On the Bloomsbury to Boston via Cheltenham road

In a few hours Mary Beard and I will be talking about On the Spartacus Road at the British Museum before heading off to the Times Cheltenham Literary Festival where Mary has organised an impressive range of classical events.

There is going to be a mass class in reading Catullus and Horace in Latin (not the usual literary festival fare) and various of us fighting (not illustrated here) about who would have won a rather widely construed 'Ancient Booker Prize'.

There will be Spartacus Road again too - with Ramona Koval of the Australian ABC Book Show. And after that the TLS, this time without Mary, goes to the American East Coast for the Boston Book Festival, meeting readers as well as discussing history and myth, Spartacus and Achilles meet Cleopatra as it were.  
 
If I get to the BM early enough tonight, I'm keen to stop by again at one of the most extraordinary discoveries in Britain in the past twenty years, the collection of late Roman gold and silver known as the Hoxne Treasure, found in a Suffolk field in 1992 by a man with a metal detector who was looking for his friend’s hammer.

This week in the TLS Kenneth Lapatin elegantly traces our changing attitudes to the very word “treasure” while reviewing the BM’s newly published account of the massive hoard of coins, condiment-holders, jewellery and toothpicks once carefully stored by a wealthy family in the years before Roman power faded and fell. Among routine inscriptions of Christian piety is the hope that the recipient of a “stunningly pierced gold bracelet” may “use it and be happy”. We may even know the owners’ names – although one of them at least seems to have been very strangely spelt.

 The “friend’s hammer” has not been discarded. It is displayed in the museum as a significant part of the discovery, its context, something from a later time that illuminates the meaning of what came before. Such application of 'reception theory' is not popular with all visitors. Although the central “battle to establish reception as a legitimate, indeed essential, part of Classics has long been won”, there are constant skirmishes about what is truly relevant and useful and  what is merely fashion. I suspect we may face some of the same issues in Cheltenham and Boston too.

Comments

[Terence Hale]

Hi,
What has "The origin of the Fire Brigade" to do with
"The Origin of the Specticals" By Charles DarwdoorKimberlyboots
ISBN-0 Donkey Verlag (in press) and Spartacus Road ?
Zeus was fed up, Prometheus nicked the fire from Mount Olympus,
he (Zeus) told Hephaestus to fix things. With utilities from
a Do it yourself shop using water and earth he made Pandora.
Pandora was given a box that she was ordered not to open.
As women do, she did. The evils contained within escaped, and thus
"The origin of the Fire Brigade".

Regards Dr. Terence Hale

[Shelley]

Speaking of reading Latin, the languagehat website has a link to a site where we can hear the sound of ancient Babylonian and Assyrian as spoken.

My characters only speak Texan, but I'm fascinated by actually hearing ancient languages. It seems almost ghostly.