensitivity in relation to trans issues, and I was left in the uncomfortable position of wondering whether after all my discussion of sex and gender in TMC might be worse than the discussion of race and ethnicity. I hope I will be excused for what I wrote then, given that it was, I think, a reasonable summary of debates about sex, gender and identity at the time. But actually the important thing is not my motive or intention, but how those words might be received today, and the fear that (1) what was then a reasonably neutral summary of the state of debate now looks like one of the entrenched positions in a rather different debate, and so the book might be claimed, anachronistically, as an endorsement of that position, or even read (by those unfamiliar with the details of the current debate, and maybe even seeking a way into it) as an authoritative account of things that then implicitly delegitimises alternative perspectives (yes, as someone commented on the Twitter, there’s loads of other stuff they could read – but what if they don’t?); (2) one of my students might be hurt or feel betrayed by what I wrote, and lose all trust in me as a teacher – and, though I don’t tend to think in these terms, actually for ‘students’ substitute ‘readers’.

The fact that this would be inadvertent, and can be explained (and even excused) by how much the debate has changed in the intervening time, doesn’t matter, if the book is read – as I hope it still would be – as something that’s supposed to be useful in the present, not just a historical curiosity. Having been progressive once doesn’t get you a lifetime pass; times and ideas both change, and sometimes that means positions need to be reviewed and reconsidered – but that is somewhat tricky when the position is established in print. I am, you could fairly say, hoist by the petard of my own over-confidence in making pronouncements on fields and topics on which I don’t regularly work, simply because I don’t then have many opportunities for later modifying or repudiating those pronouncements.

Assuming that it’s not really practical to sneak into every library where the book may be found to insert an ‘Errata/Apologies’ slip, my best hope for a clear conscience might be just to hope that no one bothers to read it any more. The problem with that is the absence of an alternative, and I don’t think it’s just my own sense of self-importance that makes it seem as if such an introductory work is potentially desirable. So, Plan B: the great thing about words is that they can be revised and rewritten, and the solution in this case is clearly Theories, Models and Concepts II: The Empiricists Strike Back. Or, TMC Second Edition, as apparently the publisher might prefer.

This is still in the early stages of planning, but at the moment I’m thinking in terms of a complete reworking, rather than just updating the bibliography: making sure that existing discussions of different theories and approaches are brought up to date to reflect current issues and debates, and considering what new intellectual developments need to be included – suggestions welcome! (Definitely something on big data and statistics; more on anthropology and environmental science; more on cognitive studies…).

Further: I am seriously considering developing this project as a collaboration – not because I think it would be less work for me, probably the opposite, but to temper some of my idiosyncrasies and identify blind spots, and try to ensure that the end result really does engage properly with the relevant debates in the right way. I’m not too old to admit that I have a lot to learn from other people… The thing is, I don’t actually have anyone specific in mind; indeed, I’m hoping that this blog post might serve as an advertisement for a potential co-author.

This is a rather different sort of academic project from most, requiring less specific research expertise and more a willingness to dabble in lots of different areas, a commitment to the basic aims of TMC as an end in itself (this probably isn’t the sort of thing to rank very highly in promotion criteria or research quality evaluation exercises, and the financial rewards are pretty negligible) and potentially a high level of patience and tolerance as I haven’t actually tried co-authorship properly before, and I suspect there is a hard core of stubborn arrogance beneath all the outward reasonableness. I am looking, I guess, for someone who is both very different from me, especially in research interests (preference for serious engagement with the themes identified above, as that’s where TMC Returns is most clearly in need of work), and at the same time shares a core belief in the importance of both engagement with theory and methodology and clear communication with a student audience.

So, who fancies themselves as the Pet Shop Boys to give a modern makeover to a has-been cult figure? (Yes, even my jokes about being dated are dated). I am, quite seriously, open to expressions of interest in exploring whether we could work together on this: n.d.g.morley@exeter.ac.uk.

Rat Trap

No, UK universities have not been taken over and corrupted by Chinese money and persuaded to orientate their research programmes; otherwise, surely there would be more evidence of serious investigation of the Tacitus Trap, one of the three critical traps that Xi Jinping warned China against back in 2014 (together with the Thucydides Trap and the depressingly mundane Middle Income Trap – was there no Aristotelian remark about the importance of the mesoi that could have been repurposed? Okay, no alliteration…). Critical voices in China have objected that the Tacitus Trap is not actually a Western concept (the relevant Wikipedia entry cites only Chinese sources); surely this would be a great opportunity to improve the authority of the idea by making it a valid debate in Western political theory? Especially as current events seem so relevant…

Quick recap (my original discussions here and here): Tacitus’ Histories opens with the brief and chaotic rule of Galba, as celebration over the fall of Nero (at least among the ‘better’ people) is rapidly replaced by discontent and anger over the uselessness of his successor (who, as Tacitus famously remarked, “by common consent would have been pronounced equal to empire, had he never been emperor”, 1.49), and especially among the soldiers who felt insufficiently rewarded. News arrives in Rome of the deaths of two military commanders, both accused of plotting their own revolts, and this arouses anger against Galba; the critical conclusion being that “when a ruler once becomes unpopular, all his acts, be they good or bad, tell against him” (1.7) – and, one might add, regardless of whether he is actually responsible.

Since, at the time of writing, Boris Johnson’s popularity (and hence the level of support for his party) seems to be holding up despite the steady flow of scandals, accusations of corruption and incompetence, apparent contempt for propriety etc., there is surely still time to set up a proper study of what happens when the vaccination bounce wears off and popularity fades. The Tacitus Trap implies the existence of a tipping point, which clearly we haven’t yet reached, after which the public stops being so tolerant, indifferent or forgiving of things that they previously shrugged off; the Johnson approach assumes that getting away with murder is a permanent attribute, or at least the consequences of actions can always be shrugged off with a classical quip or endearingly surreal stream of consciousness. (Bunny-hugging, anyone?).

Of course, as with all ideas drawn from classical antiquity (looking at you, Thucydides Trap), some adjustment is always necessary. Focusing on the person of the emperor arguably makes sense in an autocracy; in most modern regimes, it’s less clear that this makes sense (so, the obvious case study of a UK government falling into Tacitus’ Trap, the Major government after Black Wednesday, it’s not at all obvious that focusing on the ’emperor’ is the most helpful approach). The Chinese approach deals with this issue by focusing exclusively on the state or its local components, avoiding any mention of the potential culpability of its head for loss of popularity or credibility.

It’s worth stressing that, as is often the case with these things, Tacitus’ account is much more complex and interesting than the reduced one-line version. This is one observation among many, one facet of the rapid loss of credibility of Galba’s regime rather than a total explanation of it. One might easily expand the parameters of the Tacitus Trap to encompass the corruption of state servants, the willingness of the rulers to ignore the rules when it suits them, the failure to deliver on promises – actual behaviour, in other words, rather than just poor news management and public relations.

Galba’s problem, one might argue, was not just his attempt at pushing forward outmoded if praiseworthy values in unsuitable times (the line about choosing rather buying soldiers; his choice of Piso as heir) but his utter failure to impose these restrictions on his own people – prefiguring the problem of not getting credit even for the better elements of his rule. The overthrow of Nero – the “getting it done” of 69 CE – could buy him support for only so long…

English Civil War (Remastered)

There’s a long-standing tradition of setting up a contrast between Thucydides and other classical historians, usually to make a point about the ‘true’ nature of historiography. Most commonly, the foil is Herodotus, in a zero-sum game where only one can be the real Founder of History: T as critical, objective, sober, realistic etc. versus some bloke who just wrote down a load of tall tales he picked up in bars down by the Halicarnassus docks, or H as the broad-minded anthropologist of cultural difference versus a narrow, reductivist and chauvinist view of human beings (shout-out to the late great Marshall Sahlins). But there are other possibilities; in the sixteenth century, for example, T might be set against Tacitus on political grounds, for his praise of the enlightened rule of Pericles as opposed to the dangerous hostility to monarchy evident in the Roman, while nineteenth-century critical historians frequently bolstered T’s reputation as one of them by giving Livy a good kicking as the epitome of aimless chronicling of events.

I don’t recall any particular tendency to set up a Thucydides – Julius Caesar cage fight – they’re more likely to be bracketed together as men who wrote from positions of real expertise and experience (there are collections of Military Quotations, for example, that refuse to cite anyone who never fought in war, and they love the pair of them). You can, however, always count on Brexit to bring a new spin on some old habits of thought, and the announcement earlier this month that a putative Museum of Brexit has been awarded charity status and can begin fundraising included this gem from one of its trustees, arguing that it would be a proper historical endeavour, honest:

We made an early decision that the project needed to be approached in a balanced way that reflects the views and arguments on both sides of the divide – or rather, on multiple sides, as the dynamics are far more complicated than simply binary. Once people see that we are endeavouring to be more Thucydidean than Caesarian in our approach to history, we are confident we will get wide engagement and that in turn will be reflected in the range of material we can display.

Yeeeesss…. Thucydides as the epitome of impartiality, objectivity, showing both sides etc.; so far, so boilerplate (and leaving aside what an actual Thucydides would have made of the events as an illuminating demonstration of ‘the human thing’ in action). I’m more interested in the choice of Caesar as the contrast, and what it is that they are seeking or claiming to avoid. History written by the victor, presumably; history figured as the triumph of a single heroic individual (tough luck, Johnson and Farage, you are the mere figureheads of a collective effort); a history of civil war and internal conflict resulting in the rise of autocracy.

I’m guessing, to be honest, because whereas the modern image of Thucydidean historiography is well established, I don’t get the same sense of Caesarian historiography, beyond the cliches of Latin lessons in Molesworth. ‘Caesarian’ surely summons up ideas of surgically-aided birth for most people (though normally spelt with an ‘e’ in the UK) – the first couple of pages of Google results have nothing else until you get to some adverts for ‘Caesarian legionaries’ metal figurines, while ‘Caesarian history’ seems to be exclusively gynaecological. It is almost as if they started, consciously or not, with the question of how one should write about a society tearing itself apart through the ambition of a few ruthless individuals, and then decided which approach to imitate.

It remains to be seen whether they will also eschew the implicit Romanocentrism of Caesar’s account in favour of Thucydides’ style as the ‘man without a nation’ (which I think is a reasonable updating of apolitēs…).

Together in Electric Dreams

What are conferences actually for? There were plenty of reasons for asking this question even before the pandemic, above all because of concern about the environmental impact of lots of academics merrily jetting round the world, and various people have been getting quite excited that, if nothing else, the plague might have broken us of the habit, or at least made us familiar with alternative approaches. I remain in the ‘undecided’ camp, at least as far as real-existing online conferences are concerned (I’ve participated in three in the last month).

As I reflected back in July, they don’t remotely duplicate the crucial role of networking, especially for people who don’t already know lots of people, and we probably ought to be thinking about this more – it’s enormously frustrating that there was no time at the end of my CAMWS to discuss Brooke Holmes’ amazing paper on biopolitics, and no opportunity to go for a coffee afterwards, but I’m established enough to have no fear (or at least only a moderate amount of fear) in contacting her separately, whereas for a more junior person the post-paper chat can be the perfect opportunity. In other respects, too, I am still more convinced that, rather than rushing to replicate what we used to do just in an online format, we need careful consideration of what we ought to be trying to do.

This has really been brought home by the experience of glossy online conference platforms. Zoom and Teams certainly have their issues, but at least they are familiar issues; they offer the equivalent of a room full of people, with the disadvantage of lacking the normal visual cues that help manage interaction (arrangement of furniture, facial expressions) but the potential advantage of having the chat facility, emojis, and the virtual hand – and the definite advantage that many of us are using these platforms all the time, for not dissimilar activities. The online conference platforms are…not like this.

They are not familiar (hence, at least at the moment, having to set up extra meetings for instruction and log in half an hour before the session starts, and the need for extra support staff to be on hand throughout). They don’t replicate the seminar room or the lecture theatre, because they deal with the problem of lack of visual clues leading to communication breakdown by doing away with the audience altogether – or at any rate reducing it to an entirely passive role, silenced (except, possibly, getting to write something in a Q&A forum) and invisible to the speakers (who at best see a little counter of how many people are supposedly watching). The closest thing to this in my experience was a long time ago, in the closing stages of my PhD, when I gave a guest undergraduate lecture at Royal Holloway by sitting in a room on my own with a camera being broadcast simultaneously to a lecture hall down the corridor and another somewhere in central London. And that is not a recommendation.

What this offers – indeed, mandates – is a very specific conception of what a conference paper is all about: one-way transmission of information. At best, the audience get to write something in the (moderated) chat or Q&A, which I suppose could be good for allowing thought and careful formulation rather than blurting, but seems to me more likely to be inhibiting. This is not my idea of fun… More importantly, to return to a theme I’ve considered before, why could this not just be a blog post – or a video, if seeing the speaker is important? What benefit is gained by having people receive the presentation simultaneously (even if this requires them to give up their evening to participate in a conference abroad), when their opportunity to interact with the speaker is limited to posting a short question online, and their opportunity to engage with other audience members is zero? And how much additional time and money does this absorb? Yes, there are better and worse examples of this (the Inclusive Classics session at the online Classical Association conference had a really lively discussion running in parallel to the presentations, and the social media session was able to carry on the discussion on the Twitter), but I still think we’re too wedded to trying to replicate whatever bits of past practice we can, without worrying enough about the bits that we can’t and so are simply being discarded.

Or maybe I’m just cranky because (1) I didn’t get to go to Leiden, Swansea or Cleveland (HELLO CLEVELAND!) and (2) cranky cat woke me at half two, and online conferences are not good with headaches before you even start…

Crazy Train: or, in praise of derailment

My secret is out: someone in the jazz composition group happens to have an interest in Greek tragedy, came across one of my old appearances on In Our Time and mentioned this on the group chat. By an unfortunate coincidence we were doing modal composition this week, and suddenly I was threatened with explaining the origins of Dorian, Mixolydian etc., and that could lead into further discussion of Plato’s ideas about different harmoniai and their effects on the soul, and the relation between ancient Greek musical theory and what we now understand as modes… Derailment threatened – however conscious I am of the risks of taking over the conversation, could I really formulate a short answer to such a question? Thankfully someone else asked a question that derailed the class in a completely different direction, rather more music-related if somewhat esoteric, and I was off the hook.

Probably I’m being over-sensitive – feeling an extra responsibility, as a teacher, not to mess with another teacher’s lesson plan. I’m actually quite happy with derailments in my own seminars, as (except after a particularly bad insomniac-cat-night) I feel confident about my ability to pull things back on track before they go too far off piste, to recognise when a digression is serving the overall purpose of the class and when it’s all going a bit too Herodotean – and when it’s great for one person but completely tedious for everyone else. And of course I have the advantage of being older and more pompous than any of my students, and it’s relatively unlikely that we’re going to venture into areas where I have to defer to an uncomfortable degree to their expertise on anything – and if we do, well, who gives out the grades..? Managing an adult education class for a bunch of hobbyists with their own claims to authority in different fields – I am not the only academic in the group – is a whole other thing; once it’s decided that the Greek theory of modes is relevant, who other than me is going to shut me up?

As far as my own teaching is concerned, however, it’s the derailment that I’ve really missed – or, at least, the absence of derailment epitomises the deficiencies and difficulties of doing all this stuff online. There have been times this year when I have come very close to doing a Heath Ledger “Why so serious?” thing – except I know how flat that would have fallen. Everything is so serious. No one says anything that isn’t well-informed and carefully thought through – which is one reason, I think, why students have widely felt that we are demanding much more of them this year; we’re not, but they now feel much more obliged to do more of the reading, perhaps because it’s much less obvious to us that someone is avoiding our eye (even more of a problem if not everyone has their camera on), so they feel more at risk of being called upon. But doing the extra reading isn’t making them any more likely to say things without prompting, perhaps because putting up a virtual hand or even just turning on the microphone seems just that bit more formal, and on top of that everyone is nervous of talking over anyone else – maybe because the sound is just flattened out, rather than different voices being audible even if talking at the same time.

And this is a major problem. It’s not just that discussion is slower and more awkward, it’s that it’s much thinner; there are simply fewer contributions, and while the number of substantial contributions is probably about the same, they’re more isolated and disconnected. Some of the best discussions in the past have arisen from throwaway remarks, or even jokes – and we don’t get either of these any more. When first introduced, Padlet sometimes recreates that spontaneous and frivolous element, but then people start taking that too seriously; ditto the Chat function. It’s another variant of the Creepy Treehouse problem; if I tell students I want them to behave like typical students, that amazing combination of excessive sincerity and complete abandon, nothing is better guaranteed to kill the mood. But the net result instead is that we’re all much too adult and sensible, and that then limits the possibility for anything really interesting to happen.

None of this is a complaint about my students; their resilience and good humour in these astonishing and appalling circumstances have been awe-inspiring, especially the final-year students who don’t have any hope that next year might be better. I can’t imagine how ghastly this year would have been if they hadn’t stepped up to such an extent. But no one is pretending that it’s been normal; what’s been interesting, but also distressing, is discovering exactly what has been missed or lost. I do think we’ve successfully covered the core material – perhaps even better than in previous years, precisely because I’ve been covering it in pre-recorded lectures rather than having to remember to do it in class when I’m always open to being distracted by something less familiar and less interesting (because less familiar).

No, this isn’t about making the class interesting for my benefit. It’s the crucial point that, certainly by the final year, university study is not about consuming a mass of existing knowledge as an end in itself, but about using it to develop new ideas and perspectives – and about realising that this is not just a matter of doing the hard yards of research and thinking, but occasionally also the serendipity of a daft throwaway comment that actually opens up something new. My role is not just to open their eyes to new ideas, but to reveal the potential of the ideas they have produced themselves, even by accident. Sometimes you need to derail everything in order to find a new direction – when derailment is the necessary answer to railroading…

Across the Barricades

Obviously one always hopes one’s work will be read by people working on relevant topics in other disciplines – not just because of wanting to have as big an audience as possible, but with a quiet sense that perhaps extra-disciplinary readings will be somehow purer and more objective, rather than conditioned by prior knowledge and expectations. (And, for some of us, a vaguely optimistic “a prophet is not without honour…” hope that surely sooner or later someone will get what we’re trying to do). It’s fair to say, I think, that we do anticipate particular secondary audiences, and so there is always the possibility of being taken completely by surprise that someone else has actually come across our work, and apparently liked it.

I’ve recently been working on a piece on the politics of decadence. In my fairly long list of “it seemed a good idea at the time” things, this is undoubtedly a career highlight. My sole qualification for the task is an article I published in 2004 on ‘decadence as a theory of history’ – and to be honest I can’t recall why it occurred to anyone to ask me to give the conference paper on which that one was based, although it did tie into things I’d been doing with historical metanarratives. As I started to research this new piece, it did become clear that this was perhaps as much of a qualification as anyone could claim, simply because this isn’t a topic with much of an existing bibliography.

Or, from another perspective, a terrifyingly vast bibliography that no one has yet helpfully rendered down or organised. The thing with ‘decadence’ is that it has not been elaborated as a concept by anybody – it’s deployed as an allegedly objective description of reality, or thrown in as a rhetorical gesture – and so, with the exception of a brief survey of what the Decadents themselves had to say about politics (vague, incoherent…) this would be a very short chapter. The idea itself is decadent – as indeed I argued in that 2004 piece, historians are generally happy to use the equally metaphorical ‘decline’, but ‘decadence’ is too much, even when their actual analysis constantly teeters on the edge of it.

But if you think of ‘decadence’ not as a term or concept but as a complex of ideas about historical change, then it pops up all over the place, in many different contexts, through two and a half thousand years of political thought. You could almost claim that it is a constant background presence – why worry about trying to develop a stable constitutional structure, or fret about the state of civic virtue or the dangers of unbridled passions, or concern yourself with the impact of luxury on population and national virility, if not for the looming threat of decay? – in which case, trying to summarise it all in 8,000 words is basically mad. So, that’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks.

This has put me in the position of reading a lot of 17th- and 18th-century intellectual history, as that’s a period I’m relatively unfamiliar with (and heartfelt thanks to everyone who responded to my desperate pleas for bibliographic recommendations), but also deep immersion into the study of 20th- and 21st-century fascist and far-right thought, because the idea that society is sick and in desperate need of violent restoration is absolutely central to that agenda – including the whole Drain The Swamp Make American Great Again Thing, as well as Generation Identity, Golden Dawn, the Front National and their favourite philosophers…

And there it was, in an extremely clear and insightful article on the decadence rhetoric of the Front National: my 2004 piece, cited as the basic framework for thinking about the contrast between corrupt present and virtuous imaginary past. Wow. Once I’d got over the shock, I feel more or less equally flattered, reassured and terrified. (1) Someone in a completely different discipline has found my work interesting and useful! (2) Clearly this is an area where further research really is needed, and my ideas may make a useful contribution. (3) Ohdeargods this is actually serious stuff, not just me playing around with abstract ideas, and I need to get this right…

Now’s The Time

Yes, it’s been quiet on here recently; a combination of trying to get a chapter written and the recurrence of the bloody virus, and I suspect these things are feeding off one another. In addition, I’ve decided to be the last pompous middle-aged classicist left standing without having written a ‘state of the discipline, burn down classics, don’t burn down classics’ piece, and obviously any blog post is a temptation to do just that. So, this isn’t a proper post – that has to wait until this chapter is finished – but just an update on an interesting bit of Thucydideana. This time, well out of my price range.

Ornate cast metal desk clock with balance wheel escapement mechanism, made in 1908 by Japy Frères of Paris, yours for £2995 from Spencelayhs Antiques, to whom I am very grateful for permission to use these pictures. Why am I bothering to post this here? Because those aren’t just any old nymphs on the top; the one on the left is undoubtedly Clio, muse of history, as is made very clear by the scroll she’s reading…

Clio is always shown with a scroll, often though not always giving the name of an author; when the name is included, it is indeed often Thucydides (cf. the Dutch engraving used as the cover image of my Thucydides and the Idea of History). Still, it’s striking that this remained the case even in 1908, when a few more modern historians might have hoped to be in with a shout – and I love the fact that someone took the trouble to add such fine detail. Yes, it’s a bloody big clock – 64 cm across – but that is still a nice touch…

And obviously the Muse of History is an obvious character to be lounging about on a timepiece. I assume her companion is equally appropriate (indeed, at a guess this will turn out to be a traditional pairing) – given the globe, Urania as the Muse of Astronomy?