to sleep, perchance to dream

from the Fallen Princesses series by Dina Goldstein

This is why it's never a good idea to spend the weekend reading only books about neuroscience and Lucan's Pharsalia.

Last night's epic dream:

Things started off innocently enough. I was driving an old beat up car down a dusty, deserted freeway in Phoenix when I pulled the car over onto the side of the road. I got out of the car and walked down a hill, whereupon Phoenix turned into a huge lake in the middle of a tropical jungle. I crossed the lake on a series of primary-coloured plastic stepping-stone box things until they began to crumble into the lake and I had to dive in and swim. Obviously, I couldn't swim with my flip-flops on so I took them off and set them on one of the crumbling boxes while stopping to save a turtle who was trapped inside the box. After swimming for quite some time, it turned out that the jungle lake was actually a water feature at Claridge's (go figure). As I was swimming out of the lake, a bell hop ran up to me carrying my discarded flip-flops and told me to be careful that no one saw me in the lake - it was a protected environment and he didn't want to piss of the eco-people staying in the hotel as part of a big scientific conference. He also mentioned that if the eco-people knew I was swimming in the lake, my funding would be pulled. He gave me a white tuxedo blazer to wear and I began to go about my merry way, when I thought - fuck it, I'm here - so I turned about and went into Claridge's for lunch. Once seated, two preposterously obnoxious children proceeded to terrorise me until I pawned them off on the very charming couple sitting at the table beside me.

After lunch, I went back outside. The lake and Claridge's had disappeared only to be replaced by a landscape resembling the war-torn Afghani countryside, though it turned out to be a video game. Of course in this video game world, civil war was raging and the video game people had managed to trick a group of real world people into entering the video game 'to play' at war. All the men had gone off to fight and the video game women were explaining to the real world women that it would soon be their turn to fight. Some of the real world women began complaining that it wasn't their world so why should they have to fight. At this, the ringleader lady of the video game people turned into a giant jelly baby and knocked six shades of Hades into the women who had been complaining. The ringleader lady kept calling me Ingrid Bergman and asked me what I was going to do, whereupon I made a rousing speech about fighting for liberty and honour. I said that even if we weren't fighting for our own freedom were were still fighting for the cause of liberty and that there was nothing more honourable than the fight for freedom. I screamed 'vivre libre ou mourir' at the top of my lungs and we all ran off over the hill to fight.

Mental.

whose fault is it, really

Given that I�m a Classics PhD student, I spend an awful lot of time reading obscure texts, written in a language that no one even speaks by men most people have never heard of. Which is something of a shame as much of what these dead chaps wrote is rather splendid and though I�m loathe to say so, still relevant today.*

My thesis deals primarily with one text � Lucan�s Pharsalia � an epic poem written in the first century under Nero (you remember, he played the fiddle while Rome burned) which looks back on the last days of the Roman Republic. This ain�t Homer or Virgil � there�s no dawn and her rosy red fingers here. Lucan�s Erichtho makes Homer�s Polyphemus [the Cyclops] look like the BFG, and his grotesque descriptions of battle are entirely devoid of the traditional conventions of honour and glory normally found in epic. It�s a no-holds-barred gory, raging tantrum of a text, which positively bemoans the previously unimaginable fall of the Roman Republic.

One of the things I most love about Lucan�s epic is that, as expected, he rails against the leaders of the civil war � Caesar and Pompey � but his purest expressions of loathing are reserved for the Roman people.

When Caesar enters Rome for the first time, Lucan writes beautifully of how the people are so terrified of what Caesar might do that they are prepared to do whatever he wants:

�So he speaks and enters a Rome thunderstruck by terror, because they believe that he will sack the walls with black fires and scatter the gods, as if he had captured Rome. This was the extent of their fear: they equate his wishes with his power. No favourable greetings, no feigned cries of happy uproar do they pretend; hardly have they room for hatred. The Palatine halls of Phoebus [i.e. the Temple of Apollo] are filled by a crowd of Fathers brought out from their lairs, though no one has the right to summon the Senate; the sacred chairs were not resplendent with the consul, no praetor � by law the next in rank � is present, and the empty curule chairs are missing from their place. Caesar was everything: the Senate-House listened to one man�s voice. The Fathers sat, prepared to vote in favour if he asks for tyranny, for temples for himself, for the slaughter and the exile of the Senate. Thank the gods his sense of shame exceeded Rome�s self-degradation.�

This is what I mean about the contemporary relevance of the ancient texts. This passage reminds me all too well of the fear-mongering that goes on in my own terrified country: the war on terror, anthrax, communists � you name it � if the politicians and the media are able to whip up enough fear, people are all too willing to give up their civil rights.

Lucan delivers a stinging reprimand against the people for such cowardly behaviour and, as the ultimate dressing-down, suggests that ultimately the people of Rome are to blame for their own downfall. Something we�d all do well to remember, especially comparing, say the difference in cost v public anger over the MP expenses scandal with the banks bailout. MPs were paid just over �93 million in expenses in 2007-08 [the most recent total figures I could find] whereas the bank bailout was �28.7 billion � more than five times the cost of annual military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. But which do you think most twisted the britches of the general public? Not the bank bailout, which hardly merited so much as a sip of tea being spat out the nose, but the MP expenses �scandal� which has hardly been out of the press since the story broke over the summer. Frankly, I don�t have a problem with MPs claiming for expenses (though I�m less happy about them claiming excessively, obviously) � in theory, these people are public servants (again, I might not be that enchanted by the behaviour of the current lot, but I agree with the position in principle) and it�s their job to look after the health of the country. �93 million over one year is not really that much money. �28.7 billion pounds is, however, A LOT of money. That taxpayer money went to bail out organisations with zero interest in the public welfare is absolutely mind-boggling. That the people of this country were ready to draw and quarter their MPs for a few thousand pounds worth of expenses and yet raised little more than an eyebrow when these same MPs gave shed-loads of taxpayer money to bail out the banking sector is just incomprehensible.

As Lucan says of the Romans, it�s not enough to blame the sender of the message when the recipient is equally culpable. Like Caesar and Pompey, some of our civil leaders may be dirty bastards, but who lets them get away with it?

*Loathe to say so as there exists a breed of classicist who feels the need to belittle our subject matter by constantly undermining it in �justifying the contemporary relevance of the ancient texts for the modern world�. We�re academics interested in knowledge, not in increasing profit margins, I don�t understand why there�s any need to forge bonds of contemporary relevance. That they exist is both happy coincidence and proof of the extraordinary nature of the quality of the writing and the subject matter of the texts.

and now a word from our sponsors

With year two PhD deadline rapidly approaching (two weeks!), postings here are bound to be quite sporadic over the next few weeks. There's just too much to do to overstretch writing energies.

Though having just returned from the fascinating 1st of the series of this year's Reith Lectures, I can't help but want to make a brief mention. This year's lectures are given by Harvard professor, Michael Sandel, and are entitled 'A New Citizenship'. The audience is primarily invite only (and included David Miliband and Ken Livingstone, among others) so tickets are rather hard to come by. And while I initially inwardly groaned when our host, Sue Lawley, mentioned that there would be plenty of time for questions, the distinguished audience meant that what actually took place was one of the most intelligent and stimulating debates on morality in democratic, capitalist society I've ever witnessed in a public forum. There are four lectures in the series and all are being broadcast on Radio 4 so definitely take the time to listen to a timely and fascinating discussion on what it means to be a citizen in today's society.

I wish I had more time to write about Sandel's lecture and my thoughts on what he had to say, but I fear it shall have to wait for another time. At present, I have a more important man in my life and he's very demanding...

To all the Frenchmen that I've loved before

Like all other PhD's, mine is obscure. It has something to do with a poet, long dead, who wrote in a dead language, about the glory days of the Roman republic, dead before he even started writing. You get the point.

So my brilliant plan was to look at the nachleben of this poet and his poem (Lucan and The Pharsalia) in seventeenth and eighteenth century France. The 18th century translation is in prose and is really quite lovely - very civilised. The 17th century translation is a pain in the ass, to put it mildly. Even the translator's contemporaries thought he was smoking crack - one calls his verse translation "obscure gobledygook".

So I put it to you, native French speakers and Francophiles, what in the world is he on about in the following passage? I've tried to translate it literally - it makes no sense. I've tried to translate it with a little poetic license - it still makes no sense. And just to make things difficult, I can't even consult the Latin for a hint because our lovable French translator has gone off on a poetic tangent and there ain't nothing in the Latin which roughly corresponds. Typical...

And before you tell me my French is all wrong and strange and completely bizzare, I say to you that's the 17th century!

Sur tous ceux que le Ciel abandonne aux Tyrans, / Sa disgrace est cuisante, et sa travaux sont grands: / Rome que tant de Rois voyoiens comme leur Reinne. / Ne peut qu�avec horreur se former a la chairne, / La honte de ses fers en augmente le poids / et cette Reine enfin ne peut souffrir les Rois. / A qui Dieux tout-puissants, qui gouvernex le terre.