Neville Morley's Blog, page 42

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Hope is an expensive commodity. It makes better sense to be prepared. Thucydides

A new addition to the taxonomy of Thucydides misquotations! This popped up on the Twitter for the first time this morning, though I see from Google that it already features on a couple of the dodgier quotes websites and – rather unexpectedly, at first glance – in a couple of books on topics like Biosecurity and ‘making Chemistry relevant’. The original source also turns out to be the explanation: it’s from the afterword of The Cobra Event, a 1998 thriller by Richard Preston (who seems to specialise in this sort of thing), in which a scientist working for the Center for Disease Control races against time to trace the source of a lethal new virus developed by genetically splicing smallpox with the common cold, before it wipes out New York City. The original passage is as follows:

To think that the power of genetic code is not being bent towards weapons is to ignore the growing body of evidence, the lessons of history, and the reality of human nature. As Thucydides pointed out, hope is an expensive commodity. It makes better sense to be prepared.

That makes it slightly clearer: the first part of the quote (“hope is an expensive commodity”) is genuine Thucydides, from the ubiquitous Melian Dialogue, but the second is Preston’s commentary on the lesson to be learnt. It’s a chimera quote, reminiscent of the habit of taking a paraphrase (Henry Kissinger’s gloss on Thucydides’ account of the usefulness of history, for example) for the real thing, but with a clearer distinction between the quotation and the modern addition, in the original, that is then occluded through the process of excerption and dissemination.

One consequence is that the line looks more plausible because half of it is genuine. Another is that it’s more laborious to correct…

Interest Free

I’m very conscious of the risk of seeming – or indeed becoming – obsessed with one negative review; I’m sure there are plenty more such reviews to come, probably more carefully framed and less entertainingly vituperative. But my sense is that this review is less about my book than what that book is perceived to represent, from someone who feels outraged by it not just on their own behalf but on behalf of an entire scholarly tradition that feels under attack; and so it’s not unreasonable to reflect on what the review tells us, perhaps inadvertently, about that tradition. Especially to reflect on the bits that seem really odd…

For the most part, I can easily imagine why Professor Jenkyns dislikes the book, and by extension me for writing it, but at times the only reaction I can offer to some of his more esoteric invective is “huh?”. Case in point: the implication – a nicely framed bit of aporia – that perhaps I’m not interested in classical antiquity, but only in saying things about it. Now, I honestly don’t understand why this comment is supposed to be devastating, because the distinction doesn’t make sense to me. Of course I’m interested in classical antiquity, or I wouldn’t be bothered about talking about it, and vice versa. Is there a world in which people talk about things they’re not interested in, or don’t talk about things they are interested in? But of course the whole point of such a dog whistle is that only its target audience will hear it and understand the message.

I can best make sense of this by adding a ‘really’ or a ‘real’. If I were really interested in classical antiquity, I would understand the need to devote myself to it completely, even or perhaps especially the boring bits, rather than always seeking to connect it to more modern concerns. If I were interested in real classical antiquity, I would recognise that it’s all about the language rather than that archaeological nonsense, and all about Greece and Rome rather than other stuff. If I were really interested in real classical antiquity, I would stop saying nasty things about elitism and racism, and acknowledge that there is a wonderful essence that transcends such petty concerns.

It’s a variant of “not quite one of us”, isn’t it? If I am interested only in saying things about classical antiquity, then clearly I am insufficiently dedicated, inadequately trained, probably not up to it, prone to causing trouble and Not A Proper Classicist. And since I don’t offer an uncritical defence and celebration of Proper Classics As Traditionally Practised, then clearly I am not really interested in classical antiquity, but only in saying things about it. Which is bad.

To which the answer is, I guess, guilty as charged. But it’s still a really odd way of putting it.

The Five Stages of Good Grief

Bemusement So, my new book Classics: why it matters has been reviewed on the Classics For All webpage by Richard Jenkyns – I’d asked for a copy to be sent to them (I don’t know if they’re on the regular distribution list for review copies) as they’re a worthy organisation seeking to promote the study of classics in state schools rather than keeping it as preserve of the elite, and that’s one of the points of the book. Jenkyns is one of their patrons, so it’s entirely reasonable that they asked him to write the review – and he didn’t like it much… Okay, I wouldn’t have expected my comments on the place of ancient languages to win much favour with an eminent Oxford classicist, but is it really true, as is implied, that the book only shows any liveliness when it’s attacking classics? How must I have failed to express myself clearly, if someone thinks that I’m recommending David Engels’ prophecies of doom as a model for classical studies, rather than offering them as an example and symptom of alarming politicised appropriation of the ancient world? And as for the idea that Thucydides is straightforward to read in translation whereas such an approach in the case of Tacitus would inevitably lead to misinterpretation and misunderstanding…

Amusement Actually this is hilarious. I’ve always tended to avoid reading reviews of my work, suspecting that my fragile ego won’t cope very well with even a hint of criticism and so I don’t deserve to enjoy any positive comments, but this is different. I hate Twitter accounts that celebrate themselves by retweeting praise, but it’s hard to resist quoting choice snippets from this one. Because I reference Nietzsche, and refer only in passing to Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, I am “the Uebermensch of the West Country” (the downside of this is that I can now never move, or I’ll lose the use of that title). “Proud Philistine” is even better, for a child of the punk era who is therefore instinctively in favour of assaulting elite culture, but whose cultural tastes tend more towards high-brow German novels and abstract European jazz. I need to get a t-shirt made…

Acceptance It’s not just the principle that no publicity is bad publicity – there’s nothing like a rousing academic spat to build up interest in a book, suggesting the existence of a titanic intellectual struggle between the Progress League and the Legion of Gloom (though that implies I should be thinking up some equally memorable insults for Prof. Jenkyns, which really isn’t my style). Rather, it’s the nature of the attack, and its embedded assumptions; this is exactly the sort of response that my book ought to be provoking, expressed in a way which perfectly represents the sort of Classics that I’m criticising (whereas I always feel that dear old Nietzsche was actually expecting conservative German professors of philology to read The Birth of Tragedy and hail him as the true future of the discipline, and only later decided that philology was inherently flawed and doomed to irrelevance after it had rejected him). With criticism like this, who needs supportive cover quotes?

Depression But this isn’t all about my book, except as a symptom; it’s about the current state and future prospects of the discipline. That there are still people – thoroughly eminent senior figures in the field, indeed – who dismiss the study of material evidence as at best ancillary compared with the wonders of the Texts, who insist on mastery of the languages as the only acceptable approach to studying antiquity, and who fail to recognise the problematic limitations of how the subject has been conceived or the dangers of the arrogance of assuming that classicists are automatically the best people to study classical reception, not the specialists in the periods and societies in which classical texts are being received. Apparently this shows disdain for classicists – but surely not half so much as suggesting that any work that departs from the narrow path of traditional philology is likely to be “lively perhaps, but slight, easily satisfied and short of self-criticism.”

Anger I owe a lot of these later thoughts to Liv Yarrow, who wrote a thoughtful blog post in response to the review. I can find this episode hilarious, because I’m an established professor who isn’t going to suffer any adverse consequences from the fact that an eminent retired Oxford classicist thinks I’m a grumbling intellectual lightweight. But what of the numerous young scholars who see their work being dismissed like this, or at least the potential for such policing? What of all those who are worried about the future of the discipline, who see possible problems with the image of classical studies being waved away or even unwittingly exemplified? What of the young people, especially from backgrounds which don’t traditionally engage with classical antiquity, who are presented with a world that really isn’t for them unless they wholly submit to its traditions? If my book says nothing very new about the discipline of classical studies, maybe that’s because the problems with it have been known for a long time, and its grandees still refuse to accept that anything needs to change…

Over-Sharing?

Just in time for Mental Health Awareness Week, I spent most of Friday in a training course with departmental colleagues on Mental Health First Aid, aimed at improving our understanding of mental health and our ability to help support students and colleagues. Highly recommended for all teachers in higher education, if you get a chance (we did the one-day course specially for higher education, rather than the half-day taster or the two-day full qualification); plenty of things that I found moderately annoying, especially the ridiculously small amount of space left for discussion in order to fit everything essential into the day, but the ratio of useful stuff to moderately annoying stuff was far better than on the majority of training courses I’ve done over the years.

Oddly, even paradoxically, the thing that felt most frustrating about the day was also the crucial lesson: the sharing of experience, or not. I’d wondered, before the course started, how much to say about my own mental health if asked; in the event, of course, there was no such question, and it was a matter rather of deciding how much, if at all, to share in the discussion, or how far to indicate that one’s comments were coming from personal experience – and actually very little scope even for that, just enough time for one or two people to say something on each topic before we were being hurried along to sum up and move on to the next thing. Obviously the point of the course was to impart information rather than share confidences, but it still felt at times a little like a denial of particular experience, where we could have learnt a lot from each other, in favour of vague generalisations and statistics.

I did get to the point of wondering whether it wouldn’t be better not to have any discussion segments at all, relieving the pressure on all of us of having to decide how much to say, and removing the frustration of then not being able to say it – and the risk of getting impatient with other people’s anecdotes. Everyone’s experience of poor mental health is different, as the course rightly emphasised; allowing us more time to talk might have helped put that point across – but it could also have led to a dialogue of the deaf, with each of us competing to communicate our own experience as the one that matters most. Which of course it does, to us; and so naturally we seek acknowledgement of this, and recognition from others, even at the risk of seeming to downgrade their experience.

And this is the lesson: sometimes, you need to learn not to share. If a student comes to me to talk about their depression, it’s very tempting to launch into a “yes, I know exactly you feel” routine – to express empathy, to recognise what they’re going through, to lessen the stigma of mental illness, to offer some hope that these things can be survived and managed. But I don’t know exactly how they feel; and at best this becomes a matter of me talking rather than them, which isn’t good, and, worse, they may feel that I’m trying to substitute my story for theirs. If I can listen to a general factual account of depression and its most common features, carefully hedged about with the qualification that it’s different for everyone, and still feel an instinctive angry reaction that this isn’t how it is for me, then it’s unlikely to help any of my students or colleagues to be regaled with anecdotes about my individual experience.

Of course this doesn’t imply a refusal to admit ever to having problems; there are times when such openness and honesty can be useful for others, as well as for ourselves. But the crucial issue, in the moment, has to be: what does this distressed person in front of me need most, now? They don’t need my story; it’s not going to make any difference to them whether the person they’re talking to has had similar experiences or not, so long as they are listened to, and supported, and offered help.

Sharing experiences, or just sharing the fact that there are experiences that could be shared, is something for another time; with colleagues, most obviously (and what we really need is not a different approach to the training course so much as a separate opportunity for such conversations). Should we share with students at all? I can see a case that it may help them feel they can approach us, that we’re human too – and I can see a case that it’s better to allow them to believe in us as confident, proper adults to whom they can, in extremis, abandon responsibility.

But if we go with the first view, the time to do it is when our students are at their most confident and least in need of support – not when they’re too vulnerable to represent any sort of threat to us if we open up…

Some Guys From Spart

“The best are those who are raised in the severest school.” To the best of my knowledge, my grandmother never read Thucydides (whence that quote comes; Archidamus at 1.84), or Herodotus, or Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus, or any of the other ancient accounts of Sparta and its values, but she didn’t have to; she could draw on a substantial popular tradition of images of Spartan life and attitudes, including her favourite admonitory story of the Spartan boy and the fox. As a child I was never sure what the lesson was supposed to be – don’t get caught? if you get caught, never confess? – but in retrospect I think it was more a kind of mood music: big boys don’t cry, that’s just a scratch, a family of starving Bangladeshis could live on that for a week (on failing to eat one’s crusts), and in my day we’d have been sent to bed without any supper for less than that. The Spartans tell you why you shouldn’t ever have more than one slice of cake.

The point of this anecdote is to emphasise – and remind myself, as much as anything – that it’s perfectly possible to set up the Spartans as a kind of model without this automatically being a sign of fascist sympathies (my grandmother being a fiery socialist from the Welsh valleys). Of course from a historical perspective this invocation of Spartan values rests on ignoring, or simply not knowing about, the brutal reality of Spartan society, but that’s true of at least 95% of the tradition of Spartan reception, as studied in Elizabeth Rawson’s classic book and in more recent research by people like Steve Hodkinson, and doesn’t get us very far in actually understanding that tradition. And instinctive reaction against it by eating too much cake isn’t especially helpful either as a political statement.

The same can be said of the admiration of the Spartan warrior in military contexts over the centuries, up to and including the US Marines, as I (or rather one of my alter egos) ended up discussing on the Twitter the other day with @crispinburke. The ancient best of the best: check. Total dedication to military life: check. Great victories and examples of courage: check. Absolute loyalty to your comrades: check. Society built around military dictatorship, slavery and unprovoked violence against ‘inferiors’: not so much.

Sparta – and it should be stressed that I’m really talking about ‘Sparta’, the inherited and throughly worked over cultural concept, first invented by a bunch of aristocratic Lakonia fanboys in Athens, rather than the vastly more complex historical reality that lurks somewhere behind that image – Sparta is all these things and more. A given instance of reception tends to grab a handful of these associations: courage and discipline, or austerity and discipline, or black bread, fox-stealing and discipline. There’s always a possibility of sliding into some of the others, from an idealisation of the warrior caste to the idea that the military really ought to be running everything, or from praise of clean living and self-discipline to an aggressive anti-intellectualism, but there’s no reason to suppose that such slippage is inevitable.

The reason I feel I have to remind myself of this is that so many contemporary evocations of Sparta *are* thoroughly toxic, as Sarah Bond discusses in a just-published article. Take the appalling pillocks of Generation Identity, heroic defenders of 100-metre lines of plastic netting against any foreigners who might happen to be trying to sneak across the Swiss Alps, who popped up in London on Saturday at a suspiciously well-funded far-right rally. Their chosen symbol is a stylised lambda within a circle, as their website explains:

Our symbol, the lambda, was used by the Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae in 480BC. Led by King Leonidas of Sparta, the Greek forces were vastly outnumbered, over 21 to 1 by a massive Persian army. The Greeks held off the Persians for seven days before their rear-guard was annihilated in one of history’s most famous last stands.

After the second day, a local resident named Ephialtes betrayed the Greeks by revealing a small path that led behind the Greek lines. Leonidas, aware that his force was being outflanked, dismissed the bulk of the Greek army and remained to guard their retreat with 300 Spartans, 700 Thespians, and 400 Thebans, fighting to the death.

Both ancient and modern writers have used the Battle of Thermopylae as an example of the power of a patriotic army defending its native soil.

The lambda circle can also be seen as a shield. The top of the arrow stands for the metapolitical centre that we want to conquer, with the Identitarian movement as the spearhead.

The scholarly consensus is that the lambda symbol wasn’t used by the Spartans at Thermopylae, but was adopted only in the 420s, when they were substantially less invincible – but that hasn’t stopped a whole bunch of far-right groups in Europe and the US, including Greece’s Golden Dawn, from adopting it in order to lay claim to the Spartan myth in general and the ‘defence of civilisation against savage barbarians’ trope in particular. Much of the credit seems to belong to Frank Miller’s 300 (or, since it involves fewer long words, most likely Zack Snyder’s film version), and beyond that (as Marc Larance, @bleuyank, helpfully noted) the 1962 film The 300 Spartans, both of which feature the lambda on the Spartans’ shields – in Miller’s images, a distinctly stylised version that’s close to the GI icon in everything but colour.

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My tweet about this last week sparked an interesting exchange with Nicholas Tibollo (@brassandbald), who initially took it as an attack on Miller and wanted to emphasise that he and others had found their way to the study of ancient history as a result of reading 300, and D. Franklin (@D_Libris), who questioned what people were learning from it – certainly not a well-rounded, historically accurate picture of Thermopylae or Spartan society. I wasn’t actually making any claims about Miller’s work except that it was the source of Generation Identity’s logo, but it probably says something that an academic commenting on 300 may be assumed, more often than not, to be denouncing it – and that raises some important questions about history, reception and the modern meaning(s) of Sparta.

Full disclosure: such is my dislike of Miller’s other work, including his take on Batman, that I’ve simply avoided 300; and the extent to which the film has been interpreted (whether or not that was its author’s intention) in terms of the Clash of Civilizations, the eternal battle between Western Values and the barbaric Orient, hasn’t inclined me to investigate. Donna Zuckerberg’s suggestion that I should live-tweet a viewing of the film is so appalling that I’m half inclined to do it – when I have any free time, and have caught up with the final episodes of The City and the City (where I am getting cross with the way they’ve approached the source material…). For the moment, at least, I can comment only in general terms.

Tibollo’s core point, that modern reworkings of ancient material can bring people to serious study of classical antiquity, is undeniable; there’s the continuing influence of I, Claudius on conceptions of Roman imperial politics, the power of Mary Renault’s anthropologically-influenced retelling of the Theseus myth, and numerous other examples. I’m happy to accept that 100% scholarly accuracy in such receptions is impossible – not least because the scholarly view is always influenced by anachronistic factors, and hence changes over time – and, more importantly, in many cases undesirable, as the enemy of art. My objection to, say, the recent BBC adaptation of Homer was not the liberties it took with its source material, but the fact that it failed as drama (and maybe the clunky dialogue was even an attempt at faithfulness to the original…); while the glorious silliness and playful anachronism of Bromans nevertheless captured something important about the confused masculinity of the gladiatorial arena.

But things get more complicated when the anachronism not only serves artistic purposes, bringing the past to life, but is also used to push an ideological agenda (rather than simply, inevitably, reflecting contemporary assumptions and concerns), such as the idea of an endless war between East and West. A certain proportion of those reading 300 may be led to explore Greek history in more depth, discovering its complexity, but plenty of others will take its account at face value and enquire no further – and what if a certain number of those become more inclined to pay heed to the toxic politics of Generation Identity and their ilk as a result?

That is, the potential issue with Miller’s work is not whether it plays somewhat fast and loose with the historical material, but the extent to which it processes it into a form that promotes a dangerous political agenda. Certainly there are people seeking to draw on the success of 300 for their own ends, as a source of identity, reinforcement for their chosen values and propaganda tool; and, as with the examples of figures like Wagner or Nietzsche and their subsequent appropriation by the Nazis, that doesn’t reduce the originals to what a particular group of admirers made of them, but it certainly requires us to look very hard at them to evaluate how far they contain elements that do support or even encourage such readings.

As Bond puts it, “Should we then classify all lovers of Spartan culture [or indeed all Frank Miller fans] as members of the Alt-Right? Of course not! But we can and should complicate that romance.” And that means not just bringing to bear knowledge of the real complexity of antiquity, the fundamental problems of evidence and interpretation in trying to get at the reality of Sparta rather than just its always-politicised image, but also engaging with the different traditions of reception – not least because that should alert us to the likelihood that scholarly pedantry is not enough to combat the tendency for Spartan imagery to be deployed as a far-right dog whistle. As Tim Whitmarsh (@Twhittermarsh) suggested, Generation Identity and the rest can happily claim that the lambda symbol offers a direct link to Thermopylae “because identity is fundamentally emotional, and correction on points of fact will always be dismissed as the authoritarianism of the intellectual elite?” They care about history enough to make a fuss about it on their website – but one suspects that it is a history founded ultimately on conviction, in which an academic insistence on acknowledging uncertainty and debate can be taken as legitimate grounds for dismissing any criticism of what they feel to be authentic.

***

‘Sparta’ holds a powerful appeal. It tells people with an ill-defined anger against mainstream society that their alienation and marginalisation are the world’s problem, not theirs, because they can be the inheritors of a tradition that is purer and stronger, marking them out as innately superior to those who have usurped their rightful place. At any rate that’s how things play out in the ‘Revelations’ episode from Season 3 of the peerless Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Faith, ever-resentful at (and at the same time envious of) Buffy and her ‘normal’ life and friends, is addressed by her new Watcher:

Mrs Post: Faith, do you know who the Spartans were?

Faith: Wild stab: a bunch of guys from Spart?

Mrs Post: They were the fiercest warriors known to Ancient Greece. And

they lived in quarters very much like these. Do you know why? Because a

true fighter needs nothing else.

Through this prism, Faith’s prickliness, arrogance and insecurity are reinterpreted, not least by her, as signs of her elite status as a born warrior. She responds to the discovery that Gwendolyn Post has been manipulating them all by doubling down on her new source of identity, characterising her room as “real Spartan” and insisting to Buffy that “you can’t trust people… I’m on my side, and that’s enough” – a path that leads her in due course to turn rogue, fighting against her former friends in order to impose a new order on society. Admiration of ‘Sparta’ doesn’t automatically lead everyone to start aiding and abetting demonic forces, but it can certainly enable it…

Everybody Needs Somebody

I have had one of those Thoughts, which, in the absence of an effective brain-scrubber, can be dealt with only by forcing other people to share it: how about an academic version of Love in the Countryside? For those who haven’t encountered this yet, it’s a new BBC2 series – echoing if not actively ripping off a rather sweet German series that I’ve seen occasionally, Bauer sucht Frau, which according to Chris Dickenson on the Twitter (@cpdickenson) originated with a 1983 Swiss programme – in which an assortment of farming types post dating profiles and select a few of the respondents to spend some time with them out in the countryside, ‘cos it’s difficult to form or sustain a relationship when you spend your days slogging away in isolation at unsocial hours for very little money. Not a huge step away from the university…

Well, no, I don’t get a lot of practice in talking to other people in a social context. I talk to my students, of course, but it’s not what you’d call a real conversation. It’s not the sort of life that’s for everyone. I’m not necessarily looking for a research assistant, but I do need someone who’ll put up with the long hours and understand that those articles aren’t going to write themselves, and obviously they have to be okay with a bit of mess and dust and books everywhere. It’s a pretty quiet life, and I know some non-academics might think that I’m incredibly dull, so maybe it would help if they came from the same sort of background, but then Richard Dawkins married one of Doctor Who’s glamorous assistants so that’s the kind of thing I have in mind…

In subsequent episodes, the lucky respondents have to amuse themselves in Glasgow for two days in February with only £15 while the academic is in a conference, survive a departmental picnic, look after three homesick overseas students, and cope with the meltdown when a funding application is rejected. I’m sure my wife will be able to think of other amusing and dramatic scenarios…

992 Arguments

How do we teach our students to argue, in an appropriate academic manner? At least one of the key elements is to help them to recognise, and criticise, different sorts of arguments in the secondary literature – and then to encourage them to turn this critical sense on their own work, to question every statement that they make and probe every possible weakness. But it needs to be critical criticism, so to speak; criticism that’s tempered by a sense of realism, of what is actually possible in historical studies – and by an awareness that there is rarely a single straightforward answer to anything, or a single correct approach. For example, identifying every source, ancient and modern, as ‘biased’ may be true, and better than total credulousness, but it’s generally unhelpful; at best it’s a first step rather than a conclusion, given the impossibility of finding a source that doesn’t have its own perspective, concealed or unconscious or otherwise. And if I thought it would help, I’d spend a lot of time citing Matthew 7.1-5…

Edmund Stewart at Nottingham has written a blog post, ‘How to write a bad essay’, listing some of “the top mistakes that are certain to irritate even the most serene of supervisors”. I’m not entirely sure how far this was written for fellow academics, to elicit nods and chuckles of recognition, and how far it’s actually intended to be helpful to students. If the former, well, I suppose that’s understandable at this time of year, and at least it’s framed in general terms rather than the student-shaming ‘howlers’ that still get circulated in exam season.

If the latter, however, I have certain issues with some of it; not just that it’s too late to be helpful to those currently finishing their dissertations (one sincerely hopes that no student with a deadline less than a week away sees this and panics…), but also that some of the alleged mistakes are arguable or tendentious – or, more often, they do identify a problematic argument, but in a way that seems designed to push students towards an equally problematic alternative; the falsity of “all cats are black” leading to a dogmatic assertion that therefore all cats are white. Below, I’ve given the original bullet points with my own commentary.

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence 

This would be so much better with the addition of a “necessarily”. No, we cannot be certain in every case that the absence of evidence for X means X didn’t exist, and we need to spend some time discussion the likelihood that X could have existed but all evidence of its existence was then lost or erased. But the corollary of this being a mistake might appear to be that arguing a case for X without any actual evidence is absolutely fine, given that we have so little evidence for anything in antiquity, and that’s a road that tends to lead towards aliens building the pyramids. Sometimes that’s okay too, if we have other reasons for believing in X, but the absence of evidence for X is always going to be an issue, if not necessarily a knock-down argument against it.

Add an evolutionary theory or historical moment

But, says the student, proper historians do this sort of thing all the time! And actually I think Edmund’s set of Top Mistakes would be much stronger with the acknowledgement that these are by no stretch of the imagination confined to students; I’m not sure that students would be so convinced that the reign of Augustus marked a turning point in everything, not just Rome’s political system, if they weren’t being presented with such claims in half the books they read. The crucial point is not that any attempt at making sense of history in terms of change, development, evolution, crisis etc. is automatically wrong and so must always be avoided; it’s that all of these are human attempts at making sense of the world, not intrinsic to the reality of the past itself, and therefore always in need of justification, analysis and defence – always a matter of argument.

Apply a theory

Yes, Edmund, each and every use of a ‘theory’ from any other discipline is automatically anachronistic and invalid, involving the distortion of the ‘facts’ to fit it, and deployed solely for the sake of spurious originality. Proper classics contains no theories, only truth. One might make a more valid point about how one goes about using and evaluating theories, about the tensions between generalisation and detail, about the relationship between humanistic and social-scientific approaches, but no, all theory is condemned as being half-baked and lukewarm.

Develop an unconscious confirmation bias

Actually this is one I can agree with. See above for examples.

Keep your logic circular

The problem of trying to interpret a text in relation to its context when the text is itself evidence for that context is of course one reason why one might want to resort to theory… There’s no dispute that circular arguments are problematic – but I can imagine students wondering how they’re supposed to talk about certain topics at all.

It’s all Propaganda

Agreed, rarely helpful (see also: “biased”). Actually the problem is surely not just the reading of a text like the Aeneid in terms of “propaganda”, but any sort of reductionist, one-sided reading that flattens out complexity, of which “propaganda” is just one example.

Historicize

But what, asks the student, is the alternative? Never pay any attention to context? Discount any possibility that texts might be influenced by external events? Interpret texts solely on the basis of my own instincts and responses? If the injunction is simply “Historicization is a Top Mistake”, the obvious response is not a measured, critical engagement with the relationship between text and contexts but a new Top Mistake, that for some reason isn’t listed here, of Ahistoricism.

And most importantly . . . never define your terms

Here we’re in total agreement. Everyone knows what theory means, for example, and why it’s intrinsically bad. Duh.

It is of course perfectly possible that I’ve fallen into Edmund’s trap by taking this all at face value, whereas clearly it’s designed to provoke students into a more critical stance by presenting a series of statements that are obviously problematic. It would be easier, for more naive readers like me, if this could be made a little more obvious; by supplementing the mistake of ‘Historicize’ with the mistake of ‘Ignore historical context completely’, and the mistake of ‘Apply a theory’ with the mistake of ‘Imagine that objective, untheoretical study of the past is possible’.

And actually I would rather see any or all of these ‘mistakes’ in an essay, than one which didn’t offer any sort of argument at all…

Expert Opinions

As I’ve remarked before, I am never going to become a popular writer of history: my books will never be sold in railway stations or airports, or reviewed in proper newspapers or included in celebrities’ Books of the Year choices; they won’t ever have embossed gold writing on the cover; I won’t ever be invited to the Hay Festival or the Chalke Valley History Festival or the like, and as for television… Partly this is the result of wilful refusal to submit to mainstream tastes (no, Lord Bragg, I won’t talk about bloody Spartacus…), and partly sheer inability to think or write in the right sort of terms even if I wanted to – I mean, my idea of an accessible work for a general audience was a polemical account of modern theories of imperialism and the reception of the Roman Empire…

This is fine; I accept my limitations. Yes, obviously I’m envious of the fame and the money, and the gold embossed lettering, but not to such an extent that I’m willing to make any of the necessary compromises. What I would stress is that this isn’t an ivory-tower refusal to engage with non-academic audiences, or an elitist dismissal of popular tastes, let alone an insistence that only proper academics ought to have the right to present the past. It’s true that part of me still thinks there ought to be more scope for less traditional and more challenging approaches to the past (i.e. mine); but so long as there’s a demand for conventional narrative and descriptive accounts, there’s obvious scope for the professional writers of such accounts – those whose claim to attention is primarily their writing ability rather than their original research – to do their thing, not least because someone like me isn’t remotely capable of doing it.

Of course it isn’t that simple. There are some seriously heavyweight academic historians who are capable of producing popular, accessible narrative histories of the ancient world or the Roman Empire, without losing an iota of their academic credibility; it’s just that I’m not one of them. I don’t know how far they perceive a distinction between their more and less academic publications, or whether it’s more of a spectrum – and I would say that, however they view it, it is occasionally a problem when it comes to advising students on bibliography and citation, as I do get the sense that they often assume that a given author operates always in the same register, and therefore a popular book by historian X carries the same intellectual heft in a footnote as X’s JRS article.

And on the other side, there clearly are popular historians who would resent my implication that they lack the credentials of a ‘proper’ academic. I was once asked to do a review of a proposal for a trade book, which was a very strange experience (and I don’t imagine the publisher will ask me again in a hurry…). The author had published various books on different aspects of ancient history, and now proposed to move into a specialised sub-field, despite having clearly read only a couple of relevant bits of scholarship;  the pitch could be caricatured as “yes, there’s a load of tedious academic analytical stuff on this topic, but I can produce an exciting narrative which no one else has bothered to do”. The possibility that this topic might not really lend itself to a conventional politically-focused narrative wasn’t considered.

Now, I’ve no way of knowing whether the author was proposing to spend several years reading up on existing research before writing the book, or whether they had already reassured themselves that this wasn’t necessary. In either case, it was clearly assumed, by author and publisher alike, to be a perfectly normal thing for someone to switch from one aspect of ancient history to a completely different one. The contrast with reviewing proposals for academic publications, let alone research grants, where the track record and credibility of the proposer in relation to the specific topic is a central concern, is striking. I can only make sense of it as the belief that it’s the author’s proven ability to write a popular book that matters, not any other sort of specialist expertise – and yet the proposal was also built around the dismissal of academic work in the field, proposing to offer a powerful interpretation where the narrow specialists had feared to tread.

Whereas the academic historian has to present their credentials in order to win a  contract to publish – and I imagine this was probably true of people like Mary Beard and Greg Woolf when they began to write more general works – for the popular historian, it’s the book itself (and their publishers’ efforts) that then establishes their credibility when it comes to that topic, and gets them invitations to book festivals etc. No, it’s not the sort of credibility that will win them invitations to serious academic conferences; but expecting such invitations seems as presumptuous as me demanding fame, money and gold-embossed lettering when I’m not prepared (or able) to write the sort of books that merit them.

Welcome to Tomorrow (?)

Never mind the hover board, what I was really expecting by 2018 was that we’d all be projecting ourselves into overseas conferences as holograms. Sorry, Belfast, but while I did find some quite nice beer, I still would have preferred to experience the round table discussion of Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler and other delights of this year’s European Social Science History Conference without all the rain…

For the research workshop on Capital in Classical Antiquity that I co-organised in Berlin the following week, we did at least try to take a step or two into the frictionless world of the future with a live feed, making the event available to everyone with an Internet connection, a great deal of patience for all the times when the sound went down or the PowerPoint slides weren’t legible, and, in the case of those logging in from China or Australia, raging insomnia. Was it worth it? My fear is that it may have exacerbated the sense of exclusion, as the discussions after each paper weren’t audible at all (and we gave up trying to record them) while the feed kept running during coffee breaks, showing an empty room when, one might imagine, the real business was going on next door or outside in the sunshine.

It’s not impossible to do a virtual conference – I’ve logged in before now to some things that I’ve heard about via the technologically adept Shawn Graham. But those were organised from the start as virtual web-based events; it’s the idea of a genuine hybrid, or even just making a physical conference properly accessible, that seems to be difficult to do properly without some seriously expensive equipment and substantial technical support. I suspect that the main benefit of what we tried to do will turn out to be the recording of the lectures, to be posted on the website of the TOPOI Excellenz-Initiative (who generously funded the enterprise) in due course – with, I hope, copies of the illegible slides…

[image error]That a properly internet-accessible conference isn’t a complete pipe dream, or at least may not be a too distant possibility, is something I deduced from my visit to the University of Toronto at Mississauga last month (which I am still meaning to blog about in more detail. Consider the picture above of part of a new hi-tech teaching room; pods for 6-7 people, each with its own screen (and, I think, microphones, recording equipment, ability to choose what to view or project including what other tables are up to…). The central control console can determine what every table seeings, switching everything to a single view of their own screen or of any individual feed, or leave tables to their own devices. Imagine this being linked up to similar set-ups around the world…

But note that this isn’t even the ‘real’ teaching room; it’s one of two temporary set-ups, so that teaching staff get to try out the equipment, experiment with pedagogical techniques and decide on the best configurations while the real building is being constructed, so the final versions will suit their needs perfectly. Consultation and proper planning? That’s truly a futuristic utopia…

Classical Associations

There’s been a minor flurry of references to Thucydides in the context of the BBC’s bizarre decision to give Enoch Powell’s notorious 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech the historical monument treatment. It’s an interesting variant on the argument put forward by opponents of ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ and similar campaigns to protect the legacies of racism and imperialism, that something can be simultaneously incredibly important for historical understanding (and so must be preserved) and yet absolutely separate from contemporary concerns (and so shouldn’t be attacked). The claim is that Powell’s speech matters because of its role in history (so celebrating it now has nothing to do with contemporary politics, honest, and we’re going to be really critical of it), and yet the only reason anyone pays any attention to the racist pronouncements of a failed politician is the persistence of such racism as an undercurrent in British society ever since, with the increasing tendency of mainstream political parties to treat it not as a problem and source of shame but as Very Real Concerns that Should Be Addressed. A healthy, modern society would be one in which Powell’s speech was of purely historical concern – in which case this anniversary would be of interest only to a tiny number of specialists. Ours clearly isn’t – but that doesn’t mean the BBC should be pandering to such tendencies.

Anyway, Thucydides. Powell had been a classicist in his earlier career – hence the pseudo-Vergilian reference in the speech – his work including the revised critical edition of Thucydides in the Oxford Classical Texts. There’s no consistent pattern in comments so far, with some offering this information in a critical “he was a great scholar, but…” tone, or a melancholic “if only he’d stuck to Classics” manner. But there are already some offering it as justification for commemorating the speech and taking its ideas seriously: he was a serious intellectual therefore we should be thinking about what he had to say. Classical knowledge as a claim to general authority and insight; classical knowledge as an alibi, since it’s not about the racism or the present politics but the timeless wisdom of the ancients, and the thoughts of someone who had contemplated such things. I haven’t yet seen any direct claims that Thucydides justifies or legitimises hostility to immigration and foreigners – but since Victor Davis Hanson has already been doing that on the other side of the Atlantic, it can only be a matter of time…