Roman Discipline and Dutch Enlightenment

Rewarding your child for initiative, Roman-style

You are an artist commissioned by your nation’s admirals to paint a picture on a classical theme suitable for the navy’s headquarters. Jason steering the Argo? The Athenian fleet winning the battle of Salamis? The battle of Actium? No way--at least not if you were Rembrandt’s student Ferdinand Bol in 1669. 

Bol opted for one of the worryingly numerous Roman fathers who had their own children executed. Titus Manlius Torquatus had his son beheaded for breaching military discipline by disobeying his father’s order that no officer should engage the enemy.  The fact that he had won a glorious victory did not help Manlius Junior in the slightest. Bol captures the horror of the decapitation in the faces of the onlookers. He revels in the pallor of the dead man’s face and the frontal gore of his neck stump. Even the horse is terrified.

The idea of the picture was to inculcate in 17^th-century Dutch seamen a fear of the reprisals they would suffer for the slightest act of disobedience. Mutinies and disorder were incessant problems amongst the impoverished and often destitute men who served aboard the ships which ran the Dutch maritime empire. Captains needed—and utilized—barbarous punishments in order to try to maintain discipline, some of which make being beheaded look almost humane.

Water-boarding, baroque-style

The authorized punishments for mutiny or homosexuality included, besides the death-sentence, nailing the culprit’s hand to the yardarm, flogging with up to five hundred lashes, and confinement in irons on a diet of water. Most feared of all was ‘keel-hauling’, in which the culprit was stripped and dragged all the way under the ship from one side to another, to experience near- drowning. All who were keel-hauled suffered not only the baroque equivalent of water-boarding but lacerations of their flesh from barnacles which left permanent scars. The execution of the Roman thus underscored the  simple, acute form of class conflict and its violent solution which underlay the financial success of the Dutch maritime miracle.

How do I know this? Why can I reproduce a high-resolution copy of Bol’s painting free of charge on the website of my new project Classics and Class? Because the marvellous Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has taken the momentous step of allowing absolutely free-of-charge use of its entire digitized collection by anyone who wants. They even allow you to edit the image and stick it on your T-shirt. 

Taco Dibbits says art is for everyone!

One of the heroes behind this open-access decision is Taco Dibbits, curator of 17th-century art at the Rijksmuseum, who has stated, in music to my ears, “We’re a public institution, and so the art and objects we have are, in a way, everyone’s property.” YES! 

I wish every museum and gallery (let alone fatcat Dutch publishing houses like Elsevier) would take such an enlightened line. I have never recovered from being asked to pay the Cleveland Museum of Art $700 for rights to reproduce a single photo of an ancient Greek pot. At the time it was more than my net monthly income. The Dutch policy will also certainly pay off for the both the museum and the national economy by creating a website that everyone will want to visit.

For myself I foresee several happy hours gazing at the Rijksmuseum’s online gallery, since its enticing categories including ‘immoral women’, ‘unicorns’ and ‘monkeys’. There are also dozens more classical images. Perhaps one of them can make a less off-putting T-shirt than Bol’s terrifying evocation of Roman fatherhood. 

My current favourite is this smiling Artemis/Diana with pet dogs by Jacob Matham (1602). Thank you, Taco and your colleagues, for this purest form of online joy.

Why Academics aren't Retrainable

TV cop Taggart--Professional, loyal & funny: my kinda colleague

One result of turning British universities into businesses has been the inundation of work email boxes with offers of expensive courses. These will retrain me to ‘make my employing Education Provider more competitive!!’  The most importunate outfit is ACM training, whose clients include Grampian Police and Virgin Balloon Flights. ACM's website says it is the 'sister company' of ACP Television, proud maker of a documentary called 'The World’s Most Successful Madam’, starring the 'head of a lucrative European escort agency and sex empire.’

Given their distinguished pedigree, I am obviously tempted by ACM's course CRISIS COMMUNICATION. If my new Vice-Chancellor orders the immediate closure of all unprofitable teaching in the Humanities, attending this course will enable me to 'exhibit behaviours that illustrate credibility.' I want to find out what these behaviours are--presumably more than yelling 'YOU GOTTA BELIEVE ME' through a megaphone.

Stockbrokers' Summit

I considered ACM's WRITING FOR BUSINESS, which is, after all, what creating a handout on ancient Greek religion for my ‘customers’ now entails.  Explaining the Delphic Oracle could now help Define My Portfolio of Products!  I long to be partnered with a sardonic Scottish detective from the Grampians on the course, having always had a soft spot for Taggart. I have unfortunately been put off by discovering that my designated ACM tutor calls himself neither ‘teacher’ nor ‘coach’ but a ‘WORKSHOP FACILITATOR.’ If he needs two words where I use one I am not convinced he has important insights into writing.

The course I do intend to sign up for is DEALING WITH DIFFICULT PEOPLE, which costs ‘from £119’. I previously attended a course with this title as a businesswoman in 1983. The pedagogical method consisted of providing a ‘workshop facilitator’ who was himself so ‘difficult’ (halitosis, invader of female body space, incessant interrupter of interlocutors) that you were supposed to infer all your new techniques from figuring out how many times your behaviour could 'exhibit credibility' if you visited the loo to escape from him.

In Academia, anyway, all colleagues are BY DEFINITION ‘difficult’. They are of course trained in belligerent discourse (i.e. in opposing your arguments and questioning your assumptions etc.) But most (myself included) are just the dysfunctional schoolchildren who could not make the transition from the classroom to the Real World. Levels of personal hygiene, humour, understanding of the importance of collective morale, and emotional intelligence are nowhere so low as amongst academics.

Underachievers at Femininity swot

I decided to become frightfully good at academic subjects out of desperation. I could not achieve in any other dimensions of female excellence, being in adolescence both ugly and bad at sport. I was a failure at Domestic Science. At Nottingham Girls' High School, mine was the only Victoria Sponge that did not rise. I did not realize until too late that one survival option was to acquire a wealthy husband who could hire a cook, and as a teenager stupidly rejected at least two suitors with money in favour of a ‘logistics operative’ (lorry driver). I suspect that many other academics ‘chose’ their career ladder because they, too, were incapable of climbing any other.

Only in academia is it tolerated for a colleague to depress the hell out of everybody else in the workplace by weeping EVERY DAY FOR SIX YEARS because an elderly relative is (still) dying and thus get let off half her workload. Only in academia can videos be posted, uncensored, on an ‘outreach’ website about ancient history designed to ATTRACT applicants to a university, of a lecturer  with dandruff scratching his private parts absent-mindedly. Only in academia can a well-off Professor send death threats to a longstanding friend and colleague who has beaten them in a competition for a travel grant of under £100. I am of course naming no names, but suspect that ACM Training, however worldly-wise they fancy themselves, are not really ready for the Difficult People of Academia just yet.

The Other Ruler of Syria

Bring Back Hellenised Syrian Multiculturalism!

As this week the world watched  Bashar al-Assad dig his country into an ever deeper hole, I found myself celebrating a more appealing ruler of Syria on BBC Radio 4’s academic chat-show In Our Time. But we ran out of time, so please excuse me if I add the two points I really wanted to make.

Zenobia, who led the attempt of Syria to get the eastern part of the Roman Empire to break away between 267 and 272 AD, was a model of intercultural tolerance. She was herself probably of mixed Arab and Macedonian ancestry, but her city worshipped hybrid gods from west and east and at her court she welcomed thinkers from every intellectual tradition. 

 

More appealing than Al-Assad?

She protected Paul of Samosata, a working-class boy who had grown up to be an independent-minded Christian bishop (he heretically thought Jesus was mortal). She learned rhetoric from Cassius Longinus of Emesa (Homs), a brilliant Platonist, lover of liberty, and possibly the Jewish author of the dissertation On the Sublime still fundamental to literary criticism. She certainly helped some other Jews get asylum.

In European art and literature, Zenobia has predictably been reduced to an erotic figure over whose affections Persian and Roman male rulers struggled. The fact that one ancient source said she was led in chains through the streets of Rome by the Emperor Aurelian got the neoclassical and Victorian imagination over-heated. But to many Arabs, especially women, she is a heroine—a pre-Islamic role model who rode camels, read philosophy and ran an empire as well as being a good mother.  There is a charming Lebanese musical about Zenobia on youtube.

Mustafa Tlass

I am a bit disconcerted to find that my admiration for Zenobia is even shared by the Syrian former Defence Minister and deputy Prime Minister, General Mustafa Tlass, a tycoon who wrote a biography about her as national heroine in 2000. That was before al-Assad booted him out and he went to live in Paris. Who says ancient history doesn’t meet the modern world?

Speaking of which, the Researcher on the project Classics and Class has persuaded me to take Twitter seriously. I have always believed I was temperamentally unsuited to it. I like using longer prose periods than fit into a tweeting box and often get tired and emotional. I have actually had a twitter account under the name of an obscure avatar for some time, but couldn’t even work it. So just to prove I’m no Luddite, even though I am now tempted to call myself @ZenobiaAugusta, I’m about to start tweeting more sedately as @edithmayhall  as soon as I can locate this thing my family tell me is called an app.