Prof Dame Mary Beard - Classical Civilisation?

ladies and gentlemen I welcome you on this wet night to the final in a splendid series of Gifford lectures from Professor Mary beard who holds the chair of classics at the University of Cambridge and is a well known public intellectual we have been enjoying this series subject being the ancient world and us from fear and loathing to enlightenment and ethics tonight is the final summative lecture and it's on the theme classical civilization question mark being appended to that I ask you now to welcome professor beard as she joins us at the podium and thank you very much everybody and I'm very pleased to see I was just saying if there was this kind of weather in Cambridge you'd have would you wouldn't get an audience so you hardiest so I want to finish I would just to finish by starting by saying how great is going to be here and thank you all for coming the organisation has been absolutely tremendous the website is really great few Andrew and it's been a great great thing for me to do and the comments that you made in person online and by email have been really interesting and useful so thank you this evening I'm going to try to tie up I don't think it's somewhat would be too ambitious gonna tie the series together partly by talking um and I hope not to self-indulgent me about my own first engagements with classics and partly by looking a bit more widely at what we think we mean whoever we is that's obviously complicated by the contested term Western civilization and how for good or bad classics and classical civilization relates to that how does classics fit into or contribute to a let's say multicultural world again whatever we mean by that and to return to a theme that has come up in most lectures in this series I want to ask again just how toxic is the classical inheritance and if it is what should we do about it but I need to start with some autobiography and a poem that I first came across about fifty years ago now something like that and one that I've embarrassing to say and one that I've already alluded to a couple of times in these lectures it was written in 1938 by the Irish Oxford poet Louie McNeese who for 20 years also was a professional academic classicist teaching Greek first at the University of Birmingham then at what was then Bedford College London and finally at Cornell in the United States before giving it up for a mixture of part-time poetry and part-time BBC now McNeese was by all accounts enigmatic slightly aloof a hopeless lecturer and quite high-maintenance right he was described by the art historian and spy Anthony Blunt as irredeemably heterosexual which is not exactly hard to decode I think the poem that I'm referring to is his long poetry autobiographical poem autumn journal and at the opening of one section of this poem he reflects with obvious irony on his classical education at school and then Oxford between the wars Greek in Latin language literature culture history philosophy art neurology and so forth here's the part I'm thinking of which things being so as we said when we studied the classics I ought to be glad that I studied the classics at Marlborough and Merton not everyone having had the privilege of learning a language that is incontrovertibly dead and a few lines later as you see he goes on to say the classical student is bred to the purple his training in syntax is also a training in thought and even in morals if called to the bar or the barracks he always will do what he ought now elsewhere in the poem he reflects on his own engagement with the almost impossibly distant world of ancient Greece in particular itself with Hellas as he calls it by its Greek name and not when it's supposed glories but with the real-life people who often he thought got passed over and with the seedy underbelly of classical culture when I should remember the Paragons of hellos Hellas I think instead of the crooks the adventurers the opportunists the careless athlete and the fancy boys the hair splitters the pedants the hard-boiled sceptics and the Agora and the noise of the demagogues and the quacks and the women pouring libations over graves and the trimmers Delphian the dummies at Sparta and lastly I think of the slaves and how one can imagine oneself among them I do not know it was all so unimaginably different and all so long ago now you'll have spotted in that poem and it's no coincidence really the resonance with some of my things in this series and lastly I think of the slaves is exactly what we were doing on Monday but to go from his to my autobiography I first read that in the early seventies when I was fifteen or so and it opened my eyes to a very different way of looking at the Latin and Greek that I was then studying at school like many kind of nerdish teenagers I think I lived a strangely split existence I think I was in my head you know a would-be free-thinking revolutionary right but day to day in real life is decidedly on revolutionary I was a bit of a SWOT and I learned my Latin grammar with sickling obedience and I was terribly keen to get ten out of ten for my translations and looking back on it now it's very odd it seems like you know a strange combination of you know goody two-shoes and Rosa Luxemburg but but kind of more two-shoes than Luxembourg I think you know if I'm honest sadly right and I still remember how I used to do my homework on the kitchen table above which I persuaded my parents to let me pin a poster of the then imprisoned black power leader Angela Davis beneath whose profile I would struggle diligently with my regular verbs now thanks to the magic of Google Images I managed to come face to face again with the very poster now I have to say son came Paris to say it's now in a museum right but I couldn't resist putting here on the screen and if you can read the caption you will but if you can't read the caption it says the real criminals in this society are not all of the people who populate the prison's across the state but those people who have stolen the wealth of the world from the people anyway into this sort of split teenaged existence came Louis Macneices poem pointing to the connections between politics in the broadest sense and the subjects I was then learning for although I might have fancied myself as a young revolutionary I had never actually before thought about the social and cultural capital that are traditionally gone with the study of Latin and Greek that I was then enjoying and was quite good at and that's why I was doing it fancy I'd never really thought about the role of classics as a gatekeeper of the British social and political elite in fact it actually took me some time back then to realize that ManNeices phrase called to the bar was a reference to a legal career rather than being invited to the pub right nor had I consciously reflected on the loaded uses of classics the classics is sometimes being put to from upholding conservative styles of art to justifying Empire though as we saw on Tuesday that justification is actually more problematic than we might think and I suppose the divide spotted perhaps I did that the big bank branches in my hometown tended to have classical columns on their facades I think I put that down to aesthetic choice rather than any possible connection between the authority of money capitalism and the politically symbolic repertoire of classics equally important though women nieces prompts to look a bit harder at what modern students or scholars were expected to notice in the ancient world itself and that's a prompt I've been trying to follow up throughout this series - I think up till that point I had generally accepted a diet of inverted commas great men Caesars and genocide or generals possibly with a sprinkling of women behind the throne now I don't think in fact I know he wasn't I don't think McNeese was much of a feminist but at the particular moment that I read that poem it was that more than anything else that prompted me to realize that there were bits of the ancient world and its inhabitants that I had not been taught to see or perhaps rather that I've been taught not to see the ordinary people the crooks the fancy boys as he put it the women the slaves and of course the people that my Angela Davis poster was actually talking about but I've never thought about it in terms of the ancient world itself under McNeese his message as stood by me I think for decades since its saying look for what you think you can't see in the ancient world and always try to tell the story of antiquity from the other point of view why as we saw on Monday were enslaved people in antiquity so often represented small where as we reflected in the second lecture were the people of color that we're not told about how can you capture the perspectives of the conquered the women the factory workers the poor and really I think the hopes fears aspirations of just the regular people in antiquity like us right or to push McNeese further than he went how do you read the stories of violence and misogyny that seem embedded in ancient literature and continue to be part of our representational world even now we looked at the rape of Lucretia in the third lecture that's only part of it here is a particularly unpleasant recent version of the classical story of the beheading of Medusa here in ancient version here in Shalini's version Perseus beheading the monster Gorgon with us making locks and there's her kind of innards dripping out and here it's been reappropriation for a campaign bit of memorabilia by the Trump campaign there Perseus has got a rather flattering version of Trump's features and there is Hillary Clinton as Medusa with the best dropping out that image was used on all kinds of things it was used on mugs on tote bags and on mouse mats on t-shirts and there was something quite extraordinary I thought about having that image of literally ancient modernized ancient decapitation as one good household bric-a-brac because even I think if people didn't know what the story exactly was you get the point you don't need to know the story of Perseus and Medusa to get the point here I thought it was also fascinating me interesting that when shortly after the election one Athenian what if he won an American female comedian did I think a pretty tasteless sketch in which she held up a decapitated head of Trump she was sacked and this was domestic bric-a-brac and all fun anyway you know it's those kind of things which which now I think really press us to say you know what's going on here what's you know what is what are the nasty bits and I suppose I've been thinking that for quite a long time as I said it's about 50 years old from my first encounter with autumn journal and I think it did help me work out my own engagement with the classical world and the way we study it and to find a way of looking at the classical world which were all the puzzlement it raises I've come to feel personally at East Worth and I feel much bolder than I used to feel in resisting the temptation to claim that the Greeks and Romans are relevant to us in any narrow sense still west as we've seen already that they provide in a helpful analogues for modern politics the most frequent query I now receive from journalists is what Roman Emperor saw it's him again do I think Donald Trump is most like and if they ring up I take pleasure and explaining that while that might be a fun parlor game historically any superficial similarity between a modern US president and an ancient Roman Emperor is practically meaningless if I if I don't have time I usually suggest an emperor I know they won't have heard of then I think they will have to go and look him up beyond that I think I now feel fine about not admiring the Greeks and Romans in any straightforward way people often say Oh Mary bitch she really loves the Romans you know no she damn well doesn't and she certainly doesn't want to go back there go back to the ancient world unless she's got a guaranteed return ticket what I feel is something quite different from admiration I mean it's more that some of the things that the Greeks and Romans wrote and made all worthwhile reading reflecting on engaging with and thank you very hard about whether that's their dissections of imperialism and corruption as I said on Tuesday imperialists are often the most acute analysts of the faults of Empire to challenges to let's say any straightforward view of patriotism that is set by a poem like Virgil's Aeneid which has remained at classic in the European Curriculum precisely because it exposes the costs of patriotism that it simultaneously upholds one of the costs obviously being Dido I have no doubt to that in in kind of interrogating and continuing the dialogue between classical culture and modernity that's been going on for millennia we begin to understand better why Western culture operates like it does that's so example for the silencing of the public voice of women here is a wonderful Athenian pot depicting Odysseus's wife Penelope waiting for Odysseus to come back after years and years and years from the Trojan War with her young teenage slightly wet son Telemachus it's a pot which for me evokes that moment early in Homer's Odyssey second work we have of European literature to survive when Telemachus becomes the first bloke in European history to tell his mother to shut up speeches man's business and it's also that's that's true too I think for crucial debates that we continue to have and have had for centuries about the rights and obligations of citizenship the Latin phrase keyless Romanus son I am a Roman citizen was famously reused by Palmerston in 1850 and it was adapted in 1963 by John F Kennedy in his ich bin ein Berliner speech as a slogan for the protection offered by modern by modern citizenship in liberal democracies it's a phrase which in its most famous rendition goes back to the works of Cicero in the first century BC though I strongly suspect that neither Palmerston North Canada or Kennedy's speech writers realized that it in its original context it was a phrase cried out not in Pride it was cried out in vain by a Roman citizen who was being illegally crucified so that great ringing phrase was actually in its original context uttered now I think of either of them a particularly Kennedy and realized that they might have thought rather harder about the problems and ambivalences of citizenship than they did and it would certainly have given a rather different spin to Kennedy's cold war ich bin ein Berliner rhetoric no data part I have no hesitation really in saying but keeping classics in the picture hugely enriches our understanding of Western social political and cultural structures and the often on thought-out assumptions on which those structures but were and still are in part based that's said as I've often briefly referred to over the last few weeks there are voices now money coming from within the profession of classics itself who are loud in proclaiming the problems that reside at the very heart of the study of the ancient world and in decrying its toxicity as a legitimate er of white supremacy fascism Empire and almost any other nasty bit of the human achievement you choose to think about and there are some who even now would assert that it would actually be better for the whole discipline of classics to die than to continue in its present form a recent editorial in the most prominent and popular online classical journal carried an article was not cool which was entitled Bernie all down question mark and the it was classics in as it's currently practiced in universities and outside and this kind of these matches was actually the logo which the journal editors had put on there Bernie all down editorial to give you a flavor of the kind I think uncomfortableness about this there were comments underneath from the journal editorial cooperative one of whom urged not only Wooten branch reform of the discipline but she said and I'm quoting it's not my language let's start from the ground up and stop trying to polish a turd the turd being the subject classics right now classics in other words is a piece of Shi T right don't think Lord Gifford would like those words but that is what it's saying and that's the bottom line and I think you know it's probably funny you also think and I hope you're thinking what the hell is going on here all right what's the problem and what is or should be the reasonable response to it well I think in something like this it is partly that some young rebels in the subject like I'm sure I was back then are trying to kill off their mums and dads and that is part of the game but I don't think it's entirely that I don't think it's just a kind of eatable conflict between young classical professionals and their elders I think some of what is driving this kind of objection is actually centrally relevant to the overriding themes of these lectures about how we officially engage with antiquity and the political social and cultural morality of studying this subject at any level now I've already taken the opportunity to look at some of the particular charges thrown against the classical tradition and over the weeks I've responded to them in slightly different ways yes it's true white supremacists have conscripted the ancient world to their cause but they're actually factually wrong yes there are strongly paraded links between the British Empire and the Roman but as only one side of the story it's probably worth underlining at this point that classics does not have a uniquely toxic history like almost any other academic subject you could name from nuclear physics which really does have a toxic history so you know clauses can be self-flagellating but dropping your nuclear physicist right from nuclear physics to anthropology it's been put to good uses has been put to bad uses and it's very easy to give a litany of the bad but the checklist on the other side is just striking you should say to yourselves okay what subject was Karl Marx's doctoral dissertation in Greek philosophy what underpins Freudian psychoanalysis Greek myth the 1832 great Reform Act which vastly extended the franchise in England and Wales was partly driven by historians of Athenian democracy such as George grote the pressure for what we now call gay rights in the late 19th century but they they certainly wouldn't have called it that found inspiration also in the sexual politics of classical Athens and as a recent project about classics in class directed by Edith Hall in London has shown there is a radical working-class tradition of constructing classical symbols to the working-class cause trade unions for example often looked back to the plebeian struggles in early Republican Rome in the fifth century BC as a model for their withdrawal of labour Rome in other words legitimated the concept of the strike I mean legitimated on the one hand the power of the factory owners on the other hand the power of the workers and if you go and look at any exhibitions of late 19th early 20th century trade union banners you'll find wonderful scenes from classical myth and history decorate you know hercules presiding over the end of destitution is very good now obviously you can't do a scorecard here you know good versus bad uses of classics or any subject that's even supposing we could ever agree on what the good and bad uses were but part of what's going on in this burn it down rhetoric is are sometimes willful blindness let's say that rather than ignorance some tempted to say ignorance by self-flagellating practitioners who refuse to see the good uses of classics that you can that you can kind of in a sense i can script yourself to and concentrate only on the bad that's part of it but there's more to the discontent about the subject than that now one issue is rather pointedly highlighted in MacNeices his verses when he reflects not so much on his experience of the ancient world itself but of Latin and Greek languages as a subject studied institutionally at schools and universities on the screen again now what MacNeices is doing here is characterizing classical languages the learning of them as a mechanism of exclusivity at least in England and Wales I suspect that as in many other respects the Scottish tradition was rather more open and egalitarian and it might have escaped some of the problems that I'm going to outline in the English system I very much doubt that it escaped all of them but certainly south of the border Latin and Greek for centuries operated as gatekeepers for the social Elite they operated to police class boundaries only the rich and posh learnt them and it was their knowledge of those languages but by a kind of strange conservative feedback loop legitimated their position as the elite and so also underpinned the traditional social and conservative social and cultural order and kind of closed it in a haze of moral superiority that the sheer uselessness of Latin and Greek both inculcated and mystified right you know what do you do you teach your you know you have a gatekeeper of the elite two languages which as me says incontrovertibly dead you know and so you've got that kind of way that they operated to exclude by the sheet but the sheer force of the knowledge of their uselessness what at the same time precisely because they were again gatekeeper of privilege ancient languages and classics offered a practical route to power to the purple as McNeese puts it here using Roman terminology for what the emperor might wear and singling out the law and the army with a hint of British imperial administration I think lurking behind that no I'm afraid that summary is far less elegant than McNeese is elusive poetry but I think it represents it on pates that and it represents a position that is familiar to us very familiar from media discussions of learning dead languages you know what you see it's Toffs only stinking a privilege completely useless compared with IT and also it's one of the components in classicists own current complaints about themselves and the sense that they have been forced into being the guardians and protectors of a subject that was designed to exclude not to include and to reinforce class hierarchy it's another powerful strand in this cartoon that we saw on Tuesday then I argued that the humor here dependency partly does on making the link between Latin and Imperial exploration and exploitation but of course it also depends on making the link with the elite educational system that focused on the learning of dead languages it triangulates in other words imperialism particularly the Latin language and because Nigel molds worth all who's the book's antihero was a rebel but he was still a frightful tough class its imperialism dead languages and class all bound up together in a way to it's sometimes argued class privilege is written into the name of the subject itself and there is an undeniable link between classics and class the word classics in the sense that we use it whether that's for the ancient classics or whether it's classics both English literature the word classics in this sense comes ultimately from a second century AD Roman antiquarian by the name of Ollis Galius who so far as we know was the first to adapt to term that had long been used in formal hierarchies of Roman wealth and status the classes the club our classes social economic or whatever he used that social and economic term of hierarchy to Dino also the best or you might say the classiest kind of literature he invented the term classic II as the best literature Celt on the idea of the best eye the richest and the poshest men in the Roman state owned the argument is very simple however those connections quite go classics is not a word that has just for all sorts of reasons come to be defined as Posh the very word classics originally meant posh that's what it means and it's for that reason that some people would now like to change the title of the subject altogether to get rid of its classiest associations and they wouldn't ancient world studies look much more democratic no is there a response to this well I have to say that I've always felt fairly laid-back about the name of the subject to be honest you know most people in the world let's face it have never heard of all the scallions and when I tell people that I meet on trains that I teach classics it's often quite a relief to discover that they think that I study Jane Austen and the conversation goes on from there it's like me let's learn it wait and I'm quite happy for that to continue but on the substantive point it does I'm afraid go without saying that classics has been and still to some extent is guilty as charged and I'm not here talking about those Westminster parliamentary MPs who kind of reinforced the impression that classics is a posh subject every time they open their mouths and spout some semi accurate Latin drop a quotation right you know who I'm talking about it's absolutely clear there's no doubt that knowledge of Latin and Greek has been the gatekeeper of some types of elite privilege in quite literal way it was not until 1960 that Latin ceased to be an entry requirement to read any subject at all at Oxford and Cambridge and it was only after the first world war that the compulsory Greek requirement was abolished following huge arguments which had gone on for decades which partly came down I'm afraid to the brief fact that the young posh boys in order to pass the Greek exam just learnt the translation of their set text by heart so that it was not a test of Greek at all but it was a test of expensive privileged rote learning all right really and I did have a look at some of the papers that they had to do in order to pass this Greek test to get him to Cambridge and I imagine it was much the same in Oxford the papers actually gave the game who way next to one passage of Greek that had to be translated from the New Testament the instructions read candidates are advised in their translations to follow as closely as possible the authorized version of the Bible so we know exactly what they did they were supposed to mug up the King James Version spot the word spot the passage and then come out with it and not translate at all and that's what the Reformers pointed out there's no no Greek was really being learned here but memory so but all the same you know you have got a world in which you cannot go to for better or worse you cannot go to two elite English universities without Latin in Greek but even here I think there are some ambivalences that go not if not unrecognized not sufficiently recognized the bottom line it seems is that it is an iron rule the mechanisms for the gatekeeping of status that are based on intellectual talents and achievement are bound to self-destruct they are bound to be unsustainable to put that more practically if you say that the ticket into your elite club depends on the acquisition of some particular bit of knowledge in the end they'll be outsiders who will call your bluff and they will acquire the knowledge that was meant to keep them out and therefore have broken down the defenses of your status the most outstanding example of this for me is the black American Alexander crummell who you see on this screen now the free son of a former slave in the 1830s he was working as a messenger and the story goes he overheard two attorneys discussing the remarks of a South Carolina Senator John Calhoun who had said and here I'm quoting if he could find a Negro who knew Greek syntax only then would he believe that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man as interesting resonances with some of the things I've been talking about before but here what I suppose I'm saying is that this nasty story and it may be just a story this nasty story has for us though not for Calhoun I suspect a happy ending for what he overheard being talked about made krummel determined to learn Greek syntax and so show himself to be a human being and he was unable to do that in the United States but he was later sponsored by an abolitionist Society there to go to Cambridge to do just that in a theology degree he became so far as we know the first black student in Cambridge and he's recently been celebrated as such in the mid 19th century in case you're wondering what happened to him next he went on to be a missionary in Liberia and you could tell much the same story about many women and they were admittedly I think relatively privileged women in the 19th century and before who in quite large numbers responded to the challenge to learn Latin and Greek despite being excluded from the traditional educational systems that taught those languages now I'm not saying in any way that this was fair or easy and the amount of intellectual and emotional effort it must have demanded for these people was I think more than most of us would ever muster certainly there were very few people trying to hold the gate open for them they had to break it down but in doing so they not only demonstrated the fundamental fragility of any social barrier of privilege that rests on intellect but they also in the process revolutionized the nature of classical studies once they got inside to think for a moment of a predecessor of mine a distant predecessor in Cambridge Jane Ellen Harrison she was one of the first women to learn Latin and Greek on almost not quite almost equal terms in Cambridge with the men and a woman who and it was no coincidence I think she was female in the early 20th century did more than anybody to subvert the traditional com pure in a floatie white sheet image of ancient Greek religion and replace it with a bloody dose of irrationality she really changed how people studied and thought about the quote the pagan religion of Greece the fact is that we have to admit I think that it was partly thanks to her slightly flamboyant outsider status and I think this painting by Augustus John gives you a hint of the slight degree of self-satisfaction and flamboyance at her and had I have to say absolute pain in the neck nevertheless she changed the subject and it was big in a sense because of that kind of dialogue between outsiders and insiders and breaking stuff done that she made the subject are different to this day so again I think the elite gatekeeper problem for classics is true up to a point you couldn't deny that and as I've said earlier in this series classics remains in some respects a culpably untie / subjects but it is much more nuanced than it looks the historical dynamic of excretion and inclusion is much more nuanced and it is constantly changing and this I think is the right points do something I really want to do which is to pay tribute to all my colleagues here in this university and elsewhere and to teachers in schools who really are currently unsuccessfully busting a gut to widen access to Latin and Greek for kids in ordinary schools in different ways and it's particularly good to hear that after several years when there has been no teacher training in classics in Scotland at all a course for training teachers in classics is about to restart at Murray house here there is no surer way of killing off a subject than having no teachers to teach it it's not rocket science so we can project brighter future yeah right but those issues of language poshness snobbery and exclusion are only part of the problems I think the people sense an even more fundamental charge against the image and substance of a study of the Greeks and Romans is its centrality to the whole concept of Western civilization in inverted commas it is to say classics is charged with complicity in a version of the West the elevates Western civilization in such a way that it seems pretty much designed to conceal the value of any other sort of civilization which can't be termed Western in a way that leaves other cultures and different versions of culture unseen except as a kind of inferior foil to Western civilization or a kind of colonized other will it suppose origin in classical Greek this is what the sometimes serious and sometimes joking phrase Plato to NATO is said to sustain for that particular vision that sees a direct lineage of in this case modern Western geopolitics and their supposed intellectual achievement of the ancient Greeks and one the intellectual achievements of the ancient Greece one glaring example of that would be the exhibition of Greek art in Washington DC that I mentioned a couple of lectures ago in which the words of George Bush the first were used precisely to validate not only the miraculous origin of the West and to identify Greek art and Greek culture as the origin of the West but to see it that in a direct inheritance it's coming down to 1990s Washington I mean the implication I think not only of the show but also of Bush's involvement with it was really to underline the sense that Greek culture in its miraculous origins was the wellspring of our civilization and it was a civilization that was demonstrably superior politically culturally in every other way to others and what hung on those coattails were the spurious rites in the world order of geopolitics that it appeared to give the West now how do you answer that objection well there been a number of powerful attacks on that model and on the role of classics and classical civilization within it in recent decades in his 2016 reflexes on Radio 4 which is still available online the Harvard philosopher Kwame Antony up here was very good in his fourth lecture at on picking that amalgam of Western civilization he traced it back in the ideological form that we know really to not much earlier than the late 19th century people didn't really talk about the West in the loaded way that we do before then and he showed very clearly how a kind of grand narrative that it's almost impossible not impart of internalized of cultural superiority was formed that went from 5th century democracy to Magna Carta to the Copernican Revolution etc etc which combined to create an image of the West as a perennial tolerant democratic rational world while at the same time airbrushing out all its autocracy genocide racism on the rest don't have to think very long to see that medieval England even medieval Scotland wasn't much of a tolerant democratic or rational society and I do recommend up his lecture but a few decades earlier than that a rather different assault had been delivered on the centrality of classics in that cultural model in a hugely influential book by Martin Bernal called brachytherapy afro-asiatic roots of classical civilisation now to cut a very long book in fact series of books into very short summary Bernards argument was that since the 18th century in his case classicists had systematically effaced the formative influence of Near Eastern cultures and Egyptian cultures on what we call Greek to put that in another way if we're looking for the origins of Western culture for Bernal we're simply looking in the wrong place Greece was the beneficiary of the Near Eastern and the Egyptian miracle and that was another nail in the coffin of from Plato to NATO it hadn't all started with Plato anyway no but one last time in this series I am going to say yes but the claims of Bernal caused enormous but for me rather puzzling debates among classicists and particularly in the United States are more widely and there were endless Raths about the details of the NAS analysis and there were plenty of accusations the any classicist who did not accept Bernards view was pretty much as racist as the 18th century scholars who had first literally whited out the achievements of non-greeks on Greek culture but I think there's some misplaced argument in that I have absolutely no doubt that what we now call Greek culture was a complicated amalgam that had borrowed and adapted all kinds of other elements from other mediterranean societies Near Eastern societies African societies had no doubt that in broad terms that's true but I really don't think that the best way of toppling the claims made for the originally genius of the Greeks is to replace that originally genius with another right with a different set of really originally geniuses culture isn't a race to the starting gate it doesn't emerge fully formed and it really isn't a question of who gets there first a culture doesn't work like that I do not find Stonehenge more or less interesting because it happens to be older than the Minoan Palace at Knossos when things are made and built is not the heart of the problems it's the whole idea of some miraculous origin of Greek or western or classical culture that needs replacing we don't want to find just another miraculous candidate and say oh we got it wrong it's really all from Egypt that doesn't help as for Apia I've got kind of babies and bath water worries on he's analysis of the ideological origins of Western civilization and the myth of Western civilization I think is in many ways brilliant and I think it hits right home even though I fear I'm not going to be able to resist pointing out that he too makes a John F Kennedy type error at the very end of this brilliant lecture which is relevant also to our more general themes what he's trying to do when he comes to the end of unpicking Western civilization is to say can we actually think of another way of seeing things can we you know I've been destructive what how should we think about civilizations and she tries to offer a very different kind of encapsulation of a very different version of the world that he's not mired in the hierarchical terms that the West seems to be mired in and he rather bravely and I think you know quite triumphantly he goes to a piece of Roman literature at the heart of Western civilization to find his alternative model and he urges his listeners to think and act following this piece of literature in a much more cosmopolitan way and he concludes at the very end by referring her directly to the Roman comic playwright Terentius affair I'm going to read you what he said that's the reference for anyone wants it I noticed just earlier but I've got a typo here when you're actually about to say that someone's made a silly error to have got a typo in your own PowerPoint slides not a brilliant idea that you have to forgive me this is what he said he's talking about trenches after the comic playwright we would often know as Terence it was he said a slave from Roman Africa a Latin interpreter of Greek comedies a writer from classical Europe who called himself was right Terence the African I don't think this is per raishin but I can make the point better than Publius treacherous affair writing more than two millennia ago homo sum humani ninihil a me alienum puto, I am human I think nothing human alien to me now he finished there's an identity worth holding onto that piece DP pleased he has kind of he has dragged out of the heart of a text of Western civilization a model of cosmopolitanism and I think if you listen to the recording you will you know you will hear again that sanctimonious self-righteousness depend on everybody as they say yes right okay but we should hang on a minute it's true that Terrance probably did come from North Africa and he may have been an ex-slave we can't be entirely sure of that but when he had a character say in one of his plays I am human I think nothing human alien to me no he nor his character was expressing a great humanitarian vision we don't find great humanitarian visions in classical culture these words are spoken by a rather irritating busybody who is trying to justify his unwanted prying into his neighbor's affairs right he's saying oh I'm human you know I've got it's perfectly right that I should know about your you know why you're working so hard on your plot and it makes a huge difference it is like Kennedy you know there is a temptation to go back to the classical world find the tag and then say mmm yes I couldn't resist that but it's important but to finish the real question for a classicist that's raised by a pious analysis of a loaded nurse of this idea of Western civilization sprung from the Greeks is what we should then do about it I think it's truth but what do we do about it it seems to me that's very important to shed the term Western civilization obvious hierarchical superiority and to look harder as I tried to do at some of its crueler and unsettling sides but that's doing that I think doesn't it doesn't run out to me to a denial that there is a Western set of literature's and practices partly only partly but partly defining themselves by their dialogue with what we call the classical world that has some links with different coordinates say in China or Mesoamerica but with much more significant differences perhaps we need another word for Western civilization which doesn't come with a hierarchical baggage but something there sort of exists and when I have occasionally as I have in the course of these lectures used the term Western culture or Western civilization I've been doing it not to make a hierarchical point but to make sure they didn't look at what I was talking about or in what I was talking about I was assuming that all that was necessarily applicable to the rest of the world it was trying not to be culturally appropriate if you know their whole swathe of early cultures that have never heard of Lucrecia and that is fine what I was trying to do was not to foist on everybody the kind of tropes and debates that we have rotten I wasn't trying to express Western superiority but I do think that for better or worse there is a cultural link which joins up Virgil and Dante and Shakespeare and Margaret Atwood and we can't actually deny that you can't throw the baby of Western culture out with the bathwater of hierarchy the fact is that there has not been a single day in the history of Europe since 19 BC I don't know this but I'm asserting it when someone has not been reading Virgil's Aeneid you know this is a book that's been read every day for 2,000 years we cannot whoever wears we have to take notice of it we can't cut Virgil out of Western culture without bleeding leaving some very bleeding amputated limbs behind and I suppose ultimately I'm happy to come clean I think that there's lots of things as I'm sure you've got the impression of this there's lots of things wrong with the ways that classics has been studied and I'm very much with MacNeice and others there you know I'm allergic to many of the things that the ancients got up to a nice shutter to what is done in the name of Western civilization but we can't actually throw the whole idea away and we can't hope to make sense of the cultural debates that the West still has for better or worse about rape and empire without keeping the classical world on the map which to go back to my first lecture with the kids in the Coliseum is what I should have said to those children when they were learning about gladiators rather badly and I was snooping on their tours but perhaps also I should have pressed it a little harder and I should have added McNeese is simplest a most important observation which is not a bad slogan for part of this series at least it was also unimaginably different also long ago my name is David Ferguson I'm a professor of divinity and a member of the Gifford committee it's my pleasure to chair this final Q&A session with Professor Beard after which I will offer a brief vote of thanks on behalf of the Gifford committee now I should say that Professor beard has a taxi and a flight to catch later this evening and she needs to be away from here before 7 o'clock so we will be finishing in good time but now is your final opportunity to ask questions of Professor Beard there are roving microphones please raise your hand and I'll try to identify you front row on my right one of the things that have reflected during your talks is that much of what you're grappling with applies I think to many other areas of historical study and I just wonder if you could see a bit about parallels the classics that distinctive from much of the debate which you've been playing out and in these tours I think they're not distinctive qualitatively but there's a bigger quantitive impact for various reasons I mean I think in part and somebody raised this in the seminar yesterday I've been keeping it very British and all I've been talking about European culture but I'm but my examples of being British and the so one of the things that makes classics so particularly dialogic is that it was for centuries a lingua franca for Europe as a whole in a way that the other humanities subjects what some extent could be but never had that kind of um they wouldn't have that embedded but I think I mean the sense I was saying before I think that you know if you look now the way other subjects are examining both historical and para historical subjects are examining their own histories and their impacts and consequences you will see you know anthropology has you could have an anthropologist giving this series of lectures it wouldn't exactly be different but many of the basic points about the embeddedness of anthropology within a particular way of seeing the world it would happen it would have a shorter history because in fact let me say classics invents anthropology in the shape of JD Fraser it stems out of classics rather than being independent and it's not till the end of the nineteenth century but some of these points would be the same and I think that there are interesting ways now that people I know my medievalist colleagues you know thinking about how the version of the early English monarchy determines some of the ways we think about you know I think all that's true I mean classics has been going longer and has been more refracted and more widely refracted now my interest would be and I wonder you think yeah I mean like I think this is also done in departments and call themselves histories of science where often really interesting work is done on the relationship between scientific knowledge I I wonder how I'm gonna get us on terribly rude my suspicion is on the basis of people I know in my own university is that on the ground scientific practitioners don't actually do what I'm giving you is it's something that I think as we saw yesterday uh and Douglas um at least see we're doing the seminar I mean all classicists think about this you could you call now but I think never could you have been a classicist without thinking about how your subject has impacted on the world and developed since since antiquity you know the classes is a terribly nostalgic they've always been nostalgic and they were nostalgic when they were all as galius in the second century AD I don't get the impression that the hard science has got that kind of reflection embedded into it and I think perhaps you ought to have but that may be because I've met the wrong scientists question to my left third front row thank you it's been great series of lectures if you're seeing that Britain and Europe have as their foundations in the classical world part of the rendition and the basque world had the idea of elitism woven into it and today's world is being partly torn apart by this maybe invented may be existing may be real opposition between suppose it elites and the new mobs the new populist movements is there any way that we can use classics to heal and think about how to solve this mess impression quite inadvertently and I am extremely pleased that whatever we get it called Western civilization is not wholly at the air of the greco-roman world thank God it isn't but there is a strand that is I don't think I don't think classics heals things but I think that it make it can help you look harder and notice things that promotes more engaged more acute a more open debate all I think populism you know I think that I find populism quite a difficult term because you know I'm Ida cry populist or whatever you know as vehemently as any Guardian reader does you know the other part of me thinks populist is the word we give to a Democrat whose views we don't agree with tends to I mean there is a certain sense that it means I don't like what he's saying he's a rhetorically effective Democrat whose words I don't agree with no I think that you can go back and you can look at debates about demagoguery both in Athens and in Rome and you can stop just to see some of those fault lines in the clash between a traditional metropolitan elite and a demagogue and you start to wonder about Julius Caesar you know he Drake literally drained the swamp and and he was posh you know and use it so you start to be able to see some of the ways the fault lines go and it's very clear in the fifth century democracy in Athens where there's a lot of stuff about rabble rousers it's in a way quite different from our own because an awful lot of that is these supposed rabble rousers or non aristocrats coming in now despite this kind of great you know everybody's got a chance to be in the council we're going to draw a lot everybody can everybody's got to vote there's you know a very strong sense that if you come from trade your job is not to rule the state and there was hugely I mean actually and I suspect partly a consequence of the second world war and we're which in many ways did give another edge to classics you know because people did turn back say you know how could you can the Kami action will help us there are really interesting studies about how the ancients thought about and defined and used the idea of the populist the demagogue look at you know look at Aristophanes play the clouds what's what's the big what's the big problem in the clouds is the idea of the man who can make the worst argument seen the better one I think that's a kind of message for us perhaps so I don't think it doesn't there's no solution going to come out of that but I think it's a safe space for arguing about things that we need to occupy we've time for one more question I think the lady to my right was first if this is a short answer we'll take oh sorry it's my thought I keep getting older you know I'll make this quick on behalf of the audience whose knowledge of classics is from Asterix is there a book sort of discussing Asterix of in relation to like how accurate or inaccurate it is I think that would be a fascinating thing to read and if there is if there is one in French it's in French like a Roman archaeologist called Gouda no you wrote a book about Asterix and how far it was sorry could you get it translated thank you well we'll take this last question from over here it's very interesting that the young the embeddedness certainly in French culture of the Asterix model which they were all nice and I think I don't know how quick this is going to be um but as we can't just burn down the classics how do we make it less elitist less posh more inclusive for people to learn I think just do what we're doing with a little bit extra funding possibly I think that there isn't a magic bullet but there's huge amounts of effort and keenness there's there's a there's a a school audience out there that what is it there's just not enough people and you know in the end you know education is not done just with a piece of chalk and a blackboard you you need facilities and you need people and you need someone to put a bit of money in it and there are charities trying to do that but in the in the end you know charity funding tends to be less sustainable I don't know government funding slots that's sustainable either but you what the ideal for me is you know I don't want everybody to learn Latin I don't want to go back to a kind of world in which you know all these poor kids you know do this stuff and but I don't want you know I would like a world in which Latin wasn't always done after school you know not always done in the lunch hour wasn't always precarious and I really think that getting some you know some Scottish trained teachers in Scottish schools will really help because once you get a teacher in the school you you then turned really embed a subject so I think look more money and just go on doing what we're doing it's hard work professor beard is a wonderful advocate for her discipline and we need a professor beard for every discipline I suspect at the moment especially in the humanities she has this month afforded us an expert view of classical civilisation in historical political and moral perspective she's spoken not only as a historian of the ancient world but she's offered us an insight and to the various receptions of that world at different stages of our history and in doing so has exposed many of the biases and interests that surround that reception she's also asked us to consider ourselves with our own prejudices and possible blind spots in the ways in which we appropriate classical civilisation and compare ourselves with the past with her scholarly erudition and her moral seriousness she has admirably fulfilled in these lectures Lourdes Giffords remit Owen Dudley Edwards reminded us earlier this week that it is possible simultaneously to educate and to entertain one's audience some of us struggle with that combination more than others but professor beard has succeeded effortlessly I've been attending Gifford lectures since I was a student over 40 years ago and I cannot recall a series that was so consistently well attended by a large audience nor an hour that has passed so quickly I recall some years ago a colleague receiving a card from his student class at the end of a course of lectures they had all signed it and the card said congratulations on your wonderful lectures you have made one hour seem like 59 minutes and professor beards case these hours have seemed much less than 59 minutes and we thank her not only for educating us but for entertaining us she's invested a great deal of time and energy in the series coming back for the second half after a break and we thank her most warmly one last time for a splendid set of Giffords and we hope that it won't be long before she is back in Edinburgh once again please join me in showing your appreciation

Channel: The University of Edinburgh

Views: 22,010

Rating: 4.6932516 out of 5

Keywords: Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh University, Mary Beard, 2019, University of Cambridge, Mary Beard Lecture, University of Edinburgh, Classics, Newnham college, Dame Mary Beard, Edinburgh, University, lecture, The Ancient World and us, enlightenment, ethics, professor, students, learning, political change, classical civilisation

Id: igkfA-OtzdY

Length: 77min 33sec (4653 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2019