AWOL in Washington

I do not have time before I give my last paper and get to the airport for my homeward flight to write a blog. But given that last week I heard that my first book had been banned from a Colorado State prison, and that I was just leaving the UK for Washington D.C.,   I thought I should reassure people that I am safe and have not been arrested. 

I do have to get through security at the airport, but promise to  make sure I am not carrying any books which have unusual alphabets or advocate gang membership. 

I have been recuperating from nine months of fighting at RHUL during an excellent week conducting intensive research into brands of beer called after Founding Fathers (Samuel  Adams is my favourite). 

On Monday I went to the theatre where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, and watched a musical called 1776 in which Thomas Jefferson warbled his unlikely way through the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence.  

Yesterday I went to the movies to see Ralph Fiennes as Coriolanus, and finally realised what all the fuss is about Gerard Butler.  He makes the most convincing Volscian in art since Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.

Living in Antium with this Aufidius could actually have been fun. I want to be a Volscian.  Butler has obviously in the past been cast well below his thespian weight. He should drop the war porn (as in 300) and romcoms (as in Jennifer Aniston), let alone the Lloyd-Webber (as in Phantom of the Opera). Roman republican history via Shakespeare, delivered scathingly in a Glaswegian accent, is obviously his true metier. This is my idea of fun.

On Banned Books

This week, besides moving the academic books I own from Royal Holloway to my new office at King’s College, London, I discovered that the first book I wrote myself has been censored in a Colorado gaol. One of my PhD students, Katie Billotte, sent a copy of Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (1989) to a pen-pal of hers currently detained in a Colorado gaol.  

Alex Perez is a phenomenally committed self-educator. He was convicted at 18 for a drug-and-gang-related murder. But he acquired his taste for reading, especially Sophocles and Aquinas, while spending SEVEN YEARS IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, appealing (in the end successfully) against an accusation that he committed another murder inside. 

Crowley Correctional Facility, Colorado

But my sedate little monograph, an Oxford University thesis supervised by the extraordinarily conservative Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, was sent back to Katie from the Wardens's Office at Crowley Correctional Facility, with the following letter:

'We are returning to you this shipment made to Inmate #90704 currently held in the Colorado Department of Corrections. We have determined that Inventing the Barbarians by Edith Hall constitutes contraband under the State of Colorado's Revised Statute. It has been determined by the wardens of this facility that the primary or secondary purpose of the author was to compromise the good order and efficient operation of a facility under the jurisdiction of the Colorado Department of Corrections. Please note that any further attempts to introduce this item into any facility currently operated by the Colorado Department of Corrections will be referred to the Office of the Attorney General.' 

Katie has since phoned Crowley Correctional Facility, and has been told they are concerned that her PhD supervisor advocates gang membership. My answer to this would be that it depends entirely on what sort of gang. 

I would certainly join a gang which existed solely in order to defend people’s rights to educate themselves when incarcerated and read the great works produced by the human brain in e.g. ancient Greece and Rome. After all, Socrates read Aesop in gaol; Nelson Mandela read Antigone, as celebrated in Athol Fugard's anti-apartheid play The Island.

One such gang, to which we can all send our spare books or those we think might be useful for prisoners, can be found mustering (or whatever gangs do) at http://booksthroughbars.org/. 

It is probably unwise of me to write this blog the night before I attempt to enter the USA at an airport in Washington DC, especially since a few years ago I was given a very hard time by Immigration Services at Newark Airport, New Jersey. 

My copy of the Odyssey in Greek was misidentifed by a very young man with a very large gun as a subversive text in Arabic. He did back off, however, when I told him the story of the Cyclops and he recognised a character from X-Men. The Odyssey then escaped the label of contraband, even if the vastly inferior Inventing the Barbarian now hasn't.

On Fig-Leaves and Victory

Amalgamated Society of Tailors, Belfast banner

The news that there will be no lost posts  in Classics at Royal Holloway arrived on my phone in Belfast on Friday, as I was looking at this brilliant banner. The wit of the tailors’ union in that city made me laugh out loud. If you are going to make a public statement of pride in your needlecraft, you could have chosen any famous garment in history—Joseph’s coloured coat or Sir Walter Raleigh’s cloak.  

But what better than a discomfited sub-Cranachian Adam and Eve, set in a fine fabric of Irish green, trying as in Genesis 3.7 to sew fig-leaves together for an improvised loincloth? The underlying message of this image is not only funny but really quite subversive, especially for a civic community identified with fundamentalist bible-thumping. 

Welsh version in honour Merv the Swerv

Wit (not usually associated with the Left) can be a wonderful weapon in politics. This has been shown throughout the campaign not only by our speakers at the event on September 16 (Natalie Haynes and Tom Holland in particular) but by the extraordinary work of the University and College Union branch at Royal Holloway, as well as of SURHUL, the students’ Union.  

I am thinking particularly of the impromptu country walk and photo-shoot organised by the UCU the day of the November 2011 Council Meeting, and the Thoughts of Chairman Paul posted in Management Corridor during the occupation (e.g. when asked whether he thought he was worth his enormous salary, he showed how out of touch he was with the workload of his academic staff by responding, 'I work hard. I am sometimes here until 7.00 pm').

Early in the campaign a secret supporter, a former Principal of a college of London University, emailed me wise advice: once the management is on the retreat, you must make absolutely sure that you 'allow them a fig-leaf' to cover their embarrassment when it has become publicly obvious that their strategy was misjudged.  Otherwise they may turn REALLY nasty.

The metaphor of the fig-leaf as representing the transparently meretricious defence argument adopted by those who know they have no real case was used in English as early as the turbulent year of 1648, when the Presbyterian and anti-Parliamentarian minister William Jenkyn, a ‘sententious, elegant preacher’, excoriated an opponent for making ‘a meere Figg-leafe defence.’

RHUL Management have certainly needed a fig-leaf.  Their assault on Classics is  internationally known to have cost a lot of money, traumatised staff, wrecked internal relationships, and damaged this year’s  ‘Student Experience’ and possibly applications. It has also made it difficult for staff to conduct the research needed in time for the Research Excellence Framework assessment. It has lost the college a Classics Professor who has published a lot of books in the relevant REF years, along  with seven PhD students in ancient drama (almost the entire Research cluster in that field).

Acharnians in the 1880s

For several weeks now, the Management’s much-needed fig-leaf had been the remaining threat of a single possible redundancy in 2014.  But this week a new, shinier fig-leaf transpired in the form of the offer made to Dr Jari Pakkanen in Classics, our distinguished Greek archaeologist, who is to be Director of the Finnish Institute at Athens for two to four years and therefore have his salary paid temporarily by another body.  Layzell and Partners plc have applied this fig-leaf with almost indecent haste, even guaranteeing Jari his post when he returns.They have decided to attack as 'unprofitable' the college bookshop and nursery (yes, unbelievable, I know) instead.

But I would like to defend the humble fig-leaf. In Turkey they make their dolmades with fig-leaves rather than vine-leaves. Stuffed fig-leaf is one of the oldest ancient Greek recipes we possess, a dish called thrion (eggs, flour, honey and cheese baked in a wrapping of fig-leaf), mentioned in Aristophanes’ Acharnians in 425 BCE, a comedy celebrating the triumph of humane values over crazy aggressors and profiteers.  I am about to go and cook thrion for breakfast to celebrate our victory. Yum.

On Infamy

Julia Domna of Homs and husband

Today (Saturday March 3^rd) the Syrian army has renewed its onslaught onto the rebel city of Homs, known to classicists by its ancient name, Emesa.  One famous Emesan was Julia Domna, the philosopher  whose marriage to Septimius Severus eventually made her Empress of Rome. Another was Heliodorus, author of the longest and most flamboyantly written of all the extant ancient Greek novels, the Ethiopian Story. Emesa made history again when the decapitated head of John the Baptist was miraculously rediscovered at a nearby monastery in the year 452.

But today bombs and shells are thundering down onto the terrified people of the south-western Homs suburb of Baba Amr. After a siege which lasted nearly four weeks, the government has sanctioned indiscriminate reprisals. Troops have been setting fire to houses with people in them. There are reports of every male over fourteen being rounded up, small children shot dead, torture, rape and public beheadings. 

It makes it seem even worse that Bashar al-Assad, the President of Syria with the petulant mouth and joyless eyes, was trained in a caring profession as a doctor. I wonder how his (publicly loyal) wife Asma really feels: although she was raised in Britain (she studied at King’s College London and worked as an investment banker) her own parents come from Homs.

Black Rock of Emesa/Homs

If al-Assad had studied history rather than medicine, he would be more careful what he did to Homs. Its people are tough. Under the Romans, the ancient Emesans succeeded in exporting their indigenous Syrian cult of the Sun, which centred on a sacred black rock (probably a meteorite). Subsequently, Homs has survived battering by countless brutes and tyrants. 

In the mid-eighth century, it held out for months when besieged by the Damascene ruler Murwan II.  It revolted continuously against the Baghdad-based Abassids, who sent innumerable punitive expeditions during the ninth. In the tenth, its people were terrorised, raped and slaughtered by the Byzantines. It resisted the Frankish First Crusaders, and then the Damascene Nur ad-Din in 1149. It survived endless Bedouin assaults between 1600 and 1800 under Ottoman rule. Homs rose up violently against Egyptian domination in 1839. 

Elagabalus

But al-Assad should also remember what happened to a tyrant whose family actually came from the rebel city. The juvenile Roman Emperor Elagabalus, the great-nephew of Julia Domna, also had a petulant mouth and joyless eyes. He survived as emperor for less than four years between 218 and 222. In that time he outraged both the Senate and the People, imposed unpopular religious ceremonies, devalued the currency, appointed his cronies to fabulously lucrative high offices, flaunted a decadent lifestyle and brutally suppressed opposition. 

But he was assassinated by disaffected soldiers. His corpse was decapitated, stripped, dragged across the city, and thrown into the river. He had well deserved what Edward Gibbon in the sixth chapter of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire called his reputation for ‘inexpressible infamy’.

The people of Homs are amongst the poorest in Syria and have been subjected to some of the worst of the regime’s persecutions. Homs has become a magnet for defectors from the Syrian Armed Forces who have transferred their allegiance to the Free Syria Army. They may be temporarily in retreat but they will not give up. I very much doubt if al-Assad will last another four years. Inexpressible infamy is already his.

BEWARE THE WRATH OF THE GODDESS

Stuck for an hour at Twickenham railway station I studied the advertisements. The two largest both use classical imagery to promote companies which can turn you into a millionaire without manufacturing anything, doing anything useful, or contributing anything whatsoever to the human project/life on planet Earth. 

If you choose Schroder Investments Limited, you are invited to see yourself as hiring a Roman mercenary soldier who will excel in ‘defending your income’. But if you feel financially predatory rather than defensive, then you choose ‘ARTEMIS the PROFIT HUNTER’, aka Artemis Fund Managers Limited and Artemis Investment Management LLP.

In a dazzlingly offensive and cynical advertising campaign, which has won prizes for the agency which designed it (offputtingly called Libertine of Soho), ARTEMIS encourages the investor to see himself (and ‘he’ is emphatically male) as a neo-colonial white man stalking the globe. He is armed with guns and rifles and disgorges petrol fumes from old-fashioned aeroplanes, in blind pursuit of defenceless wildlife—‘profits’ portrayed as living but terrified birds and animals. 

The campaign pointedly puts two fingers up at ‘bleeding heart’ capitalists. It laughs at those who worry about the third world debt crisis or have sentimental greenish tendencies, such as criticising the use of non-sustainable fossil fuels or wanting to protect endangered species. 

This is not the sort of company which cares about being seen to be politically correct: enterprises in which it has invested include the Nigerian-dictatorship-supporters at Royal Dutch Shell, Wal-Mart (child labour in the Honduras and largest gun retailer in the USA), and GlaxoSmithKline (which sued the South African Government for trying to supply AIDS victims with affordable medicine). Not to mention Coca-Cola, against which US United Steelworkers filed a lawsuit as they have reason to think its franchised bottle plant in Colombia hires  paramilitaries to suppress union activities.

 

Yet ARTEMIS THE PROFIT HUNTER has managed to insinuate its unsavoury ideology into primary schools. Seven-year-olds are encouraged to enter a competition in which they draw or paint a cute, enterprising Profit Hunter about to slaughter a Profit--a small vulnerable zoological specimen which is obviously Asking For it. You can see the results at  http://www.artemisonline.co.uk/jisa-gallery. How very wholesome. There is clearly no more use for drawing Robin Hood about to steal from the rich to give to the poor, who was the sort of hero I was asked to admire and draw at the age of seven during my own childhood (admittedly in Nottingham).

I do have a warning for William Littlewood, legendary fund manager at ARTEMIS who previously made a 20m fortune when scarcely out of nappies at JUPITER Investments. At Bristol University he did not study Classics, but Economics, which explains why he so ignorantly risked incurring the disfavour of a mighty goddess when he named his company. 

HEROIC CASH SCAVENGER

The goddess Artemis protects the young, the weak, the defenceless, the female, wild animals, and the unsullied purity of the unploughed planet from predatory aggressors.  In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon she gets very angry because two imperial eagles kill a pregnant hare, and her wrath leads directly to the death of the human monarch, Agamemnon, symbolised by the eagles. He is murdered in a bath.

Other fates suffered by the villains who arrogantly rape the land and creatures protected by Artemis include being blinded, gored to death by wild boars, bitten by a scorpion, torn to pieces by your own dogs, and getting the plague. Littlewood may even be turned into a bear or (heaven forfend)  a girl, the fate that befell the Cretan Sipriotes when he tried to rape the Mistress of Wild Animals. CAVEAT VENATOR.

On Visions and Petitions

Opaque Oracles

Last Monday, Principal Paul Layzell published an article in The Guardian in which he lamented ‘the absence of a coherent government vision’ for Higher Education. If my reading of his bland prose is correct, he thinks that competition between universities is detrimental to the national good:  ‘we do best as a sector, with shared goals, rather than as individual institutions looking out for ourselves’. Layzell promises that he and his fellow Vice-Chancellors, given ‘a sense of direction, and leadership from government’, could ‘do so much more.’

The opacity of this pronouncement is worthy of the Delphic oracle.  The phrase ‘we could do so much more’ sends chilling tingles down my spine. It makes me feel like the sacrificial animal that was made to tremble before the Pythian priestess would mount the tripod and reveal Apollo’s opinion. So much more what? Even more assiduously turning our universities into ‘for-profit education providers’? Doing even more deals with shady corporations and hiring even more professional Managers to swell the overheads extracted from the labour of the people doing the teaching? Is Layzell asking for more emphatic governmental endorsement of commerce’s carpet-bagging of our intellectual heritage?

Perhaps my cynicism is unjustified. Another way to read Principal Layzell’s indistinct utterance, ringing out from his tripod in the oracular shrine concealed beneath Royal Holloway’s Senior Management Wing, is as evidence that he has undergone an extraordinary conversion. Perhaps he now has really seen that abandoning Higher Education to the free market amounts to cultural vandalism. 

Paul sees the light

If, like his namesake the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus, Layzell has indeed seen an edifying vision and been suddenly converted, he might consider the alternative to trying to redirect towards the government, and away from managers including himself, the blame for the recent damage done to the collective morale at Royal Holloway. 

The alternative is this. Why doesn’t he use his prominent position to begin an e-petition which, if it receives 100,000 signatures, will make the proposal eligible to be debated in the House of Commons. He could propose, for example, that ‘Higher Education and University Research need to be planned and funded by the State’.  

I can even save him time finding the website: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/. I am convinced that this proposal would attract more signatures than most of the e-petitions on Education listed there, which include making sports bras compulsory in schools. Although, come to think of it, I would much enjoy hearing that debate. I think we need to hear whether Nick Clegg could maintain a consistent position.

The Anglican, the Atheist, and the Local Councillor

As the proposed redundancies in Classics at Royal Holloway tumble almost daily towards the zero mark, thus underlining the total pointlessness of the wounds inflicted on Royal Holloway’s collective psyche over the last seven months, it's time to take stock and offer thanks. Three staunch defenders of the previously beleaguered department particularly deserve our thanks this week. 

The Right Revd. John Saxbee

Allies can appear suddenly in unexpected guises, and on Wednesday night it was the turn of the distinguished Anglican  John Saxbee, former Bishop of Lincoln and one of the 26 Lords Spiritual in the UK Upper House. Saxbee was the Principal Paul Layzell’s guest at Royal Holloway Formal Hall. One of a large group of Classics undergraduates in attendance, finalist Matthew Hyder, gave me this account of the dinner:

‘During the course of a truly brilliant speech the Bishop struck a blow for the Save Classics group whilst recounting a story of his school days. He was telling us how he had been put in the bottom class of his school (2D) and drew an interesting parallel. “2D Latin class was the lowest of the low, sort of how Royal Holloway would have been if they had gotten rid of Classics.” This was met with almost incredulous silence, then a very well deserved round of applause whilst the Principal looked like a man unsure how to react.’ 

Lane Fox with Oliver Stone shooting Alexander

Just to show that Classical culture transcends all religious and spiritual divides, on Thursday the avowed Atheist, horseman, gardener and ancient historian Robin Lane Fox braved the M25 from Oxford to deliver a dazzling performance as the college’s annual Dabis Lecturer, a custom founded over a century ago in memory of Thérèse Dabis, one of the first Classics teachers at Royal Holloway. 

Comparing the role of Pericles, leader of Athens, with that of a modern vice-chancellor, Lane Fox proposed that what would have made Pericles a great leader anywhere and any time, including Egham in 2011, was not his charisma, nor that he habitually wore his helmet in public, nor even that he prized intelligence and stickability in women. It was his understanding of the importance of long-term planning, intensive consultation of all the citizens, a rigorous annual public scrutiny of his own performance, and vision of a beautiful, free community to which everyone wanted to give allegiance because it prized selflessness and the life of the mind. Quite.

Hugh Meares

The third hero of the week is Runnymede Conservative Councillor Hugh Meares, who sits on the College Council. He has supported Classics’ case since last September, when he turned up at the event Celebrating Classics at the Friends Meeting House at Euston, and listened to our arguments. On October 5^th, he bravely put the case for Periclean values to the College Council, and has been hugely instrumental ever since in the department’s defence. As a graduate in the History and Philosophy of Science, Meares understands why ancient wisdom matters. I just want heartfelt thanks to all three gentlemen--the Anglican, the Atheist and the Runnymede Councillor--down on the public record.