Hello I'm Edith Hall and I'm absolutely delighted to be back at my old stomping ground of the
Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama to talk about the book I've written with
Henry Stead: 'A People's History of Classics'. This is a 200 000 word blockbuster which examines
all kinds of avenues by which non-elites, poor and working-class people in Britain and Ireland
could access the worlds of the ancient Creeks and Romans between the glorious revolution of 1689 and
1939 a neat 250 years and we look at it from many different angles. We look at it from the point
of view of workers reading culture the kind of cheap magazines that they could afford especially
in the 19th century, the poetry that they read and they wrote, their life writing, the visual culture
that they could get access to but one of the most important strands which does keep returning
throughout the book many different chapters is performance culture of many different kinds and
that's all the way from really quite elaborate London West End stage theatricals all the way
down to very déclassé working men's clubs and pornography shows
and the sort of travelling one-man bands that might go around on the tavern circuit
the first one that we really talk about is the extraordinary phenomenon of the early 18th century
fairground spectacle: the most famous of these was by a man called Elkanah Settle
and it was called Siege of Troy and this had a 60 strong cast acting out an extraordinarily
subversive version of Book II of Dryden's translation of the Aeneid
but this was a version of the Troy saga where the Trojans weren't defeated.
Well, the aristocrats were killed but a heroic Trojan cobbler managed to do
a deal with the Greeks and it all ends with a really massive carousal and fantasies of levelling
then as we go through the book there is a whole chapter devoted to the phenomenon of the late
Georgian history plays by James Sheridan Knowles who was an Anglo-Irish radical playwright who used
Plutarch really, the stories of the ancient Roman heroes especially the Gracchi brothers to
basically protest against the corruption of the monarchy, the lack of democratic reform, lack of
parliamentary reform. He was influenced by French revolutionary theater but his Gaius Gracchus which
premiered in 1815 just as the the worst of the post-Napoleonic wars famines were kicking in
and continued to be played in before and after Peterloo in Belfast in Ddinburgh in Glasgow
and in London. It was William McCreedy the great republican
actor who took the role of Gaius Gracchus and it was a really loud polemic against the
monarchy and against the poverty and hunger that the working class was suffering and of course it
got radically censored by the Lord Chamberlain and we're able to trace very particularly what
lines (which are all the most political ones) that the Lord Chamberlain put his blue pencil through
in later chapters we explore for example a very toxic use of classics and class in in relation
to the theater with the weird phenomenon of Caractacus musicals and plays performed by
Welsh school children in the Edwardian era they were all very enthused by Lloyd George and they
identified him with Caradog or Caractacus theancient British chieftain whom the Welsh had
adopted as specifically Wels on slightly dubious grounds but this is the heroic equivalent
of Boudicca, he's the one who who leads Britons against against the tyranny of Rome and
gives a defiant speech in the Roman forum but the purpose ideologically of this play
was to introduce history plays into Welsh schools that would make them proud
of their legacy, use Tacitus and very definitely contributed to the success of Lloyd George's
recruitment drive in WWI which was extraordinarily successful in Wales
large numbers of unemployed and mining men from Wales died in the trenches. We've got far more fun
with the sort of low-life performance cultures and these range from traveling
showman like Billy Purvis one of my favourite guys he's a Scottish bagpiper
but began to realize that what was needed was some entertainment especially for the wives and
children on the race tracks of northern England
and one of the greatest hits of these and we've got
an extraordinary painting of it which is in an art gallery in Newcastle it's of
his version of Nathaniel Lee's great restoration tragedy The Rival Queens which is basically about
shenanigans in Alexander the Great's camps. That this was a hit of the sort of proletariat going
on to lay their their bets on horses in the north of England is a really wonderful story
and further south we have the phenomena of the sapient pigs and dogs who were named after
ancient Greeks and Romans, one of them was actually said to be reincarnation of Pythagoras
who would do stunts in taverns especially around the Northamptonshire circuit
where they would do things like for example woof or snuffle or bark or do their paws or snouts
pointing at different books so that they could answer questions about Ovid's Metamorphoses
they answered questions about Plutarch's heroes and further south actually in central London
our great hero is Renton Nicholson who ran an extraordinary club out of the Coal Hole tavern on
the Strand which I'm pleased to say is still one of the favourite watering holes
of the Classics department at King's College London
but they were basically strip shows: he had sex workers acting out scenes from Apuleius' Metamorphoses
the Cupid and Psyche story or Andromeda being saved half naked from her rock or various other
winsome ladies of classical myth and history with very few clothes on indeed but these were
a great hit. We also had all sorts of different performers doing things like pretending to
be Hercules and doing strength performances weight lifters, but at that point I'm going to hand over
to the real expert on beauty and strength performers in classical costumes who is
my colleague Henry Stead. [Henry] And what a thing to be! Thanks Edith. So chapter 18 of our book is about
social class and the classical body throughout the 19th century and some way into the 20th
strength and beauty performers who are almost all from working class families
use reference to the classical world in two key ways: first performers like the Australian beauty
Le Milo, the Welsh strong woman Vulcana, and the Scarborough Hercules Thomas Inch all pictured here
drew on Classical antiquity because it was more or less universally popular in that period
not only was it central to British education but across Europe and the European colonies
classical motifs were used publicly as a kind of shorthand for power longevity and opulence
but as our book also shows classical literature loomed particularly large
in collections of the classical of the classics of world literature insofar as it was widely printed
by the early pioneers of mass publishing and this was for the simple reason that it was both quality
assured and free from copyright all of which goes to show that classical antiquity was therefore
a recognizable and readily marketable theme that would appear to audience members around the world
and across the class spectrum, but just as importantly engaging with the classical was
also a way of legitimizing and valorizing art forms that were traditionally associated
with the lowest echelons of the entertainment industry so the freak show the strip show and the
wrestling match. By training one's gaze on on a man for example lying on what could either conceivably
be a plinth or perhaps an antique couch wearing Roman sandals and in a pose resembling a Greek or
a Roman statue a viewer could offset the dangerous thrill that they were gazing at a naked body
a naked male body with all their muscles in play and with their modesty only gesturally
saved by a tin leaf both covering and at the same time conjuring an idealized pubic region.
The tradition of imitating classical statues in the flesh can be traced back to the 1780s
when Emma Hamilton a blacksmith's daughter from Cheshire developed her famous attitudes in which
she dazzled elite audiences with her classical poses but probably the best and biggest
influence on the trend of strength and beauty performance as it grew in popularity alongside
the burgeoning demand for mass spectacle was the Prussian immigrant and physical culturalist
Eugen Sandow. In Sandow's performance he would lift and sustain extremely heavy objects like men
and horses for example and he would strike elegant poses, tear packs of cards sometimes, and turn
nonchalant somersaults to the rhythms of a waltz, but it was his commoditized scientific
and hugely popular system of physical culture which grew around his carefully curated public
persona which chimed with and offered an apparent cure for the crisis of masculinity that followed
WWI across Europe so however you earned your money and however little you earned, one thing
you could control in a period of post-war economic depression was your own body and Sandow developed
a scientific method of becoming a Hercules based on the measurements of classical sculpture.
His class origins are obscure but he was born in Koenigsberg and as an adolescent worked in the
occupations of artists model and as a prize wrestler before he was to rebrand himself
as the gentleman Hercules and eventually becoming the first and I think perhaps only
Regius Professor of Physical Culture. His example showed people like Vulcana and Thomas Inch and
living statue performers like Le Milo and the Manchester born German immigrant who performed
under the name of Ethelda the Great that a classical veneer could protect their reputation
obscure their working-class origins and appeal to wide audiences across Europe and
the territories of the colonial empires. The act of exploiting one's erotic and physical capital
for commercial gain was in need of careful branding beautiful bodies and strong muscles
had clear associations with sex work and manual labor now the classical brand realized through
bodies clothed thin fleshings, chalked or painted in white enamel and posed as still as marble
this classical brand gentrified both the pose and the gaze
and in doing so reached a fully cross-class audience from the big top to Buckingham Palace
Now from the father of modern bodybuilding to the mother of modern theatre. Edith's and my book
ends with a chapter on the working class communist theatre makers Joan Littlewood and Ewan MacColl
in 1936 MacColl or Jimmy Miller as he was then known walked into a second-hand bookshop in Leeds
and picked up a copy of Aristophanes comedies - this purchase was to spark a long-term interest
for staging radical versions of ancient Greek drama. MacColl was the son of an irregularly
employed Scottish iron welder and his wife who worked as a charwoman born in 1915
by the mid-30s MacColl was himself an unemployed motor mechanic but he was also a revolutionary
theater maker only two years earlier while he was performing in an agit prop troupe
called the Red Megaphones he met his long-term collaborator Joan Littlewood. Littlewood,
now widely regarded as the most influential female director, was the daughter of an unmarried
showroom assistant of a brush manufacturer in Stockwell. Through scholarships she
took up and abandoned a place at RADA before tramping up north with an eye to
sailing to the states so the story goes but when she got to Manchester she met MacColl and
her plans changed. The potential for what theater could do was reignited with a furious passion
they set up together Theatre Union as a theatre of the people it was established specifically to
fight fascism by touring the north of England and bringing cutting-edge political drama
to the masses and they saw in the theatre of the Greeks and Romans the origins of proletarian drama
they also performed politically inflammatory plays which meant that from the 1930s onwards
the pair and all the circle around them were under surprisingly intense surveillance from
the MI5. As known communists they were blacklisted from their jobs in the BBC. Theatre Union performed
Lysistrata between 1938 and 1941. This was a lightly edited version of the translation found by
MacColl in that secondhand bookshop in Leeds it was translated anonymously in 1912 and then reprinted
in 1936. This performance of Lysistrata was a part of their repertoire for a
while but it was not until 1947 that MacColl's new and drastically edited version with extra scenes
of soldiers at the front hit the stage under the new title of Operation Olive Branch - this version
of Lysistrata challenged the motives behind WWII presenting it as an extension of the class
war by other means the workers of the world were fighting and dying in their thousands
for the enrichment of arms manufacturers and the power games of the hegemonic classes.
They later grew to regret this line but it was one help by many of
the radical left at the time in terms of career progression which I think is a term that that
Littlewood and MacColl would have despised Operation Olive Branch was a big breakthrough
the company finally got their long London run and as you know the rest is modern theater history
it is really interesting to see how the centrality of ancient drama and their deep
commitment to Communism even the strong presence and contribution of MacColl have in recent
years fallen away from our reception of Jane Littlewood as she has settled
into her role as national heroine trailblazer of modern theater theatrical techniques.
So today Edith and I have just shared a few mugshots from our gallery of People's Classics
which we really hope might offer a fresh and democratic ancestral backstory for the discipline
of classics which of course is blighted by its imperial and deeply conservative past
[Fiona] Thank you. First of all welcome Edith and Henry this time live
with us and thank you Henry for for making that fantastic film which i think gave us all
more than a sample of the extraordinary riches on offer in this this book and and I
really do have to begin by congratulating you both on quite an extraordinary achievement
I have looked and seen that it comes in at
some 600 pages so I can only congratulate you on the length
We're going to enjoy a number of questions from the significant number
of people who are on on this call watching this live but I know today we've asked you
especially because you're you're giving this talk for the Archive of Performances of Greek and
Roman Drama we've asked you to highlight the performance dimension
in the broader sense I'm pleased to to note of the book but I suppose I
really do need to ask, it comes in at two chapters in a very long book but I
just wondered if you wanted to comment and maybe Henry
you touched on this you talked about how manual labor and sex workers were in many ways
not only in the front line of of communicating
with the help of the classics to an extraordinary cross-cultural audience and I wonder
is this one reason why
even if you only have two chapters devoted to theatre as we understand it
the performance dimension of your narrative is actually a very important one.
I don't know whether this speaks maybe immediately because Henry talked very much about Sandow and
I've noticed already that there are a few people in the chat who are very interested in Sandow
but he seems to be a very good example of the way that performances are kind of
crucible and a meeting point for multiple cross-cultural cross-class encounters?
Absolutely he is a great example - I guess he timed
it right, he came in when there was this massive mushrooming
the increase of leisure time and then the exploitation of that leisure time
by not only people in their time when they weren't working
but also by those who wanted to make money out of that leisure so
he's a good example of someone who knew that classics needed to be
commoditized is the word I used and and that is the way that
the classics really got disseminated beyond the elite in some ways you know the end of the
19th century and this is more Edith's
territory really you know the actors also had
operated on that lower social level and you know they were
the first who were communicating the classics
by staging the plays but often they've historically been overlooked by the
theater, like the directors and the middle classes who kind of hoover up the praise
Maybe Edith would like to come in here and and talk about the
fairgrounds in the 18th century and how as you say Settle's Siege of Troy ran
for an extraordinary number of decades
Actually I just need to correct we actually have four whole chapters today!
There's history plays, there's the Welsh school ,theatricals there's Red Megaphones which which
we round off the book; there's also a very great deal of the section on underworlds that whole
section those six chapters are absolutely packed with showmen of different kinds so I think it's
actually more like a fifth of the book. Having said that I didn't want
to repeat stuff that you and I had explored in our several chapters on Burlesque in the
classical ballets from the very end of the Georgian period
it really kicks off around the accession of Queen Victoria and lasts all the way through to
Gilbert and Sullivan who I didn't want to talk much about because that's
my former PhD student: Peter Swallow's got a big book coming out on that soon.
What happens and we try to make this very clear in the first of the four sections is that with
the invention of classics as a discipline and it is invented under that name in almost exactly
1700 just after the publication of a translation of the Aeneid and actually before Pope's
start coming up is that you have an almighty cross-cultural cross-class tussle over whose
classics - who it belongs to, which in many ways and we try to make this clear in our epilogue
adumbrates exactly what's happening today with on the one hand the non-availability of the Latin
and Greek languages except to seven percent of our secondary school kids in private schools
but the biggest popularity of classical culture in terms of documentaries
and computer games and movies and TV miniseries that we've seen for a very long time and we
actually trace a direct argument between people advocating reading this
stuff as much as you can in the classics in the first three decades of the 18th century
and people already with money setting up, this is when you get this explosion of small private
schools all across the land to prepare people: anybody with money wanted to buy their
son an education in Latin and Greek and you have very clear battle lines drawn and I
think Settle is a very insouciant individual who sees exactly how you can monetize book two
of the Aeneid with a big Trojan horse contraption at Bartholomew Southwark Fair
and you could get actors unbelievably cheap in the summer months during the fairs because they
found it extremely difficult to get there to work. I'm quite sure this summer if we set up fairground
theater with the fact that actors have been unemployed they'd have been queueing
up to be the 24th Trojan spear bearer! But I think it was the very insouciance
it's saying "we have classics too". You also have a very very
very wobbly margin between the internal audience of Trojans and actually the London proletariat
who knew that they were vaguely supposed to be descended from Brutus and from Troy themselves
and they together cheer on the serial murders and suicides of these aristocrats at a
time when after the 17th century and the incredible changes in constitution and class
struggle you've got a huge cynicism about politics and in all its forms so you've
got a insouciance of form and medium and of content
and you could see it really annually from about 1697
in conjunction with with the publication of Dryden and the last puppet version
that we've got is is nearly 1750. So you're talking one of the most famous performance events
that continues. Even Cameron Macintosh dreams of 40-year runs for musicals
As you say is is quite an extraordinary run and and just so interesting
you end up with with the longevity perhaps above all in popular forms like
the puppet theatre and and we do know that they move of course internationally and
as much in South America as they did um elsewhere and are reborn
the writers of the late Georgian and Victorian burlesques knew all about these
the siege of Troy was much republished so when you when you have the Brough brothers or
ernard were coming along in the mid 19th century with Homeric burlesques you know they they had
Settle's incredible commercial successes. I would just like to say before we
move off from from Troy, what I love is this is actually run by
a mother-daughter theatrical group Mrs Minn and her daughter you can actually see one of them
in that famous Hogarth engraving literally drumming up the custom
so you've got you've got not only go working class performers
entrepreneurs but you've got female working class entrepreneurs when I first discovered
the Siege of Troy simply couldn't believe it as far as I'm aware nobody has written about
it before except a few dismissive footnotes in books written in 1920 saying this stuff
is beneath contempt, "we don't want to put it in our books about Georgian theatre" completely neglected
as usual because of the class angle and the very last thing I'll say on that is it's lovely to be
talking to you guys because i'm sure none of the people in this audience would agree with
the now consistent trope of the reviews of our book which is that it's "unbalanced" because we
don't bring in the upper class viewpoint. And I want to say to them, when Richard
Jenkins published The Victorians in Ancient Greece, where is the working-class viewpoint?
Who said his book was unbalanced?We're trying to correct the balance!
in terms of balance as you say if you're writing about performance you're
very often finding the most entrepreneurial as well as the most successful of the performers are
in fact the women and I've enjoyed that very very much in your book. I'm going to
probably rather ineptly try and keep my eyes on or my ear on what how you respond but my eye
on some of the questions and this is a question from Claire Barnes which will raise a few smiles
because she is in the room but she has written it in the chat
she begins by saying when the war poets from elite backgrounds engage with
classical themes there is an implication that they're seeking refuge in the classicism of
their education, what do you understand to be happening when these themes
are invoked by performers from politically or socially divergent educational backgrounds?
so how different is what happens when very different
kinds of performers run with the same themes
Thanks for the question, basically I think
you see something very different from the working class poets you see
one of the themes that keeps coming up is not so much an escapism
or a kind of refuge in their past and educational backgrounds but more of a looking
to the classics and finding in it examples that kind of valorize their struggle and also
to valorize and glamorize in a way
their own experience that they see in the same material but they pull out different
messages on the whole so an example would be
you often see the trades being celebrated they're really nicely creative
ways of establishing the tradition of one's trade um not only in biblical but also classical
culture particularly mythology but it's got a slightly
commercial twinge and that's another thing that keeps coming up is that
it's written not as a reflection so much as a projection forward and it's trying to change
the contemporary world by recourse to the classics
specifically. On the war poets the really important chapter in our book is chapter 24
on Jones's 'In Parenthesis' which is this extraordinarily long and savage modernist epic
by somebody who had fought not as officer class - every single one of the famous war poets
was officer class - and in 'Stand in the Trench, Achilles' Elizabeth Vandiver
simply doesn't mention Jones's 'In Parenthesis' which is the only one from the perspective
of somebody who fought as a non-officer in the trenches and it is savagely anti-war - I mean
savagely not in terms of any taking up any political position but it's an exposure of
the utter degradation of the barbed wire and the mud, and it's modernist in form
it's baffling how it's been neglected. His name is inscribed on the list of war poets
in Westminster Abbey but when that list was revealed in a major ceremony
overseen by Ted Hughes when he was poet laureate, all except two of the war poets were were read out
guess who was missing? he working class non-officer. So I decided we just had to
make reparations to that and although it's not performance if you want the class
element and in war poetry then you really can't afford to leave out 'In Parenthesis'
I'm looking in the chat and I notice from Judith Hallett
there's a question or a real interest in Sandow and other Eastern European emigré Jews and she's
asking have you explored the reception of classics in this particular demographic?
And to ask the obvious follow-on question, in any
other minority groups in the period that you discuss?
Thank you Judy. The example
of Ethelda the Great's quite a good one because she was part of a very poor
German immigrant family and they kind of got together and were all living
in Manchester and there was a huge community of really really poor immigrants there and
basically yes she actually came out of that but apart
from mentioning her a bit we haven't done any sustained research into that particular area
I was very pleased when we did
the index of the number of British Jews most of of course from eastern European origins
who came up in different things, partly because the early Communist party and Socialist
party and Labour party in Britain were packed out with east end Jews and they
were very important part of the working-class intellectual movement but also theatre people
I'm trying to remember his name now but one of the most popular musical comedies
in the Edwardian period was called 'The Greek Slave' which was a very insouciant version
inspired a bit by Terence and things but the important point is that it's actually
a slave who gets to marry the master's daughter, it's got very strong class politics
we have several pages on that and that's by a guy called Hall and I can't remember
his first name, I only remember he's called Hall because it's my name but
from what we all know he's an American who comes and works
in Britain, writes songs for musical theatre... The Jews have played
an important part in that historically in America
We talk about the that all starts with the very first synagogue in Britain is
built under Cromwell. He actually invited a large community of
Sephardic Jews into London when they were getting persecuted on the continent
there's a couple of others that we talk about amongst our autodidacts,
quite a lot of clever Jewish boys from the east end who get into grammar schools
one way or another so if you look at the intakes you'll find that although we
didn't devote a chapter to minorities of any kind - we were much more interested
in regional identity and Christian non-conformism because that
historically played such a massive role in in the working-class movement in Britain
but the Jews come in very strongly in the late 19th century with the trade union movement
and thanks to Lorna Hardwick for adding that Isaac Rosenberg was not officer
class either. To change tack there's a question from Arabella Currie
she says she'd love to know more about how you
excavated these stories - what sort of research did you need to do to find this democratic history
and much of this history do you think
may in fact have to remain undiscoverable. [Edith] Tell them about how I took you to
Travelodges in every rainy city in England to take you to really grotty archives
they were all hosted and run by fantastic
archivists and we were really spoiled you know this is archival research
from the from the olden days it felt like
We were presented with these massive boxes and that was how you could meet
an archivist who were very protective of their material but we were quite lucky
on the whole, being presented with with with boxloads of material to go through
we were on location in these places and in regional
archives and digging through boxes - a smash and grab approach where
you just get boxes lined up and then filtered through and we were
led by the material, that's the thing. As well as what you know about balance
we were dealing with with material from the time and following it
we were following our noses and the way that people spoke about about classics and class
was their own experience and we often got good
tips from elderly people who remembered what their grandparents had done
there was quite a lot of actual oral stuff in it but I would have to say two
other things: one is that Henry and I just complimented each other brilliantly,
he knows an awful lot about Latin poetry as in his first book,
'Cockney Catullus' - he'd already worked out quite a lot of ways of finding
demotic dimensions to the reception of Latin poetry and mine is Greek and more philosophical
and historical so that worked extremely well - I chose him
the other thing is that, and this really needs to be told to people
is that I started collecting this stuff in 1980, OK so
I had piles and piles and pile, having been very active in in in the Labour movement in in the 1980s
I met a lot of people I went and interviewed personally before they died, people
like Jeffries and de Ste. Croix and George Thompson - in the 80s these were the old Communist
guard. You can't write a book like this in three years; it cannot be done
Henry often ran with something I said "we've got to do something about Joan Littlewood"
and he's just amazing - I might say "we have to do something about Joan Littlewood"
because I've always known that 'Oh what a lovely war' came out of her experience with Lysistrata
at a fundamental level but his capacity
he's just a natural - it's a bit like when I was working with you
You know I'm good at the big picture but your nose for this telling phrase in some letter
that just clinches the argument so it's to me just a great ode to
to collaboration and the combined skills being greater than the sum of
their parts. But there were other projects
that were coming at the same time: Writing Lives is a brilliant project
by a scholar in Liverpool whose name I have momentarily forgotten but it's really great and
you know people are sifting through the same it all started with the
with the autobiographies didn't it so we split up the letters and of the alphabet
and that was my job really for a year at least: reading nearly 700 working-class
autobiographies that no classicist has ever read and I would order them up
at the British Library. They actually gave me a special compensation to have
more books because I'd get through them in the day and I was just scanning through
and turning them around - I was that weird guy with the trolley
We have to thank Mr Anthony of the rare books room
who is named in our thank yous but without him
I could not have finished the footnotes last year
Coming from your responses there Gideon Nisbet wants to know how much
of your archival research didn't end up in the book and in some ways that's
a difficult question, is there going to be a sequel I mean?
I don't know about a sequel but with my students I'm looking at Scottish working-class
receptions at the moment and there's so much more but like Edith said
each chapter can be mined further and there's a lot more material out there
whether will it remain undiscovered it doesn't necessarily have to be like that
it's just obviously there's been some loss because
very often a working-class man who didn't achieve some kind of status
you know in order to reflect on his life and therefore publish his memoirs like
that material obviously doesn't exist if if s/he didn't write it and that's important as
as well because very often women didn't write those reflections and if they did
they wrote them under their married name and therefore it's quite hard to find so there are
lots of holes but we have tried to flag up in the footnotes when we think
that you know for example certain popular journals we simply didn't have time to read through every
edition and they're not digitized so we very often said this would make a great subject
for a dissertation. We hope that people will will take it up and run with it
I don't think I'm going to write much more about this, I'm absolutely longing to get
stuck into a real ancient Greek text and be a very old-fashioned philologist
But we are going to apply for the AHRC follow on funding that
you did and you got the ebooks... we're eligible for that and
the people we know that we've neglected and there are some like George Smith who translated
the epic of Gilgamesh - that's not quite
Latin and Greek but we're going to make a film
and we're going to apply for money to go on a on a road trip to where a lot
of these people live to get a sense of the real physical landscapes and the garrets and the slums
all over the nation but for various reasons we haven't
done the application but we are going to and a film to stick up on our website
with the most egregiously neglected figures would be more fun for me in my advancing years.
Lots more questions to get through and this is very much
a follow-on to to what you've just said about what's got left out unintentionally
and will soon soon be captured on film: it's a question from Nicolette d'Angelo
with the emergence of of work like yours she says
what implications do you think this has for more contemporary material, social media
and television for example maybe that's a question for Henry
Well I suppose what it could conceivably do is it
gives a methodological background to it I'm just trying to think
mainly of social media, TV, maybe video games...I'm not sure if I understand...
I guess the message is don't neglect it because it's important
Maybe I shouldn't say but it was Comrade Stalin who said that
that quantity is equality and if you get a lot of material that doesn't
necessarily appear to be important according to our biased generally speaking elitist
approach to history then just by sheer quantities of material clubbing together
is it shows that there's a much more important line and it kind of highlights the broader
cultural dynamics which are very difficult to talk about but are probably more important than these
kind of siloed great history figures that we tend to follow and we're very used to
following so that would be my brief response there
I think that social media has huge problems - I've been the victim of hate campaigns myself
but the opportunities for very very very inexpensive and fun dissemination of material
that is generally regarded as difficult and inaccessible are just wonderful
I love vlogging, I love putting my brain to how do I make
quite a difficult idea digestible and colourful...there are dozens of wonderful Twitterers out there
Classics Twitter is a thing of of joy and beauty so I'm absolutely all for it - I think simply
the lesson from the past if you look in 1720 all the ways that somebody walking
the streets of london could access the Greeks and Romans it was equally sort of fragmentary
very little of it required expert knowledge of languages if any at all so I think
to get back to what Henry said we are really trying very hard to give a back story
to a classics where you're not constantly terrified you're going to make a mistake
and someone's going to say you're an idiot because that is the Classics I really hate
One last question and it's from Lily Beckett
do you think there's a greater more imaginative, value in working-class receptions of classics
the value of a fragmentary understanding perhaps versus an institutional education?
I've certainly found that people get hold of
one idea or one image on a beautiful ancient vase or something and it may often be
because it's the only one the one that immediately comes to mind is a trade unionist actually
called Edith Hall in 1910 who wrote about how
she had only come to life the first time she ever came back was actually when she read Thomas Hardy
and she read Tess of the d'Ubervilles
she found out about Aeschylus's Clytemnestra killing her husband and the blood...
and that for the first time when she read Tess she had felt here was a very
famous writer Thomas Hardy writing about her: she could relate to this heroine so although she
never did any more classics after that, that one encounter has really stayed with me
so your answer to your question from my point of view would certainly be yes. I can't think of any
brilliant examples either I think you could in your Latin poetry though couldn't you Henry?
Where people like obsess on Mycenas and how do they deal with Mycenas?
Yeah definitely. I'm a bit careful about
assuming that the understanding of the classics would necessarily be fragmentary
because of class origin but I understand the thrust of the
question now and the key value for me would be that it's just different
you see people drawing differently on the same material, often in in ways that that
are extremely enriching and capture a diversity of experience that is otherwise not there
As a classical receptionist it shines a really important light on the modern world and
illuminates the reception context because for example with Mycenas people
are drawing on Horace's odes and through reading those connections you understand
the importance of the patron from the 1730s on
and the importance of the people who were having to lift
others up because that was really the only rule
to be able to quit your your job as a labourer in order to
to spend more time writing so that's the working class poets group
and the value in it just extraordinarily creative.
Every member of every class has an equally fragmentary relationship with the
classics you know
we all have a very partial relationship with the ancient world.
Thank you both very much. I began by thanking you and congratulating you
before we say goodbye to you properly I think we need to thank those members of
the audience who've given us some really really good questions
So I began by thanking you for
coming, and congratulating you on on quite a remarkable achievement but I think what's
become more apparent than ever today is that we all need to thank you very much for uncovering
a really important new research area and one that yes Edith you've thought about since 1980
but not enough of us have thought about until now and I think it's very
very good news that we've got so many younger people here who are asking really
important questions and wanting to take this research in new directions um and so you
again congratulations for having having done that and thank you all for for being with us
If anybody wants and can't afford to buy a book, email me personally
through my website and I will get them a copy
I'd just like to thank you Fiona and the APGRD
you always have the best events! Well that's extremely nice
and Claire Barnes who's been the one behind the scenes. And also on behalf of Claire Barnes and
Claire Kenward and and of course this is very much my request maybe when those massive
boxes that are now under your bed just get too much to live with the APGRD might
be able to find a home for them! We definitely would very much value your archival material.
All the best to both of you and to everyone. Bye everyone, thanks.