Profile (2026) h/b 209pp £16.99 (ISBN 9781805220329)
At my first glance of the title, I rather churlishly thought Dame Mary was talking about herself, once a controversial young firebrand, playing the media like a harp, and to the very great benefit of classics (as well as herself) but now, retired, a grandmother and dangerously close to becoming a national treasure, yet still someone who can shock around the clock. Or was it a straight reference to the shock provided by anyone’s first contact with the ancient world? She soon cleared that one up.
Her aim—she is eminently quotable—is as follows: ‘I want to capture what is still so exciting, rewarding and sometimes unsettling about the classical world—or at least what has excited, rewarded and unsettled me. The underlying message is that you get much more out of classics if you revere it less. Amazement, surprise, pleasure, puzzlement, even revulsion, yes. Reverence and gratitude, no.’ For her, classics is ‘unfailingly eye-opening and interesting’, encouraging one to ‘try to understand the past on its own terms’ without compromising one’s understanding of the present. At the same time, ‘There are conversations across history but still bounded by it, necessarily contested and shifting. Don’t imagine that there are pure nuggets of truth waiting to be discovered in classics. It’s the debate between us and antiquity that is important’.
Taking Greece and Rome together, whatever their differences, she begins in Chapter One by making clear that her interests are in Athenian citizens, Roman pub landlords, exploited slaves, and self-serving senators For her, one of the great pleasures is her thauma (‘sense of wonder’) at finding the evidence that makes one feel so close to people so long ago, never more so than in ‘ordinary’ places like the pubs of Pompeii, with their graffiti and illustrations of gambling and punch ups. But however much the ancient world might seem like ours in some ways, it is understanding the differences, and these are wide and deep, between them that is so important. To that extent, I found it odd that there is no discussion of farming, the life of 90% of Rome’s population, always poised on the edge of famine, always looking for any way to make money and survive. After all, land, sea and humanity were the only resources that anyone had available to them to live off and fight over: why nothing about the plebs?
At a quite different level, she invites us to wonder at the magnificent works of art that one finds and how one might think about them. Take the Greeks’ first nude statue of a female—the Aphrodite located in Knidos—sculpted by the great Praxiteles, and the stories of men trying to make love to it (and leaving their mark). Her question is ‘Why did Praxiteles do it?’ I would be perfectly happy with the answer ‘Because he’s the great Praxiteles, Greeks loved novelty, and producing a first was catnip to a man like him’. She rejects it. One wonders what other sources are available to provide a more satisfactory answer. The statue certainly caused a stir and started a trend. She then turns to a sculpture of a hermaphrodite and suggests that it prompts the question ‘What is the difference between a man and a woman, and can we be both?’ Yet there was a god Hermaphroditus. That seems to me a much more interesting issue.
Chapter Two asks ‘How to be Modern’. Here she turns to ancient literature and mentions briefly some of its greatest hits. Homer’s Iliad is an epic of heroes and battle and yet in the middle of the slaughter he comes up with the simile of the god Apollo destroying the Greek defensive wall like a boy kicking over a sandcastle on the beach. Take the opening lines of Virgil’s Aeneid, making reference to the great epics of Homer which he was converting into the story of the foundation and rise of Rome. Dare a Roman take on a Greek? But then whatever Virgil did, Milton could also do, drawing on both epics to tell the story of Christian Paradise Lost. Then take Sophocles’ magnificent Antigone. She clearly remembers thinking that Creon was obviously wrong and Antigone obviously right. Then she thought a little bit more and realized it was not quite as simple as that. As she says, ‘Classical literature has forced me to think harder, face the uncomfortable, and to reread what I had thought I had understood’.
But this is not where her heart is. She is unnecessarily unkind to the famous meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, though it is not clear why, and says nothing about Epicureanism and Stoicism, hugely influential in the modern world. Nothing either, surprisingly, about Herodotus—if one is looking for shocks, surely he of all people provides them—or Aristophanes (let alone Martial or Plautus: does she have a humour failure?) and only one comment on Aristotle, one of the cleverest and most scientifically ‘shocking’ men that ever lived. The Greek inventors of atomism get no mention either, nor atomism’s great advocate the Roman poet Lucretius, whose poem de rerum natura was recovered in the 14th century by Poggio Bracciolini and would be central in helping lay the foundation of modern atomism. But we all have different priorities.
Plato is the philosophical exception here. One of the most moving parts of the book describe a discussion with some 15-year-olds about free speech. They went round and round until the trial of Socrates was introduced. Quite ignorant that the issue of free speech was absolutely central to that famous trial, ‘they went straight to the heart of the controversies that inevitably surround the issue and that had, until then, been buried in their nervous circumlocutions. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. It was an unforgettable teaching moment. Classics gives you a space to argue freely and without fear.’
She takes to task those in the modern world who make much of civis Romanus sum as a rather grand assertion of a properly civilised society by pointing out that it occurs only once in Roman literature. But that is a meaningless statistic. What of Roman life? Saint Paul clearly used it successfully before the Roman governor (Acts 22), and I imagine quite a few Roman plebs had to use it among the c. 2-300,000 claiming the corn dole. It was not just a patriotic slogan. B. has the equivalent on her passport during her frequent worldwide travels.
That said, she is absolutely correct in stating that the ancient world is far too complex and far too different to be associated with any 21st C ideology. The simple fact, as she says, is that classics belongs to none of us and so can provide a safe space in which to argue about the most difficult debates we face now—from race to sexual violence and gender identity (a telling selection of her priorities). ‘I have learned that you get a lot more out of classics if you allow it to be a disruptive challenge to self-serving modern certainties, rather than turn it into an untouchable ancestor in whose shadow you should count yourself lucky to sit.’
Chapter Three deals with ‘Rights and Wrongs’. Because of the status that Greek and Roman culture enjoys, however few people know anything about it, it finds itself in some very unhelpful hands—Hitler, Mussolini, those storming the White House, those justifying colonialism on the grounds that they were following a good healthy Roman precedent (all too easy to say now). But did not the French and American revolutions make use of the same imagery? As B. points out, ‘Classics belongs to no side’.
There are also issues of ‘class’ associated with classics. B. here becomes rather mysteriously taxed by the unfairness of girls’ schools in not teaching ancient Greek accents, while boys’ schools did, and that this is all part of the class ‘problem’ with the subject. My school didn’t teach it, so I taught myself. Perhaps she could try it out on her grandchildren.
But the ‘class’ issue usually relates to snobbery. That seems to me long gone: these days it is cause for amazement that anyone still studies the subject at all. It is easy to forget that Latin was the main language of education across Europe and beyond—because it was taught by the Catholic church (there was something sacred about it)—from the emergence of Christianity until England broke from Rome in the 16th century. But the subsequent ‘grammar’ schools were not called ‘grammar’ for nothing, and Latin remained very much part of the curriculum. Tradition dies hard. Remember that compulsory education in England and Wales did not come in until 1880 and then only up to the age of 10. Latin was not on the curriculum. Quite right, because it would have been far too difficult for children ‘like that’? Or an effort to keep them ‘out’?
Chapter Four ‘The Case for Classics’ is at one level a summary of her general understanding of the worth of studying the subject and to that extent something of a summary of her book. It begins with the discussion of the Browning Version (1948, a play about a classics master forced to retire) and moves on to the way the subject has developed since the 19th century. She remembers especially the words of a colleaguethat the issue was not ‘What does classics teach you about?’ but ‘What does it teach you to do?’ and suggests two answers: it ‘teaches you to argue responsibly on the basis of inadequate evidence (ancient history is always demanding that we face the gaps in what we know and then make a good case)’; and ‘classics teaches you to discuss constructively questions to which there are no right answers, or any answers at all in the usual sense of the word’. She agreed that such arguments are not designed to pull in the crowds, but they are all part of the mix.
She agrees that the language (and so the literature?) are not her real interest but, as the book makes clear throughout, it is the understanding of the ancient world as a social and political construct that grips her imagination. She does not deny that having enough of the language to go back to the sources and ensure that translations are accurate is of the first importance.
There is a great deal of provocative, straight talking and hard-headed good sense in this book. It could have been shorter—it was based on a number of lecture series—but no teacher of classics can be in any doubt about her passion for ancient history and the thought-provoking way in which she combines the ancient with the modern, at the same time doing justice to both. If any book can turn the dial on the subject, this should be it.
Peter Jones