Kenneth Williams as Caesar in "Carry On Cleo"

There’s a joke that the emperor Augustus is supposed to have made one day at the expense of one of his slaves. This particular slave was a nomenculator. His job was to remember the names of all the noteworthy citizens that Augustus might come across when out and about in the Forum or other public areas of the city, and prompt his memory if necessary, ensuring that everyone left an encounter with the emperor feeling not only that they had made a real connection, but that the emperor knew them – and they knew him – personally. This nomenculator, however, had been giving Augustus grief. He could never remember any of the names. So, one morning, when he asked the emperor if there was anything he needed to take down to the Forum for the day’s business, Augustus replied, ‘You’d better take some letters of introduction with you – as you don’t know anyone there.’

The joke (you can find it in Macrobius’ Saturnalia, book 2) fell somewhat flat when repeated at Grad Tea yesterday. True, this was something to do with yours truly forgetting the punchline (the shame..), but even when repeated correctly we had to agree that something had been lost over the past two thousand years, or it had never been really funny in the first place. I wondered how the joke had been received on its first telling (assuming that the anecdote wasn’t fictional). Was this a jolly episode of a benign, twinkly-eyed Augustus – Brian Blessed in I, Claudius – having a gentle laugh with his courtiers at the slave’s expense? In other words, a genuinely amusing event? Or was this a more cold and intimidating Augustus – Simon Woods in Rome – whose rather flat joke was immediately met, like a Bond villain’s, with gales of over-loud laughter? Or something in between? More generally, why collect jokes like this in the first place? Why tell a story about a wisecracking emperor?

Brian Blessed's cuddly Augustus from "I, Claudius"

Macrobius collects other jokes by Augustus. They are not quite the collected Laconic sayings of King Leonidas or other notable Spartans (‘Eat a hearty breakfast Spartans…’, ‘Then we’ll fight in the shade…’), but are much more domestic – troubles with slaves, or the contractors on his new public buildings, and Macrobius also includes comments by his daughter Julia. These anecdotes about what we’ll euphemistically call her freer lifestyle undercut Augustus’ stern moral policies, and as a collection they turn the emperor into the butt of the meta-joke –the father who tried to legislate Roman morals but could not control his daughter. ‘He forgets that he is Caesar; but I remember that I am Caesar’s daughter.’ The Julio-Claudian household has become a New Comedy, sitcom home.  Is the point about recording the emperor’s jokes that the man who became a god was just an Ordinary (Family) Guy?  (Implied: not like the rulers we have nowadays…)

Simon Woods as a more sinister Augustus in "Rome"

But of course, we know that Julia was not allowed to make fun of the emperor forever. (All together: ‘IS THERE ANYONE IN ROME WHO HAS NOT SLEPT WITH MY DAUGHTER??!!’) Is the point about an emperor’s jokes that the he always gets the last laugh, or just the laugh, even when the joke isn’t funny? Or is it more than that: when you don’t have a choice not to laugh, there really is no joke. In fact the joke is on you, for colluding in the charade. Rather than participating in a humorous moment between equals, you’ve become little more than a laughter track. And the reader of Macrobius knows that at least Augustus’s ‘jokes’ were harmless. What about the ‘little jokes’ of later, more unstable emperors – say Caligula’s brothel on the Palatine? What does your forced laughter mean then?

Labour Party Leader Ed Miliband with his family

In fact, we might conclude that what we learn from a collection of imperial jokes is that an emperor can’t joke -  not like you or me. Anecdotes like this only serve to underscore the difference between ruler and ruled, just like those posed shots of open-neck-shirted politicians with their families that only serve to make them seem more artificial.  The imbalance of power distorts normal social relations to such an extent that even this basic form of interaction is stilted. It’s artificial: just like your supposedly personal encounter with him, in fact prompted by a slave.

The great thing about Classics is that even the most boring of animals (which, let’s face it, sheep generally are) can turn out to be quite weird and wonderful after all. As a philologist, I’ve always been rather fond of Greek sheep, for two reasons:

One: they provide important evidence for pronunciation changes in the Greek language. If anyone ever asks you to prove that Ancient Greek was pronounced differently from Modern Greek, by far the easiest way to do it is to point out that Ancient Greek sheep go βῆ βῆ [bē bē]:

ὁ δ’ ἠλίθιος ὥσπερ πρόβατον βῆ βῆ λέγων βαδίζει

“The silly man goes around going baa baa like a sheep” (Cratinus, fragment 43)

Unless your interlocutor can find a breed of sheep that makes a noise like vee vee, you can at this point be regarded as having won the argument.

(The wonderfully onomatopoeic but sadly uncommon term βληχητά, “bleaters” [blēk^hēta], will also do the trick.)

Two: I’ve always liked the word πρόβατον [probaton]– which originally could mean almost any four-footed farm animal, but in Attic almost always refers to sheep. LSJ has some boring explanation of this being because the smaller animals tend to προβαίνω [probainō], ‘go in front of’, the herd, but since προβαίνω more often means ‘go forwards’ I’d like to propose an alternative etymology, ‘a thing that goes forwards’. This could be connected with the old story about the Welsh [originally: Spartan?] sheep whose legs are shorter on one side than the other, so they can balance on hillsides more easily. Of course, this is fine as long as they’re only going in one direction across the hillside (so that the uphill leg is shorter than the downhill leg), but when they reach the fence they can’t turn round, because then the downhill leg would be shorter than the uphill leg, and they’d fall over. So the farmer has to drive out in his tractor [cart] to pick them all up and put them back at the other end of the field, to start all over again. Hence, τὰ πρόβατα [ta probata].

Before anyone starts accusing me of drawing wildly fanciful anachronistic parallels, I would like to call your attention to the following story from Herodotus 3.113:

“In Arabia, there are also two amazing kinds of sheep which are found nowhere else. First, there are sheep whose tails are so long – three cubits or more – that they would get sore from being dragged along the ground, if the sheep were allowed to trail them behind them. In fact, though, every shepherd knows enough woodwork to make little carts on to which they fasten the sheeps’ tails, one for the tail of each animal. The second kind of sheep have broad tails which are as much as a cubit across.”

Thus proving that farmers have been playing the “let’s fool the gullible townies with crazy stories about sheep” game for – well, probably ever since people first started living in towns.

Also, in a new comic this morning, the funnies just keep on coming:

Cf. Aristotle’s Historia Animalium 487a:  Καλῶ δ’ ἔντομα ὅσα ἔχει κατὰ τὸ σῶμα ἐντομάς, ἢ ἐν τοῖς ὑπτίοις ἢ ἐν τούτοις τε καὶ τοῖς πρανέσιν.  “I call them ἔντομα (lit. neut.pl. ἐντομος things-cut-in-pieces) as so they have segments (ἐντομή) for the body, either on the belly or there and on their backs also.” ἔντομος ‘cut in a pieces’ can be further broken down into the preposition ἐν plus the root *temh₁- and the Caland adjective suffix *-mo- .  The same is found in Greek τέμενος ‘sacred precinct ‘ < *témh₁-no- which originally meant a patch of land ‘cut-off’ and dedicated to a god.  Although, the same word te-me-no also occurs in the Linear B tablets and doesn’t necessarily have to be the area cut off for a god, but can be, for instance wa-na-ka-te-ro te-me-no (PY Er 312) /wanakteron temenos/ ‘the official domain of the king’.  The same root in a different Caland formation, but with similar semantics to τέμενος in Classical Greek gives us Latin templum (< *temh₁-lo-) which was borrowed into English as temple.

…

You see what just happened there, was that I just started going after the reference in Aristotle, and I was going to leave it at that, but then I felt the need to etymologize ἔντομος in terms of its Indo-European root, and from there I felt it was absolutely necessary then to bring in the alternative semantics from Mycenaean Greek, and the English-Latin parallels, and I realized it all kind of got out of hand.  Etymology-Man would be proud.

A Duchess and Her Column: Elizabeth Cavendish (1759-1824).

I’ve spent many happy hours reading Victorian guidebooks to Rome. They formed the core evidence for a big chunk of my master’s thesis. If you need to know the correct protocol for paying a visit to Pope Pius IX, and to King Victor Emmanuel II and Queen Margherita (namesake, by the way, of the margherita pizza…) , at a time when the new monarchy of Italy and the papacy were at loggerheads, look no further than Murray’s Guide to Rome and its Environs. Similarly, if you want to know where the British expats’ Hunt set out from, or the best places to find antiquities dealers…. In particular I have been most interested in how these travel writers describe the ongoing excavations of the Roman Forum, which really began in earnest after the government of united Italy took possession of Rome in 1870. An intriguing figure recurs in the writers’ accounts of the site: the Duchess of Devonshire, Elizabeth Cavendish, second wife of the 5^th Duke to be precise.

To read Augustus Hare’s Walks in Rome you would be forgiven for believing that Her Grace had excavated large parts of the Forum singlehandedly before the Italians even arrived (disregarding the work of the French occupiers at the beginning of the 19^th century, and intermittent investigation carried out by the pope’s antiquarians):

‘The excavations made in the Forum before 1876,’ he writes (in the 1896 edition), ‘were for the most part due to the generosity of Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire.’

The Column of Phocas was dedicated to the (Eastern) Emperor Phocas in 608 AD, making it the Forum's last Roman monument.

Let’s get this straight. The Duchess funded the excavation of the base of the Column of Phocas. She was not responsible for the majority of work ‘made in the Form before 1876.’  Murray, too, while he passes over the Arch of Titus without even mentioning its spectacular restoration by Stern and Valadier, conscientiously informs the reader that ‘The solitary column, called by Lord Byron “the nameless column with a buried base,” was excavated to its base in 1813, at the expense of the Duchess of Devonshire.’ At the time the Column of Phocas, the only column still standing from antiquity, was a prominent monument in the still only partly excavated Forum. But still Elizabeth acquired an immortality in the British guidebooks out of proportion to her enterprise, which was essentially to leave the Column standing in a trench.

Before we simply attribute this to the perennial British interest in the aristocracy that has propelled Downton Abbey to further rose-tinted excesses (and who wasn’t happy at the outcome of the Christmas Special??) perhaps we should step back from the excavations. Elizabeth, when she wasn’t corresponding with the author Madame de Stael and funding treasure hunts in Rome, was a glamorous and somewhat scandalous figure. You might have seen the film The Duchess (I haven’t, so comments welcome…) in which Keira Knightley plays Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Elizabeth’s best friend, who lived in a ménage-a-troi with Elizabeth and Ralph Fiennes, the 5^th Duke. After Georgiana’s death, Elizabeth tied up loose ends by marrying the Duke.  It’s understandable that Augustus Hare (an inveterate snob, just read his books) in particular wished to invoke, and was rather in love with, the spirit of such a well-known figure. It was important for his British readers to know that, as they visited the Forum, they were walking in rarefied footsteps, not just of the ancient Romans, but of British visitors before them.

It was the same cultural movement, after all, that both propelled Elizabeth to the antiquarian scene in Rome, and prompted the large numbers of less aristocratic tourists and their guidebooks to follow some fifty or so years later. By the mid-19^th century the Grand Tour might be open to a much greater section of the British public, but Classical culture and European travel were still hot stuff.

Mid 18th-century engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi: the Column of Phocas' base is still unexcavated, and the Arch of Septimius Severus is half buried.

So far, so cynical: the standard tale about the early days of archaeology: titled amateur pays for a few labourers and carries off the kudos (and the spoils…). But I don’t think we should be too dismissive of Elizabeth’s contribution. She was (as far as I am aware) the only female Briton to take a prominent role in Roman archaeology at such an early time. The Forum in her day was still known as Campo Vaccino, where herdsmen took their cows to graze, and the big monuments like the Arch of Septimius Severus and the Column stood half buried in the debris of centuries. Her efforts, along with those of the French antiquarians who had come south with Napoleon, helped to uncover parts of the Roman site for the first time, and prompted interest in the site across Europe.

Next time: Sophia Schliemann….

It seems that Prof. Beard was rather adamant that there would be no CGI or actor reconstructions, and all televisual illustration was going to have to come from the Roman material itself – artefacts, paintings, ruins, skeletons etc. Going by the clips we saw and what I remember of the Pompeii programme when it aired, this served things well, creating a story from what Latin inscriptions and material objects could evoke, with all their possibilities, rather than what some bod with a computer managed to interpret. ‘Trust the material’ was apparently the mantra for the evening; I don’t think it was a bad one.

I was left wondering, however, as I am always left solipsistically wondering by TV on the ancient world, about how could you do the same thing with literature. Say – ooh, I dunno – Homer? Outside of translation and screenplays full of CGI and actors, it seems to me that it shouldn’t be impossible to produce a documentary about the reading of ancient texts, but I’ve never seen it done and don’t really know how you’d go about it. Of course, I can’t immediately recall a documentary on the transmission or reception history of an ancient text, which you think would be a much more standard thing to do, so maybe they need to get out there first.

On a smaller scale, though, you face the problem of visualising reading with Powerpoint in papers and presentations. How are you meant to visualise your argument without just throwing some Greek on a slide (or a handout, which in the end is basically more useful for everyone to take notes on)? How do you create something that isn’t just a book on screen, but shows the dynamics of interacting with that book?

from G. Genette 'Palimpsests' (Paris 1982) p.28 (tr. Newman and Doubinsky 1997)

It’s not as if literary theory is averse to diagrams, as this one from Genette’s Palimpsestesshows. However, tabulation like this is only really useful for categorisation. There’s always the trusty highlighter pen for closer readings, say if you want to look at repeated words in a passage – but if you take a concept like ‘genre’, for example, I’m less certain where you could go. What I’d like is a visualisation of the expectations and constraints the words then have to wiggle around, but that sounds very much like a recipe for bad CGI and potentially oldskool science lesson videos.

Having said that, however… There is always kinetic typography.

It’s unashamedly CGI’d, but I can almost see it – ‘μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ’ with drumbeats for the metre. Is that what a textual documentary would need?

All in all, I’d highly recommend the Munich exchange to anyone – undergraduate/graduate, fluent German speaker/complete novice – as a chance to visit a great city with some amazing sights, experience a proper Bavarian Christmas, possibly even to learn a bit of Classics and/or German, and especially to make a lot of new friends – from Cambridge and Munich. Which brings me to the most important point of this post – to say a huge thank-you to our exchange partners, who were all incredibly generous in letting us stay in their houses and even giving up their own rooms, supplying us with (copious quantities of) food and drink, showing us around the city, taking us out on trips, and generally looking after us extremely well, despite still having classes and revision for exams. We’re all looking forward to hosting their return visit to Cambridge in March – so, to everyone in Munich, vielen Dank, und auf Wiedersehen!

Digging for France: Caroline Bonaparte (Queen of Naples, 1808-1818)

Caroline was the sixth of the seven Bonaparte siblings, born in 1782. In her lifetime she witnessed the French Revolution, her brother’s transmogrification from First Consul to Emperor of the French, his conquest of Europe, his fall (which she and her husband survived with their lands intact), return, second fall (when her husband was executed), and survived herself in exile in Florence until 1839. She married Joachim Murat, one of Napoleon’s closest generals, when only seventeen, and with him ruled the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from Naples after its conquest by Napoleon.

A pretty impressive life story by anyone’s standards. But why should twenty-first century classicists care about this nineteenth-century queen, other than general interest? Well, Caroline played an important role in the excavations of Pompeii. We should not of course imagine her wielding a shovel in anything other than a symbolic fashion. But the interest and funds she diverted into the excavations allowed a significant part of the town’s public areas to be opened up for the first time.

This is a story about legitimation. As a Bonaparte, Caroline knew very well how powerful a tool classical culture could be in legitimising a new dynasty’s claims to power. Napoleon’s classical pretensions need little mention here, and Pompeii and Herculaneum had been mined by the Bourbon Kings of Naples since the cities were discovered in the eighteenth century, for the international prestige that the antiquarian study of the sites and the possession of their artworks brought them. The Vesuvian towns became the Bourbons’ emblem, rooting their dynasty in the ancient Italian past. A sense of mystique and royal ownership was created by limiting access to the sites themselves. Note taking or sketching was forbidden. Ordinary Neapolitans were limited by strict censorship laws and backward printing technology. Books about the sites in Italian were, until the late eighteenth century, issued by royal gift only. (As a result pirate publications – such as that by the Comte de Caylus in 1752 – transcribed from illicit sketchbooks circulated Europe, so that Neapolitans who wanted to learn about the towns were forced to do so from foreign editions).

Caroline and Murat’s French regime was not as concerned with such high levels of secrecy. In fact, the French governors of Napoleon’s Empire were looking for their self-declared classical predecessors across their Italian domains. Caroline’s excavations were part of a wider trend. In occupied Rome, French excavators were investigating the Forum Romanum (ultimately restoring the Arch of Titus after Napoleon’s fall in the 1820s), while in Etruria Caroline’s brother Lucien was indulging in a spot of light grave robbing in the search for ‘Etruscan vases’ (we now know them as ‘Greek’).

In Pompeii, the French excavations directed by General Championet (though of course the actual diggers were local Neapolitan workmen) uncovered parts of the city walls, as well as a large swathe of the town by the Basilica. The Murats purchased land that was still in private hands to allow the site to expand. The Forum, which was still littered with debris, was also fully cleared for the first time, and the Amphitheatre was investigated. Caroline was a frequent visitor and hoped that the whole town could eventually be uncovered, and anxious for progress periodically increased the number of workers. In 1813 there were over 400 workmen on site. (In the Forum area alone the number of diggers increased from 7 workmen with 2 carts in 1814 to 62 men, 4 carts and a master plasterer in 1817). Sir William Gell estimated that 15,000 francs were spent during Caroline’s patronage (in the 1830s the average French peasant could expect to earn about 450 francs a year.) Caroline herself took her favourite finds back to the palace to create her own private museum, and her patronage of the artist François Mazois resulted in his publication in 1824 – after she was driven from Naples – of the fullest report yet on Pompeii, transmitting her work across Europe rather too late for it to be of benefit to her regime.

Sad to say, in the past writers have tended to trivialise Caroline’s role at Pompeii. Writing half a century after her reign in the 1870s, one British scholar saw the excavations as a silly ‘fancy’ of the queen; another, in the 1960s, dismissed her with the snide description, ‘the Emperor’s youngest sister, who made up in elegance what she may have lacked in chastity.’ But her sustained interest in classical archaeology at a time when it played a significant role in how governments, particularly her brother’s, conceptualised and legitimised their rule, is surely not as a result of a mere ‘fancy’, but a passionate participation in the intellectual and political culture of her day. Through excavation she, and other French rulers across Italy, hoped to provide Bonapartist rule in the peninsula with a truly ancient foundation.  The amount of attention the site received would not reach the same level until the curatorship of Fiorelli and the unification of Italy.

Further reading: J. Harris Pompeii Awakened London, 2007(to which this article is heavily indebted); A. Cooley Pompeii London, 2003; V.C. Gardner Coates & J.L. Seydl Antiquity Recovered Los Angeles, 2007.

Next time: The Duchess of Devonshire and a very famous column…

Some people, though, are bothered by the apparent discrepancies between Homer’s descriptions of Troy and the actual topography of Hisarlik. Confronted with the possibility that Homer’s geography may have been less than perfect, these scholars have taken up the challenge to locate the real site of Troy and restore our faith in Homer’s infallible accuracy. Hence, for instance, the suggestion that Homer’s Troy was actually located at Bergama/Pergamon.

Others have looked further afield – after all, why does Troy have to be in Turkey? As one scholar points out, serious scrutiny of this question has been prevented by “the almost religious belief that Homeric Troy was situated in Turkey, because of its proximity to the Hellespont, Lesbos, Tenedos and Samothrace, and of course also because the story was passed on in ancient Greek”.

Amongst the few brave enough to challenge this ‘almost religious belief’ there is unfortunately little agreement as to the true location of Troy. Suggestions include Bosnia and Herzegovina and Finland (a conclusion which naturally follows from the author’s previous identification of the Peloponnese in Denmark). More radically, Troy has been interpreted as representing the whole universe, with the accounts of battles depicting the movements of constellations; and, naturally, there remains the possibility that Troy is Atlantis.

The hypothesis of greatest interest to the readers of this blog, however,  must be that put forward by I.J. Wilkens (author of the quotation above) that Troy was in fact located in the Gog Magog Hills a few miles outside Cambridge, with the citadel, Pergamon, being located in the Wandlebury Ring hill fort:

The strongest evidence for this is provided by the extensive linguistic research which has enabled Wilkens to identify the rivers of the Trojan plain in Cambridgeshire. His conclusions that, for instance, that the SCAMander is the modern Cam, while the SimOEIS is the Great OUSE, are really so obvious that it is surprising no Homeric scholar had made this identification before.

Equally surprising is that this hypothesis has as yet received little attention from our Faculty, particularly given that Wilkens apparently gave a lecture on this subject to the Herodoteans as long ago as 1992. It is to be hoped that in future this will be the subject of further research here in Cambridge; after all, if Wilkens is proved correct, the Faculty’s status could only be enhanced by its being the only Classics department able to offer day-trips to Troy.

The Ancient World Online - Keep up to date!

Blogging Pompeii - A collective blog for all those working on Pompeii and the other sites around the Bay of Naples.

Bread and Circuses - Adrian Murdoch on the later Roman Empire (among other exciting things).

Didaskelion - Erlend MacGillivray works on early Christianity and ancient philosophy.

A Don’s Life - Our very own Mary Beard.

The Edithorial - Edith Hall’s weekly blog.

The Homer Multitext  - Blog of the Homer Multitext project at Harvard, putting the manuscripts of Homer into a historical tradition.

Kenodoxia - Our very own James Warren.

Pop Classics - Juliette Harrisson talks about classics in popular culture.

Rogueclassicism - The Rogue Classicist posts classics news and interesting nuggets from around the world.

I’ve probably missed out a hundred but you can rectify that in the comments.

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Nice try, Google. Nice try.