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
 
