Paper in Canterbury

I'm giving a paper in Christ Church Canterbury next week (and it's followed by what looks like a cracking paper on The White Album).

Canterbury Christ Church University
School of Media Art and Design
Research Seminars 2015-2016

25 November 2015
4.15pm-5.30pm

A Wild West Hero: Motifs of the Hollywood Western in four movies about Hadrian’s Wall
Speaker: Dr Tony Keen (Open University)

One notable phenomenon of the boom in ancient world movies post-Gladiator is the relative dearth of Roman settings, as opposed to Greek, especially in comparison with movies of the 1950s and 1960s. However, some Roman movies have been made, and this paper focusses upon four of them: King Arthur (Antoine Fuqua, 2004), The Last Legion (Doug Lefler, 2007), Centurion (Neil Marshall, 2010) and The Eagle (Kevin McDonald, 2011). Though not produced as a series, these form a convenient thematic set. Not only are all four set predominantly or entirely within Roman Britain, but the most significant portion (and in some cases all) of the action takes place on Hadrian’s Wall or in the barbarian territory beyond. Three of them also involve the Ninth Legion – the exception being King Arthur.

One noticeable thing about these movies is the degree to which they employ the plot structures and mise-en-scène of the classic American western. The villa north of the Wall in King Arthur, which makes no sense in terms of Roman settlement patterns, becomes comprehensible as the equivalent of the isolated homestead that needs rescuing by the US Cavalry. Centurion, as Neil Marshall freely admits, steals substantially from the prolonged chase of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, including a virtual recreation of that scene’s climax. The Seal People of The Eagle are visually coded in costumes and make-up reminiscent of recent cinematic depictions of Native Americans, such as that seen in Dances with Wolves. Only The Last Legion avoids that approach, choosing instead to appropriate the mysticism of Star Wars (which has itself been described as a Western in disguise). Why are such elements so attractive to makers of Roman movies that they want to use them to supplement the more traditional tropes of the epic? Why does The Last Legion choose a different route? If moviemakers are so keen to make disguised Westerns, why are they not making real Westerns? Perhaps there is a certain portrayal of the Other that is no longer acceptable when applied to Native Americans, but can be applied on a different continent and at a greater chronological remove.

Tony Keen is an Associate Lecturer and Honorary Associate with the Open University, and Adjunct Assistant Professor with the University of Notre Dame London Global Gateway. He writes on reception of Greece and Rome in modern popular culture, in particular in cinema in science fiction. He is planning a co-authored book on the depiction of Roman Britain in cinema and television.

Powell Building – Pf06
North Holmes Road Campus
Email Dr Andrew Butler – Andrew.Butler@canterbury.ac.uk – for further details

— All welcome —

The Simonides poem that possibly isn't

For the University of Roehampton this semester I'm co-teaching Introduction to Ancient History. We're just covering the Persian Wars at the moment, and the epigram of Simonides (F 22.a Page) for the Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae has come up. You almost certainly know it. In William Lisle Bowles' translation, which is probably the most familiar form (other translations often model themselves on this), it's

Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

I describe this as 'the epigram of Simonides', and there are plenty of modern accounts that assert this unproblematically, but it's more accurate to say that it is 'attributed to Simonides'. The problem is that Herodotus, our earliest source for the epigram (7.228), doesn't actually say that it is by Simonides. This is what Herodotus says, in A.R. Godley's Loeb translation (which I use largely for convenience).

All these, and they that died before any had departed at Leonidas’ bidding, were buried where they fell, and there is an inscription over them, which is this:

Four thousand warriors, flower of Pelops’ land,
Did here against three hundred myriads stand.

This is the inscription common to all; the Spartans have one for themselves:

Go tell the Spartans, thou that passest by,
That here obedient to their words we lie.

That is for the Lacedaemonians, and this for the seer:

Here fought and fell Megistias, hero brave,
Slain by the Medes, who crossed Spercheius’ wave;
Well knew the seer his doom, but scorned to fly,
And rather chose with Sparta’s king to die.

The inscriptions and the pillars were set there in their honour by the Amphictyons, except the epitaph of the diviner Megistias; that inscription was made for him for friendship’s sake by Simonides son of Leoprepes.

So, the only text that Herodotus associates with Simonides is the third of these inscriptions. And even there Herodotus only says that Simonides had the text inscribed (using the verb epigraphō). After that, there is then a series of assumptions, set out in J.H. Molyneux' Simonides: A Historical Study (1992), first that if Simonides had an epigram inscribed, he probably wrote it, which seems a fair assumption, and secondly that if Simonides wrote one of the epigrams, he probably wrote the other two, which seems to me to be rather more tenuous.

There are, however, other ancient testimonia. The Greek Anthology (7.248-50) attributes all three epigrams to Simonides. Moreover, Cicero also attributes the text to Simonides (Tusculan Disputations 1.49.101). But I also note that other testimonia for the epigram, Lycurgus, Against Leocrates 109, Strabo, Geography 9.4.16, and Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 11.33.2, do not mention Simonides' name in connection with it. I wonder if perhaps Cicero and whichever of the many editors of the Greek Anthology first attached Simonides' name also went through the same chain of assumptions mentioned above.

It doesn't mean that Simonides didn't write this epigram; but perhaps we should be more open about the chain of assumptions involved.

An alternative model for looking at classical movies

There's a common model I have encountered for the recent (i.e. in the last fifteen years) development of movies set in the worlds of Greece and Rome, and it's this: no-one was much interested in making ancient world movies in Hollywood until Gladiator came along in 2000, and after that, people have kept making ancient world movies such as Troy (2004), 300 (2007), Clash of the Titans (2010) and Pompeii (2014), with the momentum never dissipating. It's nice and simple.

And I think it's wrong.

Oh, I'm not trying to say that Gladiator isn't an important factor in what we have seen on cinema screens in the first decades of the twenty-first century. But it is simplistic to see all the subsequent Classical-set movies as solely direct consequences of Gladiator's success. It's a view that comes about, I think, from the fact that Classical Reception scholars are often only interested in those movies set in, or directly referencing, the ancient world. Which on one level is fine - one has to set limits to one's scholarly interests somewhere. But there is a danger that this approach can become very inward-looking.*

And whilst Greek and Roman movies may be the primary focus of those of us in the Classical Studies discipline who are studying them, this is not the case for the Hollywood creatives making them. Ridley Scott's previous movie before Gladiator was the modern military action movie G.I. Jane (1997); his next was Hannibal (2001), despite the ancient history-derived name a modern thriller, sequel to The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Gladiator star Russell Crowe bracketed his performance in that movie with appearances in two thrillers, The Insider (1999) and Proof of Life (2000). David Franzoni, the writer who originated the concept of Gladiator, did indeed go straight on to another Roman project, King Arthur (2004), but his previous screenplay was for the nineteenth century-set Amistad (1997). The two people who worked on subsequent drafts of the Gladiator screenplay were John Logan and William Nicholson, Logan fitted Gladiator between Any Given Sunday (1999), a sports drama, and The Time Machine (2002), science fiction based on H.G. Wells' novel. Nicholson, who is less prolific a screenwriter, had come from Grey Owl (1999), set in 1930s Canada, and went on to Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), set in the sixteenth century.

Yes, I know that the order in which people work on movies isn't necessarily the same as the order in which those movies appear, but I think my point still stands. No-one in Hollywood works exclusively on Classical movies. So when studying those movies, we as scholars need to take account of the wider industry. Not doing so properly can at its worst lead to things like Martin Winkler's introduction to Troy: From Homer's Iliad to Hollywood Epic (2007), where he writes as if Wolfgang Petersen's entire career was leading up to directing Troy. (The fact that Petersen has only directed Poseidon [2006] since doesn't validate this view.)

Less seriously, it leads to neglecting or misunderstanding important factors in how movies are made, and what the movie-makers are doing. The beach landing sequence in (again) Troy is pretty obviously an homage to the beach landing that opens Saving Private Ryan (1998); yet the only mention of Spielberg's movie in Winkler's book is a brief comment on the visual echoes as part of an unconvincing argument for Troy as an allegory of the Normandy invasion. To take another example, I would suggest that the most significant movie in getting 300 greenlit was not Gladiator, or any other ancient world movie, but Sin City (2005). Sin City was based on a Frank Miller comics series, as was 300. Though pre-shooting work on 300 had begun before Sin City was released, it was known that the latter was in production. I suspect that the studio heads who gave the go-ahead for 300 were aware that Sin City was looking good, and expecting it to do good business (which it did), and were looking for something similar. So, rather than looking for another ancient world movie, I think that they were looking for another Frank Miller property.

The standard Reception Studies model does not just neglect the circumstances of individual movies. I'd argue that it also distorts the overall story of ancient world movies since 2000. The model ought to predict a number of Roman set movies following directly following on from Gladiator, in the tradition of the Hollywood historical Roman epics of the 1950s and 1960s. In reality, it seems to me that such movies have been few and far between, at least until recently. There is Pompeii, but as I shall argue later, there's another influence at work there. There is Agora (2009), but that emerges from a European tradition, rather than Hollywood, and is not really 'epic'. Similarly, there is Caesar, due later this year, to which Sean Bean was at one time attached, though he was absent from the IMDb 'full cast list' before that was shunted into IMDb Pro, and made unavailable to non-subscribers (but so was Julius Caesar, the role that Bean was up to play, whom one suspects cannot be excised from this movie) [ETA 08/02/17: Shortly after I posted this original article, Bean announced that he had pulled out of the project, which seems subsequently to have collapsed entirely.] - but as it is based to William Shakespeare's play, this belongs more in the tradition of British movies adapting the plays of Shakespeare than in that of the Hollywood Roman epic. In any case, while there will always be exceptions, the general trend does not seem to me to be that the model predicts.

It is true that there are often Roman historical movies supposedly in development, such as Angelina Jolie's Cleopatra project. Very often, as in this case, a sober assessment of the project being developed would suggest that it will never happen. There's been a litany of Roman movie projects that have been talked about but ended up stillborn for one reason or another, such as Roman Polanski's planned version of Robert Harris' Pompeii (Polanski lost patience when it looked like there might be a strike of the Screen Actors Guild, and went on to make The Ghost [2010] instead) or John Boorman's take on Marguerite Yourcenar's novel Memoirs of Hadrian, which again supposedly was going to be filmed in 2008, but never happened (Boorman was evidently talking up a project that he had yet to secure the money for, and which he never was able to finance). Vin Diesel continues to speak of his pet project Hannibal the Conqueror, but it's been pretty obvious for a decade that it is very unlikely that this will ever appear at a multiplex near you. Of course, it's always possible that the stars will suddenly align themselves in favour of some of these projects, but don't hold your breath.

That is the way of cinema. A great number of movie projects get talked about, and only a handful actually make it to the screen. This is why I get frustrated whenever anyone reports some announcement that a project is in development as if it will definitely happen - the truth is in all probability it won't. Scripts are commissioned all the time, and this isn't seen as a significant investment in a project (because writers are not really valued in Hollywood, partly because, as William Goldman wrote in Adventures in the Screen Trade [1983], everyone in Hollywood thinks that they could do the writer's job). As Gideon Nisbet says in Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture (2006), all talk about movies in development is just so much hot air until someone actually begins building sets - and even then, it's not guaranteed, as is apparent from the saga of Peter Jackson's remake of The Dam Busters (1955), where replica Lancasters and other props were built as long ago as 2009, but so far not a minute of footage has been shot.

The sort of Roman empire stories that used to be staples of 1950s Hollywood epic have instead transferred to television; so we have had Rome (2005-2007), the various STARZ Spartacus series (2010-2013), and mini-series such as Julius Caesar (2002), Imperium: Augustus (2003), Spartacus (2004), based on Howard Fast's novel, Empire (2005), and Ben-Hur (2010). It is worth noting that two of these mini-series, Spartacus and Ben-Hur, were based on novels that in the 1950s and 1960s had given rise to movies. The small screen now seems to be often viewed as a more appropriate venue for these sort of stories.

There is now, however, a cinematic remake of Ben-Hur on the way. This is a case where the stars do seem to have aligned correctly for the movie, and it has actually started principal photography, so the likelihood is that we will actually see this in cinemas in 2016. But this is so far very much an exception to the overall trend. It might possibly signal future developments, especially as there is another epic of the Roman Holy Land in post-production, Christ the King. But these might not be a sign of a revival of the Roman epic, but of the Biblical epic (a genre that is, admittedly, closely related to and intertwined with the Roman epic), a revival already seen in movies such as Noah (2014) and Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014). In any case, I must emphasize that fifteen years have passed between Gladiator and what I would consider to be a movie firmly in the Roman epic tradition that Gladiator supposedly revived.

On the big screen, movies of antiquity have been dominated by the Greek rather than the Roman - so the big ancient world movies since Gladiator have been Troy, 300, Clash of the Titans and its sequel Wrath of the Titans (2012), two Percy Jackson movies (2010 and 2013), Immortals (2011), and The Legend of Hercules and Hercules (both 2014). This is in stark contrast to the 1950s and 1960s. There were Greek movies made then, such as Helen of Troy (1956), The 300 Spartans (1962), and Jason and the Argonauts (1963). But, for reasons discussed by Nisbet, primarily a difficulty in coding Greece as notably different from Rome and escaping notions of camp, Greek movies were very much in the minority, and the first ancient world movies that people think of for this period of Hollywood history are the Roman ones.

Not only are things different in the twenty-first century, but the first Greek movie to follow Gladiator, Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004), was a perceived commercial and critical failure which ought to have done the same damage to the epic genre as was done in the 1960s by Cleopatra (1963) and Fall of the Roman Empire (1964). Why did this not happen?

I put the continuing appeal of Greek epics down to a movie that was near-contemporary with Gladiator, that was also massively successful, but is rarely spoken of in connection with ancient world movies. That movie is The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), and, of course, its two sequels. Lord of the Rings is not often mentioned by Classicists, presumably because they generally don't see it as overtly Classically-influenced. I think that's missing something - Gondor in particular as visualized by Peter Jackson seems to me to be drawing on the visual aesthetic of the Byzantine empire, and there's clearly a connection between Byzantium and Rome, however much it is sometimes played down. But more importantly, I feel that to cinema audiences who are not Classicists, the world of Lord of the Rings looks less different from the world of Gladiator than it does to Classicists. I would argue that the influence of Lord of the Rings is at least as pervasive in post-2001 ancient world cinema as that of Gladiator. And I don't just mean in endless helicopter shots of small groups of people walking over mountains. I believe it is thanks to Lord of the Rings that the ancient world movie managed to survive the failure of Alexander.

The shadow of Lord of the Rings means that creators of cinematic epics with a pre-modern setting are looking for other stories with magic or monsters. And that pushes people in the direction of Greece. At a conference on Classics in children's literature that took place in 2009, it was observed that authors in this field tended to turn to Rome when they wanted historical stories, but to Greece when they wanted mythology (it often being assumed, wrongly as it happens, that Roman mythology is no more than Greek mythology with different names for the gods). I myself have observed in print that this phenomenon can be seen in Doctor Who in the 1960s and 1970s. And now it is apparent in ancient world movies.

The influence of Lord of the Rings can be spotted as early as Troy. In some ways this is a very traditional epic treatment of the Trojan War, following a standard pattern of historicizing the material and removing the gods from the narrative, as seen in Helen of Troy, and a lot of the impetus for it being greenlit probably did come from Gladiator. But the battle scenes are clearly imitative of Lord of the Rings, and Jackson's fantasy epic particularly shapes Troy in the casting of two of the most important roles, Sean Bean as Odysseus, and Orlando Bloom as Paris.

The shadow of Lord of the Rings falls particularly heavily on 300. Frank Miller's original comic (1998) had already mythologized the story of Leonidas' last stand against the Persian invasion of Greece, but the movie takes that process considerably further, depicting the Immortals as deformed in a way that Miller does not, and which echoes the Orcs of Jackson's epics. The movie also includes an 'Uber Immortal', a near-mindless character not to be found in the comic, and which is strongly reminiscent of Fellowship's cave troll.

The influence of Lord of the Rings and the fantastic version of the ancient world that it encourages also extends to Roman-set movies. King Arthur and The Last Legion (2007) present themselves as historical movies of the end of Roman Britain, but both draw upon mythological material. The Last Legion, in particular, codes much of its action as a fantastic quest, with legendary swords and Ben Kingsley's Merlin being very much in the mould of Obi-Wan Kenobi - he never actually performs any magic, but the movie wants the viewer to believe that he is always on the verge of doing so. Centurion (2010) and The Eagle are more realistic movies, but these are dealing with a modern myth of the Roman empire, the supposed disappearance of the Ninth Legion in Scotland, a thesis advanced by Theodor Mommsen, still supported by some, and dramatised by Rosemary Sutcliff in The Eagle of the Ninth (1954), but for which there is precious little actual evidence. And aerial shots of small groups crossing wastelands, a trope that Fellowship of the Ring made its own, turn up in all of these movies. (Albeit that in The Eagle a crane seems to substitute for a helicopter as camera platform.)

Pompeii also codes itself towards the fantastic. Strictly speaking a historical movie, it is also a special effects spectacular. (One might compare James Cameron's Titanic [1997], which though lacking overt fantastic elements, through its special effects sequences looked like the science fiction movies that Cameron had made up to that point.) Pompeii is further coded towards fantasy through casting Kit Harrington, famous through his role in TV fantasy epic Game of Thrones (2011-), in the lead role.

So I strongly argue that most movies set in the ancient world need to be seen in the wider context of fantasy epic. But needing to see Classical movies in the light of other movies is not a new phenomenon. The truth is that Greek and Roman epics have always existed in wider contexts. Quo Vadis (1951), The Robe (1953) and Ben-Hur (1959) are all Roman epics, but they are also Biblical epics, tales of early Christianity. Even Spartacus (1960), set before the time of Jesus, adds a strong Biblical flavour by casting its hero as a pseudo-Christ, who ends up dying on a cross. Indeed, it is noticeable that when epics turned to subjects without an overt Christian element, they did considerably less well at the box office (though there are other reasons for the failure of Cleopatra and Fall of the Roman Empire). These Biblical Roman movies need to be discussed alongside the likes of David and Bathsheba (1951) and Solomon and Sheba (1959), but rarely are, particularly by Classicists - noble exceptions are Jon Solomon's The Ancient World in Cinema (2001) and Hollywood's Ancient Worlds (2008) by the film historian Jeffrey Richards.

Even restricting the idea of the epic to the ancient world (i.e. adding Ancient Egypt and the Ancient Near East to Greece and Rome) is too narrow. A BBC documentary in the Timeshift series, 'Epic: A Cast of Thousands!' (2011), included in the movies discussed El Cid (1961), set in eleventh-century Spain, and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965), both set in and around the First World War. El Cid's presence in that list suggests to me that Hollywood audiences and producers draw less firm lines between the ancient and medieval periods than Classicists do, and we should be including movies such as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) in our discussions. I myself have made a case for considering Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans (1981) alongside Ray Harryhausen's three Sinbad movies.

It is also worth noting the date of Doctor Zhivago, 1965. There is a common narrative (indeed, one followed in the Timeshift programme) that the failure of Cleopatra in 1963 and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1964 marked the end of the epic. If Doctor Zhivago is to be considered an epic, then that view requires some modification. It is more accurate to say that Fall of the Roman Empire marked the end of the ancient epic - after this time excursions into Greek or Roman antiquity tended to be confined to comedies such as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), or European art-house movies such as Fellini Satyricon (1969) or Iphigenia (1977). But the epic as a broader genre continued, merging with the war movie, a process that had already begun as early as The Longest Day (1962) and is exemplified in Battle of the Bulge (1965), which includes a lengthy Overture and Intermission, both of which are scored but lack filmed action - these are typical features of the epic, seen in movies such as Ben-Hur, Spartacus and El Cid. The actual end of the epic perhaps should be connected with the decline of the all-star war movie, which followed the relative commercial failure of Battle of Britain (1969) and Waterloo (1970).

Let me conclude by coming back to Ridley Scott, with whose Gladiator I began. Gladiator is not the only pre-modern epic that Scott has directed. He has also made Kingdom of Heaven (2005), Robin Hood (2010), and Exodus: Gods and Kings. There has been very little interest expressed by Classicists in the first two (unless someone is able to point me at something that I have missed), and I would argue that this is because both are set in medieval times rather than ancient history. (Kingdom of Heaven might be thought to have some interest to Classicists, being set in the twelfth century kingdom of Jerusalem, when the Byzantine Empire was still a player in the region, but the movie eliminates Byzantium entirely from its script.) Only with Exodus, set back in the ancient world, albeit Egypt rather than Greece or Rome, have I noticed Classicists paying attention. I would, however, strongly argue Scott probably does not recognize such a clear difference, and that these four movies need to be treated as a group, especially by anyone wishing to draw links between Gladiator and Exodus.

This is a rather more complex model than that which is sometimes used in discussing Classical movies. But if Reception Studies scholars are to be Film Historians rather than simply Classical dilettantes, as I feel they must be, then I wish to argue strongly for a more nuanced understanding of Hollywood, based upon awareness of wider contexts.

* At this point I could launch into a long digression about how some Classical Reception theory is intrinsically inward-looking, in a way that I think is not helpful, but I have dealt with that in the introduction to a special issue of Foundation, issue 118, that I've guest-edited. 

[ETA 23/08/16: I have realized that this post leaves out Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion of the Christ, but that is a movie that I consider very much sui generis and outside the Hollywood system. I am no longer able to find any trace on IMDb of the movie Christ the King referred to above, and I suspect it may have been the movie actually released as Risen (2016).]

[ETA 05/12/16: I now think Christ the King is not Risen, but The Young Messiah (2016), originally titled Christ the Lord. I assume a misreading on my part.]

New review on FA Online

New in FA - The Comiczine: I review the first three issues of Captain Marvel and the Carol Corps - A fun, but ultimately slight coda to Kelly Sue DeConnick’s excellent Captain Marvel run.

Bakkhai at the Almeida Theatre, London

Performance seen: 7 September 2015

There was a moment in the Almeida's rather fine production of Euripides' Bakkhai (that is the transliteration that they use) where I realised that the cheeky buggers were doing this as a three-actor production, as it was originally written in the fifth century BC. And extremely effective it was too. Never again will I say that three actors require the use of masks - instead it just requires clever use of costuming, make-up, accents and lighting. Most impressive in this respect was Ben Wishaw's performance as the Messenger (a role that I suspect in the original production would actually have gone to the third actor, the one playing Cadmus and the Herdsman, rather than to the protagonist, the actor playing Dionysus and Teiresias). Through keeping his face away from the audience except when at the back of the stage, when his face was partially distorted by smoke, Wishaw almost had me believing that there was another actor in the cast - and one of my companions didn't realise that only three actors were used (besides those playing the Chorus) until only three came out for the curtain call. 

Wishaw gives an excellent performance. I had wondered whether he might have been more appropriately cast as Pentheus, but that, I think, was because I had seen him being extraordinary in the role of Richard II in The Hollow Crown on television, a role that has more than a little of Pentheus in it. He carries off Dionysus with style, in a performance that emphasises the character's divinity, rather than, as Alan Cumming did, his sexual ambivalence. Having played Richard II as Jesus, we now get Wishaw doing Dionysus as Jesus. Presumably someday he will be allowed to actually play Jesus.

As well as praising Wishaw, I must mention Bertie Carvel, excellent as Pentheus and his mother Agave. He is deliberately unconvincing as Pentheus dressed as a woman, but much more convincing as Agave.

However, what first won me over to this production was the Chorus, which is one of the best Choruses I've seen in a long while, certainly for this play. It benefitted greatly from the presence of professional singers. They all harmonise well, yet each individual can be heard clearly. And I like Anne Carson's text very much.

If there's a complaint to be made, it's that the production doesn't quite convey the full horror of the play's concluding moments. But that may partly because I've seen so many productions that I'm inured to the dismembered corpse by now.

I've been left a bit underwhelmed by a lot of the big tragedy productions of the past year - the Old Vic's Electra with Kristen Scott Thomas, the National's Medea with Helen McCrory, the Barbican's Antigone with Juliet Binoche. But the Almeida has delivered the most innovative and compelling Oresteia I've ever seen, and now a far more conventional, but still superior Bakkhai. I'm very impressed.

Bloomsday

Today is Bloomsday, the day of the events of James Joyce's novel Ulysses.

I confess that I have never finished Ulysses. I have, however, got further than many - the bookmark in my copy is at p. 856 of 933, in the middle of the 'Ithaca' issue, a little more than a dozen pages before Molly Bloom's monologue. It seems silly that I never got to the end - I guess I just got distracted by something else that needed doing, and never got back to it. It's so long since I read it now I would surely have to start again. (I nearly read it along with an online acquaintance, but didn't have time.)

That copy is a Chinese Yilin Press edition bought in 1997 in Changchun, I guess because I was looking for something to read in English that actually looked worth my time. It's a pirated copy of the 1992 Penguin with Declan Kiberd's introduction.

When I started Ulysses it was a revelation. The first chapter is full of Classical references - Buck Mulligan quotes Xenophon - and, of course, the whole work refashions Homer's Odyssey. I was gripped by the early chapters (which makes it all the more surprising that I never managed to finish the novel). I revisited the first one today, and I still like it.

It also gave me an insight into Thucydides. I could see similarities in their writing styles, and I came to believe that both writers were interested in the full possibilities of their respective languages, and in choosing exactly the right words to express the precise meaning that that wanted to express. That many not be an observation that modern Thucydidean scholars would subscribe to. But it works for me. I must read this book again.

Fantastic London Course, Middlesex University

I haven't done a good enough job of publicizing the course I teach for Middlesex University in the summer, on 'Fantastic London'. There are still places available on it - the cost is £495 for British and EU residents. You don't have to be a Middlesex student, or indeed any kind of student, to apply. 

The course runs for two weeks, from 2 to 16 July (though if they got enough students, they might add another group which would run into the following week). The object of the course is to explore London as a background for the literature of the fantastic (it's a slimmed down version of a longer course I teach for the University of Notre Dame - well, actually the ND course is an expanded version of this). We look at three texts, Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, London Falling by Paul Cornell, and The Wicked and the Divine: The Faust Act by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. There are also four walks through different bits of London, explaining how they were used as background for various bits of fantastic literature - The City, Bloomsbury, Camden and the East End. At the end of the course, students submit a short critical piece (1,000 words) and a short creative piece (2,500 words).

It's a fun course that I enjoy teaching, and I encourage anyone interested to apply. And please share this with anyone you think might be interested.

Tony

Terry Pratchett

I've never been a massive fan of Terry Pratchett. I've read a few of his books, and liked them and found them funny (especially those featuring the Witches), but I was never one of those waiting on the arrival of every Discworld novel.

That does not mean, however, that I don't recognise how important he was, and fully understand why my Facebook feed yesterday and this morning is full of tributes to him. With Douglas Adams, he helped reshape the English comic novel. With Neil Gaiman, he helped reshape the English fantasy novel. And Ankh-Morpork is one of the great Other Londons.

Over a quarter of a century ago, Pratchett, just recently gone full time as a writer, was a guest at Edinburgh University SF Society's Freshercon. For some reason, I ended up on a couple of panels with him, one on writing where he and Graham Dunstan Martin did all the talking, and one in which we were telling a live round robin story - so in a way I've collaborated with Terry Pratchett. I never really spoke to him after that, though saw him on panels a lot. I also have a very vivid memory of Iain Banks doing a note-perfect Pratchett impersonation.

And I always liked the stuff about dwarves.

Places still available on the 2015 Masterclass in Science Fiction Criticism

There are still places available on the 2015 Science Fiction Foundation Masterclass in Science Fiction Criticism. If you would like to apply, please contact masterclass@sf-foundation.org.

Full details of the Masterclass are here: http://sf-foundation.org/masterclass2015

2015 BSFA Lecture

The 2015 BSFA Lecture at Dysprosium (the 2015 Eastercon) will be given by Dr Simon Trafford (Institute of Historical Research), and is entitled ‘“Runar munt þu finna”: why sing pop in dead languages?’ The lecture will be given at 5.30 pm on Saturday April 4th, in the Discovery room of the Park Inn, Heathrow. The lecture is open to any member of Dysprosium.

Simon Trafford is Lecturer in Medieval History and Research Training Officer at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research. He specialises in the history and archaeology of the later Anglo-Saxon period in the north-east of England. He completed his undergraduate studies and his D.Phil. at the University of York, where his supervisor was Professor Edward James, who sf fans know as current Chair of the Science Fiction Foundation. Simon has a particular interest in the depiction of Vikings in popular culture. His talk for us develops this, with a special focus upon the use of dead ancient and medieval languages in pop and rock songs.

The BSFA Lecture is intended as a companion to the George Hay Lecture, which is presented at the Eastercon by the Science Fiction Foundation. Where the Hay Lecture invites scientists, the BSFA Lecture invites academics from the arts and humanities, because we recognise that science fiction fans aren’t only interested in science.  The lecturers are given a remit to speak “on a subject that is likely to be of interest to science fiction fans” – i.e. on whatever they want!  This is the eighth BSFA Lecture.

International Women's Day 2015

Last year for International Women's Day I posted about Edith Hamilton. This year I want to write about something a little different. Instead of writing about Classical Studies, I'm going to write about classical music, and in particular Marin Alsop.

There are plenty of female virtuosos on piano, violin, etc., such as Nicola Benedetti and Arabella Steinbacher, the latter of whom I'm always ready to go and hear. But there aren't many female conductors, at least not in prominent roles. There doesn't seem any particular reason why this should be, other than institutionalized sexism. Conducting doesn't particularly need strengths that are particular to men - after all, Sue Perkins won the BBC's celebs-learn-to-conduct series Maestro, and has done some conducting since. Vasily Petrenko supposedly said that orchestras are too much in danger of being distracted by a pretty woman, to which the only reply is "Do you think with your penis all the time?"

Anyway, in about ten years of going to classical concerts, I don't think I've ever seen a woman conduct. So when I saw that Marin Alsop was conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra in February, Kate and I decided to go. It's unusual for us to go to the LPO - we're usually loyal to the Philharmonia. But as far as I know, Alsop has never conducted the Philharmonia (they should try to rectify this).

Anyway, we went to see her conduct three Beethoven pieces, Leonore Overture no, 3, Piano Concerto no.3, and Symphony no. 7 (which I always forget I know until I hear it). And it was great. Alsop really brought the music to life. She's a bundle of energy on the podium, and is clearly having a wonderful time. I would definitely go and see her conduct again, and I urge you to. And I hope that by the time I am put in the ground, a female conductor is not such a rarity.

Ninth Science Fiction Foundation Masterclass in Science Fiction Criticism 2015

The Ninth Science Fiction Foundation Masterclass in Science Fiction Criticism will be held from Friday 17 July to Sunday 19 July 2015. 

The SFF Masterclass involves three days studying texts supplied by three class leaders.  It is a great way to broaden your critical perspectives, sharpen some critical tools, and to make contacts with other people writing on SF and Fantasy.  The class leaders are drawn from professional writers, academics and fans, and this is a great opportunity to learn from people experienced in their craft.

Anyone interested in writing seriously about science fiction and/or fantasy, at whatever level they are in their careers, is welcome to attend.  This includes not just critics and reviewers, but historians and other scholars.  Those who have attended past Masterclasses are also welcome to apply (though we will prioritise applications from those who have not been previous students).

Past students have found these events immensely beneficial, and often return.  For some reports and endorsements from past students and class leaders, see the Facebook page for the Masterclass;

We are pleased to announce that the venue will again be the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, founded by Charles II in 1675, and the home of the Prime Meridian.

Price: £200; £150 for registered postgraduate students. 

The Class Leaders for 2015 will be: 

Pat Cadigan, multiple Clarke and Hugo Award-winning author of Synners and Fools, and Official Queen of Cyberpunk.

Nick Lowe, BSFA Award-winning critic and writer of Interzone's 'Mutant Popcorn' column.

Graham Sleight, Hugo Award-winning Managing Editor of the Science Fiction Encyclopedia.

To apply please send a short (no more than 3,000 words) piece of critical writing (a blog entry, review, essay, or other piece), and a one page curriculum vitae, to masterclass@sf-foundation.org.  Applications received by 28 February 2015 will be considered by an Applications Committee consisting of Tony Keen, Andy Sawyer and Kari Sperring. Applications received after 28 February may be considered if places are still available, on a strictly first-come first served basis. 

Information on past Masterclasses can be found here.

Classics and fanfic

One of the things I've often heard said is that most texts of ancient  mythology are pretty much fan fiction, since they reuse and repurpose characters that already exist. "Virgil was writing Homer fanfic" is the way it's often phrased. I'm not too sure that the equivalence is as strong as it's sometimes claimed to be. For a start, the concept of fan fiction is predicated on the idea that there are 'official' and 'unofficial' stories set in a particular megatext, and that the official stories hold an essential position of privilege over the unofficial ones. That's not really true in ancient literature - not even Homer is quite treated in that fashion. Still, what the comparison does show is that fanfiction, telling new stories about characters in stories that we've heard, is a manifestation of an urge in human storytelling that has very deep roots indeed, and that making the creation of original characters a sign of a superior writer, a stick that is often used to beat fanficcers, is a fairly recent idea.

Anyway, Juliette Harrison has written an interesting blog post on this subject. And Ika Willis will be editing an issue of  the Journal of Transformative Works that addresses Classics and fanfic, If you want to contribute you have until 1 March.

A couple of posts on my OU blog

I've put a couple of posts up on my OU blog (which I don't use much, but occasionally I post something closely related to my teaching interests).

One is a medium-length exposition on 'What is myth'.

The other, much shorter piece, applies a theoretical framework to a particular myth.

Marcus the Evangelist

I've had my attention drawn to an online piece by W. Robert Connor, arguing that the name of the author of the second Gospel, "Mark", or "Marcus" in Latin, suggests that he was from a pro-Roman and pro-Herodian family. The name, Connor suggests, may be a nod towards the Roman general Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, who spent two periods in the East in charge of, among other areas, Judaea - as an example of pro-Roman naming he mentions the Tetrarch known to us as Herod Agrippa, but who was born Marcus Julius Agrippa. The author of the Gospel, the argument goes, may have been named at a time when the name "Marcus" was in vogue, which Connor suggests may have been the late teens BCE, making the Evangelist born rather earlier than he is generally thought to have been.

My immediate thought was this: Surely the use of Marcus shows that Mark was a Roman citizen?

To elaborate: "Marcus" is a praenomen, the first part of the tria nomina, the three-part Roman citizen name. In the first century CE praenomina were, as far as I know, the exclusive preserve of Roman citizens - hence the inscriptional formula [praenomen] + filius (e.g. M(arci) f(ilius)) could be used to demonstrate that one's father was a Roman citizen, and therefore one must oneself be a freeborn Roman citizen. If praenomina were in more general use, this formula could not carry the intended message. Connor (who seems throughout unfamiliar with Roman naming conventions) implies that any Jewish family could choose to name their child Marcus; I think that's only the case if the family were already Roman citizens.

Why Marcus? Let's first get rid of the red herring of Marcus Julius Agrippa. The Agrippa part of this name (the cognomen)* is certainly in honour of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. But the standard practice (which doesn't mean it was universal - naming practices regularly broke any "rules" that may have existed) was for first-born sons of Roman citizens, such as Herod Agrippa, to inherit their praenomen and nomen from their father. So Agrippa's father, who we know as Aristobulus, was probably Marcus Julius Aristobulus (we don't actually have Aristobulus' full citizen name recorded, but he must have had one). The Julius comes from when Herod Agrippa's great-grandfather Antipater was made a Roman citizen by Julius Caesar. Standard practice was to take the praenomen and nomen of the person who raised one to Roman citizenship, and use one's own name as one's cognomen. So Antipater would have become Gaius Julius Antipater.

Why the change to Marcus? I think this is because Aristobulus was the third son, rather than the first, of his father Herod the Great. Now, usual practice amongst Greeks who had achieved Roman citizenship was to distinguish between brothers through the use of a different cognomen, whilst retaining praenomen and nomen. In Italy, however, brothers were distinguished by different praenomina, whilst the nomen and cognomen remained unchanged; so the brother of Marcus Tullius Cicero was Quintus Tullius Cicero, I wonder if Herod was using both systems; so instead of distinguishing between Gaius Julius Antipater and Gaius Julius Aristobulus, he distinguished them as Gaius Julius Antipater and Marcus Julius Aristobulus. If that's correct, then given that Aristobulus was born in 31 BCE, if a Roman Marcus was being honoured here, it was not Agrippa, who would not come out to the east until eight years later, but the ruler of the Roman East at the time (and Herod's close ally), Mark Antony.

So why Marcus for the Evangelist? One might speculate (and this is very much speculation) that if his family received Roman citizenship from Agrippa when he was in charge in the east, they may have taken the names "Marcus Vipsanius" as the family praenomen and nomen. But one might alternatively have expected them to have taken the names of the emperor at the time, Gaius Julius (Caesar Augustus); certainly this was later practice, ensuring that such honours were monopolized by the imperial family. And even if "Marcus" does come from Agrippa, this merely indicates when Mark's family were enfranchised - it says nothing about when Mark himself was born.

In the end, I don't think we can say with any certainty why Mark was called "Mark" rather than any other name. But this does not mean that Connor's broader point about the pro-Roman nature of Mark is invalid. Indeed, given that I think it can be 100% asserted that Mark was a Roman citizen (which leads me to wonder why it never is), his pro-Roman stance is implicit and to be expected. I also think Connor is right about where Mark grew up, in the heavily Hellenized city of Caesarea, which would have had a strong community of Roman citizens, rather than the more traditional Jewish environment of Jerusalem.

I now invite comments from better Romanists than me.

[Edit: Emma England rightly points out that the above is based on the a priori assumption that "Mark" was the Evangelist's birth-name. I don't think that's an unreasonable assumption, but it is an assumption, and I should have flagged it as such.]

*Actually I suspect "Agrippa" is an agnomen, an additional name, and the cognomen here was the family name Herodes, so he was Marcus Julius Herodes Agrippa.

Does Catullus sing Smokey? A meditation on the fannish academic and the return of the personal voice

This is one of those long essays I probably shouldn’t write here. You might want to read this in conjunction with my piece on Reception theory.

I began this piece in response to a conference in Bristol in 2010, organized by the ever-interesting Ika Willis, “Desiring the Text, Touching the Past: Towards An Erotics of Reception” (I fear the official conference webpage has long since disappeared into the black hole of institutional reorganization of webspaces). The thinking behind the conference was inspired by Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (1975), and focussed upon responses to texts that were more personal than the usual “distanced” academic approach (you can read some of Ika’s thinking on this topic here). It kicked off a number of thoughts in my head about the overlap between fannishness and academic study, and I wrote some preliminary notes for this piece at the time (initially intending it for the Friends of the Text blog that started up in the wake of the conference, but has since sadly disappeared). It never got very far, as other matters intervened, but I always meant to get back to it. I am doing so now because of a couple of interrelated developments in the teaching I am doing in the current academic year.

First up, I got offered the opportunity to teach some sessions on the University of Roehampton’s “Theories and Methods in Classical Research”, part of their MRes in Classical Research. When I was offered this, I had just been listening to Neil Easterbrook lead a class at the Science Fiction Foundation’s Masterclass in Science Fiction Criticism on the writing of scholarly articles and criticism. That inspired me to want to spend one of my MRes sessions talking about academic writing to the students. Something that never really got said to me when I was starting out as an academic was that I was now an aspiring writer, and I suspect still that most postgraduates think of themselves as researchers and scholars rather than writers. But research in the humanities must (in the majority of cases) eventually result in a published outcome. The various research assessment processes which have dogged the UK university system since the 1980s judge university departments on the publications of their members, which means, in effect, that scholars are judged on their writing, and that those wishing to make their way in an academic career will find that their chances of appointment and advancement are based upon what they have written.

The second thing was that I successfully applied to teach on the Open University’s new MA in Classical Studies. Reading through the first Block, I discovered there a Unit on “Finding a Voice”, exactly the sort of discussion I was planning for the Roehampton students. So I thought it was time I finished this piece off, to use it as a teaching object.

At the end of 2010, John Sutherland, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at University College London, appeared, as he often does, on BBC Radio 4’s nightly arts review programme, Front Row. He came on to promote his then-new book 50 Literature Ideas You Really Need To Know. That book is not of particular concern here, but something he said at the end his item struck me. He said that he now knew so much about how fiction worked, and how it was constructed, that he was no longer able to enjoy it in the way he once had. He wished he could recapture the innocent enthusiasm he once had for H. Rider Haggard, but this was now impossible.

And I thought, “Professor Sutherland, you are doing it wrong.”

This is hardly the first time John Sutherland has been wrong. Anyone from a background in science fiction fandom and criticism who has followed his pronouncements over the years on genre fiction, and why it should not be recognised by the likes of the Man Booker Prize, will be familiar with his wrongness. (And I wonder if his inability to enjoy Rider Haggard any more has anything to do with his hostility towards genre.) But his error here cuts right to the heart of what I believe to be the largely artificial and often wholly unnecessary and counterproductive divide between fandom and the academy.

First of all, let’s define our terms. In a number of academic contexts, when people talk about fannish writing, they mean fanfiction writing, and by “fandom” they mean the communities of fanfic writers who come together – so usually people will refer to “fandoms” and mean the communities that have gathered around fanfics about a particular film, novel or television series. Of course, not for a moment would I say that this is not fannish writing – indeed, a lot of my own fannish activity involves being part of those communities, if not actually writing fanfic myself (any more). But this is not the only form of fannish writing. [Edit: And see also Kate Keen's very valid point in the comment below that these writers write more than just fanfic.] There are a lot of different fandoms out there, and in many of them, the predominant writing mode is non-fiction rather than fiction. This is true, for instance, of the science fiction fanzines that were my main outlet for writing in the period 2000-2002, which were (and remain) full of critical analyses of texts. Other fandoms, such as Doctor Who, have devoted as much attention to analysing official stories as to creating new ones. So when I discuss fannish writing here, what I primarily mean is that critical analysis.

Fandom often sets itself up in opposition to academia. Academics are viewed as outsiders, and academic writing and teaching is seen as sucking all the enjoyment out of reading texts, exactly as Sutherland feels it does. On the academic side, there are some who are dismissive of the obsessiveness of fans; but as others have observed, it is a bit rich for anyone who conducts detailed academic research to use “obsessive” in a pejorative fashion.

This opposition between fandom and academia is, in my view, largely false. For a start, there are many academics (e.g. myself, Farah Mendlesohn, Juliette Harrisson, etc.) who self-identify as fans, and attend fannish events such as Eastercons or what was once the SFX Weekender. “They” are “us” in this case. And fans, as Stacie L. Hanes (another person both fan and academic) has pointed out, are entirely capable of engaging in exactly the sort of detailed and lengthy analysis of texts that academics do, in a manner that is often indistinguishable beyond the apparatus of academic criticism (footnotes, bibliographies, etc.). By doing so, not only do these fans demonstrate the falsity of the divide between academia and fandom, but they also demonstrate the falsity of Sutherland’s assertion that detailed study of the mechanics of texts robs you of the ability to enjoy them. Rather, if approached properly, this study (and being taught about texts) should enhance your enjoyment. 

Unfortunately, study of texts is associated in many people’s minds with school experience, and being made for class to read literary works that you don’t want to. This, I would say, is nothing to do with the quality of teaching (or of the texts – I appreciate that the antipathy I picked up towards Dickens from school is probably largely unfair), it’s just the child’s natural resistance to being forced to do anything; but it does lead to an attitude that is hard to shift, that analysis of a text and love of that text are antithetical (and that brings us back to the theme of the Bristol conference).

Much is lost through this division. There’s a really good discussion of the things that academics and fans can bring to each other in the “Introduction” to Matt Hills’ Triumph of a Time Lord. I recommend everyone reads this. However, there is also some recent pushing back from the academic side against the concept of the “acafan” – I particularly remember the closing session of the 2011 conference “Alien Nation: A Conference on British Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Television” at Northumbria University, where Ian Hunter argued for a move away from the acafan and paying attention to fandom, which prompted James Chapman to say that he didn’t see himself as a fan of the texts that he wrote about. Now, since I believe fervently (in contrast to the self-appointed gatekeepers of some fandoms) that “fan” is a term of self-definition, and not a label that anyone else can grant or withhold, I cannot object to Chapman’s choice not to define himself in that way (Hunter and Chapman are, incidentally, both scholars that I respect). And I can also see that scholars working with fan readings of texts run the risk of assuming (almost always incorrectly) that fan readings necessarily represent the responses of the wider audience (the problem is, of course, that while I understand what Hunter is trying to move towards, the casual consumer of a text – what Hunter calls the “indifferent audience” – tends not to record their reaction to a text in any form that is easily accessible to scholars).

But I do feel that scholars are in some manner fans, or enthusiasts, of the texts that they study, or even that they love them. I mean, if you have devoted your life to the study of the Aeneid, there must be something about that text that attracts you. I can imagine that people might write commentaries on texts in which they are not really interested, but I can’t imagine they would be particularly good, and I suspect almost always there is something in a project that engages the scholar's interests and enthusiasm. And where there is enthusiasm, I feel that there is a lot of value in scholars admitting this. It destroys the myth of academic objectivity, and allows you to situate yourself in relation to the text, thus ensuring that your audience knows exactly where you stand. 

So, for instance, when I teach cinema history, I feel there is value in letting the students know that, whilst I admire Citizen Kane (1940) for its cinematic techniques, I’m never going to love it the way I love Casablanca (1942), or that while I can see there are interesting things to say about James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), particularly in relation to the way it uses the tropes of 1940s melodrama, the way it is coded as a science fiction movie without actually being a science fiction movie, and its status as a cultural and economic phenomenon, I have to grit my teeth every time I’m required to watch it.

I think an awareness of the scope of your emotional engagement with a text may perhaps help avoid some potentially spurious avenues of research. I’ll begin with a possibly unfair example. Some recent work on the Aeneid has postulated that, far from being the unqualified work of propaganda for the regime of the emperor Augustus that everyone used to believe it is, The Aeneid actually includes some subtle criticism of Augustus. I’m not sure I buy this; if the criticism is sufficiently unsubtle to be picked up by modern scholarship, there’s a good chance it might be something that Augustus himself could spot, which might have landed Virgil in the sort of situation vis-à-vis the emperor that Ovid later faced.

Now, as I say, I may be out of order in postulating this (and perhaps just treat this as a thought experiment), but I find myself wondering if what is going on here is a clash between a love of Virgil’s craft and a dislike of the imperial system he endorses. This wasn’t an issue, at least in terms of what filtered through to students, when I was being first educated. Everyone admired Virgil, and everyone admired Augustus for bringing the Roman world out of chaos and into order (these were the days when the Roman principate was described as a sort of “constitutional monarchy”). In our post-colonial age, people are rather more wary about praising imperialists, and can see that, while it certainly can be argued that some aspects of the Augustan settlement benefited some people (the transformation of provincial government from a licence to steal to something that actually had to be done properly must have had an impact, at least on provincial élites), the emperor’s position was extra-constitutional, being a military dictatorship covered by a veneer of legality, and that intellectual freedom was not what it had been under the Republic (Catullus could never have been tolerated under Augustus as he was under Caesar.) 

But we still admire the poetry of Virgil. So are attempts to argue that Virgil is actually criticizing Augustus manifestations of a desire to continue admiring Virgil whilst removing uncomfortable elements of his political allegiance? As I say, I’m no Virgil scholar, and I’m surely oversimplifying, so I could be wrong here, though this review does make similar points about the so-called “pessimistic” reading of Virgil. If I’m right, I don’t think this is the way to go; better to acknowledge both the greatness of Virgil’s art, and the problems of the propaganda in the poem. I recommend “How to be a fan of problematic things” as a guide to how to handle this sort of issue. But as I say (and yes, this is getting boring), I could be wrong, and constructing a pure straw man in this part of my argument.

In any case, the point that is actually important here is that a more openly fannish attitude towards the text being discussed might at least enable readers to make a more accurate judgement about whether affection for Virgil is distorting anyone’s arguments, and perhaps even help authors take into account their own biases.

So let’s move onto something a bit more solid. For a really egregious example of how wrong scholarship can get when it is divorced from an emotional response to the text, I offer the late Guy Lee’s commentary on Catullus, Poem 85. Lee was an eminent Latinist, and his Oxford World’s Classics translation is well-respected, and appears on a lot of reading lists. I haven’t read enough of the work to form an overall judgement of it, but I think he goes badly astray with his commentary on this poem, one of Catullus’ most famous:

Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.

nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and I love. Why do I do that, you might ask?

I do not know, but I sense it happening, and I am torn apart.

Here is what Lee has to say about it in his notes:

This famous epigram disproves the theory that every good poem provides all the information needed to understand it. Presented with it out of context one could not possibly know that Catullus was talking about hating and loving the same woman at the same time. In other words we need to have read LXXII, LXXV and LXXVI in order to understand it.

I have used this poem and Lee’s comment when I was teaching Intermediate Latin, and the students I taught had much the same reaction as me to what Lee says here – that it’s an astonishing misreading of the poem, and in fact, palpable nonsense. The poem does contain everything necessary for its understanding, and that Catullus is hating and loving the same woman ought to be apparent from the second line; indeed, to admit the possibility that this is not the case is to render that line ridiculous. There is no emotional conflict inherent in loving one person and hating another, and it can hardly be described as “excruciating”.

No-one needs to have read another word of Catullus, or even to know anything more about him, to see that the object of odi and that of amo must be the same. You need only to have been in love with someone and feel that said person has unforgivably betrayed or hurt you, and be in that cleft stick of hating them for what they have done to you but still unable to shake the love you had for them in the first place – or to be aware that these sorts of things can happen. It is the same emotion expressed, if less elliptically, in Smokey Robinson’s “You Really Got A Hold Of Me”: “I don’t like you, but I love you.” It is precisely because of the universality of its sentiment that the poem is so famous (it is in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations). Through his commentary, Lee inadvertently casts himself in the role of Catullus’ clueless addressee, who can’t quite understand what the fuss is all about. (It is true that Catullus also deals with conflicted feelings, specifically towards Lesbia, in poems 72, 75 and 77, but that does not mean knowledge of those poems is needed to understand the emotional impact of 85.)

I have a sneaking suspicion (and this may get me into trouble) that part of the problem that results in comments like Lee’s is the emphasis placed upon philology in the discipline of Classical Studies (Lee’s introduction to his translation of Catullus is quite philological in its approach). Philology is the intensive study of the language and its constructions, through close detailed analysis of the texts. Philology is, of course, vital to a subject based upon texts in foreign and ancient languages. The only reason we can say anything at all about Catullus is that philologists have worked on the manuscripts, and given us confidence in the published texts from which we work. Everybody working in Classical Studies, in my opinion, needs to know a bit of philology.

The problem comes when some seem to suggest that philology is all that is needed, that once the intricacies of Greek and Latin grammar are mastered, any other skills (e.g. literary or historical analysis) are easily picked up without really trying. This, I fear, can lead to poor scholarship. Philology is very useful for drawing out what a text says, but it is rather less useful when it comes to what that text means (I well remember a conversation with Professor Emeritus Christopher Rowe where he expressed the view that it may be true that undergraduates are overall less able to read Latin and Greek than they were, but that critics, in focussing on that, are overlooking that these self-same undergraduates are far better equipped than their predecessors to talk about Greek and Latin works as literature). My suspicion is that an over-emphasis on philological training at the expense of anything else leads to commentary on love poetry that seems disconnected from the emotions that said poetry deals with; or people writing on Aristophanes who can tease out the complications of his syntax, but seem unable to spot where he is making a joke (and to judging the reliability of historians at least partially on the attractiveness of their literary style, and whether they tell us that they are intrinsically trustworthy – but that’s probably a rant for some other time).

I don’t mean, of course, to condemn anyone with a philological training – the majority of philologists are really good, and are aware that there is more to talking about a text than simply the philological approach. Indeed, there’s a lot of that sort of training in my background, though tempered by a Ph.D. completed in a History department, for which I will always be grateful.

What I am saying is that we, as a discipline, need to be aware of a wide range of issues when writing about texts, possibly a wider range than we sometimes consider, and that a “fannish” approach (or however you wish to describe it) can be an advantage here.

Writing with a fannish perspective almost inevitably involves writing from a personal point of view. Classics/Classical Studies academia has been here before. Twenty years ago “personal voice criticism” burst into the field, with sessions at the American Philological Association in 1994 and the Classical Association in St Andrews in 1995 (where the late David West criticised the approach in his Presidential Address as part of a general call for the rejection of “theory”). I didn’t attend the APA or Scottish CA sessions, but I was at the St Andrews conference, and I do recall there being a buzz around it about the papers (much of it, I recall, antipathetic responses to Judy Hallett’s paper about American universities’ preference for employing British scholars over Americans, a thesis which she perhaps overstated, but which probably carries more weight than it was allowed). This activity culminated in the publication of Compromising Traditions: The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarship, edited by Hallett and Thomas van Northwick (1997). And there overt theoretical exploration of the personal voice seems to have stopped, bar a couple of reviews, e.g. one by Gideon Nisbet in Bryn Mawr Classical Review (on his own admission written by “a younger and angrier Nisbet”), and an even more hostile one in Classical Journal. Clearly the issue occasionally resurfaces, at least as a practical consideration, as indicated in a report of a Twitter debate that Liz Gloyn was part of back in 2012. [Edit 20/10/14: I checked with Liz, and this debate seems to have been a general academic one, rather than one confined to Classical Studies. I have no idea of the state of play of the debate on the personal voice outside of Classical Studies.] There are clearly some scholars who have subsumed the personal voice in practice, very often, as both Liz and I have noted, in Reception Studies, where perhaps the nature of the material makes a less formal approach more comfortable.

But it is a shame that theoretical debate has not really continued – as Gideon says in a comment on Liz’s post, this is a conversation we should have continued having in the discipline (though, as I note at the beginning of this piece, it is interesting that the OU’s new MA course chooses to engage directly with the personal voice). Perhaps now is the time for it to come back. For me, the intrinsic advantages of the personal voice still apply. With impersonal usage, it is too easy for statements to appear as objective facts, when they are actually statements of opinion. I am not arguing that there is no such thing as an objective fact – it is, for instance, simply the case that the Cato who appears on stage in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is Portia’s brother and not, as Wikipedia had it until I found this and corrected it, her father. But that is a completely different statement from “Wordsworth is a better poet than Bob Dylan”, which, however much I may agree with it, remains a subjective statement of opinion. At its most egregious (yes, this is my current favourite word), an over-reliance upon the impersonal can result in students writing “It is suggested that…”, implying the existence of some third party consulted, when what they actually mean is “I wish to suggest that…” But more subtly, and perhaps more dangerously, I have seen articles in which subjective opinions are then employed as if they are objective facts – canon creation is full of this (see the Wordsworth/Dylan comment above, which is something I genuinely heard on Radio 4 – it’s entirely possible that it was John Sutherland again). And I repeat, expressing enthusiasm for your subject matter is no bad thing. I am just about to finish a long-delayed review of Classics and Comics, [Edit 21/02/21: don't go looking for this - I never finished it.] and one of the points I will make there is that a weakness of the volume (one that I am sure the editors wished to avoid) is that few of the pieces capture the enthusiasm for the subject matter that informs the best writing in comics fandom.

My own feeling about Compromising Traditions is that it often falls short of its hoped-for target because, whilst all the contributors are theoretically interested in the personal voice, not all of them actually have practical experience of its application. This results in writers unsure of their tone, and often in danger of crossing the line between writing with a personal perspective and over-sharing (I personally feel that on at least one occasion that line is crossed). I don’t myself think that the personal voice requires the dumping of large elements of autobiography into your writing – it requires merely writing from your own perspective (rather than from some omniscient “objective” view). You can liven your writing up with anecdotes without necessarily revealing your every emotion.

The solution to the problem of lack of practice in the personal voice is, of course, to practise the personal voice. And that requires finding a venue where the personal voice is more accepted, and honing your writing skills there, before bringing them to bear on more academic material. For me, this was the two years I’ve already mentioned which I spent writing almost exclusively for fanzines, which made me a massively better writer – for others, it is active writing on social media, in particular on blogs (Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter don’t really encourage writing sufficient length here). Blogging still sometimes seems something that lies outside academic activity. The pressures on full-time academics very much push them towards spending all their writing time directly focussed upon their research. Yet blogging can be very useful in raising one’s profile. This is certainly true for Mary Beard – her position as “Britain’s best-known classicist” is, I would argue, very substantially connected with her blog A Don’s Life and the increased media presence that has resulted. Beard is a special case – her blog is a piece of paid journalism. But other early career academics have certainly raised their profiles through blogging, at least within the discipline – I think of Juliette Harrisson and Liz Gloyn – and Helen King notes that she finds blogging useful to keep in the discipline of writing. As more younger (and indeed older) scholars blog as well as write in more academic arenas, I feel sure that a more personal approach will inform more academic writing (though at the same time, the opportunities blogging provides for getting noticed will decline). That doesn’t necessarily mean more use of overt autobiography, something that often gets included in the personal voice approach, but which, as I say, I don’t think is necessarily intrinsic to it, but more of a sense of the personality of the writer coming over in what they write.

What will that look like? Well, I think there’s a good example in Gideon Nisbet’s Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture from 2006. This is a book very much written in an individualist style – I have indeed told Gideon that I hate him, for writing exactly the sort of idiosyncratic, erudite and funny book that I wish I had written myself (it’s okay, we’ve been friends since the early 1990s, we’ll get by this…). The jokes, to me, function as memorable cores around which the points that Gideon is actually trying to make can coalesce. There’s a great gag about Antony in Cleopatra (1963) crying in front of the tomb of Alexander, whom Richard Burton had played seven year earlier – “a famous drunk (played by a famous drunk) weeping for another famous drunk (ditto)”.

There are risks here. I’m sure that there are some who think Nisbet’s style to be wholly inappropriate (though the reviews I’ve seen have been favourable; however, he did receive some criticism for his previous book, Greek Epigram in the Roman Empire, written in a similar style). And I myself have been told off for being too chatty. Despite what Helen Sword says, it is not entirely mythical to suggest that early career researchers may need to be concerned about this issue. As Susanna Morton Braund notes in her contribution to Compromising Traditions, the Latinist with the most individual voice in the 1990s, John Henderson, wrote from a safe position as a Lecturer (and later Reader and Professor) at King’s College Cambridge. (Interestingly, I’ve found quite hard, without doing more diligent research than perhaps this piece really warrants, to find much that Henderson wrote prior to 1987 – I’ve only turned up one article in Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society that I’m not able to access online, so I can’t say whether Henderson always wrote in an idiosyncratic style. Anyone who would like to enlighten me about this, please do so.) On the other side of the coin, my own prospects for career advancement in academia are non-existent, so it doesn’t matter what and how I write, something which, as I note in my chapter in The Para-Academic Handbook, is actually quite liberating. But I appreciate that there are many people who fall between these two points, and their concerns about how they write and the effect it might have on their careers are not entirely illusory.

Nevertheless, I encourage you to at least think about writing in a more personal, and more fannish style. I am not remotely saying that you should write like Gideon Nisbet, or John Henderson, or Roz Kaveney (another scholarly writer, though one outside the academy, whose style I admire for its personality) – indeed, the whole point of the personal style is that it is unique to the individual using it. But given the choice, I would rather write like any of these than like the dry, dull author of Dynastic Lycia.

I think it would be good for scholars at all stages of their career to meditate on what a more fannish perspective and a more personal voice could do for them. The advantages – communicating more clearly, communicating your enthusiasm for the subject, writing more honestly, and not sucking the joy out of your topic, either for yourself or for your readers – seem to me well worth considering.

That’s what I think anyway.