Adrian Goldsworthy draws up the account on AugustusMarcus Sidonius Falx lifts the lid on slavery

Jim McKeown is amazed by ancient equestrian practices

Averil Cameron reflects on Byzantium

Thonemann on the Attalids – Sawyer on Thucydides in the USA –

Stray on Jebb – West_-Sherring on Latin – Hazel answers Enfield

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T h e j o u r n a l o f t h e

ContentsAugustus—two thousand years on by Adrian Goldsworthy I—II

How to manage your slaves, by Jerry Toner III—IV

Horse riding then and now, by Jim McKeown V—VII

The Mediterranean's first Royal Family, by Peter Thonemann VII—IX

Thucydides: making it big in the USA, by Liz Sawyer IX—X

Does Byzantium matter?, by Averil Cameron XI—XII

Jebb's ad familiares, by Christopher Stray XIII—XIV

A reply to Edward Enfield, by John Hazel XV

Nil desperandum, by Jack West-Sherring XV—XVI

ex cathedra, Jeannie Cohen and Peter Jones IBC

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Cover: South frieze of Augustus’ ara pacis, see (above) for identities

Caesar Augustus (fig. 1) died on the 19th August AD 14 although, given the centenary of the start of the Great War, the date will probably pass without much notice. He was just short of his seventy-seventh birthday and

had ruled without serious challenge for more than four decades since Mark Antony took his own life in 30 BC. His adopted son Tiberius succeeded him, and even when the family line came to an end with Nero, subsequent emperors took the names Caesar and Augustus as titles. During his lifetime he created the system of monarchy that would govern Rome for centuries, tactfully veiling his power without ever letting it go, and avoiding titles like king or dictator.

For all his achievements and the crucial importance of his actions, somehow Augustus is no longer among the figures from the ancient world who still register in the popular imagination. Julius Caesar, Caligula or Nero prompt instant recognition—if often with only a vague sense of who they were—but Augustus does not. These days his name is most often heard at Christmas when Luke’s description of the Nativity is read out in carol services. Augustus appears as Octavian in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra—both frequently performed on stage and often studied in schools so still well known—but he did not receive a play of his own. Perhaps this was because he died of old age rather than being

stabbed to death at a meeting of the senate, like Julius Caesar, or taking his own life, like Brutus and Cassius and Antony and Cleopatra.

Yet there is no lack of drama in Augustus’s story. It takes a serious effort when looking at his early career to remember that he was only 18 on the Ides of March 44 BC. He did not know that he was named as principal heir in his great uncle Caesar’s will until after the latter’s murder. Political office could not be bequeathed in the Republic, nor could someone be adopted posthumously, and yet he chose to interpret the legacy in this way. His ambition was precocious, especially at Rome where office was tied to age and maturity, but no one took him very seriously at first. Mark Antony dismissed him as ‘a boy who owes everything to a name’. Cicero saw Antony as the great danger and felt that the young Augustus was a weapon to use against him—’we must praise the young man, reward him, discard him.’

It did not work out that way. He fought for the Senate against Antony, and then joined Antony and Lepidus to form the second triumvirate. They seized Rome and executed their enemies, reviving Sulla’s technique of posting proscription lists. A man who was named lost all legal rights and could be killed by anyone. Cicero was caught and killed before the lists were put up. In later years the triumvirs tried to shift the blame for this massacre onto their colleagues, but a reputation for youthful cruelty stuck to Augustus. In that pragmatic Roman way, it was seen as surprising that so young a man would

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Volume XXXXVII

A U G U S T U S -two thousand years on

Adrian Goldsworthy traces the story of the unknown 18-year old thug who changed Rome for ever

Fig. 1 Cameo of Augustus with aegis

already have so many enemies. At the end of his life he described these years simply:

At the age of 19 on my own responsibility and at my own expense I raised an army, with which I successfully championed the liberty of the republic when it was oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.

There is no mention of the fact that private citizens were not supposed to raise their own armies. Tacitus unsurprisingly would later judge events far more cynically:

When the killing of Brutus and Cassius had disarmed the state; when (Sextus) Pompey had been crushed in Sicily, and with Lepidus thrown aside and Antony slain, even the Julian party was leaderless but for Caesar (Augustus).’

Augustus won, and after the Battle of Actium there were no more challengers with the military might to oppose him—something he took great care to ensure by maintaining a tight control over the army. Success did not make him popular, but what Romans and provincials alike wanted more than anything else was peace and stability. Civil war had plagued the Republic since 88BC when Sulla turned his legions on Rome. Casualties had been heavy, especially among the senatorial families, while armies had fought and plundered all around the Mediterranean. Plenty of provincial leaders and communities loyally supported Rome, only to find themselves regularly on the losing side in a civil war and forced to pay dearly to satisfy the victor. Since warlords like Augustus had to find farms to give to their discharged soldiers, Italian communities had suffered land confiscations, In the thirties BC Virgil imagined the thoughts of one of the dispossessed—perhaps from experience, since it may be that his family lost land at this time:

Ah, shall I ever, long years hence, look again on my country’s bounds, on my humble cottage with its turf-clad roof—shall I, long years hence, look amazed on a few ears of corn, once my kingdom? Is an impious soldier to hold these well-tilled fallows? A barbarian these crops? See where strife has brought our unhappy citizens!

After so much upheaval, Roman citizens wanted to be sure that they would still own their own property in the years to come, and not be conscripted to fight in yet another civil war. Leaders and governing bodies in the provinces similarly wanted to be confident that the honours and obligations given to them would not change overnight as Roman warlords rose and fell. Decades of inertia by a Senate too caught up with bitter and often violent competition for office and honours had left many appeals unanswered and many disputes unresolved. Augustus laboured to deal with them. It is often forgotten that he travelled more than any emperor until Hadrian. Augustus spent more of his reign in the provinces than in Rome or even Italy. He worked hard, receiving delegations and listening to petitions, wherever he was. Deputations came to him whether he was in Rome, or Spain, Gaul, Greece or Syria, waited to be summoned, and in the end were heard and given an answer.

Augustus toiled to make the state work again, and at the same time he gave it peace—a theme constantly celebrated in art and literature, most notably in the ara pacis Augusti (the altar of Augustan Peace, fig. 2)

an honour voted by the Senate in 13BC. This was internal peace and the absence of

civil war, for at the same time he was one of the greatest conquerors of new territory. Defeating foreign enemies was an entirely honourable and proper achievement for a Roman aristocrat. As

Virgil put it:

Remember, Roman—for these are your arts—that you have to rule the nations by your power, to add good custom to peace, to spare the conquered and overcome the proud in war.

Order returned to the world, an order based on Roman victory and respect for Roman power. Ovid wrote of the ara pacis in his Fasti and reflects the Roman understanding of peace (fig. 3):

Come, Peace, thy dainty tresses wreathed with Actian laurels, and let thy gentle presence abide in the whole world. So may there be neither foes nor food for triumphs, thou shalt be unto our chiefs a glory greater than war. May the soldier bear arms only to check the armed aggressor ... ! May the world near and far dread the sons of Aeneas, and if there be land that feared not Rome, may it love Rome instead!

Peace and prosperity came from the victory at Actium and the continued strength of Rome under the leadership of Augustus.

Augustus styled himself princeps—the foremost servant of the Republic—and boasted of returning power to the Senate and People. His constitutional position evolved gradually through improvisation as much as careful planning, but never altered the simple truth that he controlled the legions and could not be made to give them up. Scholars like to discern a senatorial opposition forcing him to maintain a veneer of constitutional conduct, but this exists largely in their imagination. As Tacitus put it, Augustus:

seduced the army by bounties, the people by the free corn dole, the whole world by the comfort of peace, and then gradually assumed the power of the Senate, the magistrates, and the making of law. There was no opposition, for the bravest men had fallen in the line of battle or to proscription lists ... .

The only real constraint on his behaviour came from his own sense of what was wise and right.

There was no real, still less an appealing, alternative to his rule. The Republic had not functioned properly within living memory. Brutus and Cassius murdered Caesar to restore liberty but then raised armies and acted just like all the other warlords of the era—and in the end they lost.

Augustus gave the empire stability and made institutions work again or created new ones. It took time, but the benefits of his

regime soon became so obvious—and his intention of retaining power so clear—that the blood-soaked triumvir faded from memory and instead there was only the princeps, the father of his country (pater patriae) as he was hailed in 2BC. Few emperors ruled

as long, or were so lamented when they died.

*ADRIAN GOLDSWORTHY’s Augustus: From Revolutionary to Emperor was published

earlier this year by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

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Volume XXXXVII

Fig. 2 The ara pacis reconstructed

Fig. 3 Mother Earth, or Venus, or perhaps Italia, envisaged as Peace on the ara pacis

The subject of ancient slavery has always attracted a great deal of interest. From the brutal punishment of crucifixion to the heroic revolt of Spartacus, later generations have tried hard to understand the various aspects of this core institution

of the Roman world. Inevitably we tend to sympathise with the slaves and focus on their often cruel treatment and living conditions. But what if we try to see slavery from the Roman point of view? Slavery was so central that it never occurred to Romans that it might not exist. Owning slaves was a completely normal and desirable thing to do. Sadly, we don’t know what the slaves themselves thought, because their views didn’t matter. But we know plenty about what Roman masters thought of their possessions. From legal and philosophical texts to books of dream interpretation, a variety of sources survive that give us the inside details of how the Romans bought slaves, thought about them, and managed them. So I created a fictional character, a Roman nobleman called Marcus Sidonius Falx, to give us his clear and simple manual for managing slaves the Roman way. Here are some of most common questions I am asked about this project.

Q: Why did you use a Roman character?

I invented Marcus because I wanted to show that the Roman world, for all its apparent familiarity to us, could be almost casually shocking. Marcus holds many strong and unpalatable views which he refuses to acknowledge might be wrong or immoral. But by Roman standards, Marcus was a decent man. His text also shows how complex an institution was slavery. It was not just about floggings and brutality. Slaves were an expensive investment and masters wanted to protect their assets and get the best from them.

Q: Why was slavery so important to the Romans?

The Romans captured millions of people when they conquered the Mediterranean world. Owning slaves allowed them to farm large estates and also keep personal attendants to look after their every need. Whether it was waiting at table, calling out the names of visitors, or wiping the master’s backside, slaves let the Romans enjoy what they saw as the civilised lifestyle.

Q: How much did slaves cost?

By the time of the empire, when Rome was no longer capturing vast quantities of slaves in war, prices had risen. A healthy adult male slave would cost about 1,000 sesterces. Given that it cost only about 500 sesterces to feed a family of four for a year (albeit at bare-minimum rations), one can see how expensive slaves were. Most Romans could not have afforded to own even one. Having 400 slaves

in your house, as one Pedanius Secundus, Prefect of Rome during the reign of Nero did, was a high profile way of showing off how rich you were.

Q: How many slaves were there?

The evidence is fairly thin, but reasonable guesstimates suggest that about 20-25 per cent of the population of Italy was servile. The number was lower in the empire as a whole, perhaps one in seven or eight, but higher in the city of Rome, where perhaps a third or more of the inhabitants were slaves. Rome was a huge city by pre-industrial standards with a population of about a million. Its streets must have teemed with slaves going about their masters’ business.

Q: What made a good slave?

The Romans looked for slaves who were hard-working, loyal and vigilant. But the Romans assumed that, the moment their backs were turned, most slaves would start shirking their work. They also suspected that they would not lift a finger to help their masters if they got into trouble. It was only through a combination of terror and training that a slave could be moulded into the kind of servant the master wanted.

Q: What made a good master?

Not all owners treated their slaves harshly. In fact many of the surviving examples of cruelty are recorded precisely because they were considered socially unacceptable. The famous example of Vedius Pollio (obit 15 BC) himself a freedman trying to have a slave boy fed to his pet lampreys because he had broken a crystal cup was not how most owners behaved. Masters had a vested interest in looking after their slaves, thereby maintaining the value of their possessions. Some writers such as Seneca thought that masters also had a moral duty to control their anger and show that they were superior beings.

Q: Did slaves ever kill their masters?

Pedanius Secundus, the praefectus with 400 domestic slaves, was killed by one of them, probably because he had reneged on a deal to free him. In accordance with Roman law, all slaves under the same roof were executed for not having done something to prevent the murder of their master. Interestingly, as this great procession of slaves was being led to their execution, the Roman people crowded into the streets and protested against it. They went so far as to besiege the senate house. Even some senators were against the

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Volume XXXXVII

How to Manage your SlavesJerry Toner answers some common questions

about slave owning in Rome

mass execution taking place because they felt it was too harsh. But most senators argued that no change in ancient practice should be permitted: if a man of Pedanius’s standing could be killed by a slave, then what safety could there be for anyone, unless it was made painfully clear to all slaves that their own lives were at risk if they did not protect their master? In the end, Nero who was emperor at the time, had to line the road with troops to keep the crowd at bay, and the condemned slaves were marched to their deaths.

Q: Were slaves ever set free?

If you were a slave working in a chain gang in the fields, you would probably be worked until you dropped. But large numbers of domestic slaves, who were in a position to develop a more personal relationship with their master, were freed by their owners (even though the government taxed them for doing so at five per cent of the value). These freedmen were then easily assimilated into wider society, and their children had the full rights of citizenship. The Romans regarded the prospect of freedom as a great incentive to keep slaves honest and hard-working.

Q: Did the Romans view slavery differently from the Greeks?

The Greeks held a firmer view of the servile nature of slaves than the Romans. Aristotle famously argued that slaves were naturally slavish, and it was right for them to be owned by the superior

Greeks. Athenian society maintained a stronger divide between citizen and slave, which made it difficult for them to be assimilated into their society even when they were freed. A completely different model operated in Rome, where large numbers of outsiders were habitually assimilated into the ranks of its citizens. One of the main reasons for Rome’s great success was its ability to incorporate all manner of foreigners and their gods. This allowed it to expand its pool of manpower along with its territory. In such a society, it made no sense to exclude slaves permanently from becoming Roman.

Instead it seemed more sensible to think of slavery as a temporary state, after which, if the slave had shown the right attitude, citizenship could be achieved.

Q: How was sex between slaves and masters regarded?

There is plenty of evidence for the sexual abuse of slaves of all ages. A combination of the powerful position which the master had over his slaves and their lack of basic rights means that this should not come as a surprise. The dream interpreter Artemidorus in the later second century AD even states that it is good to dream of having sex with one’s slaves because it means the owner will derive benefits from his possessions. It was also perfectly normal for masters to keep pre-pubescent boys as pets.

Q: Could slaves marry or own property?

Slaves had few legal rights in Roman law but the system was flexible, especially in urban households. It was usual for city slaves to be allowed to own money and possessions, even if this peculium legally remained the property of the owner. They could not marry, but in practice were often allowed to form partnerships. Slaves acquired more legal rights during the empire: for example they could appeal to the emperor’s statue for sanctuary from an abusive master.

Q: What is the most shocking aspect of Roman slavery?

It was a requirement of Roman law that slaves gave evidence in court under torture. This routine torture as an integral part of legal proceedings is one of the most terrible abuses to the modern reader. But the Romans saw such treatment as completely normal. Slaves were too unimportant and morally weak to be relied upon to tell the truth. Torture was seen simply as a way of getting at the truth and so was both sensible and served the cause of justice.

*DR JERRY TONER is Director of Studies in classics at Churchill College, Cambridge. His How to Manage Your Slaves by Marcus Sidonius Falx with Jerry Toner was published by Profile (2014).

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Slaves prepare a meal

Prisoners led into captivity as slaves

It is almost 15 years since I bought my first horse. I didn’t know anything about horses then, and I still don’t know

much, but the experience of riding horses, tending horses, and simply watching horses graze in the pasture has made me think about them in ways I never did before. In particular, s t a t e m e n t s about horses in Greek and Roman l i t e r a t u r e that I once passed over without a m o m e n t ’ s thought now eng ag e my attention far more closely. This change in perspective has been very enlightening.

Mounting a horse is simple: put left foot in stirrup, grasp horse’s mane with left hand, step up in stirrup, swing right leg over horse’s back, put right foot in stirrup, wiggle buttocks for optimum comfort in saddle. All very easy and graceful.

But consider this passage from the Tactics of Arrian, who was a Roman army commander in the second century AD:

Cavalrymen leap on to their horses in all the many and various ways of mounting, and finally they display the so-called ‘travelling leap’, jumping on to a horse in full armour while it is running along. These are the exercises that the Roman cavalry have been practising for generations.

In his Military Affairs, written more than two hundred years later, Vegetius

endorses this statement, adding:

this drill is taken so seriously that they learn to mount

and dismount from both the right side and the

left as well, even while carrying lances or with their swords

unsheathed. The purpose of such constant drilling in peacetime is to ensure that they can mount their horses without difficulty

even in the noise and confusion of an

actual battle.

Several points will attract the

modern rider’s envy and amazement. First,

pretty well no one but a professional acrobat jumps on

to a moving horse. Secondly, it is hard enough to mount a horse

while wearing a heavy pair of steel-toed protective boots, let alone wearing armour

and carrying weapons. Thirdly, ‘the noise and confusion of an actual battle’ imply eviscerated horses and men, screams of the dying, trampling on corpses, the

smell of blood and panic; nowadays, when a rider is about to mount, he hopes his horse isn’t made skittish by flies or the proximity of an attractive horse. Fourthly, to consider the horse’s welfare, how would there not be considerable risk of spinal damage when a heavily armed soldier leaped onto its back? Fifthly, finally, and most significantly, stirrups are a sine qua non for most modern riders, but these simple and seemingly obvious accessories were unknown in Greek and Roman times, being first brought westward, apparently from China, in the middle of the first millennium AD, by the horse peoples of the steppes (fig. 1).

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Volume XXXXVII

Equestrianism Then and NowDid they really ride horses like that? asks Jim McKeown

Fig. 1 An Avar chieftain whose name is lost to history. He may look slightly bonkers, but we have him and his ilk

to thank for the revolutionary introduction of stirrups to the West.

In the absence of stirrups, other aids to mounting were devised. Plutarch tells us that Gaius Gracchus set up milestones along all the roads, ‘and also placed smaller stones at shorter distances from each other to enable riders to mount their horses without needing anyone to help them get up’ and elsewhere he comments that ‘whether through illness or degeneracy, some men are incapable of jumping onto their horses, and so they train them to kneel or crouch down. He goes on to compare such men to ‘those who marry wealthy or upper-class women but do nothing to make themselves worthy of them, trying instead to bring their wives down to their own level’.

Xenophon suggests that a rider, whether a cavalryman or a hunter, can make mounting easier ‘by using his spear to give him leverage when he jumps’. If Xenophon were not the unimpeachable doyen of ancient authorities on equestrian matters, and if this manoeuvre were not portrayed on a roughly contemporary vase (fig. 2), it would be tempting to dismiss the very idea of pole-vaulting onto a horse as a preposterous joke. A man mounting a horse with

graceful ease nowadays occasionally regrets that he has not been a bit more careful: how much more excruciating the consequences might have been for a naked pole-vaulter if his horse moved at the wrong moment.

If all else failed, a human mounting-block would serve very well. When Shapur I of Persia captured the Roman emperor Valerian in AD 260, he is said to have subjected him to this humiliation (fig. 3).

The stirrups are an anachronism, as is nearly everything else in the picture: the finery worn by Shapur and his lords was no doubt le dernier cri in French courtly couture in the early fifteenth century, when this manuscript was written. That Valerian is still wearing his crown is a rather comical touch. The horse seems to have no saddle girth, making it essential that the servant should take a firm grip on the other stirrup. The text, in French, reads:

Valerian was condemned to get down on the ground on his hands and knees like a very wretched and humble person every time that Shapur mounted his horse, letting Shapur use his back as if it were a mounting block. Valerian continued to provide this demeaning and shameful service for the rest of his life, and died a nasty death in Persia.

Some of the ways in which riders in antiquity were able to mount their horses seem miraculous enough, but getting on is only the start of it. There is so much else that keeps the modern rider feeling pedestrian about his equestrian skills. For example:

The testudo (tortoise) can be used as a tactic against archers: the whole formation crouches under the locked shields (and even the horses are trained to kneel or lie down), making the enemy think they are exhausted; then, when the enemy comes close, they suddenly stand up and throw them into a panic (Cassius Dio, Roman History 49.30).

Could horses really do this amid all the sound and fury of battle? Not even the best-trained horse could ever be mistaken for a Stoic philosopher. Cicero notes that, ‘taking part in a large number of battles often makes horses restless and aggressive, and it is a common practice to hand them over to trainers to rehabilitate them and make them more manageable’, an observation the more remarkable since we hear almost nothing about soldiers receiving treatment for any condition that might be equated with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Dio is not a particularly authoritative source of information about the Roman army, but consider this incident:

When the Jewish troops began to flee and were being forced down into a gully in a compact mass, Pedanius, one of the Roman cavalrymen, spurred his horse forward at a gallop and snatched up one of the enemy as he was fleeing. He grabbed his victim by the ankle, even though he was not just young and well built, but also fully armed. Pedanius had to bend down amazingly far from his galloping horse, thus demonstrating great physical strength, especially in his right arm, and also great skill in horsemanship. Then off he rode, carrying back his prize to Caesar ( Josephus, Jewish War 6.16).

Even when leaning down sideways from his horse, a modern trick-rider will usually have the advantage of an extra stirrup, especially if he is also hoisting up a reluctant passenger, But how

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Fig. 2 Vaulting onto horseback

Fig. 3 Valerian gets it in the back

can we doubt the authenticity of an event reported straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were, by an eyewitness in a book written under the patronage of the Caesar mentioned here, the future emperor Titus? Pedanius’s achievement is not unique, even if we hesitate to accept Servius’s claim that Julius Caesar himself was once on the receiving end of this dangerous indignity:

When Gaius Julius Caesar was fighting in Gaul, an enemy cavalryman plucked him from his horse and carried him off fully armed. One of the Gauls who knew him called out in mockery, ‘Caesar! Caesar!’ But in the Celtic language, ‘caesar’ means ‘let go!’ And so the horseman let him go. Caesar himself records this event in his personal diary, where he mentions his lucky escape (Commentary to Aeneid 11.743).

The Virgilian commentators are not always wholly credible when it comes to horse stories:

Some people say that the Trojan Horse was 120 feet long and 30 feet broad, with a tail, knees, and eyes that moved (Servius auctus on Aeneid 2.150).

Pliny the Elder assures us that:

Lancers know from experience how horses can help their riders in dangerous situations by the physical efforts they make. They even pick up weapons lying on the ground and offer them to their riders (Natural History 8.158).

The manoeuvre itself is perfectly plausible. Anyone who is happy to have his horse learn things it would never dream of doing in the wild could easily teach it to do this. But there is a crucial difference; Pliny is not talking about cute party tricks in the corral. Facing up to ‘dangerous situations’, with horses and men dying all around, is a horse of a quite different colour. It seems incredible that horses could be trained to do this under such circumstances. Of course, there are still some scholars, mostly scholars who do not read him, who would dismiss this as one of Pliny’s typically eccentric statements, on a par perhaps with:

As everyone knows, horse riding causes blisters and rashes on the inner thighs. The best treatment for any such problem is to smear the foam from a horse’s mouth on your genitals. Abrasions like this can lead to swelling of the groin; the most effective way to treat this is to take three hairs from your horse’s mane and tie them over the sore spot (Natural History 28.218).

But there can have been few people better placed to speak authoritatively about horses in battle, for he had served as a cavalry officer on the very unsettled German frontier and he was also the author of a treatise on the use of javelins in cavalry warfare.

I could go on, but, as Virgil says, iam tempus equum fumantia solvere colla, ‘it is time to free the horses’ steaming necks from the yoke’.

*JIM McKEOWN is a Professor of Classics in the University of Wisconsin at Madison, USA. His A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the World’s Greatest Empire was published by Oxford University Press (2010), and its Greek equivalent in 2013.

A lmost 80 years ago, the journalist Philip Gibbs kicked off his state-of-the-nation book England Speaks (1935), with the reflections of an English road sweeper on the 1935 Silver Jubilee of King George V:

The Royal Family is a very respectable lot… Human, if you know what I mean. They feel kindly towards us, and we feel kindly towards them. The King’s all right! A nice fellow—not like that there Hitler in Germany who puts folks into concentration camps because they don’t see eye to eye with him. He does his duty like the rest of us, like I do mine, and I don’t envy him his job. That’s why I’m loyal. That’s why we’re all loyal.

Could there be a better summary of the curious condition of the modern British monarchy? Over the three and a half centuries since the Glorious Revolution, British kings and queens have seen their real powers dwindle into insignificance. The splendours of Tudor and Stuart absolutism have, by imperceptible stages, been replaced by the cosy domesticity of the modern House of Windsor. The residual authority of the Royal Family rests on their status as ‘a very respectable lot’, human, nice, hard-working, and blessed with a rich and varied family life. The importance of the idea of family to the modern British monarchy was already noted by Walter Bagehot in his classic 1867 book, The English Constitution:

A family on the throne is an interesting idea also. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life. No feeling could seem more childish than the enthusiasm of the English at the marriage of the Prince of Wales. ... A royal family sweetens politics by the seasonable addition of nice and pretty events. It introduces irrelevant facts into the business of government, but they are facts which speak to men’s bosoms and employ their thoughts.

Few ancient monarchies better exemplify the ‘pride of sovereignty’ than the great successor kingdoms of the early Hellenistic period. The Seleucids of Asia, the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Antigonids of Macedon, the combative successors to Alexander the Great, were men and women of godlike status, literally worshipped as gods by their subjects, whose power over their dominions was absolute. Theocritus wrote of Ptolemy II Philadelphus:

All the sea and the land and the roaring rivers are ruled by Ptolemy and about him gather hosts of horsemen and shielded warriors in flashing bronze; in riches he could outweigh all the kings of the world, so great is the wealth that comes daily to

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The Mediterranean's ffiirst royal family

Kate 'n' Wills had nothing on the Attalids, argues Peter Thonemann

his splendid halls from every corner of the earth.

The coins minted by the Seleucids and Ptolemies depict them as splendid, charismatic rulers, bedecked with divine attributes, and adorned with proud epithets: ‘Ptolemy Saviour’, ‘Antiochus God Manifest’ (fig. 1).

A single Hellenistic kingdom broke away from this model, to create the earliest example in world history of a Kate ’n’ Wills-style domestic monarchy. The Attalid dynasts of Pergamum (282–133 BC) began as relatively minor members of the Hellenistic royal club. In the course of his long reign, Attalus I (241-197 BC) laboriously carved out a small kingdom in the far north-west of Asia Minor, on the outermost fringe of the vast Asiatic empire of the Seleucids. The third-century Attalid monarchy was fairly typical of the Hellenistic anciens régimes: the king ruled in absolutist fashion, was worshipped by his subjects as a god, and commemorated his wars against other kings and barbarians with lavish and baroque victory monuments.

All of that changed at a stroke in 188 BC. Fresh from a crushing victory over the royal Seleucid army at the battle of Magnesia, the Romans stripped the Seleucid king of all his possessions in Asia Minor (western Turkey), and handed them over to the small Attalid kingdom of Pergamon, then under the rule of the energetic king Eumenes II (197–159 BC). More or less overnight, the Attalid kingdom was transformed from a small mountainous principality, no larger than Yorkshire, to a rich and prosperous realm the size of a modern European nation-state.

For the last 55 years of its history (188–133 BC), the Attalid dynasty was one of the great powers of the Mediterranean world. But a slight whiff of the quisling continued to hang over the second-century Attalid kings. The new Attalid territories in Asia Minor had been won, not by the king’s spear, but through arbitrary Roman fiat. The borders of Eumenes’ kingdom, like those of modern Iraq or Syria, were simply random lines drawn on a map.

As a result, the last three Attalid kings (Eumenes II, 197–159 BC; Attalus II, 159–138 BC; Attalus III, 138–133 BC) had to adopt a completely new style of monarchic rule. The fragility of their territorial claims made it hard for the later Attalid monarchs to maintain the highly personal, charismatic royal style of their Seleucid and Ptolemaic contemporaries: we have not a single portrait of Attalus II or III in any medium. Instead, the later Attalid kings laid a new emphasis on their exemplary domestic virtues, presenting themselves as a uniquely unified and harmonious royal family—the first real royal family in Mediterranean history, it could be argued. The queen mother, Apollonis of Cyzicus, widow of Attalus I and mother of Eumenes II and Attalus II, was promoted to a central

position in the royal dynasty. An honorific decree for Apollonis, from the city of Hierapolis in Phrygia, beautifully illustrates the Attalids’ new domestic royal style:

She behaved piously towards the gods and with reverence towards her parents, and likewise lived together with her husband in a distinguished manner and behaved towards her children with all harmony. By bearing beautiful children in wedlock, she left behind great sources of praise, tending to her own glory, while also earning outstanding gratitude from her children. … In her sympathy and harmony towards her children, she has left a most beautiful and praiseworthy sign of her personal excellence, and has always behaved with goodwill in all matters towards Queen Stratonice, the wife of King Eumenes Soter, considering the partner of her son to be the partner of her own affection ... .

It is hard to imagine a Roman empress boasting of her harmonious relationship with her daughter-in-law.

The last three Attalid monarchs played the family card for all it was worth. In 183 BC, having defeated the king of Bithynia in battle, the brothers Eumenes and Attalus marked their triumph by accompanying their mother Apollonis on a tour of her native city of Cyzicus, one walking on either side holding her by the hand. As Polybius tells us, this little coup de théâtre was met with a rapturous reception: although he could not claim conquests on the scale of Alexander the Great, Eumenes II got a remarkable amount of mileage out of his reputation as a good family man.

The Attalids’ new, uncharismatic royal style comes out very clearly in their silver coinage. In the third and early second centuries BC, the Attalid kings had minted a wholly typical Hellenistic royal coinage, bearing an idealized portrait of the dynasty’s founder, Philetaerus (282–263 BC), and a seated Athena placing a crown on the name Philetairou (Fig. 2). After the sudden expansion of the kingdom in 188 BC, this disappears from the dynasty’s coinage altogether.

The last three Attalid kings struck a remarkably ugly coinage called the cistophorus, ‘box-bearer’. These coins depict (on one face) a snake emerging from a wicker box, encircled by an ivy wreath, and (on the other) a pair of snakes coiling around an ornamented bow case (fig. 3). The only writing to appear on the cistophori is the abbreviated name of one of the major cities of the kingdom, Ephe(sus), Per(gamum), Sar(dis) and so forth. One can—with a bit of effort—link the coins’ iconography to the Attalid royal house; but

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Fig. 1 Gold octadrachm (mnaieion) struck by Ptolemy IV (c. 217–204 BCE), with portrait of the deceased Ptolemy III.

Fig. 2 . Tetradrachm in the name of Philetaerus, struck under Eumenes I (263–241 BCE). The first four Attalid rulers (Philetaerus, Eumenes I, Attalus I, Eumenes II) all struck Attic-weight coins with these types.

the absence of any royal portrait, or even the name and title of the Attalid king, is without parallel among Hellenistic royal coinages. From the iconography of the cistophorus alone, no one would have guessed that the coinage was the product of a Hellenistic kingdom at all—and, I assume, that was precisely the point. Eumenes II and his successors were ostentatiously eager to downplay their despotic royal power, and to present their kingdom as a federation of free and autonomous cities (Ephesus, Pergamum, Sardis etc.).

The Attalids have not, on the whole, had a very sympathetic hearing from modern historians. Perhaps this is only to be expected of an upstart dynasty, collaborators with Rome, who never managed to pursue a genuinely independent foreign policy. But Eumenes II and his successors deserve credit for forging a completely new model of Greek kingship, based around a royal family rather than a single charismatic king, and in which the state was conceived not as an absolutist monarchy but as a federal association of free communities. King George V, at least, would have understood their motives perfectly.

*DR PETER THONEMANN is Forrest-Derow Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Wadham College, Oxford. He edited Attalid Asia Minor: Money, International Relations, and the State (Oxford, 2013).

In 1959 Ed Zern satirically reviewed Lady Chatterley’s Lover for the magazine Field and Stream:

Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley’s Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper… Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion this book cannot take the place of J.R. Miller’s Practical Gamekeeping.

The question of the reader’s own focus is one that besets scholars of classical reception studies. When looking for classical underpinnings to modern life, we ‘receptionists’, who study the influence, legacy, or resonance (call it what you will) of ancient Greece and Rome, are liable to let our very passion for the ancient world skew our response to our material, so that we run the risk of privileging—or even inventing—potential classical influences and ignoring other factors which may well be more significant. Research that concentrates on the impact of one author alone—such as the reception of Thucydides—is particularly vulnerable to this danger, which Ralph Hexter has pointed out is a ‘seeming inevitability’ of such an approach.

So why should the reception of Thucydides in the USA not be an example of this type of skewed enquiry? Is looking for Thucydidean influences in modern American culture like reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover for its tips on rearing pheasants? In many spheres that may be the case, but there are three specific professional disciplines in which Thucydides has become just as charismatic as Mellors, and has gained a status and focus of detailed attention far above that of other classical authors.

Thucydides is in fact hailed as the founder of the intellectual concept of ‘realism’ in international relations, the creed that has held sway in American foreign policy at both the strategic and theoretical levels since the 1940s. For theorists of international relations, not only in universities but also in think-tanks and governmental departments across the USA, Thucydides is the originator of the ‘might is right’ mantra associated with Henry Kissinger (a keen reader of Thucydides) and the proponents of Cold War Realpolitik. Spreading from these theorists outwards, quotations from and references to Thucydides are sprinkled across articles on foreign affairs in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. For instance, the ‘Thucydides Trap’ is shorthand for the danger that

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Fig. 3 ‘Cis tophoric’ te tradrachm, str uck at Perg amum (c. 160–150 B CE).

M a k i n g i t BIG in the USA

Liz Sawyer explains what has made Thucydides necessary reading for the USA military

rivalry between an established and a rapidly developing power, such as that between the USA and China, may escalate into animosity and even conflict which, according to Thucydides, was the cause of the war between Athens and Sparta.

The applicability of Thucydides to twentieth century conflicts is not lost on the American military either. Towards the end of the Vietnam War, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the USA’s Chief of Naval Operations, offered Rear Admiral Stansfield Turner, who had indicated an interest in naval education, the presidency of the US Naval War College, where mid-ranking officers are trained in preparation for senior policy roles. In order to address the lack of strategic knowledge at the highest levels within the military services which the war had highlighted, Admiral Turner completely overhauled the college’s lacklustre curriculum and developed a new programme composed of three sections: strategy, management, and tactics, with Thucydides as the backbone for strategy, the first and most important.

This approach puzzled many of Turner’s detractors at the other services’ war colleges, but it soon became clear that initially unwilling officers, almost all of whom had seen combat in Vietnam and who could not see why they needed to study a long-dead and unpronounceable Greek, came to appreciate Thucydides’ uncompromising but quietly human treatment of the realities of war. They came, as they read the text, to respect his holistic perspective on strategy which encompassed domestic and international politics, economics, society and ideology in one complex but coherent whole. Since Turner’s reforms in 1972, Thucydides has been a central figure in the US Navy’s educational programmes and has also been adopted by the US Army and the Marines as an essential read for grand strategic understanding of war.

Intriguingly, it is Thucydides’ remarkably frequent presence in the relatively public context of the US Congress that has attracted scantest attention. Thucydides has been quoted more times in the last 25 years in Congress than all other ancient Greek authors put together—ranking equally with Cicero, who also far outshines any other Roman sources of wisdom. Certainly, biblical sources and American figures such as Lincoln and the Kennedys get bigger billing, but Thucydidean quotations from the Funeral Oration, the Melian Dialogue, the accounts of the Corcyrean civil war and of the Sicilian expedition appear with surprising regularity in congressional speeches on topics as diverse as Greek Independence Day, tributes and eulogies to public servants, free trade, and the treatment of the American flag. He is so well-known that even quotations that do not occur in the History of the Peloponnesian War are attributed to him, such as the famous ‘Thucydidean’ maxim that adorned Colin Powell’s desk as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that ‘Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most.’ The clichéd saying, ‘Just because you don’t take an interest in politics, doesn’t mean that politics won’t take an interest in you,’ has been cited under Thucydides’ name in the Senate. Our man has also replaced the Victorian army officer, Lieutenant General Sir William Francis Butler, as the author of the mantra ‘The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will

have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools’. The first explanation for this unexpected prominence of Thucydides

in these spheres applies also to other classical and later authors, and is specific to the north American continent. A high proportion of Americans who have attended college have been exposed to the works—or at least excerpts from the works—of a range of writers from antiquity onwards. These include Thucydides, Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Virgil, Machiavelli, Dante, and Shakespeare. The American college system requires ‘general education’ which often includes broad-sweeping survey courses on the history of western civilisation since Homer. The consequence is that whatever subject students end up choosing as their major, e.g. music or engineering, they are likely to have crossed paths with some of the ‘Great Books’ of western literature, however fleetingly. The American educator E. D. Hirsch proposed, in his somewhat controversial book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1988), that reading speed and comprehension are affected most by the

reader’s background knowledge of the subject being read; he included a handy list of 5,000 terms which all Americans, he argued, should understand in order to comprehend public political discourse. Of these, there are more than 270 classical references including ‘Thucydides’, ‘Pericles’, and even ‘the Peloponnesian War’—doubtlessly a consequence of the implementation of general education.

But Thucydides is extolled far beyond other classical authors in

these spheres (except for Cicero in political rhetoric). So why Thucydides in particular? The very characteristics that make him a complicated and sometimes even intimidating subject for classicists to study in fact make him a perfect subject to adapt and reinvent. Is Thucydides a historian, exile, general, statesman, rhetorician, philosopher, or tragedian? As he can be seen as all of these, he appeals to different groups, be they political philosophers, social scientists, soldiers, or politicians, each of whom recognizes something of themselves in him and recreates him in their own image. Thus, even within academia, the notoriously outspoken neoconservative Victor Davis Hanson—ancient historian and farmer—characterizes Thucydides over-heroically as ‘a man of action, an elected official, a captain, a traveller, and a pragmatic individual, a successful combatant against warrior and disease alike, hardbitten and intimate with both privilege and disgrace’ in the introduction to Strassler’s Landmark edition of Thucydides. Meanwhile, the philosopher Paul Woodruff thinks that ‘in some ways Thucydides resembles a writer of historical fiction’, before surmising that ‘he is more like a sophist than he is like any other writer’. For American military officers, Thucydides is seen as the wise general—no mere philosopher, but a man who has led others in battle; for theorists of international relations, he is the shrewd observer of human nature; for politicians, he is often only the scribe of Pericles’ Funeral Oration and the source of bons mots. No one discipline ‘owns’ him—and that is possibly why he has enjoyed such broad-ranging appeal to this very day.

*LIZ SAWYER, who is Director of Events, Education, and Outreach at Kallos Gallery in Mayfair, studied the reception of Thucydides in the USA for her D.Phil at Oxford.

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This is the manifesto of the historian Anna Komnene (fig. 1), author of the twelfth-century history known as the Alexiad:

Whenever one assumes the role of historian, friendship and enemies have to be forgotten; often one has to bestow on adversaries the highest commendation, where their deeds merit it; often, too, one’s nearest relatives have to be censured, as and when their behaviour deserves it. The historian, therefore, must shirk neither from remonstrating with their friends, nor from praising their enemies. For my part, I hope to satisfy both parties, both those who are offended by us and those who accept us, by appealing to the evidence of the actual events and of eyewitnesses. The fathers and grandfathers of some men alive today saw these things. (Alexiad, trans. E.R.A. Sewter, rev. Peter Frankopan, Penguin, p. 4)

She should know, being the daughter of the emperor Alexios I Komnenos and that rare—indeed unique—creature, a woman who was also an ancient historian, writing in the great tradition of classicizing Greek histories. She told a stirring tale, of military campaigns, the arrival of the Normans with the First Crusade, trials of heretics in Constantinople, internal factions. Her claims in the passage I have cited may be disingenuous, in that she also wrote as a partisan of her father, and of her husband, for whom she tried to obtain the throne; but then, Thucydides was not as objective as he claimed either. And finally, Anna seems to have gathered intellectuals round her who among other things were interested in commenting on Aristotle.

There were plenty of other powerful and influential women in Anna’s time, for instance Irene, married to the brother of the Emperor Manuel I. She had had a colourful early life, including

exile and banishment to a monastery, but became another patron of writers, including poets. One of them was

the author of one of the high-style novels in the manner of Achilles Tatius that were a new

feature in the period; he was a pioneer in putting verse to new uses, while

another of Irene’s protégés wrote commentaries on Homer, Hesiod,

the tragedians, Aristophanes and others. Classicists in my day were taught to despise the Byzantine editors and commentators on classical texts, but newer

approaches to textual criticism paint a different picture, and who can deny that without Byzantine attention to the classics we would

have little left indeed? With post-classicism and the

writers of the Second Sophistic (AD 60-230) now all the rage, the

extraordinary literary ‘renaissance’ of the twelfth century in Byzantium surely ought

to be on the table. Marc Lauxtermann, professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek at Oxford, has written of the major ‘hermeneutic problem’ in interpreting Byzantine literature, especially poetry. But literary scholars are currently producing important new assessments,

especially of the huge output of poetry in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, while classicists too have

discovered the so-called ‘revivalist’ novels—Rhodanthe and Dosikles,

Hysmine and Hysminias, Drosilla and Charikles and Aristandros and Kallithea.

Historiography too is finally getting the literary treatment it deserves, for example with

new books on the Alexiad and on Niketas Choniates, who wrote a vivid history dealing with the twelfth century and the capture of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204.

Averil Cameron argues that classicists and Byzantinists need each other

Does Byzantium matter?

Fig. 1 Anna Komnene

I focus on the twelfth century because it brings into high relief one of the problems people have with Byzantium. Religion, or rather Orthodoxy, is the issue. Was this a period of repression, as the late Robert Browning, the Byzantinist, argued in 1975? Or does its cultural activity qualify it as a kind of enlightenment or renaissance? Was Byzantium a society that was intolerant, and oppressively conformist, with a rigid Orthodox framework with which even intellectuals and writers had to comply? The eleventh and twelfth centuries matter, because this was not only a period of crucial religious and educational change in the West, with the rise of scholasticism and the rediscovery of Aristotle, but also the period when Byzantium encountered the West in the form of the crusades. Numerous papal embassies visited Constantinople to debate the possible union of the churches, and along with them came other westerners, traders and travellers. But Byzantine Orthodoxy was not what it seemed. Zealous emperors and patriarchs were challenged and resisted; the mid-twelfth century saw a turnover in the patriarchate that was hardly precedented; admittedly some intellectuals were tried and punished for alleged heresy, but the rivalries and the divisions within the élite and the clergy are plain to see in the records. Byzantium was not the persecuting society that the West became.

It is not easy to get behind the stereotypes about Byzantium. But I am struck by the fact that the same twelfth-century intellectuals often wrote both theological and secular works. The authors of classicizing works, or commentators on classical texts, might themselves be clerics—but this did not mean that they were all conformists, or cowed by the risk of censure. Some theological works were themselves written in the classical manner. In the several theological arguments that divided élite circles in Constantinople in the twelfth century (and not just the clergy), protagonists circulated their arguments in the form of Platonic dialogues. They were not alone in choosing this form; other people also wrote dialogues—philosophical dialogues, or satirical dialogues about journeys to the underworld, or the pros and cons of eunuchs (important in the higher administration since late antiquity). They had all received the same education and their audiences were often the same too.

One of the most famous is the anonymous pseudo-Lucianic dialogue, the Timarion, in which the hero sets off to attend the feast of St Demetrius in Thessalonike, but becomes ill on his way back and is seized and carried down to the Underworld (fig. 2) by two demons (Timarion, trans. Barry Baldwin, Detroit, 1984).

There he meets an array of classical figures—Minos, Aesculapius, Hippocrates, Erasistratus, Diogenes, Aristarchus and Phrynichus—but also the ninth-century emperor Theophilus, the famous eleventh-century rhetor and philosopher Michael Psellos, and even John Italos, the subject of one of the key heresy trials under Alexios I Komnenos. Timarion’s teacher, Theodoros of Smyrna, who succeeded John Italos in his teaching post, and was clearly cleverer at managing his career, is one of the central figures. He is presented as a devotee of the orators of the Second Sophistic, praised for his declamations, his brilliant lectures and resonant delivery, and made to talk of how successful he had

been and how much he had earned. The work is full of Homeric and other allusions; but in fact the rivalry between paganism and Christianity is a major theme. Theodoros observes that ‘the religion of the Galileans has spread over all the world’. In a court case in which Timarion accuses the two demons of improperly capturing him, and the judges are the unlikely mix of Aeacus, Minos and the Emperor Theophilus, Theodoros is counsel for Timarion, and his speech is so eloquent that ‘the Christians’ shout, jump for joy and congratulate him. Of course Timarion wins; the verdict is read out by Psellos as clerk of the court, and Timarion is enabled to make his exit and tell his tale. As he makes his way up to earth, his mentor Theodoros wrily comments: ‘It’s a long time since anyone was resurrected’.

The treatment of the philosopher John Italos is also curious. He is said to have ‘put on the mantle of the Galileans’, which he refuses to take off, and is accordingly stoned by

the ‘dialecticians’, whereupon he exclaims ‘Aristotle, Aristotle, O syllogism, O sophism,

where are you now that I need you?’ Italos had been officially condemned in real life for his ‘Hellenic’ ideas, and for believing in the ideas of Plato rather than reading him as a model for

style; yet here he is attacked precisely for his adherence to ‘the Galileans’. It is hardly surprising

that the Timarion was later criticized for treating Christianity with disrespect. Not surprisingly, the crossovers in texts like this are

difficult to interpret nowadays, and understanding the broader interplay between religious and secular

texts is not made easier by the fact that they have tended to be regarded as belonging to different

disciplines. But nobody thinks that the western church in the same period always stayed the same, or

that everyone was religious in equal measure, so why assume that Byzantium was any different? We need more complexity, and more sympathy as well, if we

are to solve the ‘hermeneutic problem’. This is a lively moment in Byzantine scholarship,

as scholars of Byzantine literature in particular are looking for better ways of understanding eleventh and twelfth-century culture, often looking to the Second Sophistic for a model. Meanwhile scholars of Byzantine philosophy like

Katerina Ierodiakonou are demonstrating that there was indeed an autonomous philosophical tradition in Byzantium, and Byzantine historians are emerging as serious and skilful writers. The twelfth century was a crucial moment, when humanistic and individualistic trends showed themselves in a variety of ways, within a ‘rhetorical theatre’ of competition and rivalry. This cultural flowering has traditionally been seen as in some way leading to the literature of modern Greece. But I think that classicists need to take note of it too, in all its intriguing complexity—don’t leave it to Byzantinists.

*PROFESSOR DAME AVERIL CAMERON is chair of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research and has recently finished her term as president of FIEC, the International Federation of the Societies of Classical Studies; she has just published Byzantine Matters (Princeton, 2014).

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Fig. 2 Hades with Cerberus

Sir Richard Jebb, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, best remembered now for his editions of Sophocles (seven volumes, 1883-96), died in 1905. He was celebrated in his later years both as a scholar and as a spokesman for the

humanities; from 1891 till his death he was an MP (Conservative) for his university, and thus acquired, as ‘Professor Jebb MP’, an almost unique status. As Frederic Kenyon, Director of the British Museum, told him in 1901, he held ‘a double authority in ... public as well as academical position’.

Two years after his death, his wife Caroline brought out a memoir (with a substantial essay on his scholarship by his pupil A.W. Verrall) and a volume of ‘essays and addresses’. This memoir is full of interesting detail, but as one might expect, some aspects of Jebb’s life go unmentioned, including his friends’ suspicions that he was violent toward her in the early years of their marriage, and his bitter disputes with other scholars, especially J. P. Mahaffy of Trinity College Dublin, who, Jebb was convinced, led organised campaigns against him. These and other unnoticed aspects of Jebb’s life came into the light of day when in 2002 I discovered his papers in a family residence, including several thousand letters, many of them stuck into a series of two dozen scrapbooks that he kept from 1876 till his death. (This makes him, after Gilbert Murray and James Headlam, probably the third best-documented classical scholar in Victorian and Edwardian England.)

In the academic battles Jebb fought, his major opponents were Mahaffy, the Assyriologist A.H. Sayce and Heinrich Schliemann. The last of these appears briefly in Lady Jebb’s memoir, Sayce and Mahaffy not at all. Their exclusion is doubtless due in part to their being (unlike Schliemann) still alive when she wrote. The scrapbooks, however, make it clear that the two men were often on his mind, and in his view constantly plotting against him—especially Mahaffy, whose critical review of Jebb’s Attic Orators (1876) was only the beginning of a long history of mutual sniping and manoeuvring. Another area of activity which is invisible in his widow’s memoir is Jebb’s involvement in the foundation and early years of the Classical Review (1887–). His morbid sensitivity to hostile criticism and suspicion of plots led him to object strongly to unsigned reviews; so he responded warmly in 1886 to the proposal for a classical journal with signed reviews made to him by Joseph Mayor (brother of John Mayor, the editor of Juvenal), who became its first editor. Jebb’s papers throw considerable light on the inner workings both of the Review and

of the Journal of Hellenic Studies (1880–), the organ of the Hellenic Society.

The discovery of the papers has made it possible to publish a broader and more detailed assessment of Jebb’s life and career. My assembly of a selection of letters (275 in all) offers readers a chance to hear the voices of the subject and his contemporaries in a relatively unmediated fashion. Here we often see a readiness to believe himself persecuted and a concern that others should respect his social or academic position, but we also find accomplished writing, a wry self-knowledge, and a boyish humour which on occasion extends to the knockabout—as in a letter to his sister which begins ‘Vot for you send me that extrait? You speak the french, you read him not well: dat vos vot you say, “inscribed sarcastic”.’

Jebb’s papers also give us glimpses of his wife, the widow of a US general, who took command of his finances (he was hopeless with money) and was seen by some contemporaries as very bossy. There are similarities with J.G. Frazer’s wife Lilly, also a foreign widow, even more bossy than Caroline Jebb; Lilly Frazer was a ‘guardian dragon’ who kept people away from her husband, rather like the fearsome Lady Beazley, wife of Sir John Beazley, Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Oxford, who literally barred his door to some callers.

Among the mundane details of everyday life we find in the letters are some that have their own charm. The 1880s and 1890s were the great age of the tricycle, and Jebb

and several of his friends took to this new form of locomotion and exercise. In 1898 he took advice on a new machine from Charles Darwin’s eldest son William, himself a keen tricyclist, whose younger brother had married Caroline Jebb’s niece. Darwin’s reply gives a helpful survey of makes, features and the needs of riders. Tricycling became a regular part of Jebb’s routine, and his mentions of it are supported by the same quantity and quality of minutely recorded information as he supplied when editing Sophocles. In September 1900 he wrote to his sister, ‘I am getting on, but I rely on tricycling to keep me alive a little longer. ... I went 525 miles ... in 26 days of August’. Clearly his new machine was fitted with a mileometer.

The letters throw light on Jebb’s life, his scholarly work and his friendship and enmities. But they also illuminate the world of Victorian schools and universities, the realm of clubs and common rooms, of lectures and libraries, from London, Oxford and Cambridge to Glasgow and Dublin. This world was dominated

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Jebb's ad familiares

Christopher Stray examines the recently discovered cache of his letters

Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb

by men, but was beginning to be invaded, or rather infiltrated, by women; and Jebb was a strong supporter of women’s access to universities. In 1882 the Cambridge University senate voted by 398 to 32, a majority of 366, to admit women to examinations; Jebb sent his friend Henry Sidgwick a celebratory poem:

The votes by which the ladies wonWere as a leap year’s days;A month’s brief tale would all but tellThe number of the Nays.Thus, as the sun in heaven, our causeIs clear to men of sense:The adverse tide is little moreThan lunar influence.

Jebb’s own life was transformed by his marriage in 1874 to Caroline, which brought him not just love, but relatives, friendships and links with the USA. He went there more than once, on family trips and to give lectures, and in 1890 was asked to become the first professor of Greek at the University of Chicago.

Jebb’s refusal of this invitation (he had recently been elected to the Greek chair at Cambridge) reminds us of the string of non-events we can see in the letters, which we would otherwise not know about. Among these are the books he never wrote, largely because of his dual life as professor and MP after 1891. These included a grammar of Sophoclean Greek, a two-volume history of Greek literature and the planned final volume of his Sophocles edition, on the fragments. These unwritten works belong to the area of expertise for which Jebb is remembered—Greek language and literature. But his interest and achievements were wider than this, and the letters show him reviewing books on a wide range of non-classical topics, lecturing on ancient history, and most of all, involving himself in classical archaeology.

His first visit to Athens, in 1878, was planned so that he could collect information for a campaign to found a British school of archaeology. He had to battle against indifference and the lack of a tradition of state funding, but eventually succeeded after the Prince of Wales was recruited to the cause. In the final decade of his life, Jebb was one of a small group of men who planned the foundation of the British Academy, which was established in 1902. Invited to choose which section he would join as one of the founding fellows, he asked to belong to history and archaeology as well as philology. The increasing specialisation of classical scholarship, particularly in Cambridge, home of a Classical Tripos whose part II was split into five sections, was something he found disturbing.

Respected, in some cases revered, in his lifetime, Jebb inevitably became forgotten or derided (as he was by Housman) after his death. It was easy, and satisfying, to see him as just another ‘eminent Victorian’, like the subjects of Lytton Strachey’s book of 1918. Revisiting his life and work, however, as the correspondence enables us to do, reveals a more complex and more interesting figure.

*DR CHRISTOPHER STRAY is Honorary Research Fellow, University of Swansea, and Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Classics, University of London. His Sophocles’ Jebb: A Life in Letters was published by the Cambridge Philological Society in 2013.

It was interesting and amusing to read Edward Enfield’s piece on the pronunciation of Greek in the summer edition of ad fam, though I came away from reading it a little unclear about what he required of us in terms of saying the words. He seems

to want us to pronounce Ancient like Modern Greek, but I fear that if I do that I shall lose the poetry and music of ancient epic and dramatic literature and replace it with something quite different and above all unmusical and lacking the variety of the ancient tongue.

If we compare English and Greek (two of the oldest literary languages in the world that are still spoken) from a literary and phonetic point of view, it seems to me that they are like two half-full bags of some heavy substance in which the contents are unevenly distributed. In the Greek bag, by far the heaviest (and most original) stuff is in its oldest period, whereas in the English bag the Old English period is the lightest, the Middle has some substance, but Modern English starting from Shakespeare’s time is by far the heaviest. Yet it would be a travesty to read Chaucer or Beowulf according to the norms of Modern English pronunciation, and it is equally weird for a British person to read Ancient Greek in the manner of Modern. (I don’t want to decry the literature written in Modern Greek, but it does not lead the world as its ancient literature did). In doing so you would lose the contrast between long and short vowels, the diphthongs in which Greek abounded, aspiration, and melody. You would rip the heart out of the language.

I have tried to pronounce Ancient Greek texts in the way W.S. Allen describes in Vox Graeca (1968) and did so since well before he wrote that treatise on Greek pronunciation, which turned out to be more a confirmation of what I had previously learnt and practised than a revelation: his great contribution was to add the evidence and explain the detail. He did us a great service in giving us an easily accessible account of the evidence including historical information and anecdote, as he also did for the pronunciation of Latin.

It is true that Allen did not recommend an accented pronunciation, being sceptical of the ability of British classicists to produce it. But at a later stage of his life he was invited to judge a London Classical Reading Competition, at which he heard a pair of my pupils from the City of London School read aloud a dialogue taken from a play by Sophocles, and expressed admiration of their accentual pronunciation. Of course we can pronounce the musical pitch accent: if we couldn’t, we would be unable to learn to speak Mandarin Chinese and many south-eastern Asian languages. And I know that at least one Oxbridge don pronounces Greek in this way. Maybe its day has come.

*JOHN HAZEL , who has long had an interest in pronunciation, taught classics at the City of London School and elsewhere and is still doing so at the University of the Third Age.

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Volume XXXXVII

A re p l y t oE d wa rd E n f i e l d

by John Hazel

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Volume XXXXVII

Despite its political, spiritual and scientific value, Latin’s future ultimately depends on how society perceives it, and nowhere is this clearer than in modern journalism. Bill Deedes, one of the Daily Telegraph’s celebrated

editors (1974-86), always viewed Latin as a way to ‘widen his options’ as a journalist. Latin headlines were once commonplace in his best-selling newspaper, and when Deedes wrote a leading article about misconduct in a police force he used the heading: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. In the 1980s Mens sana in corpore sano was the perfect choice for his leading article on the loss of school playing fields.

The change in public attitudes over the last 30 years has been dramatic. Such Latin headings, however expressive, would today be condemned as elitist, leading to probable loss of circulation. Even mere clichés such as Horace’s nil desperandum are thought of as conveying superiority when used in conversation, and are symptomatic of an expensive, private education. It is for these reasons that Latin must be barred from the public sphere even if, as

Deedes argued, it can ‘express a point more pungently than any other language’. Society’s perception of Latin as an elitist relic of a bygone imperialist era is one of the most dangerous threats to its future.

The policies of successive British governments concerning the status and role of Latin in our education system, particularly at primary-school level, have been equally damaging to the future of the language. Since the national curriculum was introduced in 1988 the emphasis has been on ‘modern’ foreign languages at state-maintained schools, with French the most commonly taught. Timetables have changed from the older, more flexible 40 or 45-period week to 25 1-hour ‘slots’ per week, slots quickly filled with the ‘core’ subjects. Latin teachers have survived by developing an approach to Latin which encompasses the more obviously exciting features of Roman culture and ‘avoids undue emphasis on grammar’. This approach is now typical for all languages at primary school, since ‘learning to respect the similarities and differences between other people’ was the Labour government’s official raison d’être for early language learning. No language can convey cultural

Nildesperandum

Jack West-Sherring argues that Latin's future lies in grammar-plus

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Volume XXXXVII

differences more vividly than one spoken 2,000 years ago, making Latin a useful asset in the globalised 21st century as our children learn to appreciate the culture of China and the East.

While a culture-centred approach may instil ‘elements of citizenship’ in pupils it does not, however, make them good linguists. Barbara Bell observes that a class of 11- year-olds she taught at a state secondary school were strangers to the concept of verbs: proof that these changes to language teaching are undermining children’s linguistic propensity, never mind their literacy in English. Latin’s greatest educational value has always been its ability to equip children with the tools of language learning, from parts of speech to tenses and gender, and Bell writes that starting with Latin is the best way to learn English. American studies have shown that children introduced to Latin grammar have the confidence and interest to take on other languages at a later date. Selective grammar schools have for centuries offered this, but today only 167 remain in the UK, and few still teach Latin. This further intensifies the popular view of Latin as an elitist language, accessible only to those educated at private schools. The loss of grammar schools, and the scaling back of grammar-based language teaching in the wake of the national curriculum, are key reasons for the decline of Latin’s role in our education system.

Oxford and Cambridge universities abolished Latin as an entry requirement for classical courses in May 1960, and most universities now offer classics degrees to students with no prior qualifications in the ancient languages. These degrees are proving hugely popular: the intake for beginner’s Latin at Exeter University, for example, more than doubled between 2012 and 2013. While this change has certainly widened access to the ancient world, it has severely undermined the teaching of Latin in schools. There is little incentive for head teachers to introduce Latin to their schools, it has been argued, when aspiring classicists can simply take up the language at university, or study the ancient texts in translation on non language-based courses. Entries for GCSE Latin dropped from 16,236 in 1988 to 10,365 in 2001, while the number of students entering A-level Latin fell from 1,645 to 1,264 over the same period. Entries for A-level Classical Civilisation, by contrast, rose dramatically in a three-year period from 1,570 in 1998 to 3,188 in 2001, and they continue to grow steadily. The popularity of Classical Civilization is clear evidence of Latin’s changing status within the field of classics. Classics is no longer viewed as the primarily textual subject that it once was, since areas such as philosophy, art, drama and history are now given equal weight to Greek and Latin language and literature at university level. Others fear that these new courses will not adequately equip the next generation of classicists, since students taking beginner’s Latin at university rarely become independent readers of authentic Latin texts, able to read Latin without having to translate it first. In seeking to make classics accessible to those without the ancient languages, universities are endangering both the character of the subject and the future of Latin.

Fortunately, some recent government initiatives provide hope that the future of Latin may yet brighten. Parliament proposed in 2003 that more state-maintained schools should be encouraged to become specialist schools with their own identities and strengths, even opting out of the national curriculum. Schools specialising in languages quickly became ‘language colleges’ following this change. This move has been hailed as a ‘retreat from the National Curriculum monolith’, and the even greater autonomy given to schools under the Academies Act (2010), combined with the rise

of free schools will create a culture of academic freedom in which Latin may prosper: there are now 175 such schools open in England (none in Scotland or Wales).

Another change is that schools are being offered financial incentives to enter able students for GCSE examinations ahead of their age cohort. If those students have already amassed GCSE certificates in English, Maths, French and ICT (Information and communications technology), they would have the opportunity to undertake something new like Latin. Under the Gifted and Talented scheme introduced in 2003, the top 10 per cent of pupils at each and every secondary school in particular areas take part in specially funded extension programmes, such as ‘enrichment hours’ after school days. These provide the perfect environment for learning Latin in joint events involving schools of all levels of achievement, thus helping to remove Latin’s elitist label. The broader access to Latin offered by these government and university-sponsored initiatives is having a tangible impact on Latin’s future. More than 250 schools took up Latin within two years after the Gifted and Talented scheme began, while in 2012, entries for OCR (Oxford, Cambridge and RSA) A-level Latin increased for the fourth consecutive year. Latin’s role in our education system is now undergoing a gradual revival.

The teaching of Latin will have to change in the future if this revival is to continue. A grammar-based approach to Latin, supported with online activities, is surely an important option. Radio 5’s popular Grammar Slot demonstrates the growing public appetite for grammatical knowledge. Six hundred thousand 11-year-olds sat spelling, punctuation and grammar tests in May 2014 as part of the then Education Secretary Michael Gove’s plans to improve literacy in schools. Gove’s new curriculum represents a return to grammar-based language learning, with Latin now validated as an option for primary schools because of the invaluable platform it is for learning other languages.

Barbara Bell’s Minimus series for primary schools presents Latin in exactly this light and is, in my view, a model for future Latin teaching. Bell received 1,200 letters, 600 e-mails and 500 phone calls from the public within six weeks of Minimus’s release in 1999. Minimus has grammar sections in every chapter that are cleverly interspersed with Greek myths, stories about Roman food and online instructions for making sandals, thus fulfilling the government’s aim of showing pupils ‘similarities and differences’ between cultures. Latin lends itself to online grammar exercises and assessments, transforming study from the acquisition of facts into independent learning and exploration. The more Latin grammar is presented as the foundation for further language learning, the brighter Latin’s future will be.

*JACK WEST-SHERRING is studying Ancient History with Latin at Exeter University. He enthusiastically embraces the relevance of Latin as a modern global language, and the influence of the classical world on all aspects of life today.

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ex cathedra

We are delighted to be able to list below all the schools to which since April 2012 Friends of Classics has given, or in one case promised, grants, mostly to begin Latin. Thank you all for making this possible and so playing a part in increasing the number of state schools that have been able to start Latin in recent years. The 2014 GCSE figures show a 7% rise in ‘Classics’ (Latin, Greek, Ancient History and Classical Civilisation) over the 2012 figures (15,265 to 16,444). We

have good reason to believe that most of that will have been accounted for by Latin. Numbers taking the WJEC 16+ exam in Latin are not yet out, but the examiners’ report informs us that numbers have again risen.

Another very good piece of news has just come in: the University of Sussex is now offering PGCEs in Classics, three places this year, ten next.Jeannie CohenPeter Jones

St Leonard’s Academy, HastingsIsaac Newton Academy, RedbridgeKing George V, SouthportDownlands Community, W. SussexClaremont High, HarrowMoat Community Coll., LeicestershireSamworth Academy, MansfieldBloomfield Collegiate, N. IrelandFakenham High School and CollegeWest Kirby GrammarSoham Village CollegeDuke of York’s Royal Military, DoverBishop of Rochester AcademyOrmiston Academy, NorwichPenryn College, CornwallComberton Primary, KidderminsterSt John Baptist, AberdareBishop Vaughan Catholic School, MorristonOur Lady of Muswell Hill PrimaryGreenford High, SouthallPolesworth School, TamworthWest Jesmond Primary, NewcastleRutherford Primary, NewcastleCragside Primary, NewcastleChrist Church Primary, NewcastleMeole Brace School, ShrewsburyFulston Manor, SittingbourneBlandford SchoolSt Leonard’s, DurhamSt Monica's, PrestwichEast London Science SchoolHeron Hall, EdmontonCaister HighSidney Stringer, CoventryIlford County HighWrenn School, Wellingborough

Cardinal Newman, HoveCompass School, SouthwarkFarmor’s School, GloucesterEarlston High, BerwickKingsbury High, LondonDereham 6th Form College, NorfolkCrickhowell HighSir John Colfox, DorsetBrooke Weston, CorbyDereham 6th Form, NorwichShenley Academy, BirminghamDereham Neatherd, NorwichNobel school, StevenageRyde AcademyLiverpool OutreachQE Community College, CreditonThe Small School, DevonWarriner School, OxonKE VI Camp Hill Girls, BirminghamHull Trinity HouseLiverpool CollegeTunbridge Wells GrammarKeswick School, CumbriaBlessed Trinity RC, BurnleyUddingston Grammar, S. LanarkWilbraham Primary, CambridgeLiverpool Schools Classics ProjectHamstead Hall, BirminghamDevizes School, WiltshireCarshalton Sports CollegeSouthborough HighSwansea U (2015 Summer school)St Monica’s, PrestwichYsgol Bro Pedr, Llanbedr Pont SteffanThomas Holford, AltrinchamChesham School, Buckinghamshire

ad familiares is estimated to reach an audience of about 5,000 readers.

You can place a small ad on this page for £75, for 50 words plus a picture, as above.A double box or two consecutive entries will cost £100.

The only limitation on entries is that the style is as the above example and the services offered should havea classical connection that would be of direct interest to Friends of Classics members.

To advertise in the next issue of ad familiares contact Jeannie Cohen (see inside front cover) by March 2015

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RESTAURATEURS and VINTNERSFriends of Classics enjoy fine food and drink. Tickle their classical palateswith your meze and Montepulciano.

TRAVEL AGENTSGoing to Greece? Roaming to Rome? Travelling to Turkey? Many Friendsof Classics do, and they could travel with you.

EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONSReach out to potential staff and students!

MUSEUMSReach our readers all over the world with news of your latest exhibitions and acquisitions.

ANTIQUES DEALERSFriends of Classics - fiends for faience, fond of fancy frescos and fanatical about fashioned fluorite. Flog it to them via this forum!

BOOK SELLERS and BUYERSAre you a Friend of Classics who wishes to dispose of all or part of your library? Do you want to locate a hard-to-find volume? Does your bookshop have a good classical section?