Neville Morley's Blog, page 51

The Rhetoric of Factionalism

To echo the immortal BtVS: Peter Jones has written another column in the Spectator. There are words on the page referencing Thucydides. This is never good.

Yes, I know I should simply not read the damned things, let alone respond, and most of the time my refusal to pay the Spectator any money means that the monthly article limit preserves me from doing so, but sometimes – especially when I’m following up a Thucydides reference without realising where it’s leading – it just happens. In this case, Jones addresses the recent death of Martin McGuinness, and the fact that various obituaries referred to him as a freedom fighter rather than a terrorist (they did?), by observing that Thucydides would have known exactly what to say about this: the stasis at Corcyra shows how violence can be justified through loyalty to one’s faction, and how words change their meanings – moderation becomes weakness, violence becomes manliness, terrorism becomes a liberation struggle etc.

In a narrow sense, this is a perfectly correct account, and indeed the idea that the Corcyrean episode might be brought into thinking about Northern Ireland isn’t new. In most respects, however, it’s a thoroughly problematic, if not dubious and manipulative, reading – a perfect example of exactly what Thucydides was warning his readers against.

The Corcyrean ‘civil war’ episode depicts the breakdown of consensus and social order within a small, homogeneous community – a description that hasn’t applied to Ireland (or Britain, for that matter) for half a millennium or so. Of course there are different perspectives there, different modes of understanding the situation; of course there is a potential for the escalation of rhetoric and an easy resort to violence. Corcyra is at best only a limited analogy; we could equally well reach for Thucydides’ account of the opposition between Athens and Sparta, two very different communities within the shared traditions of the Hellenic World, stumbling into open conflict.

The key point in Thucydides’ account of Corcyra is that both sides do the factionalism thing (or, in the case of Northern Ireland, all sides). McGuinness was both a freedom fighter and a terrorist, depending on who was doing the describing. The UDA, UVF et al were both terrorists and defenders of their community. The British army was both an occupying force oppressing a colonised population and a defender of peace and social order. In focusing on this phenomenon solely in the case of McGuinness, Jones simply outs himself as a supporter of a different faction.

The tragedy in Thucydides – the fundamental problem that his account poses, without offering any clear answer – is that there is no obvious way out of this cycle of escalating rhetoric and violence, beyond letting things play out until one side kills the other. Once consensus and shared understanding have been shattered, how can anyone see the other side clearly, rather than through the distorted lens of their own side’s factionalist assumptions? How can any sort of community feeling be restored?

The achievement of those involved in the NI peace process was to recognise this problem, and to seek to move beyond the inherited rhetoric and the temptation to score easy approbation from your own side by reconfirming factionalist credentials. If the price of peace, or simply the possibility of peace, is to recognise that there are other perspectives held with equal conviction by others – to see for example that McGuinness was a freedom fighter in the eyes of many nationalists – then it seems pretty small, when the alternative is endless conflict. Still more when McGuinness was prepared to change; to make the same move towards acknowledging the existence of other views, but still more to take on a different, less ambiguous role as a peace-seeking politician.

Jones seeks to deploy Thucydides to bolster the claim that the other side is always wrong, in its rhetoric and its actions, without any suggestion that we might ask questions about our own side as well. It’s difficult to think of a less Thucydidean view of the world.

Losing My Favourite Game

I have made my first, incredibly tentative, step into the world of “Gaming the Past”*: using simulation games, in this case interactive text, to explore historical issues. It is, with crashing inevitability, based on Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue, considered from the Athenian perspective, and you can test the first version at http://www.philome.la/NevilleMorley/might-and-right-the-athenian-version. Part II, allowing you to play the Melian side, will follow in due course – and, once I’ve got these both up and running, I will then be developing some contextual material to tie the two together. All feedback and comments gratefully received. Yes, I know the links are going funny colours on an apparently random basis; working on this…

In some ways, it’s amazing that I didn’t think of this idea before; after all, I’ve been happily repeating the claim that the Melian Dialogue is regularly cited by pioneering figures in game theory as a foundational text (see e.g. my discussion of Yanis Varoufakis‘ take on the subject). We have two ‘players’, with different starting positions and different goals, and so inevitably they’re likely to follow different strategies. Of course, the original episode has just the one outcome, which thus appears inevitable, and I should stress that recreating the real course of events is not the primary aim of the game, ‘cos that’s ridiculously easy for either side. However, Thucydides’ presentation of the Dialogue as a dialogue surely invites us to consider the counterfactual possibilities of this episode, to wonder whether there were any circumstances in which the Athenians might have relented or the Melians might have found the one argument that saved them. Turning this into an interactive game emphasises such possibilities, and perhaps also helps to emphasise the different constraints working on those involved – even the Athenians.

I do feel completely out of my comfort zone here; it’s at least thirty years since I’ve done any sort of coding, apart from basic .html, and I was completely rubbish at Basic at the time. Further, my experience with games for the last twenty-odd years has been limited to Jonah Lomu Rugby, SimCity 2000 and Final Fantasy VII, and even that was years ago. But the great thing about the Twine utility, and the interactive text format, is that it takes me back to the sorts of games I really felt I understood: Level 9’s text adventure games like Return to Eden and Lords of Time on the dear old Amstrad CPC464, and the book-based Fighting Fantasy adventures. It quite takes me back to the days when I attempted to code Winnie the Pooh as an interactive fantasy quest…

*To adopt the phrase used by Jeremiah McCall, who’s been instrumental both in helping to inspire this project, with his own Path of Honours game giving me an idea of what might be possible with fairly simple, free-to-use software, and in providing huge amounts of advice and support as I gradually got to grips with the less simple aspects of the software… Thanks also to Shawn Graham, via whose Twitter feed I first encountered the idea of #archaeogaming – since this project isn’t exactly archaeological, I’m not sure if that’s quite the right label – and to Seth Honnor at Kaleider, who kept on at me with the idea that the Melian Dialogue ought to be made into a game until I finally realised that he was absolutely right…

Return to Sender

Partly because I am a basically shy, socially insecure and rather unspontaneous person, I remember having tremendous problems as a young postgraduate student in navigating the transition from regarding academics with awe and addressing them with reverence to, well, still regarding them with awe and reverence but being treated by them in a more informal, egalitarian manner. In particular, I recall the very gradual development of letters between me and my supervisor, with his signature moving from “Peter G” to “Peter” to “P”, and me trying to come up with ways to avoid having to address him as anything for fear of arousing divine wrath through my presumption.

This reflection has been prompted by following an interesting discussion on the Twitter this morning – partly because the computer has been busy messing about with Microsoft Office and refusing to let me do any proper work – set off by @FionaEWhelan asking about female academics experiencing men “forgetting” to use their academic titles, even when they’ve been mentioned in the course of the introduction and even in conference sessions where male contributors do get their titles used. @Katherine_McDon mentioned the fact that students could sometimes go too formal and/or over-compensate with inflated titles, and – I hope without derailing – I wondered about how far this was linked to general student unfamiliarity with written etiquette as well as (clearly) being gendered.

Certainly I find myself more and more often having to add a postscript in replying to student emails to the effect that these should be treated as reasonably formal communications (so, no “Hi!” or “Hello,”, but a proper salutation), and that I’m happy to be addressed by my first name but not just “Dear sir” – and robbing people of their hard-earned academic titles is less likely to win friends and influence people. Yes, it’s a kind of overcompensation; not that I’m obsessed with my professorial title and will be offended if a student doesn’t use it, but simply that I would have felt much happier if someone had simply told me how to address academics at different stages of my career, rather than leaving me trying to guess. If I’d received such a postscript in a reply, I’d have felt mortified for a couple of days, and then much more confident thereafter.

Clearly it’s a generational thing; someone of my vintage still thinks of emails like letters (hell, I tend to write “Dear X” in Facebook messages and Twitter DMs…), and was trained in how to write proper letters back in school, whereas I wouldn’t be wholly surprised if these emailed requests for advice, support or coursework extensions turned out to be the first time some students have ever had to write a formal letter – or, that they simply don’t think of email as a formal medium. I’ll grant also that writing to academic staff may be a discomfiting intermediate category, between formal letter e.g. to prospective employer and informal communication  – so, “Dear sir” appears the sensible option, especially for anyone who’s been used to addressing teachers as “sir”, and so it’s probably a nasty shock when I make it clear that I hate it…

But the interesting question is how far this phenomenon is driven not only by changing modes of communication but also by gendered attitudes: are female academics, and especially younger ones, substantially more likely to be addressed informally, not properly addressed at all or robbed of their academic titles? It was suggested that Katherine and I ought to compare the emails that we receive from students over a set period – and obviously this should be at the start of a new academic year, when an entire new cohort arrives that won’t yet have been subjected to my nagging etiquette postscripts. Further, @EllieMackin suggested, we need a young male and an older female academic, and someone non-binary; perhaps also fixed-term as well as permanent staff; and of course such a survey could (and probably should) be broadened out to include any academic who wants to send in a return, to increase the size of the database.

So, all I need to do now is generate a simple questionnaire – and not forget about this completely, so that in mid-September it can be publicised and everyone can start collecting data…

The Future of Classical Reception

Will the people of the future still be reading classical literature and thinking about ancient exempla – and, if so, in what ways? This isn’t a topic that gets a great deal of attention in science fiction; I’m not thinking of the sorts of books that imagine a new Roman Empire with spaceships (see this list – the Trigan Empire lives!) or which deploy classical motifs as a key plot element (hello BSG) but rather those that try to imagine the world of the future in its own terms, but take the time to mention whether anyone still references Thucydides.

Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota books, Too Like the Lightning  and Seven Surrenders – still, absurdly, showing no signs of getting published in the UK – are a spectacular exercise in world-building, imagining humanity in a post-religion, post-state 25th Century, to the point where at times the narrative seems to serve the delineation of a complex, contradictory, multi-faceted future society as much as the other way round. It’s an enormously rich text based on deep learning, and intellectual flexibility in imagining the different ends to which such learning might be put. I can only urge you to buy the books (trans-Atlantic postal charges be damned) and then head over to Crooked Timber where a book seminar has been running for the last week or so. I’ve contributed some musings on the role of different theories of history both in the imagined future and in its construction (comments already closed, so feel free to continue conversation here), but inevitably I had more thoughts than could be accommodated in a single post.

A minor theme in the elaborate intellectual and cultural architecture of the novels – Palmer’s day job is as a historian of ideas, and the depth of learning in the books is astounding – is the reception of classical antiquity. This is a world where classical names and allusions are commonplace: we have a Caesar, albeit with his capital in Alexandria rather than Rome for reasons that are clearly explained; a Senate and a rostrum, quaestor, tribunes and Censor in Romanova; the use of classical forms in buildings and gardens to signify power or learning; references to Epicureanism, Cynicism, Plato and Aristotle; Odysseus, Achilles and the Iliad; the idealisation of Sparta (albeit secretly, communicated to those in the know through the absence of decoration in a particular living complex, in a society that largely prides itself on achieving three hundred years of peace); passing references to Athens against Sparta, Caesar crossing the Rubicon, and above all the conquests of Alexander.

I don’t think it’s coincidental that this list is incredibly conventional, and that the image of the classical world it offers is that of the old Glory That Was Greece, Grandeur That Was Rome tradition. What we see in Palmer’s world is, intentionally, partly if not entirely the reception of a reception; the 25th Century’s conception of classical antiquity is based above all on the version of it presented and discussed by the 18th-century Enlightenment with which its leading figures are obsessed. Both societies look back to Greece and Rome for a model of political organisation before and/or beyond the nation state (the close-knit organic community of the polis, the empire that extended citizenship to anyone who chose to adopt its values), for an example of a society focused on philosophy and culture, and above all (especially in the 25th) for a world predating and opposed to the monotheism that had led to the appalling destruction of the Church War (in their past, our future).

In other words, like all the other societies where classical reception is a thing, they adopted an idealised version of antiquity that perfectly suits their purposes, mistaking it (to some degree, at least) for the real thing, insofar as that matters. But the image of antiquity in Terra Ignota is not wholly sanitised or simple. As noted above, both the Iliad and the Spartan Mirage persist, offering a disruptive and martial set of ideals out of step with a world of peace; the ghost of Thucydides hovers in the background, in cahoots with Hobbes, persuading at least a few people that war may be inevitable and even necessary or desirable as the expression of human nature or the engine of progress. Our narrator, Mycroft Canner, is a kind of slave – he’s a Servicer, atoning for appalling (but possibly necessary) crimes by doing whatever work is demanded of him in return for food – and as a result has a powerful sense of the dark side of classical civilisation, accentuated by fact that he’s proudly Greek in heritage (indeed, I wonder whether there’s an underlying dynamic of Horace’s Graecia capta line in the way that the ever-subservient Mycroft exerts his influence into every corner of this world).

The questioning of different aspects of the classical legacy becomes stronger in the second book, Seven Surrenders, as buried tensions and contradictions come to the surface, and the veneer of eighteenth-century civility and rationalist starts to fracture. In particular, it raises the question of whether one should wish to be ruled directly by a god – since they happen to have one on hand: J.E.D.D. Mason is (or at least is believed to be) an incarnate deity, just from a different universe, whom the leaders of the world have raised as their own child to be placed at the head of society. Cornelius MASON, the Emperor, who in any case speaks largely in Latin, makes the explicit comparison: “The mad Roman Emperors had themselves proclaimed gods, and inflicted unspeakable horrors on their subjects, but the sane ones were proclaimed gods too, and they did fine.” The future of this future is envisaged not as the radical, rational Enlightenment but as the apotheosis of enlightened despotism, Caesarism taken to its limits.

But there is concerted opposition to such a development, and Seven Surrenders ends with society on the brink of stasis (in its full sense, not just as civil war but the total dissolution of social bonds into factions and fragments, and the questioning of foundational values). The idea of an absolute pax Romana rediviva and imperium sine fine is confronted with a resurgence of older classical ideas: the pitiless power politics of Thucydides (at least in a Hobbesian reading) and the martial ideals of the Iliad. Apollo Mojave had treasured his copy of the poem and started writing his own version, with people controlling giant battle robots, as the only way of conceiving of individual heroism in the technological age; a dramatic reimagining of Marx’s question in the Grundrisse, “Is Achilles possible with powder and lead?” – to be answered in the third book, one assumes, as the second has concluded with the resurrection of Achilles himself

Towards the end of Seven Surrenders, J.E.D.D. Mason reflects on the fact that, unlike in his own universe, the god of this one has created time:

I am nowhere near understanding Time. It seems to be a direction in which sentience can only move one way and perceive the other, but it also destroys, and twists and swallows, making legacies differ from, or even oppose, intent. It annihilates, repeats, erases. It is too alien to me.

It’s easy to read this as metacommentary not only on the enterprise of science fiction as a whole but specifically on the processes of classical reception both depicted in and underpinning Palmer’s novels. On the one hand, reception offers a kind of return to or revival of the past that has been erased by the passage of time (though that cuts both ways: repetition can weight like a nightmare on the brains of theliving as much as it offers a means of recovering lost wonders). On the other hand, classical legacies do indeed, time and again, differ from the original intent. In the case of the legacy of Rome, of course, that could be considered a good thing…

 

Chimes at Midnight

We must be old. We cannot choose but be old. We have heard the chimes at midnight at the the end of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme music – twenty years ago? It was a simpler time, when one girl (albeit with supernatural strength) and her friends could avert the apocalypse, time and again, because the apocalypse was a bunch of demons trying to open a gateway to hell, or the mayor of a small town trying to turn himself into a demon, not an entire global system of doom. Even as the threats became more powerful and apparently unstoppable – deranged hellgods, a rogue military experiment, sexually frustrated adolescent boys – they remained identifiable, nameable, and ultimately susceptible to the judicious application of violence. If only…

This doesn’t mean that Buffy has nothing to say to our times; on the contrary, like all great art it continues to speak, but the message changes subtly in response to changing circumstances. How often, in retrospect, does Buffy have to cope with the fact that masses of ordinary people have lost their self-awareness or self-control and reverted to mindless aggression under some evil influence? You can’t simply slay your fellow citizens, however crazily they’re behaving, while they’re still human – and even the ones who’ve abandoned their humanity may still arouse some compassion – but they are dangerous in that state, and a barrier to dealing with the real problem. Across the globe, too many people have eaten the band candy and hatched out their bezoar eggs.

This is really just an excuse to repost what is still one of my favourite bits of my own writing, my application of nineteenth-century ideas on the revenge of the past to the first five seasons of BtVS, History as Nightmare. Looking back, I think this was my first taste of the joys of blogging, long before I got a blog; taking a couple of ideas and mashing them together to see what comes out, without any of the anxiety or self-imposed limits that come with trying to write Proper Academic Stuff. Another of the eternal messages of Buffy: your greatest enemy is yourself, your self-doubt and fear. Well, and vampires.

No Place Like Rome

We do seem to be having a Roman moment. To the numerous comparisons, both positive and hostile, between Trump and miscellaneous Roman emperors, the ‘hordes of Visigothic economic migrants overwhelming the frontier’ claims of Arron Banks and the numerous flattering interviews of David Engels on right-wing websites, we can now add the historical musings of Douglas Carswell in the Grauniad, explaining how Brexit is going to be a wonderful liberation but not at all nasty or populist, because Rome. Apparently.

Throughout history oligarchy has emerged in societies in which power was previously dispersed: in the late Roman republic, and in early modern times in the Venetian and then the Dutch republics. Each time, the emergence of oligarchy was always accompanied by an anti-oligarch insurgent reaction. Many of today’s new radical movements aren’t oligarchs, but an anti-oligarchy insurgency. Trump is no American Caesar about to cross some constitutional Rubicon.

Erm, didn’t the Roman republic have oligarchy baked in from the beginning? I suppose it’s possible that this is a reworking of Fergus Millar’s arguments on the democratic elements in the Roman constitution. More likely, Carswell means ‘autocracy’, though in that case I can’t actually work out what the Roman “anti-autocratic insurgent reaction” would be. Then again, I can’t work out what the “anti-oligarchic insurgent reaction” in the original version would be either. But at least Trump isn’t Caesar this time.

Yet such insurgents often ended up unwittingly assisting the oligarchs. In Rome the Gracchi brothers, with their Trump-like concern about cheap migrant labour, caused so much civil strife that an all-powerful emperor seemed a better bet.

Okay, so if the Gracchi are the Roman anti-oligarchic resistance movement, fighting against the way that a small group of neoliberal globalisers had seized control of the previously democratic Roman state, but undermined the stability of society to the point that they are directly to blame for the rise of Caesar and Augustus a mere 70-80 years after their murders..? No, I give up, this is simply twaddle, even before we get onto the idea that the main plank of the Gracchan programme was taking back control of immigration in the face of cheap migrant labour – does he mean slavery? Really?

The point of the article, insofar as it makes any sense at all, appears to be the distancing of both Carswell and Brexit from chaotic angry insurgents and their populist rhetoric. Well, I suppose that incoherent yet pretentious references to Roman history are a fairly clear anti-populist marker, while at the same time keeping a safe distance from any of those nasty experts and their pedantic objections. I do wonder whether this is evidence that UKIP, given its roots in nostalgic fantasy, is going to tear itself apart not on the basis of raving ego and personality clashes but about divergent historical interpretations…

Still, what is going on? Why is Rome the go-to analogy for politics at the moment? I’ve just published a piece in Eidolon, arguing that we can draw on Marx’s analysis of classical reception in ‘The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ to see how we have become trapped in the inherited idea that these inherited images of antique glory will help us make sense of the world. They worked once – but now they distort our understanding and prevent us from grasping what’s really happening in the world around us. Carswell’s article suggests that people are grasping for Roman analogies even when they make no sense whatsoever, in the belief that they will help or that this is what will speak to the moment; Banks’ and Engels’ prophecies of doom and crisis are somewhat more coherent and effective, if no more historically valid, and therefore more dangerous.

There’s obviously a case to be made for just ignoring these people, on the basis that no one will take them seriously; I know that, before I signed up to co-author our article on Engels’ arguments, Roland Steinacher approached a number of other ancient historians who declined to get involved on those grounds. But plenty of people did take Carswell, Farage, Banks, Johnson et al seriously enough to vote Leave; unlikely that their occasional references to antiquity (or frequent references, in the case of Johnson) play much if any role in the process of persuasion – but they still run the risk of tainting the entire subject with right-wing associations. Roman History? That’s all about barbarian invasions, isn’t it, like the migrants today? And emperors like Trump, and the crisis of western morality, and the failure to stand up to hostile cultures out of the east?

Competition time: what’s a good bit of shorthand for idiotic, gratuitous, ill-informed and frequently manipulative analogies with Roman history?

[Update 7/3: oh dear lord. It turns out – Carswell responded on the Twitter, not directly to me but to Thomas Blank – that this article is merely a taster for the forthcoming book: http://headofzeus.com/article/rebel-h.... So, we shouldn’t prejudge his argument about the Gracchi until we’ve read the primary source. I do not think that means what you think it means… Anyway, one more data point for the depressing theory that Roman comparisons are weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living…]

Stuck in the Middle

“We are either kings among men, or the pawns of kings”: Thucydides. Or not. It’s the first time I’ve seen this one on the Twitter, and it’s easy to track down its immediate source: Smallville, season 5 episode 10, Lex Luthor speaking: “Thucydides said, ‘We are either kings among men… or the pawns of kings.'” January 2006, so it’s actually surprising this hasn’t surfaced before. More interesting is the origin of the quote, which certainly isn’t anything to do with Thucydides. Various internet sources attribute a variant to Napoleon Bonaparte: “In this life we are either kings or pawns, emperors or fools.” Doesn’t appear to be authentic – and quite a lot of the citations note that this actually comes from the 2002 film of The Count of Monte Cristo, except that there it recurs in several different, shortened versions – “In life, we’re all either kings or pawns”; “Kings and pawns, Marchand. Emperors and fools”; “We are kings or pawns, a man once said” – that someone has drawn together into a single line. No trace of this in the original Dumas novel, so it does indeed seem to have been invented for the film, and elevated to a sort of theme. Really not the sort of thing that either Napoleon or Thucydides would say…

Incidentally, this month I’ve started recording the identities of the accounts that tweet the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote, and issuing final warnings – well, it’s the last time I’m going to bother to warn them – to those I’ve definitely seen before. Ten so far, all except one being some sort of marketing service bot, lifestyle advertiser, ‘get rich quick’ guru or the like. One very familiar face turns out to be the CEO of Social Jukebox, an automated social network management tool (translation: nonsense-tweeting bot to gather followers for marketing purposes), and I rather suspect that this is to blame for much of the activity around this quote. The one exception is @TradBritGroup, the account of the Traditional Britain Group, which seems to be devoted to the non-automated tweeting of right-wing nonsense in order to gather followers against political correctness and enforced multiculturalism… But they haven’t responded to my correction either.

 

Keep Lectures Live!

[image error] [image error]

There are two carved reliefs above the entrances to the Yale Law School intended to make a point about teaching. On the left (or above, depending on how your browser is showing it), above the students’ entrance, we have the students’ conception of the lecture: they’re engaged and eager to learn, but the professor is bored and would rather be doing something else, and his assistant is completely disengaged, reading pornography. On the right (below) we have the professors’ conception: brilliant, passionate lecturer with students fast asleep. The dominant contemporary image of the lecture is the worst of both worlds, with disengagement on both sides – let alone when we’re talking about scores of students rather than half a dozen. That is, the negative perceptions and expectations on either side – and, let’s be honest, there are real negative experiences on both sides as well – are taken to define the nature of the whole exercise.

The most challenging aspect of my first year in Exeter – well, apart from the struggle to remember that I now teach ‘modules’, not units or courses – has been preparing the lectures for the introductory Roman History module, taken by 160-odd first- and second-year students from a mixture of degree programmes. It’s not the material, almost all of which I’ve taught before in different forms, but the format: one two-hour lecture every week, supplemented by seminars once a fortnight. No possibility of simply sticking two of my existing one-hour lectures together; even I can’t talk for that long, even if anyone would be prepared to sit through it. Rather, it’s been a matter of rethinking entire topics, to break them into chunks of 15 minutes or so and recombine them into a coherent two-hour (well, 100-minute) whole with a decent amount of interaction and small group work to break the monotony.

This has been a challenge in a good, albeit time-consuming, sense: to think up a variety of ways of promoting constructive discussion and engagement within such a large group (asking them to imagine themselves as advisers to the emperor on defence strategy was a highlight, if one passes over the student who enthusiastically recommended some wholesale massacres pour encourager les autres), and to stick firmly to time for a change as carrying material over to the next class really doesn’t work. I’m not sure if I would actually want to do two-hour lectures in future, if given the option, but it has provided me with a lot to think about for more familiar forms of teaching as well.

It was interesting, therefore, to read a new piece by the ever-thoughtful Miya Tokumitsu about how the much-maligned lecture can still play an important role in pedagogy, even when it takes a thoroughly traditional form. Sitting in silence, concentrating on the real-time exposition and exegesis of material and the development of arguments and analysis – a combination of preparation and spontaneity – and developing one’s own critical commentary alongside is a valuable exercise in itself (and not, as I tended to think when an undergraduate, a pointless exercise when one could read the book instead). Moreover, it makes learning a social activity, alongside the solitary work in the library: “classrooms are a community”, and taking away the structures and rhythms of that community will inevitably weaken and undermine it.

One issue which Miya didn’t discuss in any depth is how the recording of lectures changes the dynamic. This does, as she notes, turn the learning process into an isolated, individual activity, no different from library research. But it’s also the case that listening to a lecture where you can pause or repeat sections becomes a different sort of exercise, and a less demanding one; powers of concentration are not developed or tested, while desperately trying to retrieve the thread of an argument when you’ve failed to grasp a point or just nodded off for a moment or checked Twitter at the wrong moment is a useful skill. Fine if the recording is used as a supplement to the original lecture, especially for students with different sorts of learning needs, or as occasional catch-up for someone who misses a class due to illness. Not so good if students decide that they don’t need to attend the actual lecture at all – and attendance records suggest that a number are making such a decision.

Okay, their student fees, their choice; I just hope they don’t then have the brass neck to complain about the lack of contact hours in a humanities degree… Still, I do think they’re missing something important – and contributing to the more general down-grading of lectures as a form of teaching. Unless it’s an already existing down-grading that makes the Powers That Be assume that a recording of a lecture is a perfect substitute for the real thing, so there’s no problem with mandating it. (Especially in my previous institution, where students got the PowerPoint slides and the audio recording but no visuals if, say, the lecturer writes on the whiteboard).

Complaining about the relentless advance of classroom technology always reminds me of the Musicians Union sticker I had on my gig bag: ‘Keep Music Live’. And one possible answer to the problem of lecture recording is precisely the one that the music industry has developed: make the live experience something special that people will want. Making the lecture into something different from just reading a book is of course fairly easy: improvise, put the tune through different variations, throw in some unexpected cover versions, add a few special effects and costumes, the usual (some backing dancers and an animatronic Julius Caesar might also help, but I don’t have the budget).

Differentiating the actual lecture from the live recording is a bit trickier, but not impossible. It’s about making the experience something that students – or at least most of them – will value and so pay more for (at least by investing time and effort in getting out of the house, finding their way to the lecture theatre etc.). It’s a chance (not of course the only chance) to ask me questions, as well as to meet one another, but more importantly – at least in my view – there is the stuff that doesn’t get into the recording. You have to be there, above all for the sections that are not simply me talking.

There are complex issues of consent in recording students’ contributions as well as my own wittering, and technically it’s a pain as you have to pass a microphone around, wasting lots of time, or their comments aren’t audible – and of course the small group discussions wouldn’t get recorded anyway. Every problem is an opportunity: the various exercises I mentioned above, breaking up the lecture with a quick reconstruction of the Senate debate after Caesar crossed the Rubicon and the like, are accessible only to those who attend in person, making the actual lecture far more than the presentation of material. Even in a class of 150-odd it’s possible to have meaningful interaction and debate – and in retrospect I could have used this much more directly to dramatise and draw out the nature of deliberation in a large body like the Senate…

So, if you’re not there in person, the best you can hope for is a classmate’s scribbled notes of key points raised in the plenary discussion – which is clearly far inferior to the real experience. My fear is that someone, sooner or later, is going to outlaw in-class activities that can’t be recorded, on the grounds that otherwise students who can’t make the lecture or prefer not to attend are receiving an inferior experience for their money. That really would be the death-knell for lectures as an appropriate and effective, rather than just cheap and straightforward, mode of pedagogy. Home Listening Is Killing Lectures!

Stealth Marketing and Basic Tracking Skills

“Don’t confuse meaning with truth: Thucydides.” I think I speak for everyone when I say: huh? It’s not just that it’s fake, it’s the fact that it seems, insofar as I have any idea what it’s on about, utterly un-Thucydidean. His basic assumption – even if you interpret this as a neurotic response to trauma, as I’ve suggested in the paper I finished writing on Tuesday – is that establishing the truth about past events is the only road to understanding them, and to understanding the present. I suppose that, if you squint hard enough, you could fit this line to his sense that the significance of e.g. Athenian stories about the Tyrannicides for their sense of identity has no necessary connection to the veracity of such stories, i.e. the fact something is meaningful doesn’t make it true, but that’s definitely a stretch.

What’s interesting about this quote is its rarity: yesterday morning was the first time I’ve ever seen it on the Twitter, and a web search for the exact phrase – with or without Thucydides’ name attached, which is normally a good way to get a sense of where else it might have come from – reveals just two sites, an astonishingly low number:

One is an all-purpose quotes site where this is first in a list of lots of other fake and dubious Thucydides quotations (but with a report button, so we’ll see if they now take them down…); I haven’t worked out any way of telling when the quote was added to their site. The second is a personal blog active between December 2011 and September 2015, including a page of favourite quotes (“and other literary crap”) from 28/2/2015. It would be interesting to ask where the author got this quote, given that it doesn’t seem to be from the Internet – there isn’t a contact email, but I’ve left a comment, in the hope that the author still picks up notifications when someone writes something.

If, as seems possible given that it has scarcely made it onto Twitter, the quote was only recently added to the quotes site, it will be interesting to see how quickly it spreads, whereas most of these fake lines were already too widely distributed by the time I started studying them. We have our Patient Zero; now to trace the infection. Of course, if the site now takes it down, there won’t be an immediate epidemic, but I can chalk that up as a different sort of impact, given my total failure to halt the proliferation of that bloody ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote.

A significant proportion of the accounts tweeting this (and many other quotations) present themselves as marketing or business advice agencies; they’re clearly bots or ‘social jukebox’ things (which appears to be another sort of bot), attempting to gather likes and followers through the incessant dissemination of inane words of wisdom, and I suspect most of them are being run by the same one or two social media marketing agencies. I wonder whether the firms in question know that they’re paying good money for total crap – maybe I should write to one or two…

But maybe they’re happy just garnering clicks – in which case, I may be making things worse. A tweet of a fake Thucydides quotation does at least guarantee a response from the Thucydiocy Bot to correct it – which, if engagement is the driver of all this, may make it more likely that the quotation will be tweeted again, to be corrected again, and so forth. Certainly it means that they’re not going to stop doing it.

This suggests that I need to change strategy: to study the tweeting habits of repeat offenders, to see if any patterns are evident (e.g, does this quote start to recur more frequently?). Or, I need to keep a record of all these bloody accounts, so that I correct them once and then ignore them.

Yes, this all looks like a ridiculous waste of time, but I think of it as an exercise in training my senses and getting to know my environment, as a sudden change in the behaviour of birds or a shift in the wind can alert an animal to an approaching predator…

Rome: Open City? (Reprint Project)

Another installment in my long-term project to make available copies of old chapters and articles, when I have a spare moment. This one is prompted by another exchange with Will Pooley at Bristol, who asked on the Twitter about modern historians using the dialogue form, whether invented or found. My immediate thought was Keith Hopkins’ A World Full Of Gods, which (if you don’t know it) experiments with a variety of unexpected literary forms to capture different aspects of religions in the ancient world and the numerous historiographical issues involved in trying to study and represent them. As I think I’ve remarked on here before, I’m not convinced that many of Hopkins’ experiments actually work properly – the professional exponents of science fiction do time travel stories rather better, for example – but it’s amazing that it was done at all, and a great shame that this aspect was largely passed over by reviewers as quickly as possible with an air of great embarrassment.

This was one reason why, when it came to my contribution to the volume, Rome the Cosmopolis, that was produced as a kind of Festschrift for Hopkins I chose to engage with his experiments with historical form as a means of trying to recover the lost voices and memories of those who migrated to the city of Rome in antiquity, and those who railed against this invasion of nasty foreigners and their repulsive habits (if I’d been working on this theme in recent years, all sorts of impact and engagement projects come to mind, and I’d probably have done a much better job of the article. I should mention this to my Exeter colleague Lena Isayev, who’s currently working on migration-related projects related both to antiquity and to the present).

The other reason why I took this approach, to be completely honest, is that I was expecting it to get rejected by the editors, who would then leave me in peace. I can’t actually remember why, but when I was asked for a contribution I was incredibly stressed and over-stretched, and really wanted to get out of it without being rude or alienating powerful people (who were also friends). It probably didn’t help that my relationship with Hopkins was on the ambivalent side; great intellectual influence, as is probably evident from much of my published work, but he liked people who would respond robustly to his forthright and penetrating criticisms, and I preferred people who didn’t make me feel entirely useless.

Anyway, the result was this piece, which the editors refused to reject despite its scholarly slightness and essential silliness…

Migration and the Metropolis, from Catharine Edwards & Greg Woolf, eds., Rome the Cosmpolis, Cambridge 2003: 147-57.

[Update: mentioning this on the Twitter elicted the news that Jess Torgerson from wesleyan has actually had his students perform the piece in class, which is a wonderful idea, and I now wonder why it had never occurred to me to do this…]