Risk and humanities, by Mary Beard

well welcome to the fifth lecture in this series on risk so far we've been considering risk very much in the contemporary world some of its quantified and managed and preferably avoided but in earlier words earlier world's what happened then long before we had the blessings of risk audits and risks risk assessments and all those things how was risk viewed in past societies well to discuss that the title is risk and humanities were delighted to have an internationally distinguished scholar who actually works just across the road or just across the carpark depending away she is from this lecture hall and professor Mary beards professor of classics here at Cambridge she studied here and went to lecture at King's College London before coming back here in 1984 she's the classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement she's written widely on both Greek and Latin subjects and her most recently splendidly readable book Pompeii the life of Roman town one the very distinguished Wolfson Prize but professor Beit is also known as a commentator on current events through the perspectives of the classical world and almost as impressive she's quite a huge audience through her blog site a woman for all seasons it's a pleasure to introduce Mary bears [Applause] um thank you very much master honestly I've followed this series of lectures and coming increasingly to the conclusion that I'm a real risk simpleton when these guys get up and they have these headlines which says you know green tea will kill cancer we can't believe that can we and I'm the kind of person that you know goes out and buys green tea when they see that kind of headline so I thought I'm either the best person to be doing this lecture now or completely the worst I have to see anyway we get a start in the Roman world and this scene on the screen is I think the emblem for the lecture what it shows is two Roman guys playing some sort of game of chance I've got a board between them and if you could get closer you'd see it's got countess on them and the man on the Left has just been shaking the dice in a dice shaker and in a little speech bubble just there above his head he's saying I've won this guy another speech bubble says no it's not a three it's a - no this is one of a series of paintings from the wall of a quite upmarket bar in Pompeii and it was painted sometime in the last ten years of the city's life before the eruption of Vesuvius in 1879 and it shows the kind of activities you'd expect to find going on in a bar gaming and gambling amongst them the kind of activities that are old-fashioned Roman Puritans who saw a very obvious connection between alcohol sex and dice games were very keen on deploring the scene we're looking at is I think both familiar to us and quite deeply unfamiliar which is why I've chosen it does the kind of M for this evening it's familiar to us because we too are used to making that association between sex violence seedy drinking dens on the throw of the dice in fact it will come as no surprise to learn that in the next painting the game is actually turning to blows now the panel here is very badly damaged but you can see that the two blokes are having a go at each other and they are trading insults in the speech bubbles above the insults are pretty incomprehensible and when they're not in comprehensible they're absolutely filthy and I couldn't possibly repeat them there but we'll tell anybody you asked me afterwards what they say but meanwhile almost completely lost is the figure of the long-suffering landlord on the right or alternatively the hard-nosed supremo of the drinking and gambling den I suppose and his speech bubble says if you want to get fight boys get outside but if we think a bit harder if we scratch the surface of that scene metaphorically in any way we find a much less familiar world here of danger chance uncertainty and what we but not they would call risk and if the principles of that world that I want to explore tonight know gamblers in ancient Rome remember whatever their rough-and-ready common sense would ever have formally conceptualized what is to us a very simple idea that a six-sided dice had an equal 1 in 6 chance of landing on each of its six sides fact you might say in parentheses in fact that some Roman dice are so badly made it might have meant they didn't actually have a cool chance but some of them were good and of course and this kind of are I thinks it's over you whenever you visit the recipient sites / left the bar and they saw their local friendly Mountain puffing out smoke from its crater they certainly would not have engaged in our kind of calculations of disaster planning they might not even have sniffed any danger at all the best we can hope for these guys if they were alive and if they were real is that when the eruption really did come they got out quick so what I'm going to be doing in this lecture it's looking at how the men and women in the ancient world and I have to say it's mostly the man saw represented and understood the uncertainties and the dangers of their lives I'm also going to be trying to ask a little about what it was they were anxious and uncertain about kind of I have in my mind a sort of trying to see if you could map a map of Roman worries I'm going to be thinking about because we certainly shouldn't assume that the same kind of things that worry us worried then and I'm going to be concentrating on the world of the Roman Empire from roughly the 1st to the 4th centuries ad and as far as I can I'm going to be concentrating on the ordinary people not certainly not the world of elite philosophers certainly elite philosophers did puzzle a lot about fate and chance and divine providence but they aren't my subject and there's people in the room who know a lot more about them than me I'm not going to be concentrating on the likes of Plato and Aristotle I'm trying to see if we can get back to the ancient man or woman and it's largely man in the street and see what their feelings about danger well no this is mainly then most of what I'm going to be talking about is historical but it's not only historical I'm also going to wonder if this ancient model of danger and I'm going to be talking about can still actually say anything to us when for example we reflect on how best to understand risk say in the world of higher education or the dangers or uncertainties of research and teaching in the humanities could it be the case that the ancient model that I'm going to be delineating is actually rather more useful to us than the current risk agenda under which we are now asked to operate that's the kind of kite I should be flying at the end of the lecture anyway and it's partly in response to many of my colleagues who when I said to you that in conversation that I was going to go and give this lecture on risk and humanities they came back almost to a man and a woman with the instant quip along the lines of AHA risk risk of not having a job a right now I want to try and be a bit more sophisticated than that rather gloomy perspective and I should be coming back to that at the end but let's start by looking a bit more carefully at some of the real central key differences between ancient understanding and if you like management of hazard and danger and modern ideas of risk now of course one of the things that those of you who followed these lectures will know is that modern definitions of risk themselves differ and there all kinds of debates and disagreements about how risk is to be managed or to be measured even what it's to be called should we think of it as uncertainty is uncertainty a better word than risk all the same the simple fact that this series of Darwin lectures has taken risk as its theme is I think a nice illustration of how that idea comes to occupy center stage in academic cultural and media agendas it's a nice simply the fact you can get an audience for years of lectures on risk another nice illustration you have on the screen now this is a simple schematic graph taken from Google News plotting the number of uses of the word risk in all the news media from 1840 to 2010 that have been scammed by uncle and Auntie Google the take off from the 1990s is dramatic and in case you think some of you will case you think that what you've got here is a classicist being a complete statistical idiot and that all this actually shows is that a news media expanded tremendously in the 1990s or that google has concentrated on the later period let me show you the pattern that you get if you do danger now don't bother too much about the raw numbers in this the total for danger gets hugely inflated because the same search release same search if it's done by me I'm sure there's other ways of doing this the same search picks up dangerous as well as dorje and daughter er in French so even in some ways inflate the number for this what I want to highlight is the take off in news reporting or risk in our world for the late 80s perhaps 1990s onwards compared with the steady state and a probably relative decline of reporting on a danger to put it another way as I kind of said a few minutes ago it would I think be inconceivable that when these lectures started they would have chosen the subject risk for their theme what they certainly wouldn't have chosen it if they wanted to get an audience turn this off schematic as that illustration was it fits very nicely in chronological terms it fits very nicely with anthony giddens --is definition of our own post-industrial society as what he would call a risk society what characterizes risk Society for Giddens and for others are a number of key factors that we easily recognize I think in ourselves in our own behavior in our world for example or belief that relative degrees of hazard can in theory be estimated and giving an arithmetic value in practice we disagree what that arithmetic value should be and we also tend to disagree about how many of the risks we face can be given a numerical value but still we essentially think that there is something about risk which is measurable in many cases we also believe very strongly that the state and we as individuals have a duty actively to manage risk and hazard usually in popular parlance by avoiding it right we occasionally take calculated risks that's quite interesting word in itself calculated risk when we say go potholing or rock climbing but basically we think that risk is something to be avoided despite this despite the sense of active management we can also feel quite powerless in the face of risk and this is something else the Gittens stresses for in an increasingly global world the causes of hazard seem to be very much in increasingly outside our control and the classic case of that would be the disaster of Chernobyl whose effects we could manage you know we could decide not to eat Welsh lamb or whatever but his causes were out of our power it was something like so many modern hazards that's what happened to us that we were the passive victims of this risk now I'm going to be suggesting at the end of this talk that universities have also come to see themselves as the passive victims of hazard and danger in a similar way now the ultimate drivers behind modern risk society why risk society and those assumptions developed when they did are as I'm sure you know intensely debated but everybody agrees that one necessary not sufficient but necessary condition for being able to approach risk in the modern sense is what the philosophy and hacking has termed the emergence of probability the development of the ability arithmetic Li to calculate chance in a wonderful scientific legend which is just as untrue as it is true that moment goes back to 1650 for when Pascal brilliantly used probability probabilistic calculations to solve the problem the key problem of how to divide up the stake in an unfinished gambling game it all comes back the message of this lecture actually is everything comes back to the dice now true legend or not and it's probably not the date is roughly correct a probability theory and the cognitive revolution that it unleashed is a phenomenon of the 17th century and later so how does this work for Rome that was Doug Lee's kind of old world in a oversimplified nutshell how does it work for Rome well Rome is quite different and there you will find none of the key elements of our risk agenda you can look for them and you won't find them it's true of course how could it not be that the word probability does itself derive from Tinh adjectives probabilists pre babble a but in Latin that usually means worthy of approval or commendable when it is used and it sometimes is when it is used in a sense more like our own incredible or likely it is never associated with any precise form of calculation the closest that you come to that in Rome and frankly it isn't very close is in a discussion by the first century orator and polymath Cicero it's a discussion of playing the knucklebones which were an alternative form of dice made out of animal ankle bones with just four numbered sides sister is talking about the so called Venus throw that's the prize result when you throw four knuckle bones on the floor and each one produces a different number and he says if you made a hundred throws you wouldn't get a hundred Venus throws simply by chance with just show some practical experience and observation of dicing no you don't but it's a very long way from any calculation of probability and so - as I said my dice are sitting in their bar at Pompeii arguing about whether it was a three or or a two could not possibly have seen that argument in the terms of probability that we use as for the idea the other big idea that that marks modern states not is the idea the responsibility that we all have for the management of risk I need only tell you one story about a man called Ignatius Rufus who during the reign of the first emperor Augustus at the very end of the first century BC used sixty of his own slaves to act as Rome's very first fire brigade to us that seems a classic instance of simple but sensible risk management not to say a kind of Lord Shaftesbury Essex on a version of social improvement so you'll say was Ignatius Rufus honored and rewarded for this initiative I'm afraid he wasn't the answer is he was executed his actions were treated as a means of currying favor with the rabble it was a sign that he was aiming at power and so a threat to the Emperor himself and he was put to death now he might indeed have been aiming at power but it shows you I think instantly a completely different inverse view of how the state or the individual should manage risk so how did the Romans and if that's what they didn't have how did they deal with uncertainty and how can we understand the ways that they did well despite what I've just said one way recently has been in a sense to try despite all these apparent absences to try to discern some faint traces in the Roman evidence of what we might call a risk agenda not wholly dissimilar to our own even if much less explicit there's been a series of attempts to recreate what you might call a kind of buried or embedded discourse of risk within apparently very different material in Roman culture now I have to say I've never found any of this remotely convincing but I shall later on be looking at one attempt to use Greek and Roman Oracle's as if they were a semi at least rational system of risk management and you will be able to see whether you believe it any more than I do but for the most part in the absence of anything that we can see as calculation of the probability of danger let alone a recognizable risk agenda or risk management strategy we have tended to consign the poor old ordinary Greeks and Romans to a world uh terally unpredictable danger we have tended to see them as seeing themselves as kind of buffeted by the capricious whim of fate of chance or of the gods with little defence apart from keeping on the right side of the supernatural powers and crossing your fingers and hoping for the best or shrugging your shoulders and thinking just let it come because it's all preordained anyway now part of that is no doubt not wholly wrong and indeed ancient philosophers do busy themselves frightfully about making fine distinctions between chance and fate and Providence but I want to argue there actually in this material I'm going to show you there are clear signs of a much more positive engagement with ideas of uncertainty and danger than that rather gloomy and passive picture suggests it's not in other words that the Romans were really just like us but somehow they simply lacked our ability to calculate probability or to take sensible risk management activities seriously and therefore were deeply deeply disadvantaged the Romans I want to say are operating with an alternative model of what you do about uncertainty and danger that's to say if we live as giddons would have it in a risk society the ancients I want to argue were the inhabitants of an early 'try society and it's going to be the sort of pseudo technical slogan for how I see ancient culture an early 'try society is a term that I'm adapting from one of my Oxford friends Nicholas Percel who has done some quite important work on the nature of Roman dicing and gambling for which as you'll see the Latin generic term was a layer so alia Alia tree society and personal is pointed to quite interestingly what he sees as an analogy between success and failure with the dice in the ancient world and success and failure economically or more generally why Romans loved to gamble in Purcell sense is because gambling was like their life anyway life was a lottery trade in particular he argues for the Romans with all the hazards that it involved was not much different from a game of dice it depended on luck you either won loads and got rich or you lost now I want to take that but to push it rather further in a slightly different direction and to argue but it was not as personal suggests that there was any particular aspect or aspects of Roman life which were like a game of dice got to think if you go in that direction you tend to go back to the rather passive model of the Romans being buffeted by fate that I've just criticized what I want to argue is that the Romans actively used the imagery of dicing to parade and then in a sense to manage uncertainty they actively constructed other areas of hazard in their lives on the model of dicing so that the luck of the board game became a way of seeing classifying and understanding what in our Terms we talked of as risk now this idea of really facing and parading the lot the lot and the dice and the gamble was actually reinforced by a wider symbolic repertoire that really underlies what I'm going to say but I won't have any time to do more than mention it this evening but that includes the idea of the personification of luck and good fortune in both the Greek and the Roman worlds as divine figures and just so you don't miss out this is a small miniature bronze version of the most famous god goddess of Lady Luck in the whole of the ancient world there are literally thousands of these images of good luck the Taiki the good for goddess of good fortune particularly associated with the prestige and success of the city of Antioch so what I'm going to say is that the Romans are managing uncertainty or an elliot tree model that is to say quite a lot more than simply observing that gaming with dice or knucklebones for cash or not was an actually absolutely central activity across all ranks of Roman society though that is certainly the case Roman moralists bang on all the time about what a dreadful thing gambling is they talk about how it is or should be regulated they talk about how it is or should be prohibited it's supposed to be banned for example except on certain holidays there all kinds of Roman laws which limit your right of redress if you lose money in gambling and so forth they bang on about it all the time about how dreadful it is and yet gambling and the remains of gambling or everywhere you look throughout the Roman world I think it's an interesting case actually where classes it's tended to get rather taken in by the Roman moral message you know often those things that are banged on about whether in the ancient or the all the modern world all those that are most prevalent within culture in some ways they're banging about them makes them even more visible you legislate about something that really is in your mind and you can see I mean we could spend hours just looking at but the remains of Roman gambling there's thousands upon thousands of dice and knucklebones of fact and there were once many more archaeologists are terribly bad at recognizing knuckle bones because they're after all just knuckle bones so you can't tell whether the knuckle bone that happens to have come off a dead sheep or whether they were a knuckle bone that was diced with they recognized dice but not always knuckle bones so then what we also get actual gaming boards surviving this is a nice one from Nubia and it's actually in wood which is rather rare most often we find them scratched on stone you can find them for example carved into the steps of the forum at Rome the recent excavation and a Roman military camp on the Red Sea produced no fewer than 20 gaming boards in one military camp and the oculus is rather optimistically thought they'd found the gambling den because a large number of them were found all together in a rather dark small room there are also clearly different forms of these boards which must have been used for different sorts of games and those games I have to say have occupied many many hours of the highest level scholarly attention but it has proved impossible satisfactorily to reconstruct the rules you want to kind of get some idea of what what students of ancient gambling do and it seems to me it's rather like reconstructing the rules of Monopoly when all you've got is the board some houses and hotels and you know get-out-of-jail-free card and how you would start to think what the rules of Monopoly were on that basis I don't know you get some very mad reconstructions but one of the most instantly recognizable boards is the type that you've got here and it seems to belong to an ancient version of sort of backgammon played with dice and counters known as 12-point and it had either to or us here three rows of either six squares sometimes those squares get six on this side six on that side to get twelve all together in three rows sometimes those squares which are here nicely inlaid are replaced by letters and sometimes interestingly those letters are joined up so that actually the gambling board makes a sentence as well as being a gambling board and often those sentences have a moral or ethical message as you see here you can see how it goes you've got rejected profit insane greed turns you mad which is of course a great message for gambling board they're somewhat more of militaristically Karthi ins have been killed a Briton slow to play on Romans but interestingly drawing an analogy which I shall return to between military activity and dicing but what I suppose I'm saying is that it's very interesting to see how dicing and the paraphernalia of the dicing game actually subsumes Roman ethics within it morality and ethics and in the end by the time you get to the fourth or fifth centuries ad you'll find sort of second-rate philosophers actually turning out these sentences of six words or six letters precisely to make a moral point so the dicing game and the conventions of dicing start to frame what ethics is so you get you get all the stuff you get what you people diced with and thousands and thousands of representations of people playing dice here's another image from another bar in Pompeii here is a nice little street scene from a bozo in Antioch and you got street scene and the houses are named at the top and you can probably just see that outside this house what are the guys doing they're sitting down and they're gaming you find images like that on calendars ah here's a version of the month of December from a late Roman calendar and predictably enough because it's the ceremony of the Saturn Oh Leo everybody has a good old gamble here is a dice shaker and two dice on this on the table beside December you find them on cheap pottery lamps and of course you find them on tombstones standing these images of dicing and gaming standing I think not only for life's pleasures but also for life and deaths lottery there are even literary descriptions of tombstones that just have dice on them all they've got the tasting is dice now I can't resist showing whoops this one now I have to say this is a very very sad object but I did want to say that even you know in the depths of Roman Britain you find some version of gaming and gambling coming up just the same way on Roman memorials now this is a very very seedy tombstone from bluff in Humber but it's now in the Fitzwilliam Museum which is why I put it on and actually you probably won't be able to see but there's some funny crosses here on the top of it which mimic exactly the form of one particular sort of gaming board so it looks like just nasty sort of romano-british scratching but it is probably - is also showing you a gaming board but as I was suggesting the cultural importance of dicing in Rome runs even deeper than that and it provides a way of really I think modeling the hazards of trade politics and war even it provides a model for constructing national identity when the Roman historian Tacitus is writing his ethnography of the Germans one thing he insists on is that they dice differently from the Romans but think for a moment of politics most of you I'm sure already familiar with what Julius Caesar is supposed to have said when he declared war on his political enemies at Rome are marched into Italy with his army across the boundary of the river called the river Rubicon he's supposed to have said Alea jacta asked the die is cast it's become one of the most famous latin quotes ever even though i have to tell you caesar probably said it in greek but you know the latin one now in our own cultural repertoire it's become a slogan for the point of no return it's as if caesar was saying civil war is now inevitable there's no going back that's how we use the phrase the dies cast and that indeed may have been part of it when caesar was invading but I don't think in ancient terms it's actually what Caesar primarily had in mind by choosing the metaphor of the dice Caesar was parading the uncertainty the hazard the danger of the political and military outcomes of what he was about to embark on he was not saying everything's fated it's inevitable he's saying this is jolly dangerous and we don't know what's going to happen he was right and actually as I hinted a bit ago if you're looking for another link between this kind of military activity and games of chance one nice way of finding it is in the shapes given to dice shakers which very often are done in the shape of military towers from military thoughts in a sense you're seeing the outcome of war as in my sense alia tree it's no surprise then perhaps that dicing and gaming was an important element in the image of the emperors who followed Julius Caesar old Claudius of I Claudius Fame was said to be absolute gambling obsessive he even wrote a book about dicing sadly doesn't survive he did survive we'd know the rules I imagine and in a nasty nasty Roman satire written shortly after the death of old Claudius he was envisaged languishing in the underworld one of his punishments there being to have to shake a dice in a dice box which didn't have a bottom to it for eternity right he does get rescued but dicing was also the Roman Empress power in controlling even the games of chance was mediated and discussed in general although as this powerful and repeated insistence almost everywhere you look in the Roman world this repeated insistence on dicing and it's symbolism illustrates Rome was a culture that crucially looked danger in the eye it did not attempt to avert or calculate danger but rather in a sense to assert and celebrate the uncertainties chances and dangers of human existence and that's what I meant by referring to it as an alia tree society and it's a very very different way of imaging danger from our own but it's not simply the passivity we sometimes assume the Romans were locked into Romans were not simply the dupes are the playthings of fate they managed danger by repeatedly reminding themselves that they were always facing it head-on it's looking danger in the eye it's a standoff but there's more to it even than that for in fact the throw of the dice could be used not only to expose uncertainty but also to resolve it I'm thinking here of what is known as dice Oracle's a system whereby the numbers which came up on the throw the dice or knucklebones represented if you decoded them an answer to a question that was troubling the person who threw the dice now what you need to remember here is that most ancient Oracle's are not likely imagine them our standard image of an ancient Oracle comes almost entirely from the Delphic Oracle and a few others like it and here we find ancient kings and statesmen coming to consult the god Apollo and so the stories go leaving with a riddling or ambiguous reply in other words the stock-in-trade of the iraq euler god here was to meet uncertainty with an almost equal uncertain response so the most famous example I guess is King Croesus of Lydia going to Delfy in the 6th century BC to find out if he should go to war with King Cyrus of Persia the Oracle said that if you did he would destroy a great Empire encouraged he went to war and you can see what the answer is he did end up destroying a great Empire the trouble was it was his own great empire that he destroyed the Delphic Oracle rather carefully hedged his bets I think ok that's the popular image the fact is most Oracle's in the ancient world and by Oracle's I'm using that term to refer to you know anything right down to street fortune-tellers the vast majority of Oracle's gave people who consulted them a pretty clear steer about what they should do even if not absolutely straight answers some of those answers were like Delfy authenticated by the voice of the God but I don't think we need to go a bundle on how many gods they were involved in all this it was also magic arcane foreign law and simply the aleatory power of the dice having a roll and dice Oracle's are an interesting case they're a widespread phenomenon right through the Mediterranean but they appear in a most strikingly monumental form in some Roman cities in what's now Turkey you go to a group of these cities you'll find a large stone pillar has been erected let's say in the marketplace and on this pillar have been inscribed lists of all the possible 56th rows that you can get with five knuckle bones and a response to match consultation could not have been easier you go along you throw your mock knuckle bones you look at the numbers and the answer is on the pillar have a look at this one this is a good one happiness you've got a six six four four three three coming up to twenty three if two sixes whoops I put an extra three in I'm not going to get a good happy answer take off a three if two sixes are cast into fours and the fifth is a three sail wherever you want you'll return home again having found and done everything according to your wish you will achieve everything and thus to buy and trade is happiness but they weren't all so upbeat on the gloomy aside a throw of one six four four three warned you show no insight at all if you sell now nor will it be useful and so on now these inscribed responses are interesting in all kinds of ways they're interesting about how you think you get the answer from the dice and so forth but they're also interesting of course because they give us this is what I was heralding at the beginning they give us some access to what these men in the marketplace who used these Oracle's 2,000 years ago felt anxious or uncertain about and is this that I want to turn to now for talking about the parade of uncertainty and hazard I think is one thing and it's important but we also want to know what kind of issues prompted anxiety in the ancient world because not every culture as I said worries about the same things and as we've seen repeatedly in the series of lectures people often worry about things that are not there realist danger you know we're much more worried about air travel than car travel and Mary Douglas has that famous example about the melians idea who are prey to most appalling tropical diseases but spend their time worrying that they're going to be struck by lightning and at least Mary Douglas sees that they weren't stupid to worry about that no it turns out I have to say bit sadly that the dice Oracle's are not hugely revealing in this respect or rather better they appear to be serving a rather specific niche market of anxiety in the ancient world for the majority of the responses on these great pillars that you find in these Turkish towns the majority of responses seem to reflect about reflect anxiety about one area of life only which is ancient business ventures and trade not exclusively so there are a few responses that refer to illness and to death but it's mainly economic life that they're talking about and in a way of course that fits with the position of these ocular pillars there slap-bang in the middle of the commercial area of these little towns there they're ready for the local business merchants to consult and they're simultaneously in my terms parading the uncertainties and chants of ancient commerce and also offering some sort of resolution to those uncertainties a much more vivid glimpse of more varied concerns however is provided by a different set in more intriguing set of ER Acula texts several copies of which are preserved on papyrus not stone in this case now in the introduction on the papyrus to these texts these books of Oracle's are said to have been handed down from the mathematician Pythagoras through the Egyptian magician a strap circus hence they're titled the Oracle's of a strap circus they're even said to have been the favorite ocular device of Alexander the Great they claim to be Alexander the great secret decision-making weapon in conquering the world he took the Oracle's of a strap circus with him and they told him what to do if I all that is a mad spurious exotic sizing advert for the book which certainly wasn't around in the age of Alexander the Great it's probably a second century AD commercial handbook for fortune tell us now the system here is a bit more complicated Oracle it doesn't appear to be a do-it-yourself method like the dice Oracle was and there's a good deal of obfuscation built in to getting an answer out of it presumably to protect the mystery and therefore the profit of a fortune teller so what I'm going to do now is to show you first of all what a consultation would look like from the outside and then I'm going to show you how it was done no dice are involved and it should be please don't over the first time but we do need an assistant so we're going to have dr. Scott is going to come up and I have to say that this I should just to boast this is the first public consultation of the Oracles of s traps occurs a several centuries and you'll see we've already got our ocular book which we prepared earlier on the table and dr. Scott you have to imagine is a worried Roman and he needs an answer to his uncertainties he had come to consult me the fortune teller and I point him to a list of problems in my little book it should be a scroll but we couldn't manage a scroll at their faces and I tell him that he's got to choose from the list of problems in there the problem that most closely matches his own now in real life presumably this was accompanied by a considerable amount a very lengthy mumbo-jumbo but we're going to kind of cut this to the essentials so I say to him okay young man which is your problem can I have question 100 you can write bit more mumbo-jumbo and then I say as magicians have stayed forever it's time immemorial think of a number between 1 and 10 help one more mumbo-jumbo ok one moment Emmett and I say right I've got to get a book I think what the answers in the back I say tell me your number again young man what lots of page lots of scroll unfurling is that going on I finally beam and I say I've got good news for you young man now when you discover what his question was the Oracle says no you will not get caught in adultery and off he goes beaming and happy now dr. Scott had asked me to make absolutely clear that this was an entirely fictional consultation there any resemblance to people living or dead is completely fortuitous except John Terry we thought actually the consultation how it might not have turned out so well if he'd chosen six the Oracles answer would have been you won't be caught as an adulterer for some time yet two would have produced yes you'd be caught in adultery soon and seven would have brought a nasty surprise you're not an adulterer but your wife's in love with somebody else okay so how is it done well as we saw the consultation starts from a list of 92 numbered questions running confusingly from number 12 to 1 number 103 don't ask me why will I get caught in adultery will I inherit and I'll come back to the questions in a bit anyway our Inquirer chooses number 100 from the list you can see that's just the section that was around where he picked his question from will I get caught in adultery soon he then thinks of his number between 1 and 10 and the fortune-teller adds that number to the number of the question so in Michaels case he'd picked question a hundred he chose number 1 that equaled a hundred and one fortune-teller then goes to another list or a so-called table of correspondences which converts that total a hundred and one into a different number again 32 but we still haven't got the answer because that new number directs you to one of a whole series of numbered groups of 10 answers or decades and within the decade the number he first thought of in Michaels case one identifies the answer that applies to him number 32 decade one you won't be caught in adultery right it's quite simple but if it seems a bit baffling that's the point for our concerns this evening though there are two important features of this first each question post each questions got ten possible answers I won't explain to you exactly why that must be but I can tell you there are 10 possible answers for each question and this takes us straight back to issues of the calculation of probability or the absence of the calculation of probability in antiquity that I discussed briefly at the start of this lecture now in a book published last year the Cambridge classes Jerry toner thought he could discern some pretty accurate probabilistic or perhaps better actuarial statistics buried in this rubbish he looked for example at the ten possible answers to the question will I rear the baby three answers suggested that the baby would survive three suggested that it would survive with difficulty to suggest you that it would die and one that it would not be reared which is the ancient euphemism for being killed oh and one that who would thrive yes yes next one now Turner pointed out that division of outcomes for this baby was actually not far from what we know of the demographic probabilities of an infant survival in the Roman world in which it's estimated just as the Oracle has it that three out of ten wouldn't make it through the first year and he went so far in the basis of this to suggest that the popularity of this Iraq Euler system was precisely because it reflected what would we would call the real risks of the situation now if that were true it would be extremely significant and would undermine quite a lot of what we think we know about the modern history of probability but it probably isn't true and it's no coincidence I think here the tone is a very interesting classicist because he also has a career as a financier and I think that it's very interesting that attempting to bring the risk of finance into the risk of Oracle's is certainly true that some distributions of answers do produce a pretty realistic probability but even more of them don't take for example the question am I being poisoned we're four out of ten hunters say yes now you might argue I suppose anyone asking whether they'd been poisoned had a greater than average chance to be an at-risk group of poisoners poisoning and others but even so four out of ten seems pretty high more interesting though as Toner himself would I think agree more interesting is the range of uncertainties that these ninety two questions reveal where we see both an overlap with our own anxieties and a world of worry that is significantly different from our own similar or a whole array of questions about marriage love affair sex illness commercial and career success is my wife having a baby that's a question incidentally which gets a 10 out of 10 yes response which I think pretty well puts paid to the actuarial line or suggests an extraordinary degree of fecundity amongst the christianism will I get the girl I want seven yeses three knows at least one of the esses says when you've got it you'll decide you don't want her and one later Christian version of the text has when I become a bishop which has got a five out of five five versus five market group of consultants more striking though are the range of worries that don't match our own I've already mentioned have I been poisoned it's also clear there must have been slaves among the questioners because will I be sold is one question which gives a nice little glimpse into the uncertainties of a slave life but for me the real surprise is the range of questions that refer to Roman law am i safe from prosecution will I be informed against will I argue my case now we both scholars and elite Romans are used to thinking of the Roman legal system as a great safeguard against danger a protection for the citizen in our Terms I suppose Roman law is a risk management device that's not how it appears in the oracles of a strap circus where it is a menace a threat and it's processes themselves or what is feared it's a pattern of assumptions I think that fits with something that I'd never noticed before until I came to work on this lecture that some of the technical vocabulary of Roman law actually overlaps with the technical vocabulary of gambling so for example the Latin word for the deposit you put down at the start of a case is the same as a word for a bet sponsee o so to put it another way we're back here with that story of Ignatius Rufus and his fire brigade and to a Roman world where in some respects at least what we think of as the mechanisms and risk aversion as seen as dangerous themselves so to finish does this world this world or the Romans does it have anything to say to us let it speak to us speak to us when we think of our lives within the university and what precisely given the title of my talk does it speak to us when we think of risk in the humanities I want finally to a slightly devious way that it does this gets personal but I think I'm speaking the things that many of you will relate to anyone who's worked in our university system for the last I wrote 20 years to start with and I realized it was 30 years and on his worked in the university system for so long can hardly have failed to notice how the risk agenda has encroached on an awful lot of what we do someone had told me when I started teaching 30 years ago that I would end up filling out a risk assessment form in order to take a group of 10 young adult students on a sedate trip to the British Museum I would have thought they were joking but this is what I do now with only the very slightest degree of irritation I get more irritated when I find they're going clubbing all night and I don't they don't have to do a risk assessment for for going clubbing but some of what we do is more than irritating and it's hard I think not to be worried by what we might call the Chernobyl effect in higher education attitude to risk the idea somehow that risk comes upon you and you are free of responsibility for that risk in preparing for this evening I spent some truly horrible hours going through online risk assessments of for the most part American universities among the risks you regularly find on their list is quality of academic staff which is for a start laughable but implies a truly irresponsible view of university teachers and researchers on the part of the administration as if they were a risk to be managed not a group of people to be cherished supported and enhanced and if it wasn't as if it was not the duty of the university actively to ensure the high quality of its staff we see much the same thing and I have to say I'm afraid closer to home in our own changing ideas and obsession with student plagiarism but is also increasingly seen that's cheating for which I am responsible but an appalling academic catastrophic ill that might happen to me now if you want a nasty read go to the general Board's guidelines on plagiarism but I'm not going to quote them an even worse illustration of how we think about plagiarism is the University of East Anglia's anti plagiarism quiz entitled are you at risk of plagiarism now I have to say naively when I came across this I thought this means am I at risk of being plagiarized you know how would I know if somebody had copied me but actually what it means is are you at risk of plagiarizing there are 13 questions aim to get across such key facts as plagiarism can happen accidentally and you might not always know you've done it and the fear of plagiarism should not mean that you don't talk to your friends about your work it all makes plagiarism seem like a nasty illness but you might have contracted without knowing it but one that shouldn't prevent normal human contact but you know about to say don't share a toothbrush you know in fact one of my colleagues pointed out to me plagiarism actually sounds like an illness whereas cheating doesn't but finally absolutely finally and closest to my heart is the increasingly risk-averse agenda that we find in humanities research whether at doctoral level or in senior research projects twenty-five years ago thirty years ago in a completely different academic world potential PhD students applied for what were then British Academy grants simply by writing down their study as Roman history or English now our students have to write a whole essay summarizing their conclusions before they have done the work now the old sister might have seemed cavalier but I wonder if he got worse results from it and any more senior scholar in the room who's ever applied for HRC research money will know all too well you now have to specify exactly what the outcomes will be and even the timetable week-by-week towards achieving them the HRC has become so risk-averse frankly that the only safe and sensible way to get money out of them is to apply for funding that work that you've already done then you know you'll have an outcome now we've all come to think of these mechanisms as prudence perhaps slightly irritating but the responsible management of public money and we seem to forgotten that this is not how research in the humanities is carried out certainly not how good research is carried out the basic point is you don't know what you are going to find when you open a book and you can't partay this desire for a timetable you can't say how long it will take you to read it it depends on how interesting you make it for yourself an awful lot of the best work depends on a very great deal of luck indeed I think what distinguishes successful humanities researchers from Lex less successful ones is in a part the fact they are luckier it's not that they've managed the risks better so you now see where the Romans come in I suppose I want to say that libraries are very dangerous places you find the entirely unexpected there you never know what you're going to find when you go in and you get prompted to think all kinds of things that gets you bad publicity or Nobel Prizes or whatever and I think it seems to be important that we should accept that fact about humanities research and we should parade and face the danger research and humanities I want to argue is part of a Roman aleatory culture it is not properly seen as part of a risk managed culture and it is simply dishonest to pretend that it can be risk managed so my motto that ups I meant I meant to remind you about these guys before my motto for closing this lecture is Alea jacta s because i think that is what we should inscribe on the a HRC's coat of arms thank you [Applause] well to begin at the ending I another academic I firmly uphold the view that if research isn't risky it isn't worth doing but this is clearly a a diminishing view of the world I'm sure that all those who've acted as Health and Safety officers for buildings will approve of ignatius Rufus as a patron how to become extremely unpopular by doing good and and I did notice while Michael was doing the the consultation with the Oracle a number of my colleagues taking notes in economics and in law so it may be that you've introduced a new aspect of our syllabus this evening one of the things I found so fascinating about the five lectures we've had so far is how often a discussion of risk from whatever angle quite quickly comes around to notions of free will and agency and human control and one of the things I think that Professor beard has got across so clearly is the only way that the sense of people under extreme uncertainty to see events as random rather than probabilistic and and what a wonderful insight this beautiful I think lecture has given us into the way which people coped with the brutal realism of a much harsher world thank you very much indeed [Applause] you you

Channel: Darwin College Lecture Series

Views: 1,734

Rating: 4.7777777 out of 5

Keywords: Professor Mary Beard, University of Cambridge, Darwin college lecture series, darwin college, Darwin college lectures, Risk, classicist, Pompeii, Life of a Roman town, The Roman Triumph, Classical art from greece to rome, the oracles, Oracles of Astramphsychus

Id: HApOSJRAVfU

Length: 67min 23sec (4043 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2020