What I Owe To The Ancients

It can’t be the beginning of a new academic year already. After all, it’s not as if you’ve been having the nightmares.

Of course I have; the one in which it’s my first day in a strange place, where I don’t know anyone or where anything is or what I’m supposed to be doing, and I am desperately looking for a place about which I know nothing but supposedly it will be perfectly clear when I come across it, in a ruined building that is somehow entwined with a forest and yet is definitely a Cambridge college…

By way of distraction, I found myself thinking the other day about what I learnt from my own teachers thirty-odd years ago – not the contents of lectures and supervisions, but the stuff that actually stays with you for decades rather than just until after Finals. The habits of thought, the values, the ways in which they modelled different ways of being an academic or a teacher or a human being. It’s fair to say that, at the time, I didn’t always realise what I was learning or how my outlook was being shaped; it’s also entirely possible that I learned some wrong or counter-productive things at the same time, but perhaps that should wait for another post; perhaps at the end of the year rather than the beginning.

Christopher Brooke: boundless intellectual enthusiasm. I wrote about this back in 2015, when he died (n.b. this was the medieval ecclesiastical historian C.N.L. Brooke, not the very much alive historian of political thought); the fact that among the few lectures I actually attended in my first year of undergraduate study was a series of seminars on early medieval history with no plan or structure and no connection to any exam, just the professor – who looked like an elderly professor, and my gods it’s terrifying to realise that he was then only six years older than I am now – enthusing about Wolfram von Eschenbach as a historical source, entirely unperturbed by the fact that he must have talked about Wolfram von Eschembach dozens if not hundreds of times, and on this occasion it was just to an audience of a visiting Japanese scholar and a vacant-looking first year. I think this modelled for me the need to keep things fresh and not too structured, rather than those lecturers who simply worked their way through their books, and the idea that you should still be enthused by your subject even when you’re – horror! – sixty, or why bother?

Rosamond McKitterick: patience. I can still, in my mind’s ear, hear her comment in our final supervision on the Carolingian Renaissance: “You know, you could actually be quite a good historian, if you really put your mind to it.” The latter point was entirely fair; I was at this point, iirc, co-editing a student magazine, playing bass in a series of really terrible bands, playing hockey and badminton regularly, drinking far too much, writing truly terrible poetry, wasting a lot of time on entirely unrequited crushes and attempting to get through all the academic stuff on the basis of plausible improvisation. The former point is still open to debate, given that my professional trajectory has to a great extent simply come up with a different set of distractions – and probably I should pay attention to this voice more often. But what I really take from this in retrospect is the patience required to talk encouragingly and supportively to the sort of student you really want to shake violently by the shoulders, or indeed slap.

Paul Cartledge: intellectual adventure. I’m doing this in chronological order, so we’re now into my final undergraduate year, and I have switched to Classics in a fit of pique that the History course doesn’t offer enough medieval stuff, and in particular the Early Christian History course that at this point feels like my way forward. Paul’s ‘Greeks and the Other’ course is the sort of overwhelming explosion of ideas I’d vaguely expected to define the whole university experience. Structuralist anthropology! Feminism! Postcolonialism! Reading Herodotus and Thucydides through Hayden White, and vice versa! This is both tremendous fun and incredibly serious, and I get a powerful sense, not quite that anything goes, but that a good basic idea gives you a solid basis for then making some of it up as you go along, and that ‘theory’ in the broadest sense is vital. What is really striking in retrospect is how little of this was directly promoted in the classes; it was largely implicit, something you could respond to if you wanted to, and I imagine that others had quite different experiences of the course – and that’s also a valid lesson, that not everyone will share the enthusiasms of the lecturer so you can’t design teaching around them entirely, but you can leave Easter eggs, so to speak, for the ones who might appreciate it.

Jonathan Walters: kindness. If I divided this list into two lists, undergraduate and postgraduate, then Jonathan would appear on both, albeit for the same basic reason. He had the dubious pleasure of supervising my over-excited discovery of post-structuralism – and was the only teacher in three years who took the time to consider a pattern of mood swings, intermittent failure to submit essays on time and general evasiveness, and suggest to my Director of Studies that there might be some mental health issues to consider (whose subsequent enquiries I then evaded without any difficulty, but the thought was there, and meant a lot in retrospect). And then when I began the PhD he offered the sage advice that the doctoral state was in essence barely distinguishable from having glandular fever, so it was important to take care of oneself, just in case it was glandular fever. At the time, one was mainly struck by the shortness of the black leather shorts; from a distance, it’s ever clearer that Jonathan was someone who saw students not just as students but as people. Much missed.

Peter Garnsey: meticulousness. And so much more, obviously; one’s Doktorvater is the alpha and omega of academic Vorbild. But if I have to identify the single most important thing I learned from him, which I try desperately to inculcate in all my students, then it’s the importance of taking care. To test every claim to destruction, to obsess over every reference, to be constantly aware of the possibility that there might be another reading, or another bit of evidence, or a new publication that changes the whole perspective. And all of this conveyed through the minimalist method of writing the occasional question mark in the margin – or, even more terrifying, “Are you sure?” It’s a two-edged sword; yes, students, your every misplaced apostrophe and inconsistently formatted bibliography entry wounds me, but not as much as if I did it myself.

Keith Hopkins: be interesting. Again, many possibilities here, from the importance of clarity and elegance at the level of argument to the negative example that you really shouldn’t treat young research students like that. But if I think of Keith’s work, the lesson I draw is something to the effect that it’s better to be interesting with the possibility of being completely wrong – to take intellectual risks – than to be right but boring. No, this doesn’t sit well with the meticulousness, which is why I tell to fall into the middle ground of ‘some potential here but vague and sloppy’ – but I never said I managed to put all these lessons properly into practice…

No, I’m not sure they would welcome being described as ‘Ancients’. But you wouldn’t look to Friedrich Nietzsche for a dispassionate summary of the legacy of classical literature either.