It's a Don's Life (12 page)
Authors: Mary Beard
Esperanto, Welsh and the language wars
20 August 2007
Could Esperanto save the world? When I was a kid I did learn a few words of this proto-global language, invented (as a gesture
to intra-planetary understanding) in the 1880s by the doctor-cum-linguist, Polish-cum-Lithuanian Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof.
He had, it was said, toyed with the idea of bringing back Latin as the world’s second language (that actually would have been
easier for me). But instead he decided to construct his own, making it nicely simple, with no pronunciation traps and easy,
consistent rules.
It ended up as an odd hybrid of Latin and German, with a smattering of French and Italian (not to mention a bit of ancient
Greek ‘
kaj
’ is ‘and’ in Esperanto, after ‘
kai
’ in Greek). So ‘
plena
’ is ‘full’, and ‘
plenplena
’ is ‘very full’ (Greek reduplication, I suppose). And ‘
mal
’ is the negative: ‘
ami
’ means ‘to love’, ‘
malami
’, ‘to hate’. Get it?
It was through my Dad that I ventured into Esperanto a little. He, in the spirit of his times, saw Esperanto as a weapon in
Moral Rearmament – as well as a blow to Welsh (which, as we lived in Shrewsbury, crept incomprehensibly through our letterbox
on the phone and electric bills).
I didn’t meet Esperanto again till the 1990s.
That was when a friend of mine was writing a wonderful biography of J. E. B. Mayor, Cambridge Professor of Latin (and, as
it happens, educated in Shrewsbury, as most of them were). It turned out that one of Mayor’s numerous obsessions (he was amongst
other things a born again vegetarian) was Esperanto. And, I learned, he gave the address to the Esperanto Society Congress
in 1907.
I didn’t think about this again until I picked up the Cambridge evening paper, where there was a marvellous piece of local
history on this congress, by Cambridge chronicler Mike Petty. I hadn’t realised quite what a big deal this conference was:
it had involved a sermon in Esperanto in the University Church and in the Catholic equivalent; Oscar Browning had starred
in a version of the
Pickwick Papers
in Esperanto; and the
Evening News
had carried a cartoon of the police being taught Esperanto to deal with the trouble-makers. There was also a photo of an Esperanto
agitprop stall in just the same place in the Market Square where you’ll now find the animal rights activists.
Esperanto now seems (sorry, Esperantists) faintly silly. And having a nice little European-style language as a
lingua franca
seems hopelessly out of touch. That said, there is something rather cheering about the unbatterable optimism of those who
think that they can right the world’s wrongs by inventing languages. It’s rather like George Bernard Shaw’s new English phonetic
alphabet.
Or, come to think of it, it’s like the new phonetic letters introduced by the enterprising Roman emperor Claudius to make
Latin itself more transparent. His letters were actually used for a while – and they’ve even recently been recognised to the
extent of having their own form as characters on the Unicode computer text.
Wouldn’t he be pleased?
Olympia (almost) burns ... but Paris survives
27 August 2007
First let me apologise for writing about the antiquities of ancient Greece, when so many people have died in the terrible
fires – probably almost a hundred casualties altogether so far. It reminds me a bit of the ‘bombing’ of the Parthenon in 1687,
which everyone now laments as the loss of a great building, forgetting the hundreds of women and children killed in the process.
But, conscience apart, even as I’m writing, it is not entirely clear what exactly has happened to which ancient sites in the
Peloponnese.
The good news seems to be that the Greek and Roman remains of Olympia have escaped (and a lot of them, let’s remember, are
of Roman imperial date and not from the fifth-century BC well-springs of democracy at all). The Greek Archaeological Service
is very good on disaster planning, and almost certainly its fire protection devices, as well as the brave fire-fighters and
a dose of good luck, played their part in keeping the site safe.
But the news reports have tended to concentrate on Olympia alone – when, in fact, there are any number of sites round about
whose loss would be almost equally troubling in archaeological, even if not symbolic, terms. I think here of the temple of
Apollo at Bassae on its romantic hillside (the temple itself is now covered with a strange, almost post-modern tent). We still
don’t know whether this has made it. Let alone the much less well known temple of the ‘Great Goddesses’ at Lykosoura in the
valley below. And that’s before we start to think about the Byzantine churches gone up in flames.
At this point I begin to feel grateful for the dispersal of antiquities around the museums of the world.
Suppose Olympia and its museum had actually gone up in smoke (and fire quickly turns marble to a little pile of lime). At
least some of the sculptures of the key temple of Zeus would have been safe in the Louvre. And if the temple at Bassae had
been destroyed, then it would turn out to be a good idea after all that the sculptures from its frieze were in the British
Museum in London.
This is not an argument about the quality of care these monuments are given whether in Greece or abroad (and almost all guardians
of the Greek heritage – Greek or foreign – have something to be embarrassed about). It is more the ‘stuff happens’ problem.
Nature sometimes seriously messes up. In other words, like it or not in aesthetic or political terms, there is a very practical
point to these Wonders of the World being split up.
There’s also an argument here for the old-fashioned plaster cast gallery. If the Olympia sculptures were to be destroyed in
both Greece and France, then you would still be able to find a perfect set of replicas in the cast gallery of the Museum of
Classical Archaeology in Cambridge (and in other plaster cast galleries the world over). Half a century ago many of these
cast collections were themselves threatened with the (sledge) hammer. Now we are a bit wiser about our fragile hold on the
masterpieces of the past – and the need to protect them in a variety of guises.
Comments
Not a popular post! Almost all of the many comments fell somewhere on the spectrum between upset and offensive, ethnocentric
and vengeful:
‘What about scattering the British Crown Jewels around the world ...?’
‘Shame on you, OPPORTUNIST.’
‘UP YOURS.’
‘fuck!! of!!!!!’
‘In the pure tradition of her ancestor Lord Elgin.’
‘When we were building the Acropolis, you were living in caves.’
‘They were Greek and they will remain GREEK for ever in GREECE.’
... and so on.
10 things you thought you knew about the Romans ... but didn’t
30 August 2007
After the flood of angry comments about the last post on the Greek fires, let’s try some happier topics. A fellow blogger
suggests that we classicists tend to keep too many secrets about the ancient world to ourselves. So let me share a few. Here
are 10 things you thought you knew about the Romans but didn’t. 10 myths about the Romans exploded ... !
1 Julius Caesar’s last words were ‘
et tu brute
’
Well, only in Shakespeare’s version of the assassination. Probably our best ancient source is Suetonius and he records the
words as (in Greek)
‘kai su teknon’
– or ‘you too my child’. What this means, in fact, isn’t so clear. If it has a question mark, it smacks of quizzical, dying
desperation. Give it an exclamation mark and it becomes a threat (‘they’ll get you too, kid ...’)
2 Rome was built on seven hills
Some serious miscalculation here. Palatine, Aventine, Capitoline, Janiculan, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, Caelian, Pincian,
Vatican. That’s 10 for a start. Though it all depends, I suppose, on what you call a hill.
3 Romans had ‘vomitoria’ to be sick in between courses at
lavish dinners
Sorry. This is an old one, But
vomitoria
were the exit routes which spewed people out of the amphitheatres.
4 Roman men dressed in togas
OK, sometimes they did. But it was very formal wear – and it’s a bit like saying ‘Englishmen wear dinner jackets’. Actually,
you’d have seen all kinds of dress on the Roman street, from tunics to trousers – and, just to confuse things, prostitutes
in togas.
5 Nero fiddled while Rome burned
Not if you mean that he sat around ineffectually twiddling his thumbs while the city went up in flames. Actually what Nero
did was fiddle in another sense: he played the violin (or so it was said).
6 The plebeians were the Roman poor
OK, Romans, just like us, did sometimes use the word ‘plebeian’ or ‘plebs’ for the ‘great unwashed’ (literally, ‘
sordida plebs’
). But in the strict sense both ‘plebeian’ and ‘patrician’ were old hereditary divisions of the Roman people. These may once
have signalled the poor/powerless versus the rich/ powerful. But by the time of the later Republic there were enormously rich
plebeians – like Marcus Licinius Crassus, the plutocrat who famously said that you couldn’t be counted as rich if you couldn’t
raise your own private army.
7 Gladiators said ‘hail Caesar, those about to die salute thee’
before each show
This favourite phrase is actually attested only once in classical antiquity – and not at a gladiatorial show. It was apparently
spoken by the participants at a mock naval battle laid on outside Rome by the emperor Claudius.
8 When the Romans finally destroyed Carthage in 146 BCE,
they ploughed salt into its soil – to make it completely barren
This is slightly trickier ground, but there is no ancient writer who says this. It’s a view that got common currency thanks
to an article by B. Hallward in the first edition of the
Cambridge Ancient History
– and he gives no ancient reference.
9 The Romans were much smaller than us
Depends on who you mean by ‘us’. The skeletons found in Pompeii and Herculaneum actually suggest that the Roman inhabitants
were on average a bit taller than the modern Neapolitans.
10 Hadrian built his wall to keep the barbarians out of the
province of Britannia
Only if he was a military idiot. A good proportion of it is built just in turf anyway, which wouldn’t have deterred many self-respecting
barbarians. Even if the rest was in stone, it is now thought much more likely that the whole thing was administrative (for
customs levying perhaps) – and to help east–west communications.
And that’s only the first ten!
Greek treasures and global treasures
4 September 2007
I only wish that many of those who exploded at my post on the Greek fires had read it in English. That’s not meant as a criticism.
I can read modern Greek just about well enough when I need to, but given the chance to read an English translation I’d always
take it. So I can hardly object to others relying on the account of my views on the
Ethnos
website.
The trouble is that it was a bit of a travesty of what I actually wrote. For the record, I’m NOT advocating that the Greek
heritage should be distributed wholesale abroad for ‘safe-keeping’. I am simply arguing that there
is
something to be said for some dispersal and replication. Part of the reason is an entirely practical one: it’s the ‘Wills-and-Harry-never-inthe-same-plane’
sort of principle.
And for those of you who thought that I was being decidedly insensitive – to say the least – in even raising these issues
at a time like this (‘to make such ill comments/ suggestions at the time of national crisis in Greece, it just shows the type
of person that you are’), please note that I did start the post with an explicit apology for just that – and, for good measure,
with a sombre reflection on the hundreds of Ottoman women and children killed when the Parthenon went up in smoke in the seventeenth
century.
All the same, the intensity of the responses took me aback a bit. It wasn’t just the abuse: ‘fuck!! of!!!!’, as one commenter
put it, or ‘UP YOURS MY DEAR..’, in the (slightly) friendlier words of another. It was more the bigger debate about the role
and preservation of cultural heritage revealed by many of these hard-hitting reactions.
Several of the comments raised the issue of the English Crown Jewels. How would I feel if some of them were sent to New York
(as John M. wondered)? Well, the true answer is that I would feel perfectly OK about it – and I half suspect that even now
they’re not all in the Tower anyway (on the same ‘Wills-and-Harry’ principle). To put it more positively, I actually feel
pleased when I go (for example) to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and see those English country house rooms, once in
Oxfordshire or wherever, now reconstructed transatlantically. I like the idea that visitors, who come in from the extraordinarily
different world of Fifth Avenue, should find themselves reminded of ‘my’ culture.
The other side of this coin is that I cannot agree with the idea that works of art have some necessary and natural ‘home’.
Nor do I think that those who now live in the place where ancient masterpieces were created (whether they are the direct ethnic
descendants of the creators or not) are the only people in the world who could possibly be qualified to care for them or to
speak on their behalf. So I find it hard to respond to the question: ‘WHO GAVE YOU THE RIGHT TO HAVE AN OPINION ABOUT OUR
HERITAGE?’ (whatever ‘right’ means in this context). And I could not agree that only modern Greeks can properly look after
ancient Greek antiquities. That’s a claim which would not be true for the antiquities of any country in the planet – Greece,
the UK, the Sudan, India, you name it.
I can think of few worse strategies of cultural planning – particularly for a globalised world – than one which demands that
all works of art stay in the geographical area in which they were made. That’s partly for reasons of safety, but partly too
for the worthy aim of cultural interaction.
Now hang on before you reach for the ‘send’ button. I know that there are crucial issues of power and politics here. While
I fully support the notion of a universal museum, it hasn’t escaped my notice that in reality these so-called ‘universal museums’
tend to exist in western Europe and the US – not in Ghana or Burkina Faso. Which is to say that the universal museum and imperialism
have been, historically, at some level connected. It is also clear that it is easier for a country that has been a net ‘gainer’
rather than a net ‘loser’ out of these processes to feel culturally ‘generous’. It’s clear, too, that some objects are more
singular and symbolically important than others (sending the Eiffel Tower to Australia would be quite different from sending,
say, Monet’s
Waterlilies
). All the same, the basic principle of sharing seems a good one.
It still is tricky with material monuments, though. And that’s partly the problem of their materiality itself. We can all
‘own’ Shakespeare or Mozart or Seferis. The claims of Stratford-upon-Avon do not affect the possibility of sharing the Bard’s
plays as widely as you like. Plays and poems and operas are infinitely extendable, unlike marble – which really is destroyed
by fire, despite some optimistic assurances to the contrary. How we can share
physically
monuments which are
ideologically
shared by the whole world is a problem we haven’t yet begun to resolve.
