Author Archives: Jessica Hughes

Introducing… Cathy Mercer, Associate Lecturer (AL) in Classical Studies

This week we asked one of our Associate Lecturers, Cathy Mercer, to tell us about life as an OU Classical Studies tutor

Cathy posing as a centurion

“Like most ALs, I’ve had a varied career, as entertainments manager, city accountant, teacher, examiner, editor, online shop manager and European tour guide but, without doubt, my most fulfilling and interesting work has been (and still is!) working as an OU AL. I have wonderful tutor groups full of keen, committed students from varied backgrounds and we study fantastic OU materials. Both these materials and the students’ responses to them are stimulating and enlightening.

As a tutor in the London Region, I get to meet a good proportion of my students face-to-face, which is always exciting. However, as for all ALs, my main work is guiding the students through their studies and keeping them on-track by marking their assignments (TMAs = tutor-marked assignments) and here I have a slightly embarrassing confession to make: I have always enjoyed marking my students’ work and actually look forward to each batch of TMAs. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the more obviously attractive aspects of teaching such as face-to-face tutorials, but I have always liked seeing students’ own work and believe that prompt, positive responses to this is what helps them most. Even as a school teacher I used to mark students’ work as they were actually producing it in the classroom, keeping them on appropriate paths. Each student responds individually to their studies and respecting and acknowledging this through feed-back on their work is what benefits them.

In many ways my editing work in publishing was a type of marking and inevitably this affects my marking of students’ TMAs, making me perhaps a tad over-keen to add apostrophes and colons etc. It’s the Lynne Truss in me trying to steer students clear of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, though I warmly remember one pupil’s account of ‘red hot saliva’ rolling down Mount Vesuvius and I always smile at mentions of ‘Media dominating the agenda’ in Euripides’ tragedy.

The OU offers tutors many opportunities and treats and I make good use of these, offering language taster sessions in R01 in Greek and Latin and working as forum moderator, TMA setter, exam/ETMA marker and TMA monitor. This means I get to look at other tutors’ marking of TMA assignments and learn from their approaches. It is always striking how important the tutor’s personal touch is, and how the PT3 form can be used to acknowledge a student’s individual strengths and issues.

One of the great advantages of living in London is that there are loads of great theatres on the doorstep. Last summer we were treated to a cavalcade of Greek tragedy and this Christmas it was the turn of the Romans, with Ben Hur at the Tricycle.

This pantomime for grown-ups has now finished at the Tricycle but it will surely move on to the West End, as their previous small scale epic, 39 Steps, did so successfully. If so, do try to see it. It may owe more to Michael Frayn’s Noises Off farce than to Plautus or Terence but it is a wonderful pastiche of General Wallace’s epic novel, with its slightly lumpen conversation style, and the epic film, complete with chariot race powered by lawn mowers.

Ben Hur reviews were excellent but the proof of the pudding is always in the tasting and my friends and I loved it, even more than marking.”

by Cathy Mercer

My experience as an MA student, by Flora Stagg

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I never intended to go on to do an MA, let alone an MA in Classical Studies, after my undergrad degree – BA (Hons) in Humanities with Music – but for the last module of that degree I chose a completely different subject ‘Myth in the Greek and Roman World’ and I became hooked on the classics. I was at a considerable disadvantage as I did not have a classical background, only a little Latin, but no Greek. My tutor gave me a list of books which helped increase my knowledge of the classical world before the first module began. Although the first year of the MA was a steep learning curve, it was very enjoyable, if tough. During the year I learned to improve my argument in my essays, and became more critical of academic writing. I developed a passion for the Etruscans after writing a TMA on the stork vase discovered at the Mola di Monte Gelato site in South Etruria. An essay followed on ‘Who were the Etruscans’ – a difficult subject to choose, as I soon found out! The Etruscans believed that there was a limit to the length a civilization would survive and it would indeed appear that after 800 years much of their own civilization was swallowed up by Rome. It was suggested I should consider archaeology for my dissertation topic, but I felt that was a learning curve too far.

In the second year I had reached the module that had sparked my interest in the MA in the first place – The Greek Theatre. The role of powerful women in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides proved a fascinating area of research. After the tragedians, Aristophanes took over my life. For the EMA I spent an absorbing period comparing the text of Wasps prepared in 1897 by the classics scholar and barrister Benjamin Bickley Rogers, which Vaughan Williams set to music for the 1907 Greek Play at Cambridge, with its English adaptation by David Pountney to fit the original music of Vaughan Williams. Bickley Rogers’ expurgated version was appropriate to the sensibilities of the time, but Pountney reinstated most of the obscenities, taking a fair amount of liberty in his interpretation of the text and structure of the play. He was faced with the difficult task of finding lyrics to fit the metre of the original Greek text which Vaughan Williams had set to music. It was intended as a concert version in which one actor would play the roles of Philocleon and Bdelycleon, renamed Procleon and Anticleon in the Pountney version, which the Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Trust had commissioned to make the whole work (rather than just the Wasps’ overture) more widely known. I would argue that Vaughan Williams came out of it better than poor Aristophanes.

My dissertation was on the last two extant plays of Aristophanes – The Assembly-Women and Wealth – which involved a considerable amount of research on the politics and social changes of the time. The evolution of Aristophanes’ style from Old towards New Comedy played an important part in my argument: I compared these plays with the New Comedy style of The Old Cantankerous of Menander, a playwright of whom I had not heard before the MA. A month into the dissertation I had a crisis of confidence and requested to change the topic to a music-related one, but still remaining faithful to Aristophanes. I nearly gave my supervisor a heart attack, but after thinking about it for a nano-second, and much to my supervisor’s relief, I realised what a foolish idea it was, since all my research up to that point had been on the last two plays. I was assured that it would not be the only crisis of confidence I would go through during that year.

I have always enjoyed the research aspect of studying and I am now suffering severe withdrawal symptoms, as I have no present plans to go on to do a Ph.D, but Aristophanes is my constant companion and who knows where he will lead me next. Learning ancient Greek would be a good start….

by Flora Stagg

Classics, Film and Video Games

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Sian Beavers is a first year PhD student researching depictions of antiquity in film, TV and videogames and the potential there is for informally learning about classics through these media forms. The following blog post explains some of her reasoning for this research in relation to her pilot study that is currently underway.

“Often representations of Classical content seen in popular culture (such as film, TV or video games) are considered not to be “proper” Classics – inaccurate, ahistorical, and in some cases – downright silly. But it is probably fair to say that the reason many of us study Classics, in one way or another, is due at least in part to a pop culture product that influenced us previously.

Whether it was the highly regarded 1976 TV series, I Claudius, based on Robert Grave’s book of the same name; a children’s adaptation of The Odyssey; the video games Age of Empires or Age of Mythology; or the film widely credited with reinvigorating the ‘sword and sandal’ epic, Gladiator: by now hopefully few can doubt the impact that historical representations in popular culture have on our interest, perceptions and understandings of the ancient world.

Ryse Arena In the modern world, these re-workings of ancient content and material must also be considered re-mediations, in that they not only reference ancient sources but also borrow tropes (in story/content decisions as well as aesthetic representations) from other media. For example, the arena scenes that were so iconic in the film Gladiator are now familiar to us precisely because they have been reproduced in an array of other media with similar content: the TV Series Spartacus; HBO’s Rome; as well as the videogames Ryse: Son of Rome and Spartan: Total Warrior, amongst many other film, TV and videogame adaptations. This trope has become something that we expect to see when we engage with media that represents ancient Rome.

Some may question my inclusion of videogames as a legitimate media form for representing the past, but when one considers that Ryse: Son of Rome, a launch title for the Xbox One sold in 2014 alone more than 5 million copies and the Assassin’s Creed franchise more than 73 million, we cannot deny the popularity and wide-spread effects of the historical videogame genre, or more so that videogames are a new historical form that have the ability to portray a history, even if the history can be said to exist.

My PhD research with the Open University is concerned with how people engage with these historical representations in popular culture, and how audiences’ and players’ understanding of the past are shaped by them. What opportunities for learning do the different forms (TV, film, videogame) offer? How is this related to how the form structures the content? What specific media forms or products are considered to be the ‘best’ for learning about antiquity, the most entertaining, or more authentic? This is not to say that that this is merely research into the historical accuracy of a form or product, but the audience-player perceptions of it. For example, videogames have received much criticism over the last couple of years because of how women are represented. In a historical videogame, do the players believe that the representations of women align with the history? (“That’s how women were treated at the time….”) Or are they aware, as Hardwick and Stray note, that representations of Classical content in modern culture shed more light on the receiving society than on the ancient context?

The research as a whole will start answering some of these questions, through beginning with a Pilot Study that investigates audience and player perceptions of their learning through different forms and products; the viewer/player practices while engaging with these media forms (“Do you watch/play alone, or with people?”, “Do you post to blogs or social media in response to the content?”); and the longer lasting effects of engaging with such media (“Has a TV show/film/game ever inspired you to research the history of it more?”). This will allow the narrowing and focussing of a research area that has the potential to be gigantic.

Although at this point I have ensured that the questions in the survey (mostly in a mercenary attempt to increase response rate) relate to ‘general history’ as opposed to antiquity specifically, I am very keen to receive responses from Classicists in order to begin answering some of these questions, both because your perceptions of these media forms and products will be extremely interesting, as well as the fact the research as a whole will ultimately be looking at representations of antiquity in popular culture.

I hope that you could spare 10 minutes or less to aid me in this research and do this brief questionnaire, and if it might be something that a friend or colleague would be interested in, pass it on to them too. I’m also more than happy to talk to any one of you about the research and any suggestions you might have about its nature or direction so please contact me on twitter or at sian.beavers@open.ac.uk.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Sian Beavers

Classical Influences on Georgian Stourhead, Stourton Memorial Hall, 11 & 12th November 2015

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By John Harrison, PhD student in Classical Studies at The Open University

I’ve noticed over the past few years that some PhD students cunningly organise conferences based around the themes of their research. As I am just at the beginning of my 4th year as a part-time PhD student, and in the midst of writing up, I thought I would take my cue from them. Here is my blog account of last week’s ‘Classical Influences on Georgian Stourhead’ conference.

About 2 years ago, the National Trust Garden Specialist, Richard Wheeler, and I strolled around Stourhead gardens comparing notes. He was of the view that the gardens owe a heavy debt to the Aeneid. I took the view that each of the garden buildings is best interpreted as independent tableaux. Unable to agree, at the end of our walk we decided that the time was right to organise a conference at which classical influences would be considered. Last Wednesday and Thursday this idea was fulfilled.

At the beginning of this process Helen King warned me that whilst money and time would be in short supply for such an endeavour, there would be an abundance of goodwill. She was entirely right on all three counts and it was the goodwill that carried us through. The most obvious manifestation of this goodwill was the willingness of the invited speakers to agree to present. I wrote out a ‘dream’ faculty and sent invitations, hopeful that perhaps one or two would agree to participate. Prof Roey Sweet and Richard Wheeler were my first choices for keynotes, with Michael Symes, Oliver Cox, Dudley Dodd, Susan Deacy, Susie West, Alan Power, and our own Jess Hughes, as invited speakers. To my delight they all accepted, and after the Call for Papers, were joined by David Jacques, David Noy, Alan Montgomery, Danielle Westerhof, Caroline Barron, Nicky Pritchard-Pink and Gina Muskett. We had the good fortune to get from the OU financial sponsorship of a keynote speaker and an evening reception. The run of goodwill extended to agreement from the National Trust to hold our reception in Stourhead House, with access to the Picture Gallery, Entrance Hall & Cabinet Room. Local providers were hired to provide canapés. Soft drinks and sparkling wine were arranged and provided by Mrs Rachel Harrison, ably assisted by our children Seb & Cordelia.

Our plan for the conference was to spend Day 1 considering classical influences on Georgian Britain. After a welcome from Mac, the Stourhead General Manager, we began with session 1, ‘Classical Influences in the eighteenth-century garden’. Roey Sweet’s ‘Hoares, tours and country houses’ was an excellent start, and David Jacques account of Lord Burlington and his circle offered us further context. Michael Symes then helpfully took us through ‘Greek’ and ‘Grecian’ influences, which are not, as we might suppose, the same thing.

After lunch we began our ‘Theoretical approaches to studying classical influences’. Susan Deacy offered us a consideration of the importance of Hercules, Jess Hughes the connection between reception and memory, with Susie West offering an explanation of how we understand garden design as art. For me this was one of the very best sessions, with the content of all three papers overlapping on topics such as reception theory, sensation and possible iconography.

The final academic session of the day was themed ‘Beyond Stourhead: Classical influences at other Georgian country houses’. Another great session, with presentations on Penicuik House, Delian artefacts, Herriard House and Kedleston Hall. From 6.30 to 8.00pm we were in the house supping our drinks and munching our canapés, all whilst viewing the fine art of, amongst others, Maratta, Mengs & Poussin.

Day 2 focused on Stourhead and we began with an enthusiastic account from Richard Wheeler in which Stourhead gardens were considered from the standpoint of book 1 of the Aeneid. I followed with a presentation designed to correct the view that the gardens were based on a Claude painting and then by Oliver Cox, who put the voice of the eighteenth-century visitor in the forefront. Dudley Dodd then took us on a wonderful tour of the work of Rysbrach at Stourhead. Lots of information in this session – and some very different points of view. In an attempt to reach a consensus we had an impromptu panel discussion, refereed by Roey Sweet. Perhaps predictably, no such consensus emerged. Caroline Barron also thrilled us with her fascinating account of inscriptions at Stourhead and beyond.

After lunch Stourhead Head Gardener Alan Power took us through the challenges of conservation at Stourhead, littering his presentation with anecdotes and references. After some thanks and cheering the delegates left for a tour of the garden and we got to the important business of tidying up. The conference was a wonderful experience and we have high hopes of publishing the proceedings. A host of people gave unselfishly of their time to make this happen and I would like to thank them all. Key amongst the group deserving thanks were the attendees themselves. When we began this endeavour my benchmark for attendance success was to have as many attendees as faculty. This turns out to have been very unambitious, as we sold out all 80 places on Day 1 and had 74 attendees on Day 2.

There has been some very public wrangling about the National Trust’s attempts to balance broader membership needs with providing visitors with accurate and interesting information. It was therefore a delight to be part of an event at which so many people expressed such a clear interest in recent research and scholarship. It seems to me that good scholarship and greater accessibility to Trust properties have a rich future. The challenge is to find ways to engage a wider public with the rich history and fascinating stories that were the classical influences on Georgian Stourhead.

John Harrison

Workshop on ‘Material and Sensual Religion’

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Introducing…Sophie Raudnitz, PhD student

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Just over 23 years ago, I received the advance reading list for my undergraduate degree in English. At the top of the list was the Odyssey. I remember reading it during the lazy summer holiday between ‘A’ Levels and university, dutifully at first but soon sucked in to the twists and turns of the story. As my degree progressed, I began to realise the extent to which it underlies our literary tradition and my interest in cultural, or ‘literary’, memory began to take root.

Now, I am coming to the end of the first year of my PhD with the OU and my project has memory at its centre. The title is ‘Tracing the Establishment of Political Society: Remembering and Forgetting in Ancient Greek Literature’ and it starts with the premise that memory is a political process, taking place in a political environment, one which memory itself helps to engender. I was fortunate enough to get funding for this project from the OU and have two fantastic supervisors from the Classical Studies Department (Elton Barker and Helen King) and a third supervisor – a specialist in Memory Studies – from the English Department at Goldsmiths (Rick Crownshaw).

My topic evolved out of an essay on Justice in the Odyssey which I wrote at the end of the first year of my MA in Classical Studies, also with the Open University. (At that time, my three children were very small and I little thought that I would do more than that one module of the MA, let alone go on to do a PhD.) I began to notice that an analysis of the different memory groups inside and outside the poem – suitors, suitors’ families, Odysseus, the audience – might offer a more interesting and nuanced interpretation of Homeric justice than I had yet come across. After this, I knew that I wanted to be the one to do that work.

I have spent this year adventuring on the high seas of memory theory, trying to navigate a path through research in Social Studies, Psychology, History and Literary Studies around terms such as social memory, cultural memory, myth and tradition. Some ideas have called me with the song of the Sirens, luring me onto the academic rocks, while others have sped me on with power of the West Wind to make new connections and to give me the feeling that progress is being made. I have developed an interpretive process based on my reading which involves: i) looking at literary representations of remembering and forgetting and considering the ways in which they contribute to the formation of political identities within texts; ii) examining the ways in which the audience’s or reader’s memories of other texts or of historical events might affect their interpretations of texts and, by extension, how this might make them reflect on and, even, seek to change their own political environments; and iii) analysing the ways in which texts themselves were remembered, for example in quotations or allusions in other texts and what this might tell us about the changing political climate in which they were created and received.

I have also been testing out this interpretive process on a range of primary texts, developing my analysis into papers for presentation at postgraduate conferences. At the OU Classical Studies Postgraduate Conference in April I spoke about Plato’s Theaetetus and the image of the wax tablet as a metaphor for memory – one which recalls memories of tragedy in its language and is itself remembered in Aristotle and Freud. Here I also reflected on the potential offered by memory for thinking through the seeming paradox presented by Plato’s written philosophy and the Socratic dialectic his writings espouse. I also delivered a paper at a postgraduate conference based around the topic of ‘Looking Back and Looking Forward’ at King’s College, London. This paper focused on Euripides’ Trojan Women and, in particular on his depiction of a present in which time is suspended, from which characters remember their pasts and reflect on their futures, prompting the audience to do likewise. In both cases, remembering is more than simply recalling. It is a process of recreation in a specific political situation which demands reflection and debate: a political process which re-members society. Both experiences were hugely beneficial (if incredibly daunting in the anticipation) not only for drawing my ideas together but for getting a sense of the work in which others in the field are engaged.

At present, I am still forecasting with blithe confidence that this will be a cross-generic study, encompassing Homeric epic, drama, historiography and philosophy, though perhaps I’ll be forced to abandon some aspects of the study by the wayside. Cross your fingers for me that, even if trouble may lie ahead, I may find my way ‘home’!

by Sophie Raudnitz

Greek and Roman Holidays

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Stuck for somewhere to go this summer? We’ve collected together some last-minute travel ideas from members of the OU Classical Studies community. If you’d like to add any more classical destinations to our list, please feel free to use the ‘Comments’ feature at the bottom of the article. Happy travels!

Trier, Western Germany (as suggested by Ursula Rothe)

Urs_blog

If you want to combine glorious medieval architecture and continental urban sophistication with your visit to Roman antiquities this summer, look no further than Trier in western Germany. It has an intact late antique basilica (still in use), a Roman bridge (still in use), the ruins of two bath complexes and the famous Porta Nigra – a Roman city gateway that has remained intact because it was used as a church in the Middle Ages. It’s also a beautiful city with a twin cathedral and lots of nice cafes and restaurants. If you hire a car, the surrounding countryside is also full of interesting stuff, and not only because it is the Moselle Valley wine region: there is a huge, 23m-high Roman gravestone covered in reliefs from family life at a place called Igel; a rebuilt Gallo-Roman temple at Tawern; and a spectacular rebuilt Roman villa at Nennig.

Italica, Spain (as suggested by Paula James)

Casa_de_los_Pájaros,_Itálica._Santiponce,_Sevilla.(1)

In summer 2001 our daughter Tanith, then resident in Madrid, arranged a few days’ stay in Seville and the three of us took the 50p bus ride to the Roman remains of Italica early in the morning. We were on our own for a couple of hours and I suspect it was a little visited site (and may still be!) but it was well worth it (vale la pena!). Hot and dusty (the surroundings and us!) we could only imagine what this walled town (home of emperors Trajan and Hadrian) might have been like in its heyday with colonnades, temples, baths, water features, theatre etc. Every house seemed to have had a mosaic and you got a real sense of this as a vibrant place to be from the time of Augustus. Standing under the baking sun in the arena of what was the third largest (and well preserved) amphitheatre in the Empire I found myself shuddering at what the prisoners must have felt as they stepped out onto the sand. The Ridley Scott movie Gladiator was a recent phenomenon and suddenly the scene in the provincial arena when the fear of the ‘performers’ was palpable rang horribly true. Sometimes keeping a critical and dispassionate distance which I had urged our students to do when studying the Roman Games at the Colosseum in A103 Introduction to the Humanities course is just not possible!

Pompeii, Italy (as suggested by Joanna Paul)

Pompeii

Given that Pompeii is already one of the most-visited archaeological sites in the world – attracting well over 2 million people each year – its inclusion on a list of recommended ancient sites might seem a bit pointless. Indeed, even if you can’t visit the site in person, there are a multitude of ways to do so virtually, whether it’s through blockbusting museum exhibitions like the British Museum’s ‘Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum’ (2013) or smartphone apps like ‘Pompeii Touch’. But having visited the site repeatedly over the past couple of decades, and after devoting a good deal of my research time to exploring its reception in the modern world, I couldn’t not make this my number one site to visit. Cliches and superlatives are applied to Pompeii with good reason – it is an awe-inspiring place, unrivalled for the scale and apparent immediacy of access to the ancient world that it seems to give us, and even a slog round the site in the heat of the summer sun in the company of thousands of other tourists can’t fail to have an impact. But a little extra effort is well worth it. The Pompeii that I love is the backstreet Pompeii, the quiet road that you stumble across when you’ve struck out beyond the Forum or the Via dell’Abbondanza, where the hubbub of tourist noise is suddenly replaced by the sound of cicadas, and Vesuvius looms at the end of the street, unimpeded by tourist-guide umbrellas and selfie-sticks. I’ve never really thought of Pompeii as a time machine that transports us magically back into the past (although many people do), but it is in these quiet and deserted spaces that contemplation of this ancient town – and of the distance between us and yet the close relationship that we seem to have with it – really becomes possible.

Unfortunately, this quiet contemplation isn’t easy to come by. Over the years, I’ve seen access to these Pompeian backstreets become ever more difficult, and the dream of stumbling across an empty house that you can wander around at leisure is often frustrated. Huge chunks of the site are invariably closed as the demands of staffing, and conserving, such a fragile site take their toll. But it can be done. On my most recent visit, in June this year, a lucky tip-off alerted me to the fact that the Via di Nola, heading towards the north-east edge of the site, was open beyond the usual barrier, allowing access to the House of Marcus Lucretius Fronto (see picture). Though hot, dusty, and footsore, we set off down the road, and were soon to be rewarded with a fantastic spell alone in this house, with its beautiful frescoes – by far the most memorable aspect of this trip for me. So, my advice to you is: don’t spend too long studying your map; instead, be prepared just to wander, to leave the tourist crowds behind as much as you possibly can – and if you turn a corner and a quiet road with no barrier opens up before you – follow it!

Naples (as suggested by Jessica Hughes)

Naples from the Certosa di San Martino

If you do go to Pompeii, then chances are you’ll be staying in nearby Naples and making a day-trip to Pompeii on the Circumvesuviana train. Tourists often use Naples as a base for visiting other local destinations (Herculaneum, Cumae, Solfatara, Sorrento, and so on), but the city itself is an absolute treasure-trove for historians of every period.

One of my favourite sites is the Museo San Martino up on the Vomero hill. This is a kind of ‘Museum of Naples’, filled with paintings of the city and objects from its past, so it’s a great place to start getting to grips with Neapolitan history (as well as the urban layout, thanks to the gorgeous panoramic views – see the image above). Archaeologists will obviously love the National Archaeological Museum (perhaps the best museum in the world?), but there are also many other Greco-Roman elements of the city to explore, such as the Roman macellum beneath the church of San Lorenzo Maggiore in the historic centre, and the underground tunnels of Napoli Sotterranea (‘Naples Underground’), which can be visited as part of a guided tour starting from near San Lorenzo. And there’s always something new to discover: on my last trip I wandered into the Museo Duca di Martina at the Villa Floridiana which is dedicated to the decorative arts, especially 18th-century ceramics from the porcelain factory at Capodimonte. Lots of the objects in the Villa Floridiana depict classical scenes, and the imagery is often drawn from Pompeian paintings – a nice example of the close relationship that’s always existed between Naples and the other ancient cities in the region.

If you’re preparing for a trip to Naples, two popular history books that I’d recommend as preparatory reading are Peter Robb’s Street Fight in Naples and Jordan Lancaster’s book In the Shadow of Vesuvius. To find out about ancient Naples, you can download for free Rabun Taylor’s A Documentary History of Ancient Naples, and for an insight into how this ancient past has been appropriated in later eras, you can look at our edited volume Remembering Parthenope: The Reception of Classical Naples from Antiquity to the Present. There are lots of good websites devoted to the cultural history of Naples, and I’ve particularly enjoyed dipping into Naples: Life, Death & Miracles and Napoli Unplugged. Naples is one of the most heavily stereotyped cities in the world (pizza, traffic, chaos etc), but that’s partly why it’s so rewarding to go there in person – you’ll have many of your expectations confounded, and if you’re interested in ancient history and classical reception studies – well, you’ll probably discover a dozen new research topics in the process!

Amiens, France (as suggested by Cathy Mercer)

Amiens

Just across the Channel, easy to get to, with a splendid Gothic cathedral, twice as big as Notre Dame de Paris which, remarkably, survived WWI intact. Jules Verne lived in Amiens and you can visit his house, complete with tower. There are lovely walks along the River Somme, through the Hortillonages, miles of marshy market gardens and parks, reached by charming little bridges.

Some may say that the delicious macarons d’Amiens are reason alone to visit and the delightful patisserie opposite the cathedral does a wonderful lunch. But why might a classics person would want to visit Amiens rather than Rheims or Rouen?

Why, for the outstanding archaeological display in Amiens’ museum, the Musee de Picardie, tagged by Amiens TI as a fantastic museum and they’re right. It has a really good Roman collection and a tremendous display of archaeological artefacts, carefully arranged in those lovely 19th century typologies so beloved by Pitt-Rivers and co. For me the museum’s star exhibit was the beautifully displayed Amiens Skillet, a Roman enamelled bronze souvenir of Hadrian’s Wall found in Amiens in 1949. It shows soldiers with shields peeking through crenulations, conveniently marked up with names of the forts from Mais to Banna, Bowness to Birdoswald, maybe birthplace of St Patrick. There must be a matching cup waiting to be found out there, with forts from Vindolanda to Wallsend. The Amiens Skillet is similar in design to the British Museum’s Rudge Cup and lists the same western forts on Hadrian’s Wall. Another similar HW tourist souvenir is the Staffordshire Moorlands Pan found in 2003. The interesting difference is that the Amiens Skillet shows that the fame of Hadrian’s Wall had spread beyond the shores of Britannia. The museum is housed in a handsome chateau in the centre of Amiens and visits cost 5.5 Euros. This was clearly enough to put locals off because the only other visitors we met were two English ladies on a choir visit. The contrast with the crowds at the British Museum could not be more striking. Samarobriva, as Amiens was known in Roman times, seems to have been excavated in the main in the 19th century but there is remarkably little to see in town, except for a corner of the amphitheatre under a square and a block of flats named Samorobriva. For details of these and other places to visit see www.visit-amiens.com

We enjoyed a splendid long weekend in Amiens, with stop-offs at Boulogne for its splendid old town and riverside walk as far as the La Manche (English Channel). These stop-offs were in fact enforced by the rather eccentric timing of local trains – this meant that, apart from early morning and evening worker services, there is just one lunch time train to Amiens. But Boulogne’s medieval ramparts and fascinating Napoleonic connections are reasons enough to visit.

Samothrace (as suggested by Elton Barker)

Samothrace

The suggestions from my (esteemed) colleagues are all very good and excellent, but they’re all a bit too Roman for my liking. Perhaps that’s because there are simply so many places to go to in Greece that it’s difficult to choose a favourite – the sheer variety can be bewildering! Whether it’s the centre of the world at Delphi, or the wandering island of Delos, Greece is impossible to beat for the sheer joy of ancient monuments jostling for attention amidst stunning landscape.
A personal favourite of mine, and off the beaten track, is Samothrace. You’ll all know its most famous export, the Winged Victory of Samothrace (now in the Louvre): but you’ll possibly be less familiar with the site where it was found, the Sanctuary of the Great Gods (Hieron ton Megalon Theon). I guarantee that you’ll be blown away by the views. More than that, Samothrace is the alternative place to visit. The people are incredibly friendly, it has great camping facilities, and the walks through the forests provide a welcome relief from the heat (you can even take a dip in natural mountain pools – if you’re brave enough!). The question is, with all the choices Greece has to offer, do I go there again this year…?

Introducing… Julie Ackroyd, Honorary Associate in Classical Studies

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I’m delighted to be able to introduce myself as the new Honorary Associate for the OU Classics Department. You can find me at:

http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/classical-studies/ackroyd.shtml

My day to day work is for the OU as an Associate Lecturer. Having completed my PhD recently I am what is classed as an ‘early career researcher’, so it’s out into the big wide world to make new academic friends and find out what is going on at conferences. I’m also working on getting material published in journals and hopefully a book soon. My first job on graduation was to work towards my Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy. I passed this last month so I now have letters after my name as well as Dr in front of it.

My PhD. work focused on ‘The Recruitment and Training of the Child Actor on the London Stage c.1600’. This may not on first glance seem a subject which has a particularly Classical focus, however…

The theatre company which my research covered was based at Blackfriars in the City of London on the north side of the Thames. This organisation was in direct competition with the theatres on the south side of the Thames, such as the Globe where Shakespeare was working. Hang on a minute, I can hear you saying, there were no theatres in London, actors weren’t allowed within its boundaries. Well, the company at Blackfriars were a little different to those acting across the river. The company was staffed solely with actors who were boys. They presented their plays at a more select indoor venue which led to a more upmarket clientele than those attending performances at the open air venues south of the river. On average the cost of the cheapest ticket to a performance at Blackfriars was the same as the most expensive ticket available at the Globe. In fact, the patrons were so well off that London had to introduce its first one way system and no parking area for horse drawn coaches dropping off and picking up the theatre patrons as they were creating rampant traffic jams in the area.

Portrait of Nathan Field from Dulwich Picture Gallery. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait of Nathan Field c. 1610, now in the collections of Dulwich Picture Gallery. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

A more select audience demanded a more educated and refined actor. As a result, many of the boys recruited to perform at the venue had a grammar school education. This is where the Classical component comes in. They knew Latin and sometimes Greek, they were familiar with the Classical texts which were taught day in day out at the schools. Ovid’s Heroides was especially significant for those boys who would later join the theatre as it taught them to consider dramatic and emotional events from a women’s perspective. Remember, this was the time when there were no English women on the commercial stage. Boys covered all the roles. Their education would also have involved learning by rote and, as a result, they would have an excellent memory for remembering lines. In addition they would also have experience of performing in a public setting as, at significant royal occasions the boys were often asked to present orations in Latin to welcome the ruler into the City or to commemorate events such as royal weddings. Many of the schools also had regular in house performance of plays for parents and local guild members.

When a family sent a child to a grammar school to soak up all this Classical learning they weren’t planning on turning out an actor, they were hoping to have a son who could take over the family business, join a Guild, go to University, join the Inns of Court, the world was their Oyster. So why let them join a disreputable fraternity? Well that is how I found out about this appropriation of grammar school boys into the acting profession. In the Public Record Office at Kew there is a legal case where boys are named who had been kidnapped whilst they were on their way to grammar school. They were forcibly held against their will at the theatre and made to memorise lines and act. As you can imagine, well to do families were horrified at this. The resultant legal case petitions the courts for restitution after the kidnap of a boy named Thomas Clifford. We even have a painting of one of the boys who was taken at around the same time: Nathan Field. He made a success of his incarceration and as an adult transferred across the river to work with Shakespeare’s company, where he played the romantic leads. If you want to find out more, wait for the book publication…

By Julie Ackroyd

OU Classical Studies on Twitter

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The department now has a Twitter account!

Several members of the OU Classical Studies community also have their own personal Twitter accounts. Here’s a list, which we’ll keep updating over the coming months.

@eltonteb Elton Barker (Reader in Classical Studies, tweeting about Digital Humanities and more)

@emmabridges Emma Bridges (Lecturer in Classical Studies, ‘mostly tweets with a classical theme’)

@fluff35 Helen King (Professor and Head of Classical Studies department)

@jash147 James Hutchinson (Associate Lecturer in Classical Studies, tweeting about classical languages and (mainly Greek) culture)

@joannapaul Joanna Paul (Lecturer in Classical Studies, tweets about classical reception and more)

@ClassicalJG Juliette Harrisson (Associate Lecturer in Classical Studies, ‘tweeting about whatever takes her fancy’)

@LASwiftClassics Laura Swift (Lecturer in Classical Studies)

@mairlloyd Mair Lloyd (PhD student in Classical Studies, tweets about Classics, e-learning and more)

@MariaRelaki Maria Relaki (Associate Lecturer in Classical Studies, tweets about Archaeology, Classics and Heritage)

@TonyKeen46 Tony Keen (Associate Lecturer in Classical Studies, ‘tweets irregularly in a personal capacity on a variety of subjects close to his heart’)

Other Twitter feeds with an OU connection include:

@CRSN_UK Classical Reception Studies Network (tweeting upcoming cultural and academic events)

@pvcrs Practitioners’ Voices in Classical Reception Studies (OU Open Access journal – interviews with actors, directors, artists, writers and other practitioners who work with classical material)

@classicsconfide Classics Confidential (‘Vodcasting Classicists, Sharing Research’)

Psychology and the Classics meeting in Leuven

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John Harrison is currently writing his PhD thesis on ‘Myth in reception: Insights from Stourhead house and gardens 1714-1830‘

I remember vividly during the course of studying A330 how excitedly I opened Chapter 3 of Eric Csapo’s Theories of Mythology. I remember also my surprise at finding that the chapter titled ‘Psychology’ begins and ends with Freud – with most of the pages in between dealing with Freud. It was (and is) curious to psychologists like myself how psychoanalysis seems to have become the dominant psychological approach for explaining myth, especially given the richness of psychological paradigms such as the cognitive, developmental and neo-behaviourist approaches. How refreshing then to see a call for papers announcement for Psychology and the Classics: A Dialogue of Disciplines, which was held in at the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven between 24^th & 27^th March.

So many highlights, but here is a selection of the sessions I enjoyed most:

Prof Jennifer Radden opened the meeting with her fascinating key-note in which she offered the view that Richard Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy is not just a fascinating seventeenth-century view of emotion, but also a text relevant to modern day psychiatry and neuroscience.
The Day 1 evening reception was held at the Leuven Museum and in addition to Belgian beer tasting, we were engaged by the Making Learning to make votives. Huge fun, I would do it all again in a snip 🙂
A highlight of Day 2 for me was Luca Grillo’s wonderful presentation, in which he sought to apply cognitive psychology models to our understanding to Cicero’s multiple uses of irony. Two competing models appear to explain Cicero’s irony, and Luca’s call to arms was for psychologists and philologists to collaborate to determine which model is the best fit.
In Prof. Christopher Gill’s excellent keynote he sought to show that the roots of modern Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) can be found in the work of the Stoics, especially in the writing of Epictetus. Since the Leuven meeting I have had the opportunity to discuss this issue with CBT expert colleagues from the THINC task force, who were content to agree the point.
Friday’s opening session, titled ‘What can the cognitive sciences offer Classics?’ was a fascinating session. We were treated to presentations on the application of cognitive analysis of Odysseus’ behavior during his 10 year journey home, as well as a second invocation of schema theory (I had discussed this cognitive theory in my Day 1 presentation) by William Short. This block of presentations was helpfully drawn together by Prof. Douglas Cairns, whose current research interests include classical emotions and metaphor.
The application of cognitive psychological theory to a classical theme for me found its zenith in Lilah Grace Canevaro’s entrancing presentation ‘Anticipating audiences: Hesiod’s Works and day and cognitive psychology’, in which she interpreted aspects of Hesiod in cognitive psychological terms. A further treat was Joel Christensen’s premise that theories of learned helplessness could be applied to aspects of Odysseus’ behavior, and especially whilst he was Calypso’s guest on Ogygia.

Odysseus and Calypso, red-figure vase, 5th century BC, Naples Archaeological Museum The close of the meeting brought deservedly warm applause for the organisers, and especially Jeroen Lauwers. A wish expressed by many of the presenters was that this event should be beginning of what promises to be a fruitful and mutually beneficial interdisciplinary approach. As one with ‘a foot in both camps’, I’d willingly endorse such a view. Perhaps the next step is for psychologists to repay the compliment by hosting their classical colleagues at a reciprocal event?

John Harrison

Image: Odysseus and Calypso, Red-figured vase, 5th century BC, Naples Archaeological Museum.