Waiting…

Theoretically, now I’m on maternity leave and pretty much at home all day, this would be a great time to get stuck into some serious studying. However, I’m finding much more important things to do, such as making Christmas cake and washing baby clothes. Hmm. Can the pram in the hall be the enemy of creativity even if it’s not unpacked yet?

Anyway, I managed to make it to the end of the semester through a fairly heroic effort. I have an essay on Cicero and humour, which I can either write now, or leave a year; given my need for deadlines to get anything done, I’m fairly confident it’ll be the latter. However, I’ve been enjoying a bit of research in preparation, including the serendipitous discovery that Mary Beard’s Sather lectures are a) highly relevant to this very subject, and b) available on the web (the first two, at any rate). They have already revealed the fascinating fact that Erich Segal wrote not only Roman Laughter, but also the screenplay for Yellow Submarine, which I find disproportionately pleasing. Sitting quietly and listening to an entertaining lecture is about the right pace for me, at the moment.

Back in that Latin groove

Because I’m studying part-time, I do each academic year in two halves. In practice this means that last year was all Greek, while this year is all Latin. Last year was great – it was brilliant studying language, close-reading texts (in the original) and looking at broader themes of epic and tragedy (in translation) all at the same time, and there was a lot of cross-fertilisation between the different strands.

I’m definitely more of a fan of Greek than Latin, although I find it much harder and have less of a grasp of the language basics. This being so, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this Latinate year. However, now I’m getting stuck in, it’s surprisingly enjoyable. I’m studying the Pro Murena, and although Cicero is comically full of his own self-importance, you’ve got to love the pace and swing of his rhetoric. Also looking at some Livy and Seneca, and although they don’t rock my world in the same way, it’s quite encouraging that the vocab and grammar are coming back to me. I think the alphabet is still a surprisingly large obstacle in Greek – there seems to be an extra mental loop of transliterating the text before I can begin to get a handle on it.

That said, my main goal for this semester is to get to the end before pregnancy slows me to a full stop. And from the new year my life will be completely different; it’s hard to predict what it will be like, but not like this! I hope there’s still a little scope for classics in the new world.

Getting stuck into Cicero

Some progress, some lack of progress… As far as I can tell, the baby is coming along quite nicely, which means that I have a great sense of achievement without having actually done anything except provide a comfortable, alcohol- and caffeine-free home. The 20 week scan revealed a lot of gymnastics going on, which makes me absurdly proud.

However, possibly because of this, progress on uni work has been slow to abysmal. I’m not even going to talk about the proposed summer reading – suffice to say that, like the summer, it didn’t really happen. I have a voracious appetite for novels, but not for anything that involves work – can I count this as a pregnancy craving?

But, with the new term looming at the end of the month, I have begun to make a start on the Pro Murena. This is reminding me why I always liked Cicero – he is so shamelessly self-aggrandising, I imagine the other senators thinking ‘Oh, come off it, Cicero’. And I do love his sentence structure – great complicated riffs on a subject that threaten to lose themselves in grammatical complexity but always resolve beautifully like a well-formed equation. Maybe there’s hope for me after all.

Summer sloth

Progress on my reading pile is minimal… generally I work better with the incentive of exams or deadlines to keep me focused, but even by my standards it’s proving exceptionally difficult to get down to some work. Being pregnant is my excuse. I was expecting my brain not to be at its sharpest in the months after the birth, but surely it’s a bit early to be losing mental acuity? Let’s just call it laziness.

In the interests of making some progress, I’ve started work on the Pro Murena – partly to help switch back to Latin mode. Not so bad so far – my Latin will probably always be more fluent than my Greek – except that I keep reading all the semi-colons as question marks, which doesn’t help.

Who knows where the time goes

Been a bit slow around here lately – mainly because, without the cast-iron excuse of exams, the job-that-pays-the-bills has eaten all my study time. At least the exams seem to have turned out OK, judging by the provisional marks – which are there on the uni website, if you know where to look. Even the language paper on which my answers were only tenuously related to the questions wasn’t too bad. Let’s see what the external examiners do; last year I had a pretty good paper on Ovid downgraded because the external examiner felt the scores were too high. Too high for what? Why should we aim for mediocrity – flattening out the curve so that we’re all much the same?

Anyway, as we know, it’s not about the points, it’s about the journey of exploration and discovery. Not much to report on that front – see above – except that Simon Goldhill’s Reading Greek Tragedy is even better on the second reading than the first. I love the way his argument never strays far from the text, and he is more interested in what it has to say than in positioning himself in relation to other critics. This is the kind of writing I admire and aspire to.

More holiday reading

I note that posts mentioning Edith Hall get a (relatively) high number of hits – is this self-Googling, or are there just lots of fans like me out there? Anyway, top of my holiday reading list is Hall’s recent collection of essays, The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions between Ancient Greek Drama and Society. I can’t afford it – it’s £71 – but I’m going to buy it anyway. It includes a few favourites – including the essay on lawcourt oratory and theatre which made a light go on in my head when I was reading Lysias in the first year – but is mainly new to me and looks fascinating. I find many professional classicists make their scholarship so dry that they kill any excitement dead; but Hall makes the subject come alive. And any book with a sub-heading ‘Dry Ice and Ideology’ is OK by me.

Done done done

That’s it for exams this year – nothing to do for uni until the new semester starts in September (apart from obsessively check the website for results – but even that can wait a few weeks yet). The next task is to tidy up the avalanches of paper and books which have covered every available surface and most of the floor in my study. And then the fun starts – deciding what reading I’m going to do over the summer.

Previous experience suggests that I will make a grandiose list and will in fact barely scratch the surface, but I refuse to let that put me off. I quite fancy having a look at Triphiodorus, maybe even translating some, doing some work on accents, and reading more around Greek tragedy, in particular Vernant and Vidal-Naquet and Oliver Taplin’s new book . We’ll see how much of this actually happens…

End in sight

I haven’t ended up blogging instead of revising, which is probably a good thing. There’s just not anything very interesting to say about the process of cramming a term’s thoughts into tidy exam-shaped nuggets. The whole thing is fairly dispiriting; fortunately after tomorrow I’m done with exams for the year.

The one good thing has been really getting to grips with Iliad 24, to the point where I can read it fluently from the Greek; I keep finding new ideas, new connections and subtleties I hadn’t noticed before. Maybe someday I’ll have read the whole poem in this amount of detail. But for the next few weeks, it’s light reading only!

Classical carry on

Now back at my desk, attempting to install a full working knowledge of Iliad 24. But enlivened by a few days at the Copenhagen Glyptotek, which is possibly the best museum of classical artefacts I’ve ever visited. While its collections don’t really rival the British Museum, the Louvre, or even Basel, it’s certainly the only museum I’ve seen with a palm lined atrium:

And its collections of Greek and Roman portraits are beautifully laid out in a succession of rooms with mosaic floors and trompe l’oeuil painting, and include a bust of Vespasian, my favourite emperor, looking exactly like Sid James:

And a very pleasing ’severed head in gigantic disembodied claw’ motif, apparently designed to keep intruders from Etruscan tombs:

Which strikes me as very effective – I could do with one by my desk at work.

A dance to the metre of time

I’m having lots of fun with metre at the moment – suddenly it’s all clicked and the rules seem intelligible and easy to use. I particularly like Porson’ Law of the Fifth Foot Spondee, as a pleasingly esoteric piece of knowledge.

Also spending a lot of time revising at the cafe – they’ve started bringing over coffee to me now so I don’t have to pack up every time, which makes me extremely happy. The sunny weather brings more people out to play giant chess:

Although at 4.30 prompt, whether mid-game or not, the lady in charge comes and takes the pieces:

But there’s always tomorrow.