2018-01-04

Clio's companions

At a university, there's a distinction which makes me stand out from almost all other members of faculty. Unlike the botanists, the chemists, the gender studies people and all the rest I am a historian, so I have a Muse. That's not a 'muse' in the slightly patronizing way that creative types use to refer to the significant others in their lives - mine is an officially-credited, one hundred percent genuine, daughter-of-Zeus type of Muse. The type that 'museums' are named after.

Meet Clio. She's the Muse of History. If you are wondering where the rest of the Muses are, mostly they are fighting for the attention of one solitary individual in the arts faculty. Budget cuts to the fine arts being what they are in a modern university, one rarely finds separate departments of Epic Poetry (supervised by Calliope) Elegiac poetry (Euterpe), Lyric Poetry (Erato) and Hymns (the appropriately named Polyhymnia). The Performing Arts take up most of the remaining Muses, with Melpomene (tragedy), Thalia (comedy) and Terpischore (dance).

That leaves Urania, whom the astronomy faculty has to share with astrologers and (for some reason) lyre-tuners, though the latter probably do not keep her very busy these days. Of course the computing department also have a claim on Urania's son Linus, who is the mythological patron of computer nerds.

So why does history have a Muse, and not, for example sculpture or painting? And why do writers of history books have this unfair advantage over biographers, travel writers and the writers of popular romances? The answer goes back to the Performing Arts which occupy so many of the other Muses. History was once also a performing art. History has a vital social function in that humans of all times and ages have wanted to know who they are and where they come from. Once Herodotus and other historians in the classical era would climb on to a podium and read aloud extracts of their work to meet that need.

History was once related by the historian to a live audience. To keep that audience, the historian's material had to be both interesting and accessible to the general public. That's why historians have Clio - to help them compete with the poets and dancers and others who divert the public gaze.

2017-12-04

The Ghost of Christmas Past

Technically, it's still autumn until December 21st. It does not feel that way hereabouts, where the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness stopped being misty and fruitful around early November. Since then we have had just over six feet of snowfall, and temperatures last night scraped below -10c for the seventh or eight time this year.

The fact that winter has come early and come hard is enthusiastically welcomed in town. Snowmobiles gambol (illegally) along the back streets en route to forest trails, where snowshoers and cross-country skiers have been having fun for weeks. The local ski resort is about to open, and all runs will be usable. Add shops packed with Xmas goodies and brightly-clad ski bunnies cluttering up the coffee shops, and there is a general feeling of celebration in the air.

Yet it was not always so. For most of the history of the human race a brutal start to the winter was a cause for gloomy contemplation. That's when householders carefully checked their stocks of food and firewood, and calculated how much hay the livestock would get through, now that the snow had covered the fields. The idea that in future times people would anxiously hope for a 'good snow season' would have been incomprehensible to these folk. Snow was not just a nuisance, it was a killer that forced people and animals into shelter. And those shelters had better be stocked with resources to wait out the snow.

As we prepare our platefuls of Xmas goodies, here's a thought - biscuits, jam, prunes, raisins, kippers, ham, bacon, sausages, cheese, and dozens of other foodstuffs were not created because they are delicious - though they are. These were all made from more perishable foods in the autumn and carefully packed away into the larder, designed to last and keep the household alive through the winter months. You didn't enjoy winter in antiquity - you hoped to survive it.

2017-11-04

The Villa Economy

Last week I was complaining that my favourite soap bars were late in arriving from England. The local supermarket stocks few brands, and most too scented for my liking - the rest is that new-fangled liquid soap. A friend commented that instead of importing the stuff at huge expense (for a writer, almost any expense is a huge expense) I should talk to a particular individual at the farmer's market and get soap made to my personal specifications.

It turns out that soap is not really that hard to make. All you basically need is lye, oil or fat, and patience. (You can't make soap overnight. Like beer, it needs to mature for a fortnight or two before it is usable.) But home-made soap, like home-brewed beer, firewood and moose-meat sausages, is one of those commodities one can exchange with the neighbours for other goods and services. My own speciality is bread - I aim to make friends and influence people with fresh-baked sourdough loaves.

It's rather intriguing. A century ago, this small mountain town was frontier territory. Goods had to be brought in upriver and by mule train, so what could be made locally was made locally, and some of those skills have never died out. Being a historian, I immediately thought of Roman villas in places such as Britain, where the weaving, barrel-making and ironwork (hello, Messers Weaver, Cooper and Smith) and every other necessity of 5th century life happened within a mile or two of the central villa. Every villa was a self-sufficient economic island. It's surprisingly liberating to find that elements of that still exist here today.

2017-10-04

Someone is going to call this 'hate speech'

Aristotle was a racist. Plato was a totalitarian. Socrates was sexist. Each of them, and almost every member of Roman and Greek society was a stalwart supporter of the 'white cisheteropatriarchy'. (A social order which favours white males who identify with their birth sex and make love to the opposite sex.)

Is this a reason to stop teaching classical history? For a small but extremely noisy minority of university students the answer seems to be 'yes'. One has to feel - for example - for Ms Valdiva; an assistant professor at Reed University in the USA. She is of mixed-race and describes her orientation as 'queer'. Yet she has abandoned lecturing on Sappho, because of opposition from students who condemn her as a 'race traitor' for doing so. Promoting the poetry of the woman who put the 'L' in LBGTQ is 'anti-black' according to these radicals.

An article in the September 7th Economist Magazine has this quote from Ms Valdiva. ''I am at a loss as to how to begin to address it, especially since many of these students don't believe in historicity or objective facts' (they denounce the latter as being a tool of the white cisheteropatriarchy).'

Okaaay. Let's take a step back here. Firstly, campus radicals have never been known their level-headed common sense, and newspaper reports tend toward the sensational. It may all be a storm in a teacup. If we are going to get outraged, perhaps we should direct some at the university authorities who have allowed such an atmosphere of intimidation and censorship to develop on their watch.

Secondly I'm all for a debate on the role of the classical cisheteropatriarchy (what a great portmanteau word!) in modern society. The opinions of ancient philosophers and how they have affected the development of modern western attitudes deserve a rigorous and critical examination. Let us by all means question whether dead white European males deserve the respect that historians give them, and ask if they were as important as previously believed. Yes, let us see if other voices have been excluded from the conversation, and by all means let us see what other races and religions have brought to the development of western civilization. (That they have developed other civilizations should go without saying.)

But to flatly reject facts, not because you can disprove them, but because you dislike them, and to shout down anything that you disagree with by lumping it under one of a dozen derogatory labels- well, there are other groups that do that - and none of them support a liberal democracy.

2017-09-04

A matter of perspective

There's an apocryphal story about researchers in Beijing University who discovered a way to predict earthquakes.

To test their device, they rushed to a tectonically active area in the remote Himalayas.

Sure enough, as soon as they had set up their equipment they found that a powerful quake was due. Realizing that a large village nearby would be flattened by the quake, the researchers sent an urgent warning. Consequently, despite massive damage, not a single life was lost.

As the villagers returned and started to stoically rebuild their lives, the scientists detected strong aftershocks on the way. Again warned in time, the villagers escaped without a scratch. Then they killed the scientists and smashed their equipment.

'But why?' asked an anthropologist sent from Beijing to investigate. 'Did they offend your customs, your Gods?'

'No', the villagers replied. 'They were just evil men. They had a machine that caused earthquakes.'

And that's the problem we have as historians. We assume that our Greeks and Romans and Gauls are approaching issues from approximately the same direction as ourselves, while in fact their mindset might be completely different.

We can't understand ancient history without understanding the minds of the men and women who made it. And that, I respectfully submit, is impossible. But that's the fun part of it. We still have to try.