How to Conceal a Female Scholar; or, the Invisible Classicist of Cardiff

Kathleen Freeman, the Laughter of the Lecturer

Just how good does a female scholar have to be? I am ashamed of my complicity in the under-estimation of an outstanding ‘foremother’ in my field just because I internalised some disparagement of her I heard as an undergraduate.

Like every other student, I used to hide my copy of Kathleen Freeman’s Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (1948) under the desk during lectures.  Without it we could not understand what Thales, Parmenides, Zeno and Democritus had said, the prescribed text being the terrifying multi-volume German edition of the Greek by Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz. This is a legendary work of scholarship but bristles with apparatuses, cross-references and abbreviations. It baffles anglophone teenagers from  provincial high schools. But Freeman’s user-friendly, translation into well-sprung English, with lucid discussions, was inspirational. It was also explicitly forbidden as ‘unreliable’ by the official bibliography. (It is not.)

A Version for children of her work on Solon

I have now researched the original sources of all the sexist (and envious) obloquy she attracted. The review by ‘heavyweight’ Hellenist Friedrich Solmsen sounded the first notes of warning that someone without a Y chromosome had dared to essay the Pre-Socratics. 

Solmsen grudgingly admits that the Ancilla will have ‘a certain usefulness’ and concludes that it is 'clear, straightforward, and also - generally – accurate’.  But in between, his vocabulary reads like a handbook called How To Imply a Dazzling Female Scholar is Inadequate Without Actually Saying So. Her translations are ‘dangerous’, ‘misleading’, ‘stultified,’ ‘over-emphatic’, ‘vague’ and ‘inappropriate’. I could go on.

The daughter of a travelling salesman from Birmingham, Freeman studied Classics at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire. She was appointed Lecturer in Greek in 1919 and never left Cardiff.  In 1926 she published The Work and Life of Solon (still essential reading). It was the first of many erudite and vivid books on a breathtaking range of classical topics and authors, philosophical, historical, legal, rhetorical and literary. She published on Jane Austen and Dylan Thomas. She also knocked off, under the pseuodym of Mary Fitt, several detective novels. 

Freeman ploughed her own furrow. She lived with her girl-friend, a G.P. She never got promoted or an honorary doctorate except for one for fiction. She never won any classical honours, fellowship, memberships of academies, prizes, or distinctions. She was never invited to give any prestigious lectures. Instead she worked hard for the Cardiff Naturalists’ Society, the Save the Children Fund and the National Council of Women.  She lectured to miners and to soldiers. We await the biography of her by another excellent female classicist, Eleanor Irwin.

Many reviewers, even while patronising her, wondered why Freeman had called her book an Ancilla, the Latin for ‘a little handmaid’. I think that Freeman was having a jolly good laugh at them. We know she was hilarious because of the portrait of a Latin Professor in her first novel, Martin Hanner. She had used her excellent brain to make the Pre-Socratics intelligible and accessible to every man and woman in the English-speaking world. But of course she was not going to get uppity. She was just a little handmaid to the Solmsens after all.

Niobe, all tears in Soma

Soma is in the province of Manisa, in ancient times called Magnesia. Drive south for an hour from the mine where so many lost their lives last week and you will come to the province's capital, Manisa City, and the mountains of Spil, ancient Sipylus. It seems horribly appropriate that on Spil you can find the rocky spur formed by Niobe herself, the ancient mother who lost every single one of her grown-up children in a single day. She was turned into rock, her tears forming streams running from the rock face, so she could lament her dead children in perpetuity. “Niobe, all tears” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet calls her.

"Niobe, all tears" in Manisa (Magnesia)

There have been mines in north-west Turkey for millennia: its gold and silver were famous under the kings of ancient Lydia, including the plutocrat Croesus, before anyone began extracting coal. Minted coins were invented there. And people have been dying down mines all over the world ever since, simply because they have no other source of income and nobody has taken proper care of their safety. 

Even the de Re metallica of Georgius Agricola (a.k.a. Georg Bauer), the foundational Renaissance treatise in promotion of mining (1556—an elegant Latin essay which shows an astonishing grasp of every piece of classical evidence on the industry), conceded that mining was impossibly dangerous: “miners are sometimes killed by the pestilential air which they breathe; sometimes their lungs rot away; sometimes the men perish by being crushed in masses of rock; sometimes, falling from the ladders into the shafts, they break their arms, legs, or necks.”  

I happened to spend the week before the Soma catastrophe researching the history of British miners. Every pit’s history contains grim documents showing how miners have always died underground in droves. Deep-shaft miners know that every day they go to work they may never see the sun again. After every shift, when they return home, they feel like dust-encrusted revenants. 

The famous authors who evoke the reality of mine labour—Zola in Germinal, D.H. Lawrence in The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd—all had dead miners in their immediate family or circle. Two British miners whose interest in the Greeks and Romans has led me to excavate their personal careers—the Yorkshire painter Gilbert Daykin and a young Thucydides enthusiast in 1920s Northumbria—both died in underground accidents. The tragic story endlessly repeats.

So on Sipylus in Turkey, a little south of Soma mine, Niobe weeps for all the world’s unnecessarily dead sons and daughters (and it is beginning to emerge that women miners as well as men died in Soma).  It would be good to think that one day Niobe could stop weeping—that all people on the planet who do dangerous, difficult and dirty work can receive the safety conditions, respect and high pay that they have always deserved. Call me a naive optimist or even a Bolshevik if you like.