Meet the Classicist Foremothers

The glyph 'woman' is after 'man' so why does 'sow' come before 'boar' etc?

How gratifying it has been this week to see the role played in decipherment of Linear B by a woman—Alice Kober—finally being acknowledged in the New York Times!  The ‘code’  in which the elusive Mycenaeans wrote their lists was cracked  because several scholarly minds, British and American, male and female, had cumulatively applied their brains to the problem over the course of several decades.  Kober was on the verge of full decipherment when she died young, in 1950.

de Romilly, great Thucydidean

Many other outstanding female classical scholars remain unsung. Two months ago, with my colleague Rosie Wyles and student Lottie Parkyn, I convened an international conference devoted to unearthing them. We chose the date to mark the centenary of the birth of Jacqueline de Romilly, outstanding French Hellenist and first ever woman to be nominated to the Collège de France.

But we also unearthed Lusia Sigea, the 16th-century Spanish humanist who actually made a living out of teaching Latin and Greek to other women.  The foremother of Dutch women classical scholars,  Anna Maria van Schurman, was a leading light of the Dutch Golden Age; her wit and intelligence shine through her Latin treatise Whether a Christian Woman Should Be Educated, available online in English translation. 

Sigea, professional lecturer

The 18th century saw Anne Dacier showing  the French how to do Classics with erudition and style, and in England Elizabeth Carter enthralling Dr Johnson with her command of ancient Greek and translation of Epictetus.  By the late 19th, the study of classics was central to the campaign to secure African American women education in the post-emancipation USA.

van Schurman, prodigy of Utrecht

Excavating these ancestral figures is fun and inspiring.   I want to build a library room in which their portraits hang in the alcoves alongside the standard-issue tired clergymen and bewhiskered dons. Actually, we will be building a virtual gallery, online or in print or both, so my wish will soon enough come true.

Carter as (Smiling) Minerva

There has been a two-month delay in writing about this conference. The reason is that celebrating anything felt entirely inappropriate given the absolutely tragic death in America during it of Professor Kate Bosher, a superb young scholar and the kindest person with whom I have ever worked. 


I had just reviewed a fine volume by her for the Times Literary Supplement on Feb. 1st and can scarcely believe she is dead. She was only thirty-eight, leaves a husband, a young child, and a painful hole in the lives of many friends and colleagues. The output from Women Classical Scholars conference will of course be dedicated to her memory.

The Conundrum of the Netherlands

Leiden Uni. The Most Civilised Place on Earth?

I have just taught an MA class at the University of Leiden, and fell in love with the institution. The chairs of both Latin and Greek are held by wonderful women, a situation I never expected to see at any university in my lifetime. The students have all learned their excellent Greek in state schools. They come from diverse social and ethnic backgrounds.  

Leiden was awarded its university in 1575 by William I of Orange, as a reward for holding out when besieged by the Spanish.  The foundation story claims that the citizens were offered a choice of reward--advantageous tax breaks or a university-- and chose the latter. The inhabitants of Leiden are still actually proud that their forefathers chose intellectual life over lucre.

Gulliver in Brogdingnag

The Leiden students, of both sexes, are so tall that I feel like Gulliver in the land of the outsize Brobdingnagians, whose advanced culture was based on the practice of reason. They are polite, but I am careful not to offend them. Remember the tackles with which the enormous Dutch national football team assaulted all opponents in the 2010 World Cup? These culminated in the final, with Nigel de Jong’s chest-high kicking of the Spanish midfielder Xabi Alonso.  The (British) referee was so scared of de Jong that he only gave him a yellow card. 

Why I am careful not to offend Dutch people

Perhaps the Dutch are so tall because of the proteinous dairy products derived from their glossy Friesian cattle.  Perhaps it was an evolutionary adaptation which helped them fix their windmills without having to use ladders. Since the Renaissance, they have themselves traced their height to the rigorous physical training of their forefathers, the glorious tribe of the Batavi, whom Tacitus described as most courageous.

The Batavi were exceptional horsemen and swimmers and conducted rebellions against Rome when they felt they were treated disrespectfully.  In my favourite Latin inscription of all time, a Batavian auxiliary serving under Hadrian in AD 117 boasts, ‘I swam across the wide waters of the deep Danube with all my arms; and while a weapon from a bow hung in the air fell, I transfixed it with an arrow and broke it, I whom no Roman nor barbarian, no soldier with a javelin nor Parthian was ever able to outdo…’

Fectio, the Dutch Batavian Re-Enactment Society

The Batavians’ descendants, at least in their football stadiums, still systematically applaud when their stars execute violence against their opponents. I am finding this hard to reconcile with the rational organisation of society and high levels of civilisation and culture which the country has achieved. Please can someone enlighten me?

May the Force of Greek Storytelling be With You!

Luke, Han & Leia

A long-lost brother and sister with a father who went to the moral Dark Side are reunited in young adulthood far from home. The youthful hero, on the threshold of initiation into warrior status, has a loyal male friend  who is also in danger. Their lives are threatened by an outlandish Emperor, but all three escape in the end, thus demonstrating the inherent superiority of their culture.

The plot of Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi (1983)? Yes and no. The person who invited the two-guys-and-a-gal-escape-from-an-exotic-location story, where the ‘gal’ has been held captive by a barbarous male ruler, was actually Euripides, tragedian of Athens, in about 414 BC. This is exactly the plot of his adventure drama Iphigenia in Tauris, in which Iphigenia, her newly recognised but long-lost brother Orestes and his best mate Pylades escape from the northern Black Sea after tricking King Thoas of the bloodthirsty Taurians.

Orestes, Pylades, Iphigenia

I have always loved Star Wars since the original 1977 release of the first instalment, which I watched the day I finished my ‘A’ Levels. I was absolutely delighted when my last child decided to be born on May the Fourth, the official 'Star Wars Day', and obligingly grew up to love Science Fiction. But the Greek dramatic ancestry of The Return of the Jedi makes it my favourite example.

'Peru', Trader Horn, and Nina

I am not alleging that George Lucas had studied Euripides in any depth, or at all. The plot type was introduced (demonstrably via a source who knew the Greek tragedy) to Hollywood in 1931, with MGM’s Trader Horn. A white woman (Nina), the longstanding captive of an African tribe, is rescued by her blood-brother and his comrade Peru. Trader Horn received a nomination for an Academy Award.  Today it makes an impact so excruciatingly racist that it is almost impossible to watch. But it was imitated in the Road to... films made by Paramount Pictures, starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour, which started with Road to Singapore in 1940. The intermediate step was constituted by the taste Trader Horn created for talkies like Paramount’s Jungle Princess (1936), in which Lamour played the sarong-clad titular heroine, discovered in a remote location by air-crash survivors.

Bing, Dorothy and Bob

I am delighted to have been invited to address the Science Fiction Foundation conference in Liverpool this summer. I haven’t decided yet whether to talk about the first ‘Voyage to the Moon’ story in world literature, Lucian’s True History, or the relationship between Star Trek and the Odyssey. It is too bad that The Myth Makers, a four-part Dr Who story I can dimly remember watching as a child, set during the Trojan Wars and broadcast in 1965, has been wiped from the archives. But while I decide what to talk about, May the Fourth Be with You anyway!

Why Crassus could do Business in Bangladesh

Would YOU buy a second-hand factory from this man?

If Crassus, the shady ‘third man’ of the late Republic along with Pompey and Julius Caesar, were alive today, he would be trying to buy the Rana Plaza factory buildings in Savar, Bangladesh. He became the richest man in Rome not by crucifying Spartacus’ rebellious slave army, which was a one-off stunt, but by speculation in collapsing real estate. 

In ancient Rome, the shoddily erected trading and apartment blocks, insulae, often fell down. Crassus would turn up and make a rock-bottom offer for an insula as it teetered, its residents screaming. He only got his 500-strong private slave fire brigade to rescue the building if the offer was accepted. He would then refurbish the insula and sell it on for many times his outlay.

Rana Plaza building, not renovated

I became disenchanted with life as a trainee businesswoman when in the early 1980s I discovered the files relating to the deaths at work of several tugboat crewmen of Merseyside. My privileged childhood in a household where ‘work’ meant doing things with typewriters had protected me from any real sense that (even discounting the armed forces) most people--builders, miners, manicurists, dry cleaners, machine operatives, removal personnel--routinely face physical danger in the workplace. 

Wakefield Cathedral, being renovated

This does not apply to the middle classes. Bishops do not often fall out of pulpits. Few bankers pay so many checks into their offshore accounts that they get Repetitive Strain Injury. Barristers and Judges only occasionally asphyxiate when their wigs slip. University teachers’ throbbing egos threaten to make them mentally, rather than physically, sick. The most serious threat faced by the chattering classes in the media is bitchy tweets from envious rivals.

A clothing retailer selling clothes made in the Rana Plaza is Primark, behind which lurks the holding company of the Weston family. Their charitable foundation, the Garfield Weston Foundation, makes much-lauded and very visible grants to worthy causes including the UPKEEP OF THE FABRIC OF OLD CHURCHES in Britain.

Today, 28^th April, is the annual International Workers’ Memorial Day. It will commemorate what the International Labour Organization says is the staggering SIX THOUSAND humans who die EVERY DAY across the world as a result of work-derived illness or injury. 

Don’t get me wrong. I do like old churches and would like them to stay

perpendicular. But surely the one day a year formally reserved for thinking about safety in the workplace would be an appropriate moment for the Garfield Weston Foundation to consider supporting a different kind of architectural renovation, just a little less visually obvious in Britain. Perhaps it could donate some money towards the UPKEEP OF THE FABRIC OF THE FACTORIES from which the Weston family’s vast wealth derives.