It's a Don's Life (12 page)

Esperanto, Welsh and the language wars

20 August 2007

Could Esperanto save the world? When I was a kid I did learn a few words of this proto-global language, invented (as a gesture
to intra-planetary understanding) in the 1880s by the doctor-cum-linguist, Polish-cum-Lithuanian Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof.
He had, it was said, toyed with the idea of bringing back Latin as the world’s second language (that actually would have been
easier for me). But instead he decided to construct his own, making it nicely simple, with no pronunciation traps and easy,
consistent rules.

It was through my Dad that I ventured into Esperanto a little. He, in the spirit of his times, saw Esperanto as a weapon in
Moral Rearmament – as well as a blow to Welsh (which, as we lived in Shrewsbury, crept incomprehensibly through our letterbox
on the phone and electric bills).

I didn’t meet Esperanto again till the 1990s.

That was when a friend of mine was writing a wonderful biography of J. E. B. Mayor, Cambridge Professor of Latin (and, as
it happens, educated in Shrewsbury, as most of them were). It turned out that one of Mayor’s numerous obsessions (he was amongst
other things a born again vegetarian) was Esperanto. And, I learned, he gave the address to the Esperanto Society Congress
in 1907.

Or, come to think of it, it’s like the new phonetic letters introduced by the enterprising Roman emperor Claudius to make
Latin itself more transparent. His letters were actually used for a while – and they’ve even recently been recognised to the
extent of having their own form as characters on the Unicode computer text.

Wouldn’t he be pleased?

Olympia (almost) burns ... but Paris survives

27 August 2007

First let me apologise for writing about the antiquities of ancient Greece, when so many people have died in the terrible
fires – probably almost a hundred casualties altogether so far. It reminds me a bit of the ‘bombing’ of the Parthenon in 1687,
which everyone now laments as the loss of a great building, forgetting the hundreds of women and children killed in the process.

But, conscience apart, even as I’m writing, it is not entirely clear what exactly has happened to which ancient sites in the
Peloponnese.

The good news seems to be that the Greek and Roman remains of Olympia have escaped (and a lot of them, let’s remember, are
of Roman imperial date and not from the fifth-century BC well-springs of democracy at all). The Greek Archaeological Service
is very good on disaster planning, and almost certainly its fire protection devices, as well as the brave fire-fighters and
a dose of good luck, played their part in keeping the site safe.

But the news reports have tended to concentrate on Olympia alone – when, in fact, there are any number of sites round about
whose loss would be almost equally troubling in archaeological, even if not symbolic, terms. I think here of the temple of
Apollo at Bassae on its romantic hillside (the temple itself is now covered with a strange, almost post-modern tent). We still
don’t know whether this has made it. Let alone the much less well known temple of the ‘Great Goddesses’ at Lykosoura in the
valley below. And that’s before we start to think about the Byzantine churches gone up in flames.

At this point I begin to feel grateful for the dispersal of antiquities around the museums of the world.

Suppose Olympia and its museum had actually gone up in smoke (and fire quickly turns marble to a little pile of lime). At
least some of the sculptures of the key temple of Zeus would have been safe in the Louvre. And if the temple at Bassae had
been destroyed, then it would turn out to be a good idea after all that the sculptures from its frieze were in the British
Museum in London.

This is not an argument about the quality of care these monuments are given whether in Greece or abroad (and almost all guardians
of the Greek heritage – Greek or foreign – have something to be embarrassed about). It is more the ‘stuff happens’ problem.
Nature sometimes seriously messes up. In other words, like it or not in aesthetic or political terms, there is a very practical
point to these Wonders of the World being split up.

There’s also an argument here for the old-fashioned plaster cast gallery. If the Olympia sculptures were to be destroyed in
both Greece and France, then you would still be able to find a perfect set of replicas in the cast gallery of the Museum of
Classical Archaeology in Cambridge (and in other plaster cast galleries the world over). Half a century ago many of these
cast collections were themselves threatened with the (sledge) hammer. Now we are a bit wiser about our fragile hold on the
masterpieces of the past – and the need to protect them in a variety of guises.

Comments

Not a popular post! Almost all of the many comments fell somewhere on the spectrum between upset and offensive, ethnocentric
and vengeful:

‘What about scattering the British Crown Jewels around the world ...?’

‘Shame on you, OPPORTUNIST.’

‘UP YOURS.’

‘fuck!! of!!!!!’

‘In the pure tradition of her ancestor Lord Elgin.’

‘When we were building the Acropolis, you were living in caves.’

‘They were Greek and they will remain GREEK for ever in GREECE.’

... and so on.

10 things you thought you knew about the Romans ... but didn’t

30 August 2007

After the flood of angry comments about the last post on the Greek fires, let’s try some happier topics. A fellow blogger
suggests that we classicists tend to keep too many secrets about the ancient world to ourselves. So let me share a few. Here
are 10 things you thought you knew about the Romans but didn’t. 10 myths about the Romans exploded ... !

And that’s only the first ten!

Greek treasures and global treasures

4 September 2007

And for those of you who thought that I was being decidedly insensitive – to say the least – in even raising these issues
at a time like this (‘to make such ill comments/ suggestions at the time of national crisis in Greece, it just shows the type
of person that you are’), please note that I did start the post with an explicit apology for just that – and, for good measure,
with a sombre reflection on the hundreds of Ottoman women and children killed when the Parthenon went up in smoke in the seventeenth
century.

All the same, the intensity of the responses took me aback a bit. It wasn’t just the abuse: ‘fuck!! of!!!!’, as one commenter
put it, or ‘UP YOURS MY DEAR..’, in the (slightly) friendlier words of another. It was more the bigger debate about the role
and preservation of cultural heritage revealed by many of these hard-hitting reactions.

Several of the comments raised the issue of the English Crown Jewels. How would I feel if some of them were sent to New York
(as John M. wondered)? Well, the true answer is that I would feel perfectly OK about it – and I half suspect that even now
they’re not all in the Tower anyway (on the same ‘Wills-and-Harry’ principle). To put it more positively, I actually feel
pleased when I go (for example) to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and see those English country house rooms, once in
Oxfordshire or wherever, now reconstructed transatlantically. I like the idea that visitors, who come in from the extraordinarily
different world of Fifth Avenue, should find themselves reminded of ‘my’ culture.

The other side of this coin is that I cannot agree with the idea that works of art have some necessary and natural ‘home’.
Nor do I think that those who now live in the place where ancient masterpieces were created (whether they are the direct ethnic
descendants of the creators or not) are the only people in the world who could possibly be qualified to care for them or to
speak on their behalf. So I find it hard to respond to the question: ‘WHO GAVE YOU THE RIGHT TO HAVE AN OPINION ABOUT OUR
HERITAGE?’ (whatever ‘right’ means in this context). And I could not agree that only modern Greeks can properly look after
ancient Greek antiquities. That’s a claim which would not be true for the antiquities of any country in the planet – Greece,
the UK, the Sudan, India, you name it.

I can think of few worse strategies of cultural planning – particularly for a globalised world – than one which demands that
all works of art stay in the geographical area in which they were made. That’s partly for reasons of safety, but partly too
for the worthy aim of cultural interaction.