Prolegomena to a Steampunk Catullus: Classics and SF more

Prolegomena to a Steampunk Catullus: Classics and SF Thank you, Tony, good afternoon to you all, and thank you all for giving me your time this afternoon. Like Tony, I’m a classicist, which is to say I research and teach in the literature and culture of ancient Greece and Rome. Within that field, my specialisation is ancient epigram, a genre of short and often funny poems – more or less the precursor of the limerick. I first met Tony at an Eastercon many years ago, and then saw him again a week later at the CA – the annual conference of the Classical Association of England and Wales, which always takes place in the Easter vac so that schoolteachers and university lecturers and students can attend. Classics, then, has an Eastercon of its own, and I’ve argued in print that’s not the only way in which our discipline resembles the fandoms that grow up around SF, comics, and cult media. Back then, of course, it was quite rare to see the same faces at both. I remember once mentioning to my tutor at university that a passage in Theocritus very much reminded me of a comic I was reading at the time – Neil Gaiman’s Black Orchid, for those interested – and him shushing me and telling me that, if I was into that kind of stuff, I should keep very quiet about it if I wanted to be taken seriously as a Classicist. I remember, too, that back then, people such as Tony and myself were solitary islands of glamour among the veritable sea of tweed that was the CA, which at that stage still very much had the feel of a genteel, elderly clique, run largely by and for the benefit of cobweb-encrusted schoolmasters. The last ten or fifteen years have seen something of a sea-change. I hardly ever make it to the CA now (it’s got too expensive now the universities have realised there’s big money in the conference trade) but it’s become much more of a professional conference, with exciting research being presented from across the world. And these days there are funky panels about classics and popular media. Subjectively, what I remember setting the ball rolling, some time in the mid- to late Nineties, were a couple of CA papers on Classics and popular fiction that threw up some surprises. 1 The first was on Lindsey Davis, the well-known author of the Falco series of historical detective stories set in ancient Rome. Please don’t get the impression from what follows that Lindsey is anything other than a jolly good egg – she’s pretty sharp in her own way and went on to contribute a lot of her time and skills to the CA, including serving a term as its President. Now you’ll probably be familiar with the critical concept of the Death of the Author. Briefly put, that as soon as a writer sends a text out into the world they become just another reader of it, with no more authority to say what it means than anyone else, and that this makes the Author as a person much less important as an object of study. Learning about their life and opinions might be fun in and of itself, but it doesn’t tell you what the text means, because that’s something that’s figured out as you go along, in the interaction between the text and its readers, and perhaps also between readers and other readers, who in turn bounce their interpretations off the culture at large. As fans, you’ll probably feel some sympathy for this view, because it pretty nicely articulates what we do with texts. The only ‘Author’ here is the Author-in-the-text: that is to say, the narrative strategies and manipulation of point of view that constitute style. Anything the author then says about what they’ve published isn’t a judgement from on high – it’s just more text, which in turn becomes fair game for literary-critical analysis and deconstruction. At that CA panel, a postgraduate student gave a very smart paper on Lindsey Davis’s first published novel, The Silver Pigs, that picked up some suggestive recurring images in the text. Without wishing to spoil the plot for anyone who’s not read the book, I think the gist was that writing, and especially the pen, is a very significant thematic strand. And then at the end Lindsey Davis, who was in the audience, stood up and said: “But that wasn’t what I meant at all!” Classicists had by then bought into the idea of the Death of the Author in a pretty wholesale way, but in retrospect it helped that all our authors safely were dead, by a couple of thousand years in most cases. We weren’t used to engaging with contemporary texts at all, and explaining to Lindsey that from our point of view she was as Dead as Socrates was beyond the explanatory powers, and more particularly the tact, of the assembled company. Clearly we were going to have to up our game in one way or another. 2 The other surprise came with a paper on, yes, Classics and SF – I forget the exact title but you can bet Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series came into it somewhere, riffing as it so famously does on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The question came up, and I think it was Nick Lowe who posed it: how many of those classicists present had a half-finished science fiction novel kicking around in a bottom desk drawer somewhere? I swear to you that half the hands in that room went up – perhaps even more. Of course, the people attending that panel were a self-selecting sample, geeking as we did simultaneously in two subcultures – Classics and SF – which most people would consider polar opposites. But of course the connections are there, and always have been, and suddenly we were all coming out of the closet and discovering we weren’t alone in having a foot in two different worlds – itself of course a very geeky, science-fictional motif. Up to that point Nick Lowe had been something of a voice crying in the wilderness – you’ll probably know him for his brilliant film review column in Interzone, ‘Mutant Popcorn’, which won a BSFA award last year and which he’s now been writing for over a quarter of a century. Until then, though, the two Nicks – the Nick of fandom, and the Nick who published on Athenian drama – had been living notionally separate existences, just as had the two Gideons and two Tonys and two Lynn Fotheringhams and so on. The signs were there if you knew to look – the dress sense, the obsession with gadgets – but now a love that had dared not say its name was out in the open. The scholar and the fan could integrate into one whole person. Or at least, that was the plan. Practically overnight, it seemed, we were coming up with a new way of doing Classics and gearing it to modern popular culture – a partial reinvention of the discipline, which we now call Classical Reception Studies. [PowerPoint] There had been a high-culture, top-down version of this before – the study of Classical Tradition. But now the emphasis began to shift away from grateful passivity – the glories of the past infusing and guiding the present – towards an idea of the active audience, forever constructing ancient worlds out of hand-me-down materials. In the mid- to late Nineties, Maria Wyke at Reading 3 showed that you could teach and research the ancient world on film – Ben-Hur and Spartacus, alongside or even instead of Tacitus and Vergil – and still call yourself some kind of classicist, and still be taken seriously. Covering her teaching there, during one of her countless research leaves, is what got me the contract for Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture, [PowerPoint] a book whose big schtick is that classicists and fans are two flavours of the same lollipop. And then Gladiator happened, doing wonders for our recruitment onto Classical Civilisation degrees, and then 300 – the best excuse ever for a shiny second edition – and the rest is history. Maria’s a Professor these days, and Nick’s conducting what I know will be very valuable research in the reception of ancient Greece in popular fiction. And Tony edits the CA’s newsletter. All your Classics is belong to us. Since the 90s we’ve considerably broadened the kinds of media text we engage with. To be honest, I personally find Ben-Hur quite boring for a lot of the running time, although in retrospect I can see how sticking with major studio films of the Fifties and Sixties – recognised as modern ‘classics’ in their own right – must have helped soothe our crankier senior colleagues, back when reception study was first being slipped into the curriculum as something more than a bit of end-of-semester fun and games – the equivalent of Hangman in the last lesson of the school year. Now, though, pretty much anything goes – a brace of conferences in 2006-7 covered everything from Buffy (of which I’m a huge fan), to videogames, to children’s literature, to porn. Classics Hell was where Tony and I got to meet Bettany Hughes, who is, I’m pleased to report, incredibly sweet as well as very bright; and Greeks and Romans in the Buffyverse (or the train to and from it) may have been when a discussion with Nick Lowe, about how the internal complexity of the DC and Marvel Universes makes them just like Greco-Roman mythology, inspired Roz Kaveney to write her excellent book on superheroes. The porn bit, I regret to say, was by me; I made them put a disclaimer in the conference programme, indicating that it might induce blindness. And since then it’s been published by a scholarly press; which would never have happened in a million years, back in ‘old’ Classics. (And it’s just as well it saw print,because I was showing clips from 4 the source material in the background as I gave the paper, and I don’t think anyone in the audience heard a word I said once I’d pressed Play.) The last Class. Civ. module I taught had as its set text, not an ancient author or indeed Ben-Hur or even Gladiator, but Seasons 1 and 2 of Xena: Warrior Princess. [PowerPoint] It was actually a very rigorous course– these days there’s an extensive bibliography both on the Xenaverse and on fan studies generally, much of which is all the more valuable for not being written from a classicist’s or ancient historian’s point of view; and I dined well that year on the royalties from Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture, which I was able to set as the coursebook. If a student these days wanted to draw comics into the discussion of an ancient text, chances are they’d get a much more sympathetic hearing. There’s a new volume out from Oxford University Press called Classics and Comics, edited by a couple of American academics – the comics fans in the room will recognise what’s being parodied on the cover – and a sequel, Son of Classics and Comics, is planned for the near future. Both Tony and I hope to be in it – him with his material on the Trigan Empire, a quasi-Roman science-fiction comic strip by Mike Butterworth, and me with Masamune Shirow’s cyberpunk-ish manga, Appleseed, which is shot through with Greek mythology by way of Robert Graves. My own piece in the first Classics and Comics isn’t actually about modern comics at all – it’s about an ancient precursor to the graphic novel, a fragment of a papyrus book-roll which presents a satirical twist on the adventures of Xena’s buddy, Hercules. [PowerPoint] Hercules is being interviewed about his Labours, and he talks a good game, but his comic interlocutor keeps undercutting the hero’s self-promotion by sticking in funny pictures. We keep getting hints that the true story behind the Labours isn’t nearly as heroic as the version we’re getting from Hercules. For instance, in the second picture in this sequence, he’s performing his famous first Labour – grappling with the Nemean Lion. But if you look closely you can see that, unlike the supposed lion in the third image, this lion is standing on a stepped base. This isn’t a lion, then, but a statue of 5 one – it’s a posed shot, all part of his PR. In the text that accompanies the final picture, Hercules boasts that he wrestled the lion to the floor – but the Greek used, meaning “on the ground”, is khamai. Put that together with the Greek for lion, leOn, and you get Hercules wrestling something much less heroic – khamai-leOn, a chameleon, and the socalled lion in the picture is inked in green and does look rather like a lizard. Now, I worked with papyri for some years, on an imaging project – essentially as a photographer, web-monkey, and all-round dogsbody. That’s when I came across this thing. I’m a rotten papyrologist, if I even count as a papyrologist at all, and I’m not sure I do. But I am a comics fan, and that’s why I was able to figure out what the pictures were doing, when the proper papyrologists had long since given up. (In this case the particular debt I owe is to Alan Moore’s Miracleman.) The experts who tried to figure out the Hercules papyrus in successive scholarly publications back in the 1950s weren’t engaged with the popular culture of their own day – or if they were, they didn’t dare admit it, but I think they genuinely weren’t – and that made mixed-media narrative a massive blind-spot for them. They thought pictures in books were strictly for children and slow learners; they had no concept of a dynamic interaction between texts and images – that each could add nuance to, or indeed subvert, what the other meant. Whereas I was able to try out my findings on various random fellow-commuters on trains, and they all got it very quickly, because comics are more visible now in mass culture... and because they hadn’t locked themselves in a library for most of their lives. I also got to present my research at two successive small-press comics conferences in Oxford – CAPTION, for those who know it, which is now the longest-running comics conference of any kind in the UK. That was scarier than presenting it to academics, because that audience really knew how comics worked. But they basically bought the package, which was how I knew I was right and got the nerve to work it up for publication. Which, in turn, is how I became something of a go-to person for ancient book-illustration, and ended up at an academic conference in Oxford a couple of years ago surrounded by world experts on the so-called Artemidorus Papyrus [PowerPoint]: 6 two substantial fragments of an ancient book-roll, which seem to follow on from one another. I don’t have an image of the whole thing, and if I did, you wouldn’t be able to make much out, because it’s three meters long; but these snapshots give some idea of how miscellaneous the content is. It’s a weird mix: bits of text on one side of the roll, from at least one and (I think) probably more works on ancient geography, but also various kinds of illustration on both, including real and mythical animals, an uncompleted map, and pen-and-ink studies of hands, feet, and heads. Because I’d hung around comics creators for years, I had a good sense of what that artist was about – hands and feet in particular need lots of practice because they’re bastards to draw. As the only comics fan in the room, I was thus able to point out that the initial editors (who luckily weren’t there that day) had almost certainly put the two pieces the wrong way round, and that it wasn’t at all the kind of book they’d thought it was. This interpretation is now accepted by the papyrological community as correct, Nisbet 2009 is cited as the key publication, and the original editors probably hate me: their massive first edition represented years of labour, had only been published the year before, and costs nearly five hundred pounds a copy. I’m still nowhere near being a good papyrologist, but sometimes being the right kind of geek can get you a surprisingly long way. I’m probably not a terribly good classicist, either. There are some holes in my traditional skill set: I work on epigrams, a species of poem, but I can’t do metre to save my life. But I do know how to work with serial narrative, because I’ve read and collected comics, and watched far too much Buffy and BSG; and epigrams invariably come to us in sequence with lots of other epigrams; and connections are there to be found between poems at different points in the series, which gives a larger meaning and structure to the series as a whole; and messing around with the running order changes what each poem means. A bit like comics or serial TV. 7 So, geek wisdom rules the ancient world – not that some kinds of geek wisdom haven’t always. But I’m aware I’ve digressed at least a little; the Artemidorus papyrus isn’t science-fiction, although the Heracles one might have a claim to alternate-history status in the Xena mould, and it’s the relation between Classics and SF that I most want to talk to you about today. There are some obvious avenues which I’m not going to explore, because they’re just too obvious. So I won’t be comparing Asimov with Gibbon; or poking into any Roman-style galactic Empires, in or out of Star Wars; or paying a visit with this or that incarnation of the Doctor to ancient Rome or Pompeii; or mourning for Adonais with Plato’s Stepchildren. Or even talking about Battlestar Galactica, although I was tempted, and not just by the obvious mythological allusions – Apollo, Artemis, and so on. As a take on the cycles of history, “All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again” is pretty much word-for-word out of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, although whether that’s by accident or design would be hard to call. Nor will I tread the broad and well-worn path of arguing that this or that ancient text is a prototype SF – it’s a theme that’s pretty much been done to death, the usual suspects being Lucian’s astronautical True History and various bits of horrid Plato. (These tropes of generic refusal, by the way, have a classical pedigree – they’re Hellenistic, by way of Latin love elegy.) What we really need instead, what we’re not yet getting from the very slender scholarly literature on the subject, and what I have neither the time nor the depth of expertise to give you today, is a completely fresh treatment of how the two worlds of SF and Classics come together, and of what happens when they do. In case he missed it, that was a big hint to Tony to write his damned book already – we’re all looking forward to it a lot. For myself, I don’t get to read as much SF these days as I’d like, simply because I don’t have the time or energy right now to read much at all that isn’t work-related – but (immoderate quantities of Buffy slash aside) I do continue to enjoy one guilty pleasure, which I’ll take as the point of departure for my larger argument. This is the Foreigner series of novels, by C. J. Cherryh, a prolific and talented author whose work I regard with 8 both affection and respect. [PowerPoint] Cherryh is a former teacher of classics in schools, and her rather charming self-authored website includes an interactive course which you can use to learn Latin, the way the Romans learned it themselves (or at least the way she thinks they must have, and who’s to say she’s wrong). She’s been writing SF since the late Seventies, and has won numerous awards; you may know her for works including Downbelow Station and Cyteen, both set in her increasingly capacious Alliance/Union universe. The Foreigner series, in which to date Cherryh has published a round dozen novels, is by implication set in some remote corner of this universe. The novels centre around the Earth of the atevi, a richly described culture of humaniform aliens in which assassination is an accepted part of daily life, and with which a hopelessly lost and stranded colony of human former space-farers has reached an uneasy coexistence as separate states. Humans and aliens now share the one planet and, as the series opens, are building up a common technological base, with the long-term view of going back into space as a joint project and on terms of technological and political parity. The formal and aristocratically conservative culture of the atevi is overtly reminiscent of feudal Japan, and their complex, inflected language has a pseudo-Japanese ring to it – atevi, aiji, machimi, nadi, kabiu. Syntactically, though, it’s put together very much along the lines of the author’s beloved classical Latin. An appendix at the back of Foreigner helpfully declines a sample noun, complete with nominative, genitive, accusative, and ablative cases. All that’s missing is the Latin dative. [PowerPoint] If Cherryh had been taught her Latin in the UK, she’d have learned these four cases in the order: nominative, accusative, genitive, ablative; but she learned from an American textbook, so the atevi go from the nominative directly to the genitive case, meaning ‘of’, just as in Latin. Reflecting the hardwired propensity of their species for complex mathematics, the atevi language also has multiple plural forms, a feature which recalls ancient Greek – a language which, unusually, has separate sets of noun, verb and adjectival endings not just in the singular and a plural, but in the so-called dual. That’s dual with an A, for when you want to discuss two of a thing, for instance, heroes and their sidekicks. If Homer were writing comics, Batman and Robin would be described in the dual, just like Achilles and 9 Patroclus – and of course much slash would be written in it. There are even special dual forms for ‘the’, if you want to say “the two of them”. Masculine nominative singular ho, plural hoi, dual tO – and of course different forms for feminine and neuter, and for the various cases. The atevi language has, not a dual, but a treble (threes of things) and a decimal (tens of things), and, we’re assured, other pluralities besides. Cherryh wants us to take this alien language seriously, as part of what makes her atevi who they are, both collectively and individually – and thus, helps drive the plot. Her notes on the grammar reassure the nervous human beginning atevi linguistics that basic pronunciation isn’t all that hard – “Also, a foreign accent if at least intelligible can sound quite sexy.” Unless Google is lying to me, and with the exception of pronouns, Japanese basically doesn’t do plural forms at all; which makes me think that Cherryh’s interest in multiple pluralities must have been born here, in her education in classical Greek. So much for the Death of the Author – figuring this stuff out may not be critically du jour, but it is kind of cool. Cherryh’s hardly the only SF author to have had recourse to classical sources. More often, we see allusion to myth and literature. It happens quite a bit, and I imagine examples will come to mind from your own reading. Perhaps sometimes this allusion to classical source material is merely in the hope that some of its high-culture prestige – the Glory that was Greece and the Grandeur that was Rome – will rub off on what the critical mainstream tends to perceive as a grubby genre ghetto. At other times, perhaps, it’s because so many of the stars and constellations that are space-opera’s natural stomping ground are named for figures in classical myth. Depending on your mood, Andromeda is either a constellation in the northern sky (and actually given that name by the astronomer Ptolemy, way back in the second century AD) – or the bondage eye-candy in Clash of the Titans. The use of classical myth and literature in SF is by no means always as schematic or as superficial as my tone here might imply; not by a long shot. Sometimes these writers engage with classical content in quite a nuanced way, effectively urging us to re-examine 10 ancient sources we thought we knew with a fresh set of eyes – Jane Yolen’s The Kindly Ones, which takes Aeschylus’s Oresteia as its thematic stalking horse, might stand as a case in point. The comics fans in the room will know that the climactic story arc of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, titled ‘The Kindly Ones’, goes to the same dark and challenging classical source. Or of course in more recent years there are Dan Simmons’s Ilium and Olympus, which engage assertively with their Homeric epic intertext (and to an extent with Homeric scholarship). There’s plenty of fun there for the reader who knows his or her Iliad, even if only in outline, or indeed the reader who has hung out with classicists. But the Foreigner sequence is the first and only time I’ve seen an SF author choose to mine, not the mythology and literature of antiquity, but its linguistics. (That said, I’ll be delighted and grateful if any of you can point me towards other examples.) To put it another way, and momentarily lapsing once more into the critical faux pas of biographical criticism, it’s her background as a classicist that makes Cherryh the SF author she is – both focused on the difference language makes to how cultures interact and express reality, and properly aware of how disturbing it can be to look across the chasm between two profoundly incompatible cultures. Cherryh’s view, which I think I share, is that one needs a certain amount of practical experience of bilingualism even to recognise at a theoretical level the likelihood of pitfalls when two cultures interact, at just those points where the cultures in question appear to see things the same way. In fact, these points of apparent agreement are precisely where potentially disastrous misunderstandings are most likely to occur, and the history of the Earth of the atevi as written by Cherryh conveniently bears this out. This is an author who knows from personal experience that some things just don’t translate, and that a seemingly obvious, word-for-word ‘translation’ can end up inadvertently communicating its opposite. The atevi language doesn’t have a word for ‘trust’, in the same way that English doesn’t have meaningfully close equivalents for basic Roman concepts such as uirtus and pietas. Translate those as ‘virtue’ and ‘piety’ and you get completely the wrong end of the stick. 11 The potential for confusion works in both directions. Ancient Latin and Greek don’t have words for ‘love’, or not for what we mean by love when we say it in English. Try to tell an ancient Roman that you love them by looking the word up in an English-to-Latin dictionary and trusting what you find, and you will definitely be misunderstood, which in a culture of periodic casual mass violence may be unwise. Try to tell an atevi that you ‘like’ them, and there’s no telling what kind of trouble you’ll be stirring up for yourself, in a culture where licensed assassination is a familiar and respectable recourse. In atevi, you can ‘like’ a favourite dessert, but there’s no way of ‘liking’ a person – neither as a word, nor as a concept, because (in the Cherryhverse as arguably in real life) language structures how we experience the world and how we respond to it. To be told a person regards you in the same way they regard a tasty snack is, for an ateva, profoundly disturbing at gut level, and I imagine you would feel the same way. We all – human and fictional atevi alike – feel emotions, and at times we feel them intensely and viscerally, but we feel them within a cultural sphere and a mentality formed by language use. It therefore makes perfect sense that Cherryh’s protagonist in the Foreigner novels, Bren Cameron, the character we’re meant to identify with, holds the position of paidhi – the only official translator between humans and atevi. Not only does he maintain and safeguard the dictionary, in itself a politically very sensitive responsibility, and oversee the ongoing process of technology transfer from humans to atevi; he’s also the one mediator allowed by treaty between the two segregated cultures (not that ‘treaty’ is a word that really translates into atevi either). He’s the only non-ateva who can talk to the world’s hereditary lord of lords, the aiji. His unique linguistic abilities qualify him as the only human who can set foot on the atevi continent and experience their world face to face. By getting inside their language, he can get inside their heads and begin to figure out their needs and agendas, a task which becomes increasingly delicate as the two races begin to approach technological parity and the human colony’s former technical edge becomes eroded. Effectively, this is the Classicist as action hero. 12 As well as Latin tutorials and lists of her books, Cherryh’s website also includes a long rant – rather cutely entitled ‘The Romans: a Soapbox’ – about how the ancient Romans really weren’t the evil Empire that American television audiences get spoon-fed on channels such as Discovery. This is worth quoting: THE ROMANS: A SOAPBOX You know, I have a background in Mediterranean civ. And I am shocked...aghast...at the picture of the Romans being handed the unknowing public by numerous educational programs on television. Wrong, wrong, wrong! my friends. I've spent decades immersed in this culture. I know the Romans from what they wrote in books and what they wrote on bathroom walls and what they built and what they did and refrained from doing, and I'm here to say what you're seeing on the telly is just outright wrong. [PowerPoint this bit] The motives for that wrong input are about the same as those of us who handle such hot topics as race and religion in sf stories where we can make up participants that don't have modern baggage. What the purveyors of "the Romans as Nazis" are doing is much the same---rather than getting into the sticky, embarrassing politics of real Nazi history, we transfer the matter to the Romans, who are safely dead and a convenient high-profile target. Unfortunately they're creating a false history that gets re-shown and referenced by subsequent documentarians who don't go back to original sources and check out what was really the case. Let me shoot down a few misconceptions. If you find this interesting, I can go on for hours. And we haven't even mentioned the Spartans, who've also gotten undeserved bad press.....and let me add, the Egyptians... 13 ... Aaaaand she’s off. Let’s leave her to it and focus in on these few paragraphs. Are the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome, and the future worlds of SF, the same kinds of world? Do we – as writers, readers, broadcasters, and audience members – use them in the same kinds of way, and for the same kinds of purpose?... and if not, why not? A further question: what happens to these classical and science-fictional worlds when they go out of date; when the future, or the past, stops working like that any more? These are very big questions and I’d be insane to suggest that I have any definitive answers, but I do have some basic ideas I’d like to try out on you, and this is the real meat of my talk here today. First, Cherryh’s point about cultural immersion [PowerPoint] It’s the dream of the classicist and of the science fiction fan alike; here, of course, combined in one shouty package. Whether we’re producing or consuming the stories we love, we want to be there – we yearn to be a fly on the wall of a thrillingly alien culture, like the paidhi, and see how things really were back then. And the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome are excitingly and scarily different. One thing I sometimes tell first-year students who’ve not done classics before – and I also say it to students who think they have – is that they should start by imagining that all these people with funny names – Cato, Plato, etc – have blue skin and four arms, and are ten feet tall. There’ll be fewer preconceptions that way, which is to say misconceptions. Insofar as we can tell, which is frustratingly little, they really weren’t much like us at all: we can’t project our values and expectations back onto a Plato or a Cato and expect them to fit. Second, the loud noises about painstakingly acquired disciplinary knowledge and authority to speak I have a background in Mediterranean civ... I've spent decades immersed in this culture... I know this, I know that, and if you disagree with me, you’re wrong. Professional classicists, which is to say people who produce knowledge about the ancient world rather than just consuming it, tend not to come out with stuff like that; it might be kind of slightly true, but we’d feel like tits saying it; and we’re painfully aware 14 of how much we don’t know, and of how impossible genuine immersion really is. We can’t go back there. The one thing we know for sure about the past is that it isn’t there anymore, and the proportionately very few sources that survive can be made to tell any number of different stories about what it was like and for whom. As more and more of us spend more and more time online, it’s increasingly noticeable that the shouty voices saying “I’m an expert! Respect my authoriteh!” about classical topics in discussion forums (for instance, on IMDb when new films come out set in the ancient world) are the autodidacts and armchair historians – the hobbyists, because the pros are busy making knowledge and don’t have the time to get sucked into the vortex of particulate bullshit that is the typical forum thread. In other words, this is the hardcore of ancient-world fandom. These are the people who tell you that Troy censors Homer because Achilles and Patroclus are gay lovers in the Iliad, which they swear they’ve studied at college as part of their Very Important Education. (They’re not, by the way – Achilles and Patroclus, lovers, that is, in the Iliad, or never explicitly – but the ancient Greeks liked to think they must have been. If fanfic had been invented back then, they’d have been writing a lot of A-slash-P.) And then they get into it with the Troy fans, and the wank just keeps on coming... fun, fun, fun, although that’s nothing compared to when the expatriate modern Greeks start going on Alexander the Straight... Cherryh’s clearly not like these people. She has put in the hours; in fact, years of service. But in many ways she’s still functioning as an ancient-world fan, of a particular kind – and I add that qualification because the academic discipline of Classics has some strikingly fannish aspects itself, so from that point of view, I’m as big an ancient-world fan as she is. Because she’s always focused her energies on receiving and transmitting knowledge about the ancient world, and not on figuring out new knowledge about it, she has a different attitude to canon than I do. 15 Of course, there’s no reason she should be conducting original research into ancient Rome: she’s found a pretty satisfying outlet for her creative energies in telling stories about the future instead. And it’s a future she conceives as being like the past, or like the wrong kind of past, in a functional or even ontological sense. By this account, both the ancient Rome of bad documentaries, and the various futures imagined by SF, are empty receptacles – analogical spaces in which we can explore the prejudices and act out the fantasies that are harder to confront head-on even in fiction based in the here and now, still less in real daily existence. The only difference from where Cherryh stands is that it’s OK for SF to use the future to play dress-up, but not for historical so-called documentary to use Greece and Rome in the same way way. And at this point we might ask: why? What’s in the background here – never explicitly expressed, I think, because they don’t need to be – are a couple of important ideas. The first is that the past, and especially the classical past, is our collective responsibility. It is our legacy; we are its curators. I have a certain amount of gut sympathy for this view, although I’m not sure I can bring myself to subscribe to it – I suspect the past gets along fine without us, or at least that all we can achieve in the present by shouting “But they’ve got the togas all wrong!” is make ourselves hoarse. No-one’s really that interested in what classicists and ancient historians have to say about the Greek and Roman past, and every time a professional scholar gets sucked into being an adviser on Gladiator or whatever, they come away feeling as though no-one on the production team was really listening. Which they weren’t. The second idea is cultural ownership. By collectively curating and defending this past, a past which we agree to share, we assert that it belongs to us. Because we fill our museums with its relics, visit its sites, read its texts, and practice its languages, classical antiquity is our past, in every important sense. By asserting property rights we also advance a genealogical claim: even if not a drop of Mediterranean blood flows in our veins (although of course we’re all from all over anyway), we are the spiritual 16 descendants of those grand and glorious classical civilisations. Whatever might be misplaced in translation, fundamentally we’re in sympathy with them. These underlying preconceptions are ideological – that is, they assume the status of the obvious, things everyone sort of knows without even thinking about it. And like any ideological construct, the churn rate is low. In fact, this has been particularly and strikingly true for the Classics in the modern world, in large part, I think, because of the sheer cumulative weight of old and new ideological baggage which the ancient world has been made to shoulder in the present. This is much too large a topic for me to get stuck into it in this talk, but believe me, it’s there – the ancient world has long existed primarily as a function of the present day, serving as an exemplary past which can lend its inherited authority to whatever political or moral agenda we might be trying to peddle. As a direct consequence, most of what most people kind of think they know about ancient Greece or Rome – and I’m not necessarily including the hobbyists here – is out of date by maybe fifty years. And education is part of what keeps the churn rate down. Cherryh is right that TV does produce new factoids from time to time, and that these can creep into our culture’s shared package of assumptions about ancient daily life. Notoriously, Romans never went to the vomitorium to sick up their dinners before Saturday Night Live made it so, some time around 1980. But education, including Cherryh’s own commendable work as a promulgator of Latin, sets a particular version of the past in stone. Often this is sanitised – kid’s stuff aside (The Groovy Greeks and The Rotten Romans), the ancient world that makes it onto schoolbooks is often light on dirt; and also, unsurprisingly, on violence, and especially sex. C. W. Fordyce’s little red Oxford edition of Catullus is an example that lives in infamy – he mentions in passing in the preface that “A few poems that do not lend themselves to comment in English have been omitted”, and then cuts about a third of them. Fordyce was mocked by his reviewers even at the time – the start of the Sixties turned out to be a particularly bad moment to publish an essentially Edwardian commentary – but his edition is still in print and still selling steadily, because those poems just are easier to explain to a bunch of schoolkids 17 without anyone getting embarrassed, or potentially into serious hot water with the headmaster and school governors. This kind of passive censorship by playing it safe is still fairly pervasive at school level, and indeed the set books tend to make it hard to play it any differently. However, in a sense it’s merely a side-issue or specialised instance of the more general and basic problem of how Classics pedagogy continues to live off its own past glories. When I was at secondary school the big history books I was given were called, I kid you not, The Glory that was Greece and The Grandeur that was Rome. The original soundbite is by Poe, but became the titles of two fat tomes by the educationalist John Stobart, first published in 1911 and 1912. My copies were brand-new paperbacks; there’s a good chance that they’re still kicking around at the back of a cupboard somewhere at Dyson Perrins High, and if anyone ever does Classics there again, out they’ll come to gum up the churn cycle once more. Or if they’ve been lost, the books are still in print – they’re out of copyright so they’re cheap, which with school textbooks is always a consideration. When the default turnover of Classical facts and factoids is this slow, it’s small wonder there are still people who continue to insist that the Romans really did go throw up in vomitoria halfway through dinner. Stobart, by the way, went on to become the BBC’s first Director of Education; in the 1920s he was proposing a new radio channel for cultural programmes, called Minerva, for the Roman goddess of wisdom. In his optimistic vision, Roman civilisation remained of vital relevance to the present day for its lasting achievements, in the continuing progress of humankind towards the universal realisation of liberal values and the rule of law. Reading Stobart’s life story in isolation, you’d never know that by the early Twenties the first of Europe’s Fascist dictators, Benito Mussolini, was already experimenting with Imperial Roman fancy dress to glamorise and dignify his abrogation of executive power and subsequent, violent Mediterranean land-grabs. A few years down the line and with World War 2 under way, proclaiming classical Roman paternalism as a cure for social political ills would stop making quite such obvious sense to anyone whose wardrobe wasn’t heavy on eagles and lightning bolts – themselves, of course, impeccably 18 Roman imagery, and dutifully echoed in their turn in a whole parade of post-War toga epics in which Praetorian Guardsmen goose-step and salute their beloved Führer, the Emperor Nero (or Caligula, on Nero’s off days). But Cherryh’s version of Roman history is still Stobartian in its essential outline – her Rome still has grandeur, and only ever conquered other people for their own good. Typically at their own invitation! Slaves were treated well, and the Romans had never really wanted to end up with all those slaves on their hands in the first place – it more or less happened by accident. Again, it’s all there in the rant on her website if you feel like an interesting read. Now, I agree with Cherryh that the Romans were not Nazis, not in the slighest – I sometimes let myself get ticked off at stuff I see on TV, just the same as she does – but I don’t think they were much like this, either. Rome did not acquire a slave workforce and a world Empire reluctantly or by accident. Still, it’s a version I recognise very well, because this is exactly the story I was told back when I was learning Latin, back in the early to mid-80s; presumably because it was the version my teacher had been told, back when he was learning his Latin in, I guess, the 1950s – he’d have been handed his copy of Stobart too; and so on. It keeps coming around, time and again, in the Rome of mass culture; and education has its part to play. No-one in universities has believed anything like this for seventy years, but that doesn’t matter, because no-one’s that interested in listening to us. We might tell stories that unsettle their comfortable sense of ownership, and that thus contradict common sense. The past we describe isn’t always as familiar as its prospective customers require. What this means is that it’s actually very hard for these discredited versions of the past to go out of date, at least in the popular imagination; and that’s fair enough, because they continue to prove useful to people in the present. As classicists, we don’t have the power to delete them, and even if we did, I’m not convinced we’d have the right to do it. It’s not a past we actually own, any more than anyone else does. Instead we can learn lots by studying how and by whom these academically defunct pasts are being used. What we 19 learn won’t tell us much of anything about the real ancient world – whatever that means; but it might tell us plenty about our world, and that’s kind of nifty. Futures, on the other hand, are often gone in the blink of an eye, and not just because the present keeps catching up on them, one day at a time, until suddenly they’re gone. I’m sure I wasn’t the only teenage Escape from New York fan who felt let down when 1988 came and went, and Manhattan still wasn’t a maximum-security prison. We’ve only got till 2019 to acquire those off-world colonies, so that Blade Runner can happen, and I don’t think we’re going to make it. But futures also go out of date because our shared fears, desires, and fixations continue to change, in ways that only seem predictable with hindsight, if at all. They evolve in dialogue with the technology which increasingly populates our daily lives: we didn’t know that mobile phones would become as ubiquitous as ballpoint pens or calculators (and to think I remember when calculators were a big deal); or that Cyberspace would turn out to be like a big Tesco, but with porn instead of frozen veg. They intersect with our environment and economy: we didn’t know the icecaps were going to melt, or that people would get fat and have allergies, or that we’d accidentally spend all the money we collectively didn’t have. Where are our jetpacks? Where are my food pills and my flying car? When can my perfect 1950s nuclear family enjoy its annual vacation on the moon? Those futures don’t just seem misguided now, in hindsight. They’re sweet, and funny, and mostly good-natured. What we (whether rightly or wrongly) perceive as their naivety endears them to us. It makes us nostalgic for the good old days when we could anticipate such brave new worlds coming up just round the corner of tomorrow. And it amuses us to turn these discarded pasts into sandboxes, where we can play around in a knowing and postmodern way with those lovely old themes and tropes. One name for this dynamic, of course, is steampunk, on which Peter Nicholls’s article in the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction he co-edited with John Clute has useful things to say. One point he makes is that the alternative nineteenth-century Londons of the American authors who drove steampunk’s early phases – James Blaylock, K. W. Jeter, 20 Tim Powers – are “at once deeply alien and intimately familiar, a kind of foreign body encysted in the US subconscious”. In other words, these steampunk Victorian Londons are much like the Rome of popular fantasy, and of course London fulfils the same role, as the mythically ancient Imperial metropolis, against which America can define itself as the eternal present; a metropolis which within the world of the story could still go either way, either declining and falling like old Rome, or making a break with its guilty past and entering a new world. But there are crucial differences. Steampunk tempers its nostalgia with ideological distance: these authors know we can’t go back to when these futures seemed realisable, and more, that we wouldn’t want to. The lurking Morlocks in the sewer remind us that, whatever they offered to their original inhabitants, we can never inhabit these discarded futures safely or innocently. These are spaces of explicit metafiction and magic realism – and the magic is often very dark indeed. The prospects of tempering mass culture’s Classical nostalgia with just a little irony? Not great. The hand of the past lies heavy on the present – not so much the Classical past itself, which Cherryh is right to say gets a raw deal but which we can never fully know anyway, as its nineteenth- and twentieth-century representation. And there really is no headway to be made against this self-perpetuating burden of inertia, as far as I can see; because people keep on using those pasts over and over, for as long as they have even residual value; and we’ve seen that that can take a century or more to exhaust. And in order to keep these pasts useful, in order to keep putting them to work in the present, people have to carry on insisting they’re true. This, ultimately, is why there can be no steampunk Catullus; no playing in the ruins of the Classical pasts we have discredited and discarded, because against all good sense (but also inevitably) people still live there. Lots of people. Or rather there could be a steampunk Catullus, and, done well, it would be marvellous... for the couple of thousand people who would get the joke. For everyone else, the fact that it was massively ironic would probably slip completely under the radar. They might well 21 just accept a floppy-shirted, Romantic Catullus, who sighs, and loves his girlfriend madly, and never swears; and certainly never engages in political mudslinging, or boasts about the boys he’s fucked, or threatens to rape his male peer group... because that’s what they’ll have grown up with in school, or met in other novels, or just generally picked up around the place. Horror of horrors, it might even sell well, thus driving another nail into the already very well-nailed coffin of the Catullus from whom a few poems that don’t lend themselves to comment in English haven’t been omitted. Meanwhile, the future worlds of C. J. Cherryh (and I’m sure other authors besides) continue to refract a view of ancient Rome that’s remained largely unchanged since 1950 or 1910 or, as often as not, 1880. An Augustus transposed to science fiction can still, after all these years, be a Good Thing and a Good King, the liberal, constitutionally-minded aiji who brings peace and wise governance to the Earth of the atevi with minimal bloodshed. The peculiar biology of Foreigner’s aliens even guarantees the aiji’s fitness to rule quasi-monarchically, like a Caesar, but without the ancient historical downsides – he was born with leadership in his blood, and his people perceive this and instinctively respond with loyalty, thus neatly sidestepping the messy problems the real JulioClaudians and their successors experienced in the crucial areas of dynastic succession and executive competence. Projecting a discarded past into a universe not our own, lets us make believe that it could really have been true. Futuristic fancy dress lets us inhabit a Roman Empire which really was a benign project to spread civilisation to all the nations of the world, a win-win deal for all its faithful subjects. It lets us spend time with an Augustus who didn’t come to power on a tidal wave of the blood of his fellow-citizens, because he has far too much finesse to lower himself to any solution as messy as that. The Romans didn’t have a word for finesse, but luckily the atevi do, biichi-gi. Problem solved; the broken past is fixed again, and the Empire not only doesn’t fall but reaches up into space. From that point of view, the Foreigner novels could almost be my elusive steampunk Catullus, but for one crucial objection: they don’t know they are, and steampunk’s not 22 steampunk without the irony. It’s not nostalgia unless you know that that future has gone for good. Or that past. Thank you for listening. 23