Sociedad de Estudios Latinos - SELat

New Labour has shown again that it only has one response to things it doesn’t like: that is, criminalise them.

And if it wants to show it dislikes something more than it used to, it puts the criminal penalty up a notch, pour encourager les voters.

Many of us don’t like hunting, even if  -- in my case – we flirted with it in our rural pasts. But I can't help thinking that it would have been a good deal better to kill off this nasty nineteenth-century tradition (which is what it surely must be) with the drip, drip of ridicule than with unenforceable legislation. After all, those men in red (pink, I mean) jackets do look very silly, don’t you think?

As for cannabis, it is extremely enjoyable  (more enjoyable than hunting, as -- inter alia - it doesn’t require staying on the back of a horse). There is also no doubt at all that for some users it is dangerous, even life ruining. Surely there is a way of getting that message across without upping the potential prison sentence, which is what the government’s reclassification of the substance from Class C to B means. In fact young people's cannabis use had actually been falling since it was down-graded to C, which makes one wonder whether the risk of punishment might have been part of the allure.

But isn’t it odd that Gordon Brown’s first, turn-over-a-new-leaf, style of listening, actually means not listening to the very committee he got to advise him on this ? For they advocated precisely the reverse. I guess ‘listening’ is a good sound-bite, but it still means a choice about who you are going to listen to.

Almost 50% of young people between 25 and 29 in the UK have used cannabis, just like their parents – ie my generation – did. We might want to encourage them not to, but what on earth is the point of criminalising half the population? OK, 5 years inside is the maximum sentence. But can we really countenance a government regulation that could in principle put half the nation behind bars for half a decade (with remission)?

The police wont enforce this, of course; they haven’t got the time, for one thing. But that ends us up in a worse position… with the idiocy of an un-enforced law.

There is also the complete illogicality that rules most of our “rule-making” on drugs. We all know – and any sensible teen-age sees this clearer than any of us  – that if either alcohol or tobacco were subject to the same scrutiny as cannabis it would be found a much more dangerous substance indeed. But in the case of alcohol we decide to allow its sale at all hours, in the case of tobacco we just ban it from public spaces.

It is the weird accidents of history that have decided which dangerous things we tolerate and which we don’t.

Of course the big bogey of the moment is skunk. Apparently this is much stronger than what Mums and Dads used to smoke in the 1970s, and so much more dangerous. But as the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs observes, that may well mean that kids use less of it.

Come to think of it when I have a whisky, I don’t put it in a pint glass.

A tricky issue has just hit the Greek courts. Some residents of the island of  Lesbos have just decided to resort to the law to prevent the "Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece" from using the word Lesbian in its title.

The idea is that the heterosexual female denizens of the island don’t much like the idea that when they claim they are Lesbian everyone assumes that they are gay. (It’s a claim that might be stronger, I think, if the appellants in this case were women, not men representing their sisters. .) But if they are successful in their suit against the Greek organisation, the plan is to try to outlaw “Lesbians" (as a word) worldwide.

The problem here is the sixth-century BCE Greek poetess Sappho (on the right): born and bred in Lesbos, she addressed some of the most passionate erotic poetry the world has known to fellow women. An achievement which in the ancient world  earned her the title “10th Muse”. Almost ever since Lesbos has been synonymous with Lesbianism (in fact since the 18th century in British English).

This idea of decoupling Sappho, female homoeroticism and the island of Lesbos seems to me about as mad as trying to white out William Shakespeare from Stratford on Avon.

In fact, Sappho is the sexiest thing to have come from the island in 3000 years. Why on earth jack in the commercial possibilities?

The competition for most famous islander is not great. Alcaeus was also a Lesbian, another early poet, who famously claimed to throw away his shield on the battlefield and walk (?run) away – so giving rise to a whole tradition of ancient poetic military refuseniks.

You might also think of Theophrastus, fourth-third century BCE scientist, who wrote a wonderful analysis of different character types called “The Characters”. Read my colleague Paul Millett on this.

In the modern world you might go for the poet Odysseas Elytis who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1979. But that’s not quite the 10th Muse and, though his family came from Lesbos, he was actually born in Crete anyway.

So why on earth aren’t the Lesbians (islanders that is) celebrating Sappho and doing all they can to resurrect her poetry. Out of 9 volumes, only a handful of stuff survives. But more may be found. Only a few years ago another poem was discovered on an Egyptian papyrus. A nice middle-aged lyric about not having the knees to dance any more. A translation was published in the TLS.

Why don't the islanders buy into this, instead of complaining about the supposed sexual "insult"?

It’s local election day -- and, of course, I have voted, in a way. I learned very young from a radical mother that women had only recently fought for suffrage and that it was little short of a crime not to use the right. So use it I do.

But nowadays I use it on the kitchen table, with a postal vote. It takes rather less time than going down to the polling station, which is why I opted for it. But actually the opaque instructions they give you, the complicated system of envelopes (two of them A and B) and the declaration that you have to sign, means that the saving is less than you think. I also half suspect that several of my previous postal votes will have been invalidated because I put the wrong piece of paper into the wrong envelope.

The real problem, though, is that on this system voting becomes a very low key experience – done over a bottle of wine, and a jolly chat with the husband about the merits of the various candidates (or in our case about the merits of the Lib Dem and the renegade Lib Dem now standing as an Independent -- I opted for the former; he did too, I think, but confidentiality here is still the rule).

All this is a far cry from walking to the polling station in the redundant school down the road, passing the friendly copper and the party reps taking your number, declaring your identity to the officials, going into the little booth, putting a cross with your pencil and finally folding the piece of paper up and slipping it into that battered tin box.

Even I could never do that without a bit of a shudder of civic responsibility and sense of occasion.

All of which makes me think that the New Labour ideas of encouraging us to vote by making it easier (postally, on-line, at the supermarket, by text) are terribly misconceived. If you want people to take voting seriously, you don’t make it an everyday event; you let it continue to be part of a moving, even inconvenient, ritual of citizenship.

And you certainly stop people like me thinking that they can save a few minutes by not trooping down to the polling station and doing it all by post. Meanwhile you give up those silly symbolic substitutes that Gordon Brown has in mind, like saluting the flag. It’s not hard to foresee a nightmare future in which none of us vote, but we all have a Union flag loyally fluttering in the front garden.

Other cultures do, and did, this better. My anthropologist daughter put me on to some great work by one of her tutors on the ritualization of voting in Indian democracy. And, of course, the Romans knew that voting worked by making it an occasion that you had to give up time for.  In their case, it probably took a whole day, waiting for your turn to go up on the “bridge” to cast your vote.

I think on balance I’d be prepared to give up the convenience of the kitchen table vote if we could just recapture some of that mystical shudder of going into the polling booth and being a fully enfranchised citizen. Citizenship is, after all, supposed to take time. And that’s what my Mum wanted and valued, and was prepared to give almost anything for.

Will Cambridge have its own traffic congestion charge? It looks likely. A bit different from the London version, it would charge you (£3-£5) for driving around between 7.30 and 9.30 am; after that it would be free. One notch up from the London scheme, there would be no concessions for residents within the zone – and in fact the plan is that you will get charged even for driving out.

I’m all for this in principle, but can’t for the life of me see why someone should get charged for driving from where I live OUT of the city, and so relieving congestion.

What’s puzzling is exactly who is backing this. All the leaflets from the three main parties that have dropped through the letterbox in advance of the City Council elections on May 1 have come out against. The Lib Dems say that it is being introduced by the Conservative County Council, and object (like me) to the driving out charge, and to the fact that the profits are to be spent on a road in Ely, rather than improving cycling facilities etc in Cambridge itself.

The Labour leaflet had the nerve to complain about the civil liberties implications of all the cameras required to operate the scheme. There may well be a point here, but when the Labour party has enthusiastically spread CCTV cameras across the nation to make us the most photographed part of the planet, what idiot (or dissident) in the local Labour party thought we wouldn’t notice the inconsistency?

The Tory, on the other hand, claims that it is all being driven by the Labour party. And with a charming classical reference reassures us that “like all cities since Rome in 70AD, Cambridge suffers from congestion. It is part of being a city.”

So what would the Romans have done?

That’s easy. And the answer is not, I think, Tory policy – even in the hands Roman-loving Boris. I’m not quite sure why the local party thinks that the year 70 AD was crucial (the beginning of the Flavian dynasty). But from the period of Julius Caesar, more than a hundred years earlier, laws banned wheeled transport from the city of Rome during daylight hours.

There were exceptions of course. It was OK “for anything to be brought or conveyed for the purpose of building sacred temples of the immortal gods” or for rubble to be taken out of the city when “a contract has been let for public demolition”. It was also allowed for Vestal Virgins and other priests to use carts when going about their religious business. It was OK for triumphal processions and the games too.

That apart, all traffic went by night.

Was it a good solution? Well, it must have made for a nicer city by day. But just think of the night. As the Roman satirist Juvenal complains, it was impossible to get to sleep.

Still, it might just be a model for Cambridge.

I was chuffed to be nominated as an “excellent blog” by Heresy Corner (an excellent blog itself). So, according to the rules of this game, I must now nominate ten more excellent blogs.

Here goes in no particular order  (not all are on my links list yet, but they will be soon).

One: BLDG BLOG is a real queen of blogs. Hosted by Geoff Manaugh in California, it’s mostly about architecture, art and urban (and other) spaces. A book of the blog is coming next year.

Two: Clive Davis' Spectator blog. The Spectator isn’t Beard’s natural home, but when I discovered he was reading me I gave him a go (OK -- how self-regarding can you get?). He picks up lots of good things – and has a nice wry take on them.

Three: Soleil en tête is one to catch for the francophone. A French Canadian writer and history teacher blogs about writing, teaching and her brain tumour. Not the usual illness-blog-cliché and not mawkish at all. She posts, for nice classical reasons, under the name of Danaee.

Four . . .

. . . . CultureGrrl. Lee Rosenbaum gets all the news and gossip from the art world. What Greek pot is about to be sent back to its country of origin? Who struck the deal?

Five:  Books, Inq. Frank Wilson was until a few weeks ago the Book Reviews editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. He’s a great trawler of the web for literary stuff.

Six: I have a soft spot for my colleague James Warren’s Kenodoxia. There is some hardcore ancient philosophy here, but it’s also a pretty true to life account of life as a working academic.

Seven: PhDiva has just come back after a break. I’m not always on the same side as Dorothy King (I, for example, tend to think that overall the British Museum is a force for good in the world. . .and Dorothy doesn’t seem always to share that view). But there’s usually a sparky and fearless post on classical archaeology and other things here.

Eight: University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.

Nine: Liberty London Girl is a bit of a surprising favourite of mine. An anonymous blog by an English fashion editor in New York . . .another world, folks.

Ten: Not hugely sexy, but the best place for keeping up with Classics news in the UK and elsewhere is the ARLT blog, run by David Parsons.

I am beginning to feel some nostalgia for the old-fashioned mortgage. I’m sure that some readers of this blog must remember what it was like borrowing money to buy a roof over your head in the old days. The old days? I mean a quarter of a century ago,  which is when I bought my first flat, overlooking the main railway line just north of Euston. Jolly nice it was too; but jolly noisy.

Anyway, the old system went something like this. First of all, you had to show you were a ‘regular saver’.  That usually meant picking a Building Society some years before you thought you would ever want to buy a house, and paying 50 quid or so into a savings account. Unless your Mum and Dad were going to help out, you’d need to do that anyway, because 100% mortgages were quite unheard of. If you were very lucky, you might get 90% -- so my £27,500 flat needed £2750 from my own little nest egg of savings.

Then there was the basic rule of thumb that you could have two and a half times your annual salary, which JUST about worked for me. But more than that there was the scary interview . . . all about financial responsibility and being part of a mutual building society. Patronising and paternalistic it may have been. But this was not a questions of banks and shareholders and profits; this was about membership, and the symbiosis of investors and borrowers.

So I had a quick check on the Halifax’s mortgage calculator website, to discover that the rule of thumb was now FIVE times your annual salary.

I tried entering my own annual earnings – substantial by many standards, even if university teachers as a group are still woefully underpaid – to see what I would have to pay each month, if I took the maximum. Suffice it to say that after I had paid the utility bills, the council tax, the food and (OK. . .I COULD do without it ) the car, there wouldn’t be  much left. Holidays would be the very cheapest, clothes-buying would be a rare event (not much different from now, you might say), and heaven knows how the central heating boiler or washing machine would be replaced.

True, it wouldn’t exactly be the breadline, but then I’m lucky and earn a lot more than the national average. Try it on half the money.

The objection to my nostalgia is that things (ie house prices) have changed since the late 70s. The average house price in Cambridge is now £300,000 – which means that on the ‘five times’ calculation a newly arrived professor at the bottom of the professorial pay-scale (and I mean professor, not junior lecturer) could just about afford it, if they took the maximum mortgage. Junior lecturer, nurse, shop assistant, not a hope. And on a two and a half times mortage, you must be joking.

So what is the option? Honestly I haven’t a clue. But I can’t help thinking that some kind of effort to turn the clock back might be a good idea.

Meanwhile though, I have rather less sympathy than Brown and Darling seem to have with those coming off fixed rate mortgages and finding they have a big rise in their payments. Not that I wish repossession on anyone. But with a fixed rate you always reckoned it probably saved you money for the fixed term, on the understanding that it might well go up after that. The more you saved, the nastier the shock at the end. Wasn’t that the point of it?

As for the banks, can anyone explain to me how they have gone from 'record profits' to needing a government bale-out in lass than a year?

I know that tales of travelling misery rarely touch anyone else’s heart. The obvious answer is: well if you must go off jet-setting around and spoiling the planet, why should the rest of the world feel sorry if you are delayed/your flight is cancelled/you lose your luggage…

All the same, I am going allow myself a moan about my latest trip to the States. It’s been huge fun in all sorts of ways: I gave a lecture on the triumph at Rutgers, talked to a great group of US high-school teachers in Cambridge Mass., and had a fantastic two days in Seattle at a wonderful conference on Roman Art, which had been timed to coincide with a loan exhibition of Roman art from the Louvre at the local museum. A long way, you might say, to go to see art from Paris, but the display in the Seattle Art Museum was brilliant – and actually made me see all kinds of objects afresh.

But, nice as the whole trip has been, every single leg of travel has gone wrong in some way or other. I’ll pass over the more trivial problems: the almost missed connection in Chicago on my way from Boston to Seattle (I got the plane by 30 seconds as it was closing its doors, and it took me most of the flight to get my breath back); the suspicious package on the railway line, which held up the inappropriately named Acela Express from New York to Boston,  in New Haven station for over an hour. (OK, I know: better safe than sorry – but it doesn’t always feel like that when you’re not moving).

One of the worst bits was arriving in Newark “Liberty” airport – which had the effect of making me feel rather benign towards Terminal 5.

Everything looked good. We got off the plane to find the arrivals hall uncharacteristically empty, and we  were spread around the different booths for immigration processing. A warning note was struck (though I didn’t realise it at the time) when the officer at my booth (“Pete” as I later had plenty of time to discover) went off on some errand before turning to process me.

He had returned ten minutes later, taken my passport, just inserted it into his bar code reader, when his computer crashed – and not just his computer, but all the computers in the arrivals hall.

Pete and his friend at the next booth tried logging in again, several times – but to no avail. At this point, the human psychology got interesting. Neither Pete nor his mate thought to use the phone to find out what was going on. We passengers, meanwhile, tired as we were, knew that only an idiot picks a fight with an immigration officer, so restricted ourselves to smiles and polite queries about whether we could use our cell phones (answer: no); and whether those meeting us had been informed of the delay (answer: yes).

After half an hour or so, the hall was beginning to fill up. But there was no sign whatsoever of anyone who was remotely in charge – nor any airline reps for that matter. In fact, incoming flights were still being told over the tannoy on which carousel to pick up their luggage, without a mention that they weren’t likely to get that far for some time.

After 50 minutes or so, the tannoy voice told the immigrations officers to reboot – which they tried, unsuccessfully. Half an hour later, a man did come round and deliver a cd to each of the officers, but neither Pete nor his mate had a clue what to do with it, or even how to insert it in their machine – so that wasn’t much good.

The next idea was that some of the machines might be working, so Pete and mate, and me and my queue moved to another booth. We did manage to get a bit further now – up to the fingerprints. But then the machine crashed again, leaving my index fingers displayed all over the screen.

It was now something like an hour and three quarters since we had entered the arrivals hall. At this point, another man came round and instructed Pete and mate to process manually and just keep a list of numbers of US and non-US citizens who passed through (what US citizens were doing in my queue I can’t imagine). The trouble was neither Pete nor mate knew this guy and ‘didn’t feel comfortable’ with this instruction. So off Pete went again (taking his immigration stamp with him in case we should take it into our own hands) to get confirmation.

Ten minutes later he was  back and ‘comfortable’ and we were through. The thought of UK ID cards and computer systems came to mind.

And no, those meeting us hadn’t been told a thing.

And the return home? Yet worse. I am writing this in Seattle airport where I have been for the last 13 hours. I was going back with American Airlines to New York, then back with British Airways from JFK. I got here at 6.00 a.m. to find that the American flight had been cancelled and they couldn’t offer me another flight to get to JFK in time to make the connection (not to mention the fact that they were totally unsympathetic, bordering on the rude).

BA were absolutely charming on the phone (they don’t have a human being at Seattle airport in the early morning), but at first not much practical help . But then the husband phoned them up in the UK and explained my plight, in no doubt graphic detail. And though it’s counting chickens till I actually get on that plane, it looks as if they are now going to transport me back to the UK direct from Seattle later this evening, without charging me a month’s salary for the privilege.

So cross fingers it will all work out, and big kisses to dear old, unfairly maligned, BA. 

PS (Monday evening) – indeed it did all work; and I am extremely grateful to whoever it was in BA’s call centre in Newcastle who sorted it all out.

Last week the main BBC news (plus the Today programme) was full of a piece of research which demonstrated a gender bias  in choice of musical instruments.  Whereas 90% of young harpists are (apparently) female, almost 80% of young tuba players are (apparently ) male – and even more  electric guitarist. Indeed kids are encouraged in those choices by friends, teachers, society . . .you name it.

While parts of the planet were in melt-down, while Zimbabwe tottered, Kenya  simmered and  too few people were  killed in Iraq to be newsworthy . . .THIS was transmitted as a piece of gender discrimination akin to the revelation (the sort of news we faced when I was a kid) that more girls than boys were encouraged to become doctors and vice versa.

After a short time, feeling a bit bad about this, as I was obviously supposed to, I found myself reflecting….do I care really  if tuba players are largely male?

OK, I’ve seen Billy Elliot, and I know that it is rotten to be  looked on as a wimp if you’re a boy and you want to do ballet. I also know (from even more personal  experience) that it can be rotten to be a girl and want to do blokeish things.

But this didn’t seem to me to have much to do with the old doctors and nurses argument. The point about that was that girls chose to be nurses and got lower pay, less prestige, and a life time of emptying bed-pads; boys chose to be doctors and got more money, more prestige, while prancing round in a white coat/suit and marrying a nurse. The gender choices cashed out into economic and status disadvantage.

But is that the same with musical instruments? Is there a built in advantage in learning the harp over the tuba, or vice versa? If not shouldn’t we just let the kids be gendered and just be pleased that they are learning any musical instrument at all. If it takes a tuba or a Fender to get boys interested in learning an instrument, well, phew. . . . And if girls are inspired to go on with the cello by the sight of those old (and, of course, now sad) images of Jacqueline du Pre making love to her instrument, it’s a small price to pay.

I thought it might have been more interesting if the survey (and no, I haven’t read the original) had taken that other Billy Elliot theme and looked at class. How many working class kids now learn to play any instrument at all?

Isnt that more of a worry?

There were enough good jokes to keep even the meanest classicist amused in Doctor Who’s visit to Pompeii on Saturday night.

For a start, when Donna and the Doctor emerged from the tardis, they immediately assumed that they were in ancient Rome. Well actually they were. Any keen follower of historical movies can spot the “ancient Rome” built at Cinecittà in modern Rome a mile off (it’s actually very like the “ancient Rome” built in modern Tunisia, except the whole thing is a bit bigger and the extras tend to have a slightly lighter facial colouring).

But just a few minutes into the plot, the table were nicely turned when we saw an unmistakable Vesuvius looming at the end of the street. The penny quickly dropped for us and for the Doctor. This must be Pompeii.

And it turned out to be August 23 AD 79: for those in the know (like the Doctor) the day before the final eruption. At least that is the usual date: an alternative school of thought, based on the traces of pollen found in the volcanic ash and on the heavy clothes worn by a number of the victims thinks it must have been later in the autumn. (I’m not convinced by the clothing argument. I always imagine I might put on my winter woollies in the middle of an eruption.)

A good start. And hopes that the writers actually knew something about the history of Pompeii and even knew a little Latin were not disappointed.

There were, for example, plenty of reference to the earthquake which had struck the city in 62 (or 63 according to another alternative line of thought) – which may, or may not, have had something to do with the Pyroviles (I cant honestly remember). The city had also obviously been experiencing a fair number of tremors in the run-up to the “Big One”.  That is exactly in tune with modern archaeological orthodoxy. We now think that the  reason that almost every Pompeian house seems to have had the decorators in at the moment they were overwhelmed is because they were trying to patch up all those recent cracks. No archaeologist, so far as I know, has spotted the Pyrovile connection.

Best of all, the screen writers had obviously done the Cambridge Latin Course back in high school. For those reading this outside the UK, the CLC is the favourite modern school course for teaching kids Latin in this country. The first book is set in Pompeii, around an ordinary Pompeian family: Caecilius the banker, Metella his wife, and Quintus the son.

Who did the Doctor meet when he arrived? Caecilius, of course (though apparently no longer a banker, but in the marble trade), Metella and Quintus. The family had also, since the CLC was written, grown a daughter Evelina, who was here briefy in the power of the Pyroviles, uttering weird prophecies and having her arm turn to stone.

For Doctor Who fans the big question at the end was whether the time-lord Doctor was going to allow himself to re-write history and rescue Caecilius and his family. The human Donna eventually persuades him to do so. So, whereas in the CLC only Quintus lives to fight another day, in the Doctor Who version, we find the whole family six months later living happily ever after in Rome.

What actually happened to the REAL Caecilius (for the CLC had based him on the figure of  Lucius Caecilius Jucundus, hundreds of whose wax tablet survive detailing his transactions) – we do not know. The chances are that he died before Vesuvius started to rumble.

Writing on the Roman Triumph has opened some very unexpected doors. I’m hoping to be able to report from the Emmy awards in Los Angeles in September (courtesy of the Triumph). But meanwhile, on Friday, I’m off to talk at RUSI (the Royal United Service Institute for Defence and Security Studies, founded by none other than the Duke of Wellington).

As a bit of a wobbly pacifist, I’m slightly surprised at myself for having invested (so apparently sympathetically) into the dilemmas of Roman warfare. Indeed I must also confess to having a bit of a soft spot for intellectual soldiers (the sort that end up as Bursars of Cambridge colleges). They  always seem to have better moral credentials when it comes to warfare than I do (a bit like the atheist clerics who end up as chaplains of Oxbridge colleges – a worthy tradition stretching back at least to the eighteenth century).

This is a romantic sensibility I must have inherited. For I also have a cousin who was once married to frontline member of the SAS, who managed to charm my mother (a far more hard-line pacifist that I am). Even she would somehow manage to overlook what this guy had done in the Iranian embassy siege, because he could intellectualise the moral problems so nicely (and help with the washing up).

The trouble is that smart generals and clever SAS boys are one thing; most other aspects of the military seem not so appealing.

Notwithstanding my flirtations with uniforms, I have no doubt that the NUT has a point in thinking to make the recruiting sergeant a persona non grata from British schools  More than that, the idea that we should be exporting the CCF to state schools (at the same time as we are trying to counter ‘gun culture’) is simply bonkers.

I wonder if any of these New Labour enthusiasts for the CCF have any experience of it. I remember visiting the sixth-form ‘taster evening” at the son’s school (an excellent ex-direct grant school), to be greeted by a host of teenagers dressed in camouflage clothes and smudgy faces, with the odd bit of tree stuck in their hair. They looked very silly. But the encounter was predictable. They spoke eagerly about the parachuting opportunities, and looked blank when I asked what they thought about going and dropping bombs on Iraqi civilians.

As usual, when it came to it,  the alternatives to CCF were made as unglamorous as possible, There was granny-bashing, writing letters for Amnesty, helping out with reading in the junior school, litter-picking (hardly beats parachuting does it?). But the real downer was that you weren’t allowed to stay at any of these activities for longer than a term. Non-CCF activities had a compulsory rotation. No follow through – so no seeing what had actually happened to your prisoner/granny/8-year old.

When I wrote and said that I assumed that the military types would also rotate from army to air-force to navy, I  didn’t get a wholly satisfactory reply!

Shouldn’t we save state school kids from this awful institution.

I know it’s all too easy to knock Health and Safety rules, and the like. I’ve done it before and – yes – that smirky cynicism will be knocked out of me, if ever I get trapped in a blazing building because the Evac chairs have not been properly installed, or the emergency lighting isn’t working.

All the same . . . try this story.

The Classical Faculty building in Cambridge (where I tend at the moment, finishing my Pompeii book, to spend rather more hours of my life than I do at home) has just installed disabled access: (semi-)automatic front doors. This isn’t anyone’s fault. We were obliged to do this to be “compliant” (and, as one of my senior colleagues put it, to be “transparent” and “robust” too, no doubt).

So, until two weeks ago we had perfectly manageable front doors : a double set - one pair of outside doors plus another pair the other side of a small lobby. They were very easy to handle. The outside pair were heavy-ish, opened one way only and were still just about possible to manage if you had a large pile of books in your arms. The inner pair swung both ways and were easy to push or pull from whichever way you approached.

They have now been “up-graded’ to disabled use, and are almost unusable by the rest of us.

Both sets have been fitted with automatic openers, operated with a push button, wheel-chair height. If you choose not to push the buttons, they are unwieldy and certainly far too heavy to open with a pile of books in hand. If you opt for the button method, you have to stand and wait for several seconds while the doors graciously  (ie very slowly) open before you. It’s inconvenient enough with just a few graduate students and elderly academics going to and fro during the vacation. Heaven knows how this system will work when confronted with hundreds of undergraduates, trying to go both ways.

In addition to this, these once relatively elegant doors are now encumbered with machinery and look quite ghastly. And given the complicated system and the couple of nice guys who took about a week to install it, I expect that we could have financed several Masters’ students for the price of all this.

How many disabled people visit our Faculty each year? A handful. Now, I realise that the current policy is that wheel-chair users or others who are “physically challenged” should not have to ASK for help; they should have free access wherever without having to draw attention to their needs. But surely, in most cases, it would be better, more efficient, cheaper and (frankly) more ideologically sound to change hearts and minds -- so that no-one at all would ever see a disabled user hoving into view without stopping to hold the door open, offer a hand or whatever. Shouldn’t we all think it our job to help those who need it, as a matter of course?

These, legislation-driven, installations are a way of making us feel that we’re doing something for the disabled, without actually having to do anything ourselves. A bit like all those emergency notices in Braille in American hotels – fine, if the blind know where to put their hands to find them. But don’t you imagine that, when fire strikes, we able-bodied will have scarpered, leaving the blind to find the notices we so kindly put up for them?

In our case in the Faculty, the disabled can now get into the lobby by merely pushing a couple of buttons. But what then? They can’t get upstairs (because the lift to the first floor is via another entrance). And the library has no push button doors.

So now we’re “compliant” because they can wheel themselves around the lobby and go out again.

The result of the great debate was, as I predicted, that a rather large majority of the audience decided that they would accept the invitation. As Tom Holland said in the moments after our defeat: that’s democracy for you…but, of course, Socrates, wasn’t exactly a fan of that.

All the same I thought our side made as good a showing as we could, so didn’t feel especially pissed off. It’s a bit like doing an exam. You don’t mind doing not so well as you hoped, if you think you did as well as you could.

In fact, once the Taplin/McCabe side had trailed the idea that one might be having dinner not just with Socrates, but Hippocrates, Sophocles, Pheidias, Euripides, Hegel and Wittgenstein too – honestly I thought the audience would rebel. But they didn’t.

Anyway, everyone can listen to the podcast and see what you think.

I had the feeling that, zany silliness that it was, some more substantial ideas were bubbling under the surface.

One question that came up in the audience discussion (which is not on the podcast) is about how we choose to imagine the past, and to what extent it is anyway a largely fictional creation. Socrates, of course, is a good case to explore that on, because he wrote nothing. So all our “evidence” is already some sort of fictional construction by contemporary and later admirers or detractors.

You get one picture of the sage if you follow the image of him, as most people do, in Plato. You get quite a different one if you take the more chubby, pub-philosopher style created by Xenophon.  (I talk about Xenophon a bit at the start of my pitch.)

I would have liked to explore a bit more why we have this hankering after actually meeting writers. That after all is what literary festivals are largely about. But isn’t it part of the old fallacious identification of author and text, page and personality? Why can’t be satisfied with a good book without wanting to get to grips with the author too. Especially as we know that it is more often than we would like a terrible disappointment.

As I write this, I’m listening to a discussion on In our Time  about Isaac Newton  – who was a well known, taciturn social-inadequate, whom it would have been ghastly to come across in the flesh. And I wouldn’t have much fancied an evening with Philip Larkin (though much enjoy an evening with Whitsun Weddings).

But is this to bite the festival  hand that feeds?

Hope you’ll listen to the podcast (turn up the volume when you get to McCabe, whose uncharacteristic quietness is caused by her being more distant from the mike than the rest of us).

Preparations are now apace for our TLS debate in Oxford tomorrow: would you accept a dinner invitation with Socrates? Beard, in case you didn’t already know/guess, is on the NO THANKS side (along with fellow sceptic Tom Holland). Those thinking that they would reply with a YES PLEASE are Oliver Taplin and MM McCabe.

I am already, I must confess, resigned to defeat. For a start I have never been known to win in debates like this (not enough punchy, simple , populist rhetoric??). I managed to lose when I was standing up for the Parthenon in a head to head with the Alhambra, championed by Robert Irwin. His pitch was that the Alhambra was very very beautiful indeed. Mine was that the Parthenon not only stood for the whole of western culture, having been pagan temple, church and mosque – but that it also affected us more qua ruin, than any complete building ever could. True – but not a winner in the rhetorical cut and thrust.

Then last year I managed to lose in the Greeks versus Romans debate at Cheltenham. I lost so badly in fact that the Greeks registered more votes at the end of the session than they did at the beginning. In other words my inventions actually lost the Romans some of the votes they already had. The problem is that Hellenophiles find it so easy to stand up and bang on about well springs/originary moments of Western culture: QED. (It is what I should have done when speaking for the Parthenon….)

So what am I going to say about Socrates?

Not sure yet (I write carefully, in case the opposition take a peek).

There’s obviously the points about the lack of women, the aggressive homosociality, the dreadful food and ghastly wine. Easy hits. Anyone with an eye to food would choose dinner with Trimalchio before dinner with Socrates. Then of course there is the dire political legacy…”Our” Socrates wasn’t a nice cuddly Western liberal.

But I think that I want to convict the man from as near to his own mouth as we can get. So my first port of call will be Xenophon’s Symposium – an account of dinner with Socrates that offers a different sort of anecdotage from the usual Platonic stuff.

I shall also be dipping into Emily Wilson’s book on The Death of Socrates – because she is more honest than most on what an irritating creature the old guru was.

But if anyone has got some particularly pointed darts that I might use, please let me know…as soon as possible, please!

I’m hoping by the way to get in the wonderful Monty Python ditty, the Philosophers Drinking Song . . “David Hume could out consume/ Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel./ And Wittgenstein was a beery swine/ who was just as sloshed as Schlegel…etc etc..”  Its rousing finale is most memorable of all, and relevant to this occasion: “Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;/ A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's pissed.”

I was so taken with this when I was a young lecturer in London (obviously already working up to tomorrow, without knowing it) that I once recounted it to Arnaldo Momigliano at dinner. He didn’t think it was half as funny as I did.

No, I have not had the misfortune to visit the new Terminal 5 at  Heathrow today, Thursday. But the husband has. Though, happily for him, he was arriving rather than trying to leave (hand baggage only, if your flight wasn’t cancelled).

The whole experience started brightly enough. The check-in at Athens was serving champagne (and juice for the minors) to celebrate T5 day. But things got darker pretty quickly when he discovered that, owing to problems at the new Terminal, the flight was delayed by two hours.

When it did finally take off, the cabin crew had stories that went rather beyond the official line of  “teething troubles with the baggage system”.

They had apparently turned up for work as usual this morning, but with no information on the security system for entry to Terminal 5, which slowed down their getting onto the planes considerably -- and started the rot.

The flight itself was fine and made up some of the lost time, but when it got to Heathrow, the plane sat  on the tarmac for most of the time that it had made up, then another 15 minutes while they tried to get the jet-way to link to the plane.

The scene on the ground was reminiscent of a police state, rather than a cradle of democracy. The most prominent officials were not those of BA, nor even the battalions of electricians trying to patch the system up, but larger battalions of burly cops carrying their prominent military hardware.

But no one in any kind of uniform could tell him either how to get to the Piccadilly line (were they on commission to Heathrow Express?), nor which loos might be in working order (answer: one in the departure lounge). When he did finally get to the tube (again via the departure lounge) the automatic gates refused to take the return to Heathrow he had bought at Cambridge. No point in changing his mind now. By this time he’d been told that the Heathrow Express wasn’t working anyway.

We’ve read all these articles about the dry runs being practised at this Terminal for weeks. Did none of these pretend first class arrival passengers from Sydney ask for the Piccadilly line? Or expect a working loo?

The irony was that the new BA glossy brochure about the wonders of T5 arrived this very morning. “So calm, you’ll just flow through . . .” it promised. “Intuitive design makes your journey through Terminal 5 easy and carefree”, accompanied by a picture of one of the 131 escalators.

Great if they’re working.

I don’t quite understand how we have forgotten that the “Olympic Torch” ceremony was invented by Hitler and his chums.

If ever there was an “invented tradition” well worth stamping out, it is this ridiculous, Fascist-inspired waste of money – which sends a Bunsen Burner around the world at tremendous cost for several months before the Games, manned (and womanned) by people dressed up in pseudo-ancient Greek costume, no doubt feeling very silly.

In London, we are now told, it will soon be doing a mini tour, carried by a London bus, Docklands Light Railway and Dame Kelly Holmes (inter alios).

I can’t quite work out whether most of the press reports are pleased at the pro-Tibetan protests which dented the hi-tech assisted, sunbeam lighting ceremonial (plucky little Tibet poking the Chinese dragon where it, for once, might hurt); or whether they are a touch censorious at this upsetting of the peaceful, non-political programme of the Olympic Games that we have inherited from the ancient Greeks; or whether they are wondering what might happen to the UK in the ceremonies to come in 2012  (don’t forget Iraq, Mr Blair/Brown….).

Hardly any commentator stops to mention that this silly torch ceremony has nothing to do with the ancient Greeks, and was really invented to be a magnificent shot in Leni Riefenstahl’s movie (choreographed by Carl Diem). This is one of Hitler’s most pervasive legacies.

They also don’t stop to mention that the ancient Olympics – far from being that sweet haven of peace -- were pretty political anyway. Even in their hay-day, they were often interrupted by the rough hand of Politics.

The classic case is the eligibility of Alexander the Great’s ancestor, Alexander 1 of Macedon.  When he turned up to compete in the early fifth century BC , the other Greeks said that he was a foreigner and so wasn’t eligible. Eventually the gate-keepers allowed him to take part, but -- although he finished first (equal) – he didn’t  get his name written into the official list of winners. (Hence, he is an awkward example on both sides for the modern argument about whether “Macedonia” is “Greek”. Does Alexander 1 prove the Greekness of the Macedonians, or vice versa?).

But there were plenty more political controversies.  The worst was in 364 BC when the Games happened while Olympia was under enemy occupation, or more accurately in the middle of a war zone. In fact, the Arcadians (Olympia’s neighbours in the Peloponnese) invaded during the Pentathlon event and some of their soldiers looted the sacred treasures. So much for the “Sacred Truce”.

That was only the tip of the iceberg. In the 380s Lysias, the Athenian orator and democratic hero, harangued his fellow countrymen, urging them more or less to wreck the Olympic village. Four and a half centuries later, the Olympic officials appear to have turned a blind eye and let the emperor Nero win whatever competition he wanted -- in return for some rather generous investment at the Olympic site.

We may not like the politicisation of the Olympic games, but let’s not pretend that this is a modern invention.

I’ve only just caught up with the fact that there is a version of Wikipedia in Latin: or, to be precise, Vicipaedia.

I have to say that it is all very well done. I explored it, hoping to discover some dreadful howlers. But a ten minute glance gave them pretty much a clean bill of health. And there is plenty of earnest worrying about how to translate such termini technici as ‘link’ into Latin. Ligamen, nexus or vinculum? Oh help…

They haven’t got very far yet. Check out  the section on “professores rerum classicarum” (professors of  Classics) and you’ll find they’ve only got to three: the distinguished, but unlikely trio of Barry Baldwin, E. R. Dodds and W. L. Westermann.

But my problem with this enterprise is not its accuracy in Latinity or its progress. It is: what on earth is the point?

I am a great supporter of retaining Latin where it is traditional or useful. I don’t want to get rid of  Latin mottoes on coins. Nor, for that matter, do I want to ‘modernise’ the speeches made on our Cambridge Honorary Degree day. They are delivered in Latin, with written English crib provided – for the benefit of those whose Latin is a bit challenged.

For one thing the slight incomprehensibility with which Latin clothes the whole occasion makes what might be the oozing flattery of the speeches in honour of those getting Hon. Degrees a bit less offensive. It also (as you’ll see if you take a look at James Diggle’s published Hon. Degree speeches) it allows a lot more wit than you’d get away with in English. Try him on Jacques Derrida – I always wonder what our Chancellor, Prince Philip, who has to listen to all this, made of that one.

Much the same goes for college grace before and after meals. “Benedictus benedicat etc etc” makes it a whole lot easier for the agnostic crew to let it all wash over them, while apparently satisfying the believers.

I’m pretty keen too on the general idea of using Latin in books meant for modern classical scholars. If you are a publishing a collection of ancient Latin inscriptions, you might just as well publish the commentary and explanation in Latin too. After all, anyone wanting to consult a Latin inscription is, by definition, bound to know the language – so it can be more inclusive to publish the commentary in Latin than in one particular vernacular, whether English, Swedish, or Japanese. It’s the lingua franca argument.

But that argument doesn’t extend to the likes of Vici – or to those charming Finns who waste their spare time putting the news into Latin and broadcasting it to the waiting handful.

The whole point about Latin is that it is a wonderful language, with wonderful literature worth reading on any evaluation of the world culture. But it is also well and truly dead. It doesn’t help the cause of Latin one bit to pretend that it is remotely worthwhile inventing new Latin words for “web” or “wind turbine” or “EU”.

So sorry if I’m being a killjoy, but I’m hoping that Vici dies a death.

(With thanks to Frank Wilson and Tony Francis for alerting me to Vici!)

The credit squeeze has started to hit even leafy Cambridge. Last week the son, who had received frequent communications from what we used to know as “The Listening Bank” suggesting that he might like to extend his overdraft, decided to take them up on their offer.

So he trotted off to the local branch and had an interview with some bank official not much older than himself, reviewing his assets etc. The upshot was that he was not a good enough credit risk. In other words, despite the come-on advertising campaign, the answer was no.

In some ways, this was an entirely sensible decision. The son has no assets at all apart from a few guitars and his Mum and Dad, so without some investigation into us, I don’t see why he should get a bigger overdraft.

On the other hand, he came home clutching his refusal letter explaining that he had not been given more credit for two reasons. One: he hadn’t passed the bank’s own guidelines. Two: he had “failed”, as it were, a credit reference agency check. The letter helpfully suggested that he might like to see what the credit reference agencies were saying about him and gave the names of three.

Having heard stories of terrible errors creeping into these records, we decided to take a look.

The first one on the list was called Experian and it offered a free glimpse of your credit reference. But on the principle of there being no such thing as a free credit search, we went on to the next one. This was called Equifax and was selling you your details for a one-off fee of £14.95.

The result turned out to be fine. He had a “good” score. The only warning light on the report was against the “electoral roll” section. He had only been on the electoral roll at his current address for two years, which was not as long as some lenders liked. True, but he is only 20 – so he couldn’t actually have been on roll any longer, even though he has lived at his current address for the last 11 years. Maybe it might have been simpler just to take points off for being young.

But the other revealing section was the one about “how often has your credit rating been checked by a lender in the last 6 months”. The answer was: "never". So despite what they’d said in his letter, the bank hadn’t actually used a credit reference agency at all. It was just a convenient alibi for not giving him the cash.

In the end, though, his story has a happy ending (or an imprudent one, if you have a stricter attitude to credit). He went back to Oxford and into a bank branch there. They increased his overdraft in a flash.

If you have academically elite universities, it’s only predictable – indeed it's right and proper – that people debate exactly what qualifications students should have to get into them.

A hundred years ago, the headlines were all about whether ancient Greek should be a  necessary qualification to get  into Cambridge. Technically speaking it wasn’t actually a qualification you needed to be admitted in the first  place. But, if you wanted an honours degree, you had to do a preliminary exam in Greek soon after you arrived – which was pretty much the same thing in practice.

The arguments went as you might expect. The abolitionists claimed that the Greek requirement was preventing highly intelligent boys (sic) from coming to Cambridge, if they weren’t already at a select group of socially elite schools (the access argument). They also suggested that it was pretty ante-diluvian requiring a dead language when you could be getting the boys to learn a modern language, French or German (the utility argument).

On the other side, the retentionists argued that Greek was an essential part of a liberal education, and that it would disappear from schools unless Cambridge continued to require it. To this the abolitionists retorted that it wasn’t Cambridge’s job to take responsibility for the school curriculum.

The arguments went on from 1870 to 1919, when in the brave new post-war world the Greek requirement was abolished (and, true to the retentionists fears, the decline of Greek in schools had begun).

A hundred years on and the radical choice of the early twentieth century – namely French and German – are now in their turn to be toppled. Cambridge is planning no longer to require a modern language from all students across the board.

The arguments are strikingly reminiscent of those on “the Greek Question”, and both sides have a point.

On the one hand is the access argument. If only 17% of state schools now require pupils to study a foreign language after the age of 14, then you’re de facto excluding a lot of potential students if you make it a necessary condition for Cambridge entrance. (Or, to put it another way, you’ll find it hard to make your government access targets...)

This is backed up by the utility argument. Why should we care if physicists know French, since the language of science is universal English?

On the other side, is the argument that an elite university cannot be a monoglot university, and it is to challenge the very excellence of Cambridge as an institution to suggest that it should be producing graduates who know no language but their own. (That has been part of UCL’s argument for introducing the requirement that Cambridge now plans to abolish.) And you can add to that the likely prediction that Cambridge’s decision on this will further weaken the precarious position of modern languages in schools.

In my position, the safest place to be is on the fence. But deep down, as you’ve probably guessed, I am sure that this proposal cannot be right. It is the duty of a university such as Cambridge to stand up for the highest academic standards (that’s a responsibility that being a world class institution brings). If it believes that modern languages are an essential part of excellence, then it should be doing everything it can to ensure that all children have access to them (access in the real sense) – not acceding to short term quick fixes to meet some cynical government target.

As for the argument that physicists don’t need French. . .  It may be that the international  language of science is English, but do we really think that we are properly equipping our best scientists to work in the international world of Europe, China, India, etc, if they don’t even know what it is like to learn a language to a decent level of competence? Isn’t ‘networking’ something we are now supposed to train them to do?  I bet that doesn’t all happen in English.

Maybe the idea is that we are going to teach them all a foreign language when they get here. But I doubt it somehow.

When my mother was dying, she made it very clear that she didn’t want anyone wearing her clothes after she was dead. I didn’t quite understand this at the time. After all, she would have happily have given away her internal organs if they hadn’t been past their sell by date. And she happily distributed her used clothes during her lifetime. So why not after her death?

I vaguely supposed that it was something to do with the final annihilation that people going through, choosing or rejecting your clothes would seem to entail. And didn’t give it much more thought.

But last week, I came face to face with that sense of annihilation when the vultures(self included) descended to take the pickings of my old, recently dead supervisor’s books.

For many academics, books have much the same significance as clothes. They are what you use every day and you have your favourites as well as your expensive mistakes. Not to mention the carefully mended, the carelessly torn, the messily annotated.

The trouble is what happens to them when you’ve gone to the great library in the sky.

In Cambridge, the labour of disposal often falls to your college – which normally take its pick for the college library, then lets the local second hand bookseller take his pick and make a tidy profit.

John Crook’s college had made a different decision. They announced an afternoon when  college and faculty, students and staff, would be let into his old rooms to buy any book they wanted for a pound, though larger donations were welcome. All profits were to go to a fund for the college staff. It was a nice idea – designed, I guess, to ensure that the old man’s books went to those who would use and value them.

In fact it turned into a truly ghastly occasion.

The omens were bad when I walked into the college and met one of my graduate students who said that he’s just bought a copy of my PhD thesis. Now, it couldn’t have gone to a better home, and I'm truly glad he got it. But I still felt that somehow it was a personal thing between me and Crook – not something to be flogged for a quid.

It was altogether worse when I got in his rooms. They were emptier than he had left them, but his cap was still there, the desk in the same place and all the books still on the shelves – or some of them were. For the vultures were already at work, rifling through them section by section, picking out some, casually rejecting others. A few people had piles numbering what looked like hundreds of volumes.

Couldn't they have put the books on tables? Or just somewhere else? It seemed like theft taking them from the shelves where some of them have spent the last 50 years.

The worst moment was when I heard one student bibliophile loudly bark: “Is it a presentation copy?” I could have thumped the boy. I wanted to say, “That book was given to him by a friend, who wrote in it for him …and he then used it. It isn’t a commodity which will enhance your collection because its got an author’s signature in it.” But what was the point? We were all there sniffing out the bargains, a bit like the first day of the sales.

Mum was right about her clothes, I thought.

Another new site to visit opens in Rome this week. It’s four rooms of the House of the first Emperor Augustus on the Palatine hill, never on show to the public before. Some parts of this building have opened from time to time, but those bits which you might have seen in the past  are currently closed. The plan is that in due course, when conservation has finished, they will open again to join this new section.

You’ll have to pay (11 euros), to cover entrance to this and  the whole of the Forum area. In fact, there’s been a bit of a sleight of hand here. For the last few years entrance to the Roman Forum has been free – one of the few major Roman sites in Italy making no charge at all. This ‘combined’ 11 euro ticket uses the new display of these four painted rooms to conceal the fact that you’re now being charged for the Forum too.

But the material you can see is so good that its hard to complain about the price. For what you’re walking into is part of the ‘modest house’ of the first emperor.

Of course modesty comes at various levels.

This is pretty lavish modesty, with exquisite wall-painting in the so-called Second Style of Roman painting. But ancient authors were always struck by the fact that, unlike later emperors, Augustus always lived in a ‘house’ rather than a palace. Or rather he lived in a couple of linked houses on the Palatine, now known conventionally as the ‘House of Augustus’ and the ‘House of Livia’ (there’s actually no reason to suppose that he lived in one and the wife in another, frosty as their marriage may have been). It wasn’t until his successor Tiberius that something that was recognisably a palace appeared on the Palatine (the hill then giving its name to the building).

The point for ancient writers was that Augustus lived in an ‘ordinary’ style of house (and it was not even new, part of it it had once belonged to the orator Hortensius). This, of course, fitted with his ‘first amongst equals’ image. And the imperial spin doctors were hard at work staging the ancient equivalent of photo opportunities to rub the message home. On occasion, for example, Livia was to be glimpsed sitting in the house at her loom, in an old-fashioned Roman way –even though she can hardly have weaved for real any more often than Cherie Blair peels the potatoes.

But there was another side to Augustus’ house, which archaeology only partly reveals. If it was in one respect just an ‘ordinary’ up-market dwelling, in other respects it was close to divine, literally. For it somehow linked directly to Augustus’ new temple of Apollo – so that the inside of the temple could be used by him as a ‘palatial’ reception area. As usual Augustus was having it both ways – blazoning the fact that he was living as an ‘ordinary’ aristocrat, while at the same time sharing house room with the god Apollo.

Thinking carefully about his living arrangements give you a good insight into the ambivalences of Augustus’ rule.

If you want a bit more of Beard on ancient housing, I had a piece on the Roman property market in yesterday’s Sunday Times (it's at the bottom of the main article in this link). This also involved translating bits of modern estate agents jargon (des res; location, location, location; all mod cons etc) into Latin. This kind of thing always takes much longer than you think. But I was quite tickled by some of the results, partly borrowed (I admit) from Pliny and Statius.

I was particularly chuffed with ‘nil ibi plebeium’ for ‘up and coming area’ – it’s Statius (Silvae 1, 5)describing the swanky property of an ex-slave, so hits the nail on the head I think. See what you think of the rest.