All in a Don's Day (25 page)

PL

Actually PL, it wasn′t China that was uppermost in my mind … it was more the neighbours of ′Greece′ and ′Rome′ around the Mediterranean … Egypt, Lycia, Macedon.

MARY BEARD

Can I say without offence, Professor Beard, that you have, for me, just now entered Dante′s Lower than Lowest Circle of Hell, which
is populated by Those Who Set Wide-Ranging Essay Topics With A Minuscule Word Limit.

Low word-limits are appropriate for limited topics only.

ANNA

I′m tempted to suggest that ′Did the Trojan War Actually Happen?′ could be satisfactorily answered in three words (plus a footnote or two, and bibliography, I suppose): ′Yes. So what?′

RICHARD

Did the Trojan War actually happen? Yes, it all started with an apple.

ANTHONY ALCOCK

Unde malum? A malo.

OLIVER NICHOLSON

de malo bonus est iocus hic quem scripsit Oliver

nam malus peperit mala tulitque mala.

Prose translation for the non-Latinists: ′This joke about the apple,

that Oliver wrote, is a good one, for the apple tree produced

apples and brought evils.′

[It′s a pun on ′malum′ = evil and ′malum′ = apple]

MICHAEL BULLEY

Bold and malicious, a Golden Delicious.

ANTHONY ALCOCK

About essay-writing. When I was in year 3, I moaned to my Greek History tutor that I no longer knew what I was doing when I wrote
an essay. He said, ′Mr Potts, if you can write an essay by the time you leave this place, we shall consider your education to have been a success.′

It occurs to me that Ludwig Wittgenstein never wrote an essay in his life. Why is it so important to be able to do so?

PAUL POTTS

28 October 2011

I have to confess that I have always thought it was to the great good fortune of the female members of the royal family that they didn't have to face the awful prospect of the throne, unless they were unusually deficient in the brother department. Just occasionally discrimination can work, inadvertently, to our favour.

For me, it's rather like not being able to go to Mount Athos. Of course, I tend to protest publicly that it is ‘men-only', but secretly I feel a twinge of relief that I don't have to go there, or have a view on the place, or join in those dreary conversations about old Father Demetrios … and so forth.

But since getting called twice by radio journalists in the last 24 hours to say something about changing the Act of Settlement etc., and about girls getting an equal chance to get to be monarch as men, I've found I have rather stronger views.

For a start, what
is
the point with tinkering with the monarchy – as if a tiny bit of political correctness could bring it up to date? You don't make a medieval/Victorian institution ‘fair' by rearranging the deckchairs like this. The whole institution is unfair, like it or lump it. That I think was more or less Alexander Chancellor's view in the paper this morning. ‘The daughters of monarchs are obviously as qualified (or unqualified) to succeed them as their sons, but the only way to
deal with something as illogical as hereditary monarchy is to abolish it or accept it in all its weirdness.'

In fact, I suspect that in 200 years' time, we'll look back to this reform as the beginning of the end of the whole institution – as its much more serious inequities, its mad fantasies, get seen in even more clear relief, once this little bit of discrimination is removed.

But more to the point, fretting about the monarchy is almost always a political displacement activity.

Just reflect on the hours of parliamentary time that are going to go down this particular drain, when our MPs might actually be devoting their time and attention to banks, jobs, universities or whatever.

And just reflect on the effort and interest, across the Commonwealth, that will be devoted to the possibility that Kate and Wills's baby Princess might succeed to the throne, when there are millions of women in those territories who are still waiting for a proper education, or a proper job … Priorities, priorities, priorities?

Anyway, when I ranted along these lines to the said journalists, I found that I didn't get invited to share these views with the listeners! Funny that.

Comments

Three cheers for Clovis.

The Swedes seem to have managed the transition, fairly painlessly, from agnatism to equal primogeniture a couple of decades ago.

ANTHONY ALCOCK

So a monarch's first-born will no longer be deprived of the throne because of the accident of her sex. Only the monarch's second-born will be deprived of the throne because of his or her accidental place in the birth order. And 99.9999999% of British citizens will be deprived of the throne because of the accident (not their fault) that neither of their parents happens to be the monarch. The idiocy of this is staggering.

PL

Quick, to Pseuds' Corner!

LUIS A NAVARRO

When you think of Royalty's habit of passing itself around, any of us with roots in Britain going back more than a generation or two are likely to be Royal Family without knowing it. I once saw a family tree on my mother's mother's side; it went back, partly on the legitimate and partly on the illegitimate side, to a bastard of Lionel of Antwerp, a younger son of Edward III. That presumably makes me 20-millionth or so in the line of succession. Some of you can doubtless do better.

TIM WEAKLEY

16 November 2011

You can see the problem for Italy and Greece. But were Mario Monti and Lucas Papademos really the only feasible solutions? To go from the mad excesses of (what turned out to be) foolish democracy to the de facto imposition of an entirely unelected leader (approved, no doubt, by the Eurocrats) seems a bit of a ‘frying-pan-into-the-fire' situation.

Sure, sensible political systems have some fall-back position for how to cope in a crisis, when the usual democratic arrangements are in danger of simply not managing. The Republican Romans had the institution of ‘dictatorship', which on balance seems a better option than these technocrats (a term which is not far short of a euphemism for ‘banker').

The trouble about ‘dictator' is that the institution got nastily tainted in the first century
BC
by Lucius Cornelius Sulla and Julius Caesar – both of whom, in their different ways, hijacked the office for long-term, autocratic one-man rule, and radical political reform (ultimately to the benefit of themselves and/or their faction). That's the sense that ‘dictatorship' still has.

But before that, it really was a short-term emergency office; certainly not sinister.

One of the basic principles of politics in Republican Rome was that political office was always shared. No one held political office independently, but always with a colleague. So even the very highest office, the consulship, was shared between two men. (This was largely an attempt to safeguard the political system against anyone making himself a king.) Sometimes, however, for the most part when the Romans were facing a
particularly tough military opponent, there was a feeling that ‘joint command' (for the consuls acted as military generals as well as civilian politicians) wasn't going to bring off victory, that one man was needed to make the big decisions on his own, not in committee. On those occasions a ‘dictator' was nominated by the senate or consuls themselves. They were to serve for an absolute maximum of six months, and were supposed to lay down the office anyway once the crisis had passed.

One of the most famous of these dictators was Cincinnatus (whose name lies behind the city of Cincinnati). In our terms he was a right-wing ideologue, but he was a hero of propriety when it came to the dictatorship. Having been consul in the past, he accepted the senate's request that he become dictator while working on his farm (‘Cincinnatus called from the plough', as his tag-line went), and as soon as he had secured the victory, he laid the office down. The famous modern sculpture shows him giving back the symbols of the dictatorship (the
fasces
) and returning to the plough.

The advantages of this over the technocrats? For a start, the time period for the suspension of democratic government was strictly limited. Secondly, this wasn't the flying in of someone outside the political process; dictators were generally senior figures who had previously been democratically elected to political office.

Pity the ‘dictatorship' got abused and got a bad name. Come to think of it, maybe ‘technocrat' will have become a term of abuse in a thousand years' time.

Technocracy in Greece? Wouldn′t Plato have approved?

LV

22 November 2011

One of the things that I really like about this blog is that the commenters are (by and large!) courteous, on-topic and full of relevant learning (and languages). The comments engage with, and add to, the blog. Most people have read the original post very carefully … too carefully sometimes, if you ask me (that's why they pick up all the errors of punctuation … but thanks anyway). And they (I mean, you) make the blog more than the sum of its parts.

I've only recently come to realise quite how different we are from the usual online postings. I've been doing a few BBC talks, and the comments on these are nothing of our sort. There are some careful engagements, that's true, and I'm hugely grateful for those, whether pro or anti. But a frightening lot of the comments that appear on the Have Your Say BBC website seem to be driven by different versions of bile. Same is true for the
Guardian
Comment, and at least one thread on Mumsnet (though not all) … or really any big commenting site.

There is an awful lot of ‘this is rubbish', ‘you are a complete idiot to write this' … or ‘ho ho old lady, do you have a beard?'

My first reaction is slight fear. My second is to wonder what makes otherwise ordinary people write this vicious stuff when they get on-line, when they wouldn't do so otherwise. It is partly the pseudonyms, I think. On this blog most commenters use their own names, or their first names or initials: you/we/I are there as ‘us'. On an awful lot of big public blogs people adopt all kinds of
noms de comment
… like ‘StrawberryJam'
or ‘RainingCatsandDogs' or ‘QueenElizabethi' and so on. My hunch is that this kind of ‘para-identity' somehow allows people to write in a way that they would never do under their own names. It gives them a licence to be rude, in a way that they would never be face-to-face.

Strangely (and a bit unnervingly), some keen commenters seem to bond with their sobriquets. When I misremembered the complicated sobriquet of one regular commenter on the Mumsnet thread, she replied that it was an insult to get it wrong. An insult not to remember an on-line nickname? Come on …

I also have the sense – when people are commenting on my on-line articles – that
they
think they are talking on-line about someone who isn't really a person. That's partly why I respond to some of even the most aggressive comments. It's just to remind everyone that there is ‘me', a real person, there. And actually one who might be hurt by unmitigated vitriol.

I also think that
never
to reply is bad in itself. If you ‘put yourself about' on the web or the radio, there is a duty (and in a way a pleasure) to respond and discuss. It not only reminds the commenter that there is a human being involved; it also confirms the general idea that we're in dialogue, not just in lecture. And I have found some good friends this way, in the constructive disagreements between author and reader you can set up with new technology.

All the same, I do have one basic rule for on-line commenting. Cut all that ‘rubbish' and ‘idiot' talk; only respond on the web as you would do if you were talking face-to-face. For me, it's a bit like reviewing: only say what you would say if you met the reviewee over a drink.

I would take issue with your frankly rather snide comments about pseudonymity. I′ve had a pseudonymous identity on the internet for almost ten years now – yes, the same, continuous identity. This is not because I′m running around bashing people on-line, but because I would much prefer that my on-line hobbies – though innocuous – not be fully accessible to all and sundry, particularly future employers, via a Google search.

SIRIANNE

Well said, though I do think that there′s a great deal more bile out there than you imagine. The sites you mention – Mumsnet, the
Guardian
and the BBC – are models of decorum compared to some.

However, I don′t think that the use of pseudonyms is much of a contributing factor. Here I agree with Sirianne. My own pseudonym came about simply because originally I used to post only on matters connected to my own profession and industry, and occasionally I expressed views which differed from the public and corporate positions taken by my employers, even though privately they might have agreed. The only solution to this conundrum was to use a pseudonym, or not to post anything which might displease my present employers or prospective future ones. Then I discovered that I had built a history, a reputation (I only ever use this pseudonym) and an online community of like-minded people that I′m now reluctant to abandon.

CHURM RINCEWIND

I wonder what Sirianne′s innocuous online hobbies are, that she doesn′t want ′all and sundry, particularly future employers′ to learn about.

TIM WEAKLEY

Knitting and crocheting, mostly! Together with discussion of (objectively not so good, I admit) SF and fantasy TV shows in probably more detail than the average member of a university hiring committee would be comfortable with. Nothing that would shock my aged gran, I assure you.