Magnífico señor Rector de la universidad de Santiago de Compostela, autoridades académicas, estimados colegas, señoras y señores:
Quiero comenzar mi intervención agradeciendo la concesión de este doctorado honoris causa. Me siento profundamente honrada. No sólo honrada, en realidad, sino también encantada de estar aquí con todos ustedes. Esta es la primera vez que visito esta maravillosa ciudad de Santiago y tanto mi marido como yo misma nos sentimos abrumados por la amable acogida que hemos tenido. Reciban, por todo ello, mis más calurosas gracias y sepan que tienen con ustedes a dos huéspedes entusiasmados y felices. Muchas gracias.
And now, I apologise, I must talk in English.
I am honoured for myself, of course. But I hope you will not mind if I look on my award as an honour for all those people across the world – school teachers, university professors, museum curators, archaeologists, film makers, writers and more – who are working hard to keep the study of ancient Greece and Rome alive and well, and to promote Classics and Classical Philology.
That study is always a work in progress. It is never finished. We are making new discoveries about antiquity all the time, we are building new theories and new interpretations, and we are finding new scientific ways of analysing what remains from the ancient world – from the lavatories of Pompeii to the pottery of Roman Britain. It is here in Spain where some of the most important recent archaeological finds have been made, changing our understanding of Roman history in the first centuries AD, and it’s here where some of the most distinguished interpreters, and communicators, of ancient culture are at work. And that makes me feel even more especially honoured.
But, at the same time, the study of the ancient world is not simply about the past. It is not only backward looking, fixed in history, or imprisoned in the library. To study Classics is, of course, to have one eye on what happened, or was written or was made, many centuries ago. But it is also always to keep one eye on the present too, and to think about how antiquity and its debates can help us change our view of ourselves and make us think differently about now, not just then. Classics is interesting and, I would say, indispensable because it is also modern.
I am not for a moment meaning that the Greeks and Romans can give us any simple answers to modern problems. They don’t. During the presidency of Donald Trump in the USA, I got extremely fed up with American journalists phoning or emailing, to ask, time after time, the one same question: which Roman emperor is Donald Trump most like? The idea seemed to be that if we could just get the right Roman comparison, then we would somehow be able to deal with him more successfully. I am afraid we wouldn’t. So, what was my answer? Well, if I had the time, and they were on the phone, I would give them a little lecture about the stupidity of the comparison, about why Roman emperors were completely different from American presidents, and how the exercise would tell you nothing about Trump at all. And so on.
But if I was busy, I would save time by just naming the little-known emperor Elagabalus, a teenager who briefly reigned in the early third century AD, and whose reputation for luxury and perverse sadism made Nero look mild (among other things, Elagabalus was apparently very keen on child sacrifice, he is said never to have worn the same pair of shoes twice (which always reminds me of the stories of Imelda Marcos), and to have killed his dinner guests, accidentally perhaps, by luxuriously smothering them with rose petals -- and there was even worse, which I probably shouldn’t mention in this esteemed company). Now I didn’t really think that Trump (even Trump) was like Elagabalus. But I enjoyed the feeling that the journalist in question would almost certainly never have heard of him, and so would have had to go away and actually do some work to find out! (It became a teaching exercise!)
More seriously, for that was always a bit of a joke, Greeks and Romans don’t provide us with answers. There’s absolutely no point in asking ancient texts what to do about climate change. But they do give us different perspectives, they expose the long history of some of our debates and why, in the west, we have come to think and argue as we do, and they retain their capacity to surprise, shock and to make us look again.
Theatrical productions of Euripides’ Medea, for example, in which the character of Medea kills her own children to take revenge on her faithless husband, Jason, still helps us probe questions of the limits of human responsibility. As I tried to show in my book on Women and Power, the moment when at the very start of Homer’s Odyssey the young Telemachus tells his mother Penelope to shut up, because ‘speech is man’s business’ is not only the very first recorded moment in western culture when a teenaged boy silences his clever, long-suffering mum (and there have been countless more of them since the eighth century BC when the Odyssey was first composed), it also offers a way to help us now interrogate the silencing of women in western culture in the twenty first century. And writers during the Roman empire offer us powerful and radical critiques of imperialism, as much as they offer us the predictable justifications of imperialism. The historian Tacitus, in the second century AD, had one of his characters sum up the effects of Roman military expansion with the words, ‘They make a desert and call it peace’, it certainly the most succinct and probably devastating denunciation of empire there has ever been. In fact, this may count as one of the very few cases where the Roman do still have a direct lesson for us. For military powers in the twentieth and twenty first centuries are still making deserts and still calling them peace (I don’t need to give you examples, I am sure). In that sense, I am afraid, we are no different.
But perhaps more than anything, I am always really excited by the way school children engage with, and get so much out, of the classical past. Recently I’ve been having a number of informal discussions with various groups of British school kids who are all very interested – like so many kids are -- in issues of free speech and cancel culture. It has been extremely interesting to get them to take the question right back to Socrates, who was put to death in Athens in 399 BC, for charges that included corrupting the young with his philosophy, with his talk and with what he had to say. The fact is that many, probably most, of the children have never imagined that these controversies that they are now debating have any history that goes further back than the present day. They think they are entirely modern, that no one had ever thought much about them before, and that they are probably the consequence of social media. When you show them that they actually have a history going back into the ancient world, two and a half thousand years ago, you give them a whole new, deeper and more sophisticated perspective. And you give them a new space for arguing and new tools and ideas to argue with. Unsurprisingly, they disagree fiercely, like we all do, about whether the Athenians were justified in wanting to shut Socrates up. Was he someone who made you think, even if also made you feel a bit uncomfortable? Or were his words actually dangerous for the safety of the community? Or were they worth hearing even if they were dangerous? What are the conditions that should allow you to silence someone else? And could we ever agree on those? For me it has been a classic case of the ancient world not so much guiding the present but enlightening it. And it has been wonderful seeing children drawing on the Greeks and Romans as a resource to help them argue better.
Para mí, todo esto sintetiza una de las cosas que la filología clásica y la historia antigua nos ofrecen. Ambas son un recurso -y no sólo para los niños- que nos ayuda a debatir mejor sobre cuestiones difíciles. Por esta precisa razón, en mi reconocimiento al aceptar este doctorado honoris causa, y si bien no puedo decir que los griegos y romanos me gusten excesivamente, quiero también rendirles homenaje, porque, después de más de dos mil años, aún tienen significado y por obligarnos a repensar las cosas. Por tanto, gracias una vez más, en mi nombre, en nombre de mis colegas y en el de aquellos ancianos vestidos con togas. Muchas gracias.