Mary Beard "The Shock of the Old" Lecture 2 of 3

- Good evening. My name is Clifford Ando. I'm the Chair of the Classics Department at the University of Chicago and on behalf of the Division of Humanities, I want to welcome you to the second of this year's Berlin Family Lectures, "What Can We Learn from the Classics," delivered by Professor Mary Beard of the University of Cambridge. Many of you surely heard Dean Anne Walters Robertson's introduction of Professor Beard at the first lecture. She went some way to explain Professor Beard's extraor

dinary reach as a humanist and public scholar. It so happens that Mary and I work in the same field and I should like to say something at least of what Professor Beard has achieved as an historian and what she has given and continues to give to the field. Now I have only a few minutes so this will therefore not be a work by work traversal of her publications, but an effort at appreciation. Classics is a field with a cannon. Did you know that the term, cannon, to lean a select body of the most im

portant works of a literary tradition derives essentially from the second quarter of the 20th century? Its appearance therefore coincides with the taking up at several universities, including this one, of the term classics as a name of a discipline. Before that we had separate departments of Greek and Latin, which is to say that classics is a field with two sets of canonical texts. Each arrived from a very narrow period of production in close to a single place. About these texts the field long p

osed what were or what became canonical questions, which gave us not only canonical answers, but also canonical scholars, the ones you read to know the history of the field and around whom you map the terrain. Now we should be clear, something like 130 million words of Latin and Greek literature survived from the classical period and then there's the extraordinary content of ephemeral text and documentary materials and the artwork and the pots and the sculptures and the coins, the farms and the

kilns and the sewers and the aqueducts and so forth. And while the term, classics, is not that old, people have been studying Greek and Roman stuff for a very long time with the result that this data has been collected and sorted and cataloged in a most remarkable way. We are the very model of a model area study. I'm not going to reflect on what it has meant, at any given moment, that the parameters of the discipline have been so often reaffirmed around a set of aesthetic criteria that were more

or less established already in antiquity within a heartbeat of the production of the works in question. What I want to emphasize instead are the complex affordances of the systematic way in which classicists know their stuff, even if they make poor use of it. A point to which I'll return. It's highly empirical field. To range as widely as Mary Beard does from books on the Pantheon and the Colosseum to religions of Rome to surveys of classical art, from a book on a ritual, namely the triumph, th

at was really a study of method, to a book on the city of Pompeii in the ways that we know it. Well, you get my point, this kind of mastery and classics is exceptionally hard won, and when you wander as a scholar into some new specialty, there's always going to be someone out there who feels territorial, who will write a caps book review, perhaps in Bryn Mawr Classical Review, in which they lament, "I did so want to like this book, (audience laughing) except Professor Beard didn't know her Polyb

ius or her wall painting or parasitology," and so on. They will of course be wrong. They're simply gatekeeping. In point of fact, to write as beautifully as Mary does across such a range of topics is nothing sort of remarkable. I said a moment ago that Mary's book on Pompeii discusses how we know what we know about Pompeii. Indeed, the book performs a kind of double movement in showing us how we know what we know. Mary also performs a set of deconstructive acts, robbing us at once of illusions a

nd also of certainties. We emerge better and more humble students of antiquity. And this turns out to be a hallmark of Professor Beard's work, which is one reason why the people who criticize her as a popularizer are so mistaken. There is no one in the field who writes so brilliantly and consistently on matters of method, as does Mary. Indeed, this was a feature of her work from around the moment it went from being very good to brilliant. All sorts of other people were reading these millions of

words of non-canonical Greek and Latin in order to uncover nuggets of information preserved in lesser or lower grade orders about the people in periods we really cared about. What Mary did was to suggest that even if our interests remain fixed on classical Rome, our first job is to take seriously the people, the projects, the commitments and the priorities that deliver us these bits of knowledge in their context of production. For whatever they were doing, they weren't doing it in the service of

our projects but of their own. And that, it turns out, was a pebble that started an avalanche. In short, Mary Beard told classicists of a certain stripe that they should be better historicists. The term doesn't do justice to her later statements on method, but I think it suffices as a summary of a particular set of arguments 40 years ago, and it brings me to the point on which I wish to close. In the year 2000, the position of Professor of Ancient History in Cambridge went vacant, and you have

to remember Mary was on the faculty at Cambridge at this time. I've been told that a certain eminent professor at the other university, which is to say at Oxford, was asked to advise Cambridge on the process of selecting a new occupant for the chair. "Well," he said, "you don't have any historians locally whom you could promote, so you'd better run a search." This is not written down anywhere, and so it's possible I have none of the details correct about a story that only sounds true. But it doe

s ring true, all the more so for being said of a very great historian and a very decent man, not least on questions of gender and scholarship, but the complete horror of the sentence is, I'm afraid, entirely plausible. To come back to where I started, I am an historian and when I said that Mary and I are in the same field, I mean Mary is an historian. What does it mean to the field that one of its best and certainly its most famous practitioner is a woman? Indeed, this woman. Now, I'm not going

to say a word at this juncture about Mary on Twitter. I will say that some years ago Mary and I overlapped for a few days at the American Academy of Rome, which has a lovely coffee shop that the Romans call a bar because it toggles from caffeine to alcohol when the light starts to slant, an economy regarding real estate that the rest of the world would do well to emulate. One morning Mary came to the bar and placed herself in the corner and one by one, something like every young woman in Rome wh

o cared about classics came and told Mary about herself and her work, and I bet you each one of them went away more confident that she too belonged and with work and craft might make it. I didn't make an appointment that day, but I was schooled too. And now to deliver the second of her Berlin lectures, "The Shock of the Old," I give you Mary Beard. (audience applauding) - Thank you very much, Cliff. I mean, leaving out some of the very nice things you said, all the gossip is true. Absolutely all

of it is true and I think it's quite important, really, because people, you know, as I was saying last time, when you get to be my age, people think that it's always been fine. Everybody's always thought you were great. That is not true. Professor FGBM, I was giving you a clue, was a great friend of mine, but he never thought I was a historian. He had the grace to say it to my face, which is I suppose makes it better. Anyway, I call this lecture "The Shock of the Old" as a kind of backhanded tr

ibute to the art critic Robert Hughes, whose TV series and book, "The Shock of the New" over 40 years ago now, celebrated the power of modern art and its capacity to make you think difficult things. Hughes was not a great fan of the supposedly stale traditions of classicism, and I don't actually think he ever really recognized the capacity of classical art and culture to be equally revolutionary and, in fact, to shake up the very notion of what the traditional is. The classicizing architecture i

n our cities, for example, is easy enough just to dismiss as the treasured possession of fascists, dictators, and the far right or at least as the badge of a kind of time expired ideology. Now, in some cases, it has been exactly that, right? And in the U.K., as you can sort of see here, classical architecture used to be dubbed, before he was promoted this is, as the kind of Prince Charles phenomenon, right? And this collage is trying to capture that, but it's easy to forget that the very same ar

chitectural idiom has, over the last few hundred years, supported radical culture too. It supported revolutionary politics and daring civic secularism. That is true whether we are thinking about the fantastic architecture of someone like Etienne-Louis Boullee, who saw extreme classical form as by far the best way of capturing revolutionary politics against an oppressive old order. Or whether we are now thinking of the sort of taken for granted classicism of so many museum buildings throughout th

e world. I haven't named these, but you'll be able to spot some of your favorites. Why was this the go-to style for museum architecture? Now there's a standard set of answers to that question. It was a gesture to the classical origins of the museum, the ancient museum, or Temple of the Muses. Plus, it reflected the museum's connection to cultural power and political authority that was embodied in the classical and ultimately its connection to empire and Western white world order. But let's not f

orget also that the modern museum originated in part as a radical assertion of a new secular civic world, which found its inspiration in the classical past. In part, the classical style signaled the museum not as a high-bound traditionalist but as an innovative institution in early modernity, an institution of and for the citizen. Now, it certainly didn't always live up to that ideal as some of the things I was discussing last time uncomfortably demonstrated, and there's always been the question

of so who then counts as a citizen, but we simply get it wrong if we see only conservative authority written into this kind of classicism. But that shock of the old goes right back to the ancient world itself in ways that have also proven easy to forget. Virgil's "Iliad" was not written as a venerable classic. People would've been falling off their chairs in 19 BCE when they first heard Virgil read it, and so too they'd been falling off their chairs when these two statues were first unveiled. T

hey're are pair straight out of the playlist of classical greatest hits. On the left, the so-called "Aphrodite of Knidos," the original sculpture made by the sculptor Praxiteles in the early fourth century BCE, doesn't survive, this is a plaster cast of one of very many later Greco Roman versions of it. What you see is the goddess of love. She's naked, she's just about to have or she's just finished having a bath, with her water jug and her towel at her side, which are also fulfilling the vital

function of helping the statue stand up, which it otherwise wouldn't. On the right from the early first century CE, the first Roman emperor Augustus, the statue found in his wife's villa just outside Rome. He's wearing elaborate armor, decorated with emblems of some of his signature achievements and helping him stand up is a little Cupid who's also reminding us that his family traced their ancestry back to Venus or Aphrodite, the goddess of love, Cupid's mum. In 2023, these are extremely unremar

kable images, indeed. The kind of thing that in museums and galleries, people just tend to walk past. And as we've just seen, for Charles, here was a mockup of Augustus. They're cliches that are ripe for parody. I particularly like the Cupid Trump here, but (laughs) I chose it for Charles. And they blend into hundreds of lookalikes that for many people become the baggage of the classical, whether it's lineups of similar naked women, semi-naked women or the rows of powerful men, emperors, dictato

rs, and modern dynasts who ape the Roman emperor style. Some of these that you're seeing on the screen are ancient, some are modern. The first glance you can't tell which is which. Now to go back to the point I just made about classicism, I'm not so certain that all these later versions are quite as inertly conservative as we assume, but one thing is certain, the original pair that I showed you were not born orthodox. They were new, they were difficult, they were dangerous and very shocking. The

Aphrodite, in fact, was heralded in the ancient world as the first full-sized female nude ever made in Greece, supposedly never seen before. The first client who was offered her by Praxiteles is supposed to taken one look and said, "No, thank you very much," which is why she ended up in the town of Knidos, on the coast of modern Turkey, which gives her her name, eventually becoming a huge tourist attraction, but always remaining on that dangerous edge. One particularly troubling ancient tale fe

atures a young man who, I'm gonna put this euphemistically, fell in love with the statue and, wait for it, he got locked up with it, her, at night, made love to it, her, and the next morning rushed off and threw himself off a cliff, though leaving a telltale mark of what he had done, don't ask for the details, on the statue's thigh. But that of course prompts a whole range of further questions for us. Through what lens do we read this statue, ours or theirs? Can we be stereoscopic with both an a

ncient eye and a modern eye? Does it matter that it represents a goddess, not a human? Is it actually a rather reticent modest image or is it a real coy tease? Is she covering herself up or is she pointing at what the viewer most desperately wants to see? And how does that relate to debates about the female body as the object of male gaze in art since the Renaissance? Is this where all that starts and with a story of literally having sex with a statue, not just sex in the head, and with fatal re

sults? Or in reading it that way, are we projecting our own concerns back onto this ancient image? For the other, one question is, how or can we ever get past our own familiarity with, and I think for many of us are slight disdain for, the long history of images like this, and can we ever recapture the moment during Augustus's reign when, and this is I think hard to take in seriously, but I mean it that, when no one at Rome had ever seen an image of power like this before? A perfect, ageless, an

already strangely classicizing symbol, a ruler. Looking back to some of the sculptural forms of fifth-century Athens, how do we understand the success of this formula and what drove it when it is now so taken for granted that it's impossible for us, I think, to see it as anything which is special or new? And what does an image like this actually mean for, in this case, thanks to microscopic traces of surviving paint, we can actually get a glimpse of its original color. This is how it might once

have been, and it's not so very different from the collage parody that I showed you with Charles. You don't have to like it, but you have to face up to it. All right. (audience chuckling) What difference does this make to the way we see this statue or to the way we see ancient sculpture in general, much of which was also painted? And what does it say about the image of whiteness that in the modern world, at least since my Michelangelo, has become so firmly associated with marble sculpture? Now

I raise these issues up front because they're some of the threads that run below the surface of all these three lectures, issues of interpretation combined with issues of politics. For me, one of the things that animates the study of classics is the way that it collapses or at least puts a question mark over the simple boundary between the radical and the reactionary, between the new and the alt. But these sculptures are also a useful overture to this evening's lecture in particular because I wa

nted to bring some of the classical greatest hits back into my picture because last week I'd rather bypassed them in pursuit to that kind of tantalizing fragile spark in the paintings that you find in Roman bars and giggles in the Colosseum. I wanted to say, look, I haven't forgotten these greatest hits. And I also wanted to give a tiny snapshot of some of the questions, and there are many, many others, of course, that get raised in the classical classroom, questions of meaning, questions of cha

nging meanings between past and present, questions about the very origin of what we think of as traditional and so on. Because tonight I'm going to be asking more specifically what the payoffs of learning and teaching classics are. What actually is it that you learn and why? And can we get that across a bit more bravely than we usually do? And within what is so often called the crisis of the humanities that we are supposed to be living through, what's classics got going for it? And what does cla

ssics, Cliff Ando has already broached this for a little, what does classics mean anyway? Now to be honest, I'm a bit suspicious of the rhetoric of the crisis in the humanities. I have absolutely no doubt at all that things are not going well for the humanities, to put it mildly. And they're not going well pretty much anywhere. And there's a familiar gloomy list of symptoms, declining enrollments in some or many humanities subjects, funding cuts, and an underclass of precariously employed and ex

ploited academic labor who are replacing tenured faculty, the closing of whole humanities departments, as well as the widespread view that the humanities are quite nice, optional, extra, but they aren't essential elements within the curriculum. They're not what a citizen needs to know about. And there are equally familiar competing explanations for this from pressure by governments or university administration to demonstrate tangible value for money, through risk-averse subject choices, by stude

nts who are anxious about debt to the, "You only have yourselves to blame, guys" line, which goes something like this. "If people within the humanities hadn't taken refuge in obscurantism or in micro squabbles over the politics of pedagogy then people in general would've paid more attention to them and students in particular wouldn't have fled in droves," if that's really what students are doing. Now, all that's well-known, but we should be a bit more careful and not forget that an internalized

rhetoric of crisis has defined the self-image of humanities for a very long time. I say internalized rhetoric because the vast majority of people who read the hand wringing tracks about the imminent demise of the humanities are other hand wringers with a vested interest in the subject. I mean, I don't think we imagine that the average punter in Barnes & Noble picks up a book called "The Death of the Humanities," and thinks that would mean nice bedside reading. It's people like us that do that, r

ight? You know, we are worried. Broadly, I guess I'm on the side of Ritter and Wellmon, in the book you see here on the left, who argued that this barbarians at the gate kind of despair has been embedded in the humanities as long as they've existed as a specific set of disciplines, at least back to 19th-century Germany. But even if you don't go that far, similar debates and complaints have come in regular waves since the early 1960s. The striking thing about the other book on the screen, a colle

ction of essays from 1964, entitled "The Crisis of the Humanities," is that it could have been written yesterday. The arguments are almost identical. So I think we have to be a bit careful about taking the rhetoric of crisis too literally. But that said, I think some of this hand wringing ought to be a prompt for people within classics and the humanities in general, but I'm going to be speaking about classics, to say a bit more clearly what it is we do and why, right? And that's what I'm going h

ave a shot at. I'm not thinking about micro-issues, I'm not going to think about why it is worth reading the Greek novels or studying the end of the Roman Republic. I'm asking more generally what is it to study the ancient world and why is it worth doing? And if you came to university and got interested in that and decided to have a go, what is it that you'd actually learn? I'm also not trying to compare the intrinsic values or politics of different subject areas. Is classics more or less challe

nging than history? Should European studies make way for African studies? Is it better to read Tony Morrison or Homer? That way Florida lies, and actually it doesn't have to be either/or. I'm taking Classics on its own and on its own terms-- and I'm pretty sure that quite a lot of what I say is relevant to the humanities more widely. Okay, so why are we doing this? Why would you do it if you try putting those questions to the web, I realized I should have done it to a chatbot, but I did it to th

e web, you get a pretty gloomy answer. I did a quick trawl of websites of Classics departments on both sides of the Atlantic, most of which include a section called something like "Why study Classics?" Now I'm not going to name and shame here, and I did find a few OK ones, (and I purposely avoided looking at that at the University of Chicago, although I'm sure it was one of the better ones). I thought better not to know, eh? For the most part though, the ones I went through, ranged from what you

might they ranged from the dull to the dreadful, honestly. There was a list of hostages of fortune, outright falsehoods, and trivial half truths. "Majoring in classics would really help you at med school," said one, "as you would already be familiar with some of the Greek terminology." (audience laughing) Literally this is true. This was on somebody's website and not a crap university either. As if a Classics was a degree in vocabulary, you know, and it is not, it struck me as not so different

as a once common argument in the U.K., less common now, that studying Latin in high school would make it easier to learn French, which might be true but, you know, actually it's even easier to learn French by learning French. (audience laughing) There was also an awful lot of the well springs of Western Civilization knocking around these websites too and timeless truths is another phrase that came up. Even in departments where I knew that most of the faculty abhorred the old narrative of Western

civ, their websites were still trailing the Greek miracle along with the origin of almost anything. You know, we owe the origin of democracy, theater, the alphabet, arches, et cetera, all to the ancient world. Now it's not just that some of this is plain wrong. I think there's almost no definition of it, which is correct. The Greeks did not invent the alphabet. But it buys into that insidious idea that culture is some kind of race and that the prizes in culture go to those who get there first.

Well that is simply not true. You know, it doesn't matter whether or not Minoan culture is older than Stonehenge in Britain. It's the conversations that you have with culture; it's what you do with it. It's not a race that's important. Culture is a conversation. Anyway, all this online PR, which you might call ineffective PR, was also often sprinkled with the language of love and passion, right? Your teachers, you'd be assured, will love Classics, occasionally, even more implausibly, they will l

ove the Greeks and the Romans, right? That was explained there. They will teach you, and this is a direct quote, to love words. Now that might seem harmless enough and in a way you can see that it's meant to capture the idea that you are being taught by people who are really keen. But just think how infantilizing that rhetoric is. I do Classics, speaking personally, because it challenges me, it intrigues me, it destabilizes me, it baffles me, it engages my expertise, my brain. And return to last

week, it's thaumatic. I don't do it because I love it, right? You don't ask a virologist if they love viruses, nor do you ask an astrophysicist if she or he loves black holes. So please do not ask me. And it's all part of the package that helps make the humanities look like a hobby, as an optional extra, not as an essential. We all do it because we're really passionate about them, not because we think they're interesting and we need them, right? Now, I am of course being a bit unfair, and it is

easier to satirize than to do better. You know, we all recognize that some of this web stuff might have been written at the end of a very long week by a colleague in a hurry who is being dumped on, right? I don't think writing the why study classics on the website is up with the priorities of many heads of department. Some of it was probably written to please a dean who was perhaps believed to be keen on timeless truths, so they got sprinkled in. And we've all done something similar. Trying to

answer the paymaster's questions in the paymaster's own terms. And I confess here that I have wasted hours trying to compute the net gain to the U.K. economy of Greek tragedy through a calculation of the bums on seats at London West End theaters adding what the audience might have spent in the local restaurants to the ticket price. Took me forever till I thought, what am I doing? You know, this is pointless. So this evening I want to try and unseat that a bit and knock the arguments around in a

bit of a different way. I'm not going to give you my fantasy Classics website, though I did flirt with having a competition, you know, amongst all the learned and PR conscious people here. But no, I want to look at three questions that seem crucial to me in explaining what we're doing all this for and particularly in a university context, but with wider implications too. Okay, number one, what or how do we learn from the classical past that is useful for understanding the present? Now that quest

ion can be a bit of an elephant in the room when we think why Classics matters. Most professional classicists and historians, myself included, tend to get anxious about the notion that there are direct lessons in the ancient world that we can directly learn from, but I think we should be careful before we throw the baby out with the bathwater. I was very struck a few weeks ago when I heard the Spanish novelist, Antonio Munoz Molina, reply to a similar question. His answer was, "Yeah, it could be

hard," he said, "to learn from the past, classical past included, but we didn't actually have anywhere else we could learn from. So we better try our best to learn from what's gone before." And that's quite a shrewd observation. What I suppose professional classicists usually object to though comes down to a particularly narrow view of what learning from antiquity means as if it was taking ready-made solutions or applicable parallels from a supermarket shelf and then somehow using them. Now, th

e clearest example of that sort of approach in my own experience came during the term of your 45th president. During those four years, the most common question I got from journalists, both sides of the Atlantic was, "Which emperor is Donald Trump most like?" As if that kind of parallel would tell you anything. Now, I can actually recommend my answer to anyone who faces this question in the future. And of course, you may. If they were calling on the phone and I had a bit of time, I would take the

unfortunate reporter step by step through the reasons why what they had asked was a really silly question, and there was no point in me trying to answer it and why. If I was busy I would just say an answer to what kind of ruler is Donald Trump most like, what ruler. I would say Elagabalus, a short-ruling Roman emperor of the early third century CE. Now this was not because I thought there was much of a parallel here. Even Trump doesn't begin to approach the levels of unreliably reported luxury

for Elagabalus, like never wearing the same pair of shoes twice, that kind of thing. But I was fairly certain that he was an emperor they wouldn't have heard of. (audience laughing) So at least even if only through Google, they would've had to have gone and done some work, and they would've learned something from their stupid question. They would have to do research. I didn't ever see a newspaper article which says, Professor Beard says Elagabalus is the closest... So it must have worked in a wa

y. But the question I posed a few minutes ago was a bit different. It was not give me a cheap parallel. What are the cheap parallels? It was what do we learn from the classical past that is useful for understanding the present? And after that, I've become more bullish than I used to be. That is partly because as I tried to show in my book "Women & Power," deep history, going back to the ancient world can help us contextualize. I don't think it explains, but it can help us contextualize all kinds

of modern assumptions and prejudices, misogyny included. It's also partly because we are still debating some of the big questions that were debated in the ancient world. And whose terms of argument we still rely on, but it goes even further than that, I think. Classics is very good at teaching us the complexity of how our view of the past is constructed, and it helps us to interrogate the supposedly orthodox historical narrative we've been fed, some of which is actually crudely based on the cla

ssical world itself. Now, a very tiny, but I think it's telling is a kind of metaphor, very tiny example of that would be the Latin phrase, 'civis Romanus sum.' I am a Roman citizen. Which has been banded around for hundreds of years as a proud slogan of citizens rights and citizenly liberalists, most famously of course by President John F. Kennedy in his Berlin speech in the middle of the Cold War in 1963. Two thousand years ago, he said, the proudest boast is "Ich bin ein Berliner!" "All free

men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin." Now I may be misjudging them, but I suspect that neither Kennedy nor his speech writers knew that the single most famous occasion on which this phrase was used in the Roman world, was one in which citizenly liberties were being outrageously floated. For those were the words repeatedly and fruitlessly shouted out by a Roman citizen dying on a cross, stripped of his civic rights, and illegally crucified by a rogue Roman governor. "You can't do

this to me, I'm a Roman citizen," was his desperate plea. Oh yes, we can, was the implied answer, and no one lifted a finger. The fact is that civic liberties are often most loudly claimed when they are most gruesomely being undermined. And that is the rightly complicated lesson that the classical story helps to get your head around. To put it another way, the study of Classics here helps not to celebrate the glorious origins of democracy in some spurious, mythical Athenian past, it serves to cr

itique our own deceptive certainties about the rights of a citizen to expose the fault lines in those taken for granted and over-quoted truths. And I think that's what Munoz Molina meant when he said the past was all we've got, so we better work out how to use it. My second question is, how do we relate ourselves and our identities to the ancients? My answer here is that one of the prime strengths and attractions of Classics is that it is not a subject in which anyone at all will find themselves

or see themselves reflected. Now I say that with some trepidation because it flies in the face of a powerfully expressed modern view that people, and here we mean particularly students, people should be able to see themselves in the subject they are studying. And in Classics, this has a current political edge for it's commonly argued that one problem of the ancient classical world is that it looks, or rather I think it has been made to look, so European, so white European, that it can seem to b

e the property of scholars and students of a European background. And that, of course, is where the idea of the embeddedness in our heads of white marble sculpture starts to be relevant. So if, so the argument goes as we surely do, we want to attract a more diverse range of students into the subject, and particularly people of color, we need to extend the disciplinary and geographic boundaries of the subject beyond the so-called heartlands of Greece and Italy into Western Asia and Africa and bey

ond. If, for example, we made Africa more central within the discipline, we would see more students, we would encourage more students who didn't identify as white European to see and find themselves in the Classics. Now of course, I understand that logic, and I realize too that it could be terrible hubris for an insider, however tentatively I define myself as that, to offer her own solutions to why an outsider might be put off her subject. Even so I'd like to try turning those arguments upside d

own. Now, just to be clear, I'm not for a moment saying that the disciplinary or geographical boundaries of Classics should stay where they are. Any disciplinary boundaries are always to some extent arbitrary. And since their invention in the 19th century have always been shifting. There's no right answer to where a disciplinary boundary should lie, but there are a series of pluses and minuses, gains and losses as you move them around. It makes a difference to the character of any subject, what

material you decide to group together under its rubric. What books you see side by side in the library. As I say that, I can see that's a rather pre-digital comment to make, but it makes more of a difference who you have coffee with, in which common room, and who the disciplinary divisions separate you from and link you up with. If you learn, say, Greek with Sanskrit, as was often the case in 19th-century Europe, and here I think, you gain some things but you lose others. Personally, I'm pleased

and it's added to my understanding that the Persian empire, say, takes a much bigger part in classical history than the cardboard cut out enemies of the classical world that the Persians were made to seem when I was an undergraduate. They only ever came up when there was a Persian war, and we didn't know anything about the Persians except, you know, we sort of hoped they lost. (audience chuckling) And I accept also that sometimes people looking for and not finding themselves in Classics has rev

olutionized the subject. It was largely, for example, because a group of women academics in the 1960s and 1970s said, "Where are we in Greece and Rome that we now have feminist Classics?" And we could think of many other examples like that. But there are real dangers with the finding yourself argument. Let me put it this way. As I see it, one of the problems about Classics over the last few hundred years is that some people, largely powerful or would-be powerful white men, have thought they coul

d see themselves in the ancient world. They've thought that the Greeks and Romans were like them, and they've sometimes weaponized that. From all those dictators and dynasts presenting themselves to a man as Romans, The one on the left is interestingly a governor of India from the British foreign office through FDR and his toga party. Now, okay, this was partly a joke, and it was partly an attempt to face down allegations that FDR was becoming a Roman dictator, but it's still playing to the same

tune. And it comes right down to this kind of unsavory propaganda, which links classical history and particularly on the two left pieces, particularly kind of white marble classical history to extreme right-wing politics. And it's all this, I suppose, but it's actually also helped make the Mediterranean heartlands look so white in the first place when, as I'll discuss briefly tomorrow, they really weren't. My point is that if we want to confront that kind of appropriation, which has done I thin

k not terrible damage often, but as skewed the vision of what the subject is, I don't think we do that by pretending, and it is a pretense, that other people can find themselves in the classical world too. What we have to do I think is challenge the lazy half truth that any of us can see ourselves there. Important thing is that the ancients are different. There are all kinds of connections we can make, and conversations that we can have with antiquity whose writers, as I said, were debating them

es that are still important to us from slavery and sex to empire and exploitation, but we ought to be positively celebrating the fact that antiquity is not a place in which we belong or which anybody owns, and that we are all equally foreign to it. That's the point. In fact, that's why in principle, and I don't, it certainly doesn't yet, but in principle it's a great subject for welcoming anybody because none of us belong there. Now to misquote the poet, Shelley, "We are not all Greeks." That's

the biggest lie in a whole of classical studies. We are all Greeks, no we are not, right? What we all can be is not Greeks and Romans. It's on those terms that I think that we can engage. And I think that's why we should be able to make, if you are thinking about the future and what I'd want to do, why we should be able to make Classics where it isn't already and it isn't a positive, safe, shared unknown space for discussing some of those difficult issues that I've just mentioned and which you g

ot a little taste of in what I was saying about Aphrodite. I think when I've tried this, it has been absolutely enlightening. Quite recently, I was talking to a series of what would be here, middle school groups about free speech and kids of 12 and 13, they're very interested, in the U.K. at least, in cancel culture and no platforming and who can speak, et cetera. And we were going around a bit of a roadshow trying to see if we could help sort of not improve and enhance their discussions by look

ing at a classical case. And obviously we went and we brought them a cardboard cutout model of Socrates, we put him in the dock and we started to talk about cancel culture in fifth and fourth century BC Athens. None of these kids before would admit to have heard of Socrates. They hadn't actually thought that debates about free speech were anything other than modern. "No we have it because of social media." That's where they thought free speech came from. The teachers assured us, the kinds of dis

cussions that we then had with the kids when we pushed it out of whatever was, you know, being said on TikTok or Instagram. We pushed it out of that, we pushed it into the classical world. There was a safe space there in which they learned to disagree in really much more productive ways, and it was heartwarming actually. But you know, middle school kids, that's easy. It's harder when we are thinking about university subjects, but I think that's what Classics has got going for it. It is a non-own

ed space. My third question is simply, what do we think Classics teaches us or our students to do? Not what does it teach us about, but what does it teach us to do. Here I'm sure we should be much more up front than we usually are. Like many humanities disciplines, Classics teaches us to argue responsibly on the basis of fully inadequate evidence. And like all humanities disciplines, it teaches us to discuss productively questions to which there are no right answers, probably no answers in the

popular sense of that word at all. The quality of Virgil's poetry, the reasons for the decline of the Roman Empire, et cetera. Now, both those skills arguing on the basis of inadequate evidence and discussing questions to which there are no right answers, seem to me to be absolutely essential and fundamental to the whole democratic process, the whole civic process under the health of public debate. Those questions, what politics are about, actually politics aren't about answerable questions, pol

itics is about unanswerable questions. There are, of course, some questions which do have right and wrong answers, but not all. And as I say, the majority of the most important and divisive questions we face about justice, morality, choice, judgment, and so on are among those which don't have answers. But the point seems to me that you have to learn how to talk and argue about those questions and to learn that, even when there are no right answers, some answers and some arguments are more potent

and better than others. And that's difficult. And you have to learn that those with whom you disagree may not necessarily be wrong. In some ways that takes me back to what Cliff said about Professor Miller, as we should now call him. The important thing was he wasn't wrong, he wasn't wrong about me and he wasn't wrong about history. I fundamentally disagreed with him. And that's what I'd learned to do. I think in a way it's what we are missing when we talk about social media, actually. The appa

rent devaluing and polarization of debate on Twitter and beyond isn't ultimately about some terribly new sense of tribalism, or it isn't about the fact that you can't get a nuanced argument in a few hundred characters. I think the problem about social media debate and polarization is more the false assumption that debate's a zero sum game, and there's always a right answer to be found somewhere. And some of the risk of sounding a bit preachy, I think we should be shouting louder that the humanit

ies, and I'd put Classics at the vanguard of that, are an essential foundation of the democratic process and as essential to the civic good sciences, which usually, though not always, deals with questions that do have answers. In a way, I suppose I'm picking up the point I made earlier about not loving the subject. We have to get across the idea that Classics isn't a nice excuse for sitting around and indulging in interesting chit-chat about "Fragments of Sappho." We might do some of that and th

e chit-chat might be interesting, but that is part and parcel of a much bigger project about conversation, disagreement, and argument that ultimately underpins civic debate. Now I suspect for having, I did have a quick look at your website, I suspect that I'm here skating over the surface of issues that are being discussed in much greater detail in your University Center on Democracy, of which this is only a tiny, I think, speck in the ocean. But you know, I think we undersell ourselves. You kno

w, we've got to say the kind of things that we do, the way we learn to argue is something that a civic society cannot do without. And we need to teach it. However, I do not want to end on a triumphalist, overconfident note in which kind of Classics marches of great, new diverse Classics, marches off into the sunset, helping us all to be better citizens. I sure would like to see some of the kind of arguments that I've made today, you know, getting more of a foothold in websites, but they aren't t

he full story. We can't ignore the issues that I touched on last time with the boy who breathed on the glass in the British museum, namely, basically, exclusion. And the fact that earlier this evening, I resisted the idea of expanding the geographical territory of the subject to encourage diversity within it, doesn't mean that I'm ignoring the problem of an undiverse Classics. It was the solution I was challenging, not the existence of the problem. Now, institutionally and pedagogically, Classic

s and especially that branch of the Classics, which demands the study of Latin and Greek languages, seems like an educational sociologist's dream case. Or nightmare scenario, whichever you think of how two useless dead languages that nobody speaks have been deployed internationally in the West as a means of policing entry into the elite, sometimes absolutely mechanically so. As late as the 1960s, there were some universities in the United Kingdom where you couldn't go to study anything, you know

, even physics, if you didn't have a Latin qualification. And, of course, it was only posh high schools that taught Latin. Now, Louis MacNeice, with all the privileges of his own elite education ironically reflected on this in his "Autumn Journal" that I quoted from last time. Here he links the study of ancient languages as he knew it. And it is ironic, I assure you, with worldly success and moral gentlemanly property, how to become a gentleman. This is what he has to say, "I ought to be glad th

at I studied the Classics. Not everyone having had the privilege of learning a language that is incontrovertibly dead. The classical student is bred to the purple. His training in syntax is also a training in thought and even in morals, if called to the bar or the barracks, he always will do what he ought." Now, I had to confess that when I first read this, I missed the point because I thought being called to the bar meant something along the lines of being invited to the pub (audience laughing)

in the English sense rather than being admitted to a legal career. So it did baffle me for a while, but when I saw what the real point was, as usual, MacNeice hits it on the head. It's about Classics as a gatekeeper for the elite, but not just for the elite, not just in a career sense, but in terms of the morality. The spuriously claimed morality that underpins elite culture. Now there is absolutely no way that one can feel comfortable about how classics has been used like that and to some exte

nt continues to be. It's not the only subject that's been used like that. In some ways, all education is a combination of an attempt to challenge the existing social and cultural order and simultaneously an attempt to underpin it even further. You know, education is always on the battle line between changing and conserving. But Classics, I think, has been an extreme example. I mean, I suppose I don't have a solution. I think all we can do is try to do better and, in a way, be more like my curato

r opening the case last time. But I think we can also perhaps expose the fragility and the fault lines in that model of exclusion. The Classics has never been as good at gatekeeping. It's never been as good at policing the boundaries of the elite as we imagine, or as the excluders might have hoped. Now, of course, Classics as a gatekeeper has excluded many more than it has admitted, yet I'm sure you were wondering if you were here last time when Antonio Gramsci was going to make his repeat appea

rance. Yet as Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, saw when he strongly advocated, in the 1930s, for keeping Latin on the school curriculum for everyone. Gramsci saw that gates that close can also open, and that gates that were constructed out of an intellectual barrier Can you learn Greek or not? Can you learn Latin or not? 1132 01:03:56,310 --> 01:03:59,100 are notoriously vulnerable. So Gramsci was all for social revolution through the learning of Latin. But I think also of the infamous words of Joh

n C. Calhoun talking of Alexander Crummell, in the famous story, Crummell who went on to be the first Black student in Cambridge, that no person of color was capable of learning Greek. Those words, I think, now stand witness not only to the struggles of and the discrimination of Crummell, but also to Calhoun's utter wrongness. We now remember them because he was so wrong, and I think that's important to remember. There are also many more people than you would imagine in the history of Classics w

hose outsider status we fail to recognize. I'd pull just one last person from the Rogues gallery that I showed last time. Meet again Richard Porson, an extremely pedantic professor of Greek from about as high in the traditional classical pantheon as you could get in some of its most obfuscatory, technical, and incomprehensible forms. If anybody wants me to explain Porson's Law for you, a particular bit of... God, I can't even explain what it is, let alone tell you what it is, particular bit of t

he rules for how to construct Greek meter. I would have to say, look up Porson's Law on Wikipedia, and it will tell you. Don't ask me, right. (audience chuckling) When you do look at it on Wikipedia, you'll soon get the point when I say it's pedantic and looking at him on the screen, he looks for all the world as if he was, in MacNeice's words, bred to the purple. Actually, he was the son of a weaver, the grandson of a cobbler. He was spotted and funded by a local school master and a local gentl

eman in his own village. And I suppose in a very minor way, I'm not anywhere in the glitz of Porson, I don't feel that entirely different from that myself. Classics was a gate opener for me. No one in my family had ever had a university degree before. Now, of course, you can object that this is just the usual establishment trick of replenishing itself by assimilating a limited number of outsiders and, analytically, that's probably true. All I can say is that for me it didn't and doesn't feel lik

e that. I feel that gates have been opened for me, not that I've been kind of invited in, you know, on terms. Now, in order to show how fragile and complicated all this is, I'm going to go back, as I promised, to the name Classics itself. Now to be honest, I've always rather liked the name Classics for a subject because it was conveniently impenetrable. You'd get on a train one of those in England, old compartment carriages and you're obviously a student, the person opposite would you say, "You

are a student?" You'd say, "Yes." "What are you studying?" And you'd say, "Classics," and mostly a happy chat about Jane Austen and Charles Dickens would follow, you know? Whereas if you'd said, "I'm studying Demosthenes," it would've been silence for the rest of the journey. And of course, I suppose in some ways, that just reveals the many and constantly debated uses of the term Classic, whether it's from classic cars or classic literature or classical music and so on. But it is now commonly sa

id that Classics in the disciplinary sense has had that role of social policeman and cultural excluder, not just added on in the modern era, but embedded in it from the very beginning, from the very first use of the word Classic in the classical world itself. And that's one argument used by those who would like to change the disciplinary title of Classics to something more like ancient Mediterranean studies. Now, I want to finish by challenging that view with a little bit of amusing pedantry. It

's not pedantry up to the Porson standard, but it's not bad and I think it illustrates what I want to show. So bear with me and I'm going put the Latin words on that, right? The fact is that the Latin adjective, "classicus," from where obviously we get classic and Classics to apply to literature and culture is found in antiquity only in the work of one, not much read, second century CE Polymath by the name of Aulus Gellius. He's not in Cliff's cannon I'm afraid yet, but it's a crucially loaded u

se. Gellius is reporting on one of those, to us, mind numbingly, scholastic debates that intellectuals of the Roman Empire really got off on. Now, I don't recommend dinner with the elite in the second century CE because you might think it's all going to be stuffed dormice and Falernian wine. Actually, it's enormously long discussions about grammar is what they're doing. They never put that on the movies, but that's what it is. In this case, the discussion was on the question of which Latin nouns

could be used only in the singular and which only in the plural. Now you have to imagine this is really exciting. The key examples that Gellius gives in reporting the discussion are harena, meaning sand, which in the best authors, as his characters in the discussion agree, is always singular. You can't have plural sand. And quadrigae, chariot, which in the best authors, is always plural. Now, the words used for best in that discussion are 'classicus' and 'assiduus,' and they are explicitly cont

rasted with the word 'proletarius' for the not best authors. Now, the social implications of proletarius are obvious, but classicus and assiduus, too, are words drawn from the traditional Roman hierarchy of wealth and power, the classes. Classicus is the title of the top wealth class in Rome. And assiduus kind of means something not very far from top rate taxpayer, I think. Now it looks as if Classics is caught red-handed here. The first time we find it used in Aulus Gellius, never again, never

before in the ancient world, to refer to literary or cultural things, classics and classical authors and the best authors are already implicated in and using the vocabulary of social, political, and economic power. The argument goes that Classics and social class and cultural clout have always gone together, and they've always excluded the proletariat. Now, up to a point, up to a point, that is true, but only up to a point because there is, I think, a sting in the tail. If you read to the end of

the section where Gellius is discussing this gripping debate, I think quite a lot of people understandably stop before they get to the end. You discover that these classically, these best authors, those at the top of the social and political hierarchy of literature don't all follow the rules, or they get it wrong. They occasionally, for example, use the supposedly singular harena, in the plural. Red pencil there. Now that complicates things. Yes, there is an obvious sense in which the word clas

sicus is a symbol of the role of Classics from the very beginning, in being knitted into the social hierarchy. But it is also, at the same time, a symbol of the fallibility of that hierarchy, of the ambivalence of the classic, and from the very beginning of the inability of the supposed political, social, and cultural elite to police their own rules. What I'm saying here, I think, is that we need to hone in on that fallibility of the link between classic and the social hierarchy, and we need to

prise it apart. And that seems to me the most important thing we should be doing. And that is what Aulus Gellius, for all his appallingly grippingly boring discussion, is legitimating what we do. I suppose, just to finish with another thought, it could have been that Aulus Gellius, despite the fact that he doesn't seem like this kind of guy, that Aulus Gellius was just enjoying one of those questions that don't actually have a right answer. So maybe he's behind us there too. Thank you very much.

(audience applauding) - Well, thank you very much, Mary. As in the first lecture, we're going to alternate between questions from the live audience and questions that we're going to, that I will receive from the outside world via the screen here. Is there any question to start with? Oh, hello? The microphone will come to you. - Oh, thank you. Thanks for both these lectures and from the first lecture, I kept thinking about some of the categories you raised and how they relate to religious tradit

ions, the contact with the ancient, so in your case, the old piece of bread that the curator would bring out of the case. But in my particular case, reading from a Torah scroll is a kind of contact with the ancient. Or I've been with Christian pilgrims in the Galilee visiting the sight of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, and quite visible that they were feeling a contact with something ancient, but something also very present to them. And I wonder if you'd care to reflect a little bit on the similar

ities, differences, parallels. - I do think there are some similarities, and I don't, because I don't think of myself as religious. Of course I don't make those comparisons, but of course, perhaps this is my substitute. This is, well, I'm doing it. I think it goes in quite a lot of different ways actually, because I think there is that sense of the touch, the real, this is the place, this is where this happened. And yet also knowing that it's impossible actually really to be there knowing that,

you know, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, you know, wasn't really, you know, the tomb, et cetera. I think also that the religious aspect though is quite instructive in other ways because it's the fact that the idea that the tradition is constantly remade, you know, I think here particular like as I started my career in Roman religion and the puzzlement that we always had, that Roman religious authorities would say Roman religion never changed. The absolutely crucial thing is that Rome keeps it

s religion the same. And yet you also knew that in the doing and the repeating and in the ritual enactment, what always the same was, was always different. And I think to some extent, you know, I think now you're getting me going, I must stop. But you could think of the subject of Classics in partly that term. I am doing the same as boring old Richard Porson. And we'd have something to talk about, but it's completely other, and it's other within a tradition that represents itself as conservative

. And actually what we know is, you know, here I appeal at the Roman Republic, traditions which represent themselves as conservative, are very, very often the most radical changing traditions that there are, that change is much more easy to justify on the basis that you're doing the same as you did than to justify on the basis that you're changing everything. As almost every ancient politician knew. Sadly, modern politicians haven't quite got the point. The museum would be another good case. You

know, it's representing itself as not religious. And yet, it's a challenge to the authority of the church. And yet by the time we are into the middle of the 19th century, everybody's treating the museum as if it's a temple and being very quiet and reverent in front of these objects. So it kind of, it recuperates exactly what it was fighting. - The first question is very brief, but I think it invites considerable reflection on the comparison that it's asking you to make. Was words in Latin, the

ultimate form of cancel culture? And you should feel free to explain- - I think a bit differently. (Words in Latin) is a phrase actually never used in the ancient world, although similar phrases were used, which is most commonly referred to now as what happens when a bad emperor dies. When a bad emperor dies, you will cancel, you'll damn his memory. And what that involved was pulling his statues down, but also gouging his name out of public inscriptions. Right? When talking to these kids with on

e group who was interested in Rome as well as Greece, we did start to think about (words in Latin) and what other forms of similarity you might find in the ancient world. I think (words in Latin) is quite an interesting one in terms of cancel culture because it, of course, acts in precisely the opposite way that it sets out to do. You have a big inscription here, let's say, and there's the name of demission or (words in Latin). And if we decide we're going to remove it, we come along with a chis

el and we gouge out (words in Latin). We leave all the rest of the sculpture and of the inscription on public view. What's the effect of that? The effect of that is that we can never, ever forget (words in Latin) because the gouging reminds us that we have to remember to forget. And as soon as you remember to forget, you have to remember. And so it's, I think, a great example from antiquity of what looks like cancel culture actually operates the other way around. Cliff probably has a better answ

er than that. - Yes, please. - Oh, thank you. Oh, thank you, Mary. My question is about review of "SBQR" from a very prominent American newspaper a few years ago. It shocked me when it came out and it said that it called a weakness, your willingness to hedge bets or to equivocate about evidence. And it almost seemed to decry that you weren't being more like Edward Gibbons with your desire to make magisterial certain statements. And I wonder how much do you still encounter that in the world of th

e so-called elite or people who think that history needs to make definitive statements in order to have some kind of legitimacy? - You do encounter it. I think that... I and others have had some impact on that, and I see it more with television actually, or at least I can track it more easily with television. So when I first did television, what the executives wanted, they said, look, you've got to tell the story, just got to tell the story. And you know, we want to know what the Romans did at d

inner or something like that. And I kept saying, I think what people are interested in is how we know and what we don't, right. And after one or two goes, particularly with the response, these television guys were convinced that that was true. There was a huge number of people wrote in, tweeted, emailed, to say, we like to know how you work. We want to see the working. We don't like just being told the story. We want to be in there. And I think that that's really encouraging. I would be stupid a

nd blind if I didn't recognize that there were some people who think, oh no, you know, instead of telling us what Romulus did, she now gonna have two paragraphs on why we don't know whether Romulus existed or not. You know, you know, fair cop, guv. I've learned a bit from doing television. I think what I've learned is ways of saying we don't know in a way that doesn't sound like a cop out. And I think I didn't used to know that. And there was a British satiric bit of some totally internalized na

val gazing British telly the other day in a comedy program. And it had got about 20 clips from me saying, we don't know. I kept saying, we don't know. We don't, we don't know. And I thought to have learned not to do that, saying what's interesting is how we can work this out. But the worst, I'll tell you, the worst critiques I had was that I'm not interested in battle plans. You know? And you know, after I'd visited Julius Caesar's great palace, Alesia, where he'd defeated the Vercingetorix. I t

hought, there is no way that Caesar could have, you know, he didn't have a microphone. There is no way that all this kind of great strategizing by our great general, as a great general, as loved in a military academies, this must have been terribly random. And that was what just caused me grief. So I said, look, you know, I think this is mythologized the idea of the great general. I just got every retired military man in the Western hemisphere wrote, you know, to say, "You're undermining the gre

at military scale of one of the world's greatest strategists." (audience chuckling) But you know, I've learned to live with it. But you're right, some people don't like it. - From online, "As classics becomes a little more democratic, do you feel women can add new perspectives to the field? Or is gender irrelevant?" - I don't think gender's irrelevant. I think in some ways women have added huge amounts to the field even before they got a fair foothold in it. And at the risk of, again, I've added

some quite unfashionable things, and I will say another one. I am absolutely committed to equal rights for everyone within Classics. However, when I was studying with Jane Harrison, who was utter female Classist in Cambridge at my college, utterly excluded from the male hierarchies, but totally influential in the way the study of Greek religion went. She actually broke through all this crap about, you know, calm exteriors of philosophical religion in Greece. She just said, look, it's bloody and

it's sacrifice and it's cathartic and it's mad. And once I'd finished working on her, I thought she'd had a really, really rough time. But partly she wasn't able to put a bomb under those guys because she wasn't part of the club. And I think she paid a high price for that of not being part of the club. But the relationship between interiority and exteriority, whether it's gender, ethnicity, whatever, is complicated in terms of academic production. But I think we need more women in Classics. Not

fewer, but, you know, but that's not new. - Somebody over there. And I think I have time for one more question. - So in particular, I was very interested about what you said about the (words in Latin), including how you said that basically what others have sought to have been erased is now still very much remembered like Caracalla's reign. However, it also interests me that we are still searching for a lot of things relative to the the history of the Classics, such as we don't know the location

of Alexander the Great's tomb. And I was wondering if you thought like, do we have the right to know everything about the Classics and would that destroy kind of the internal mystery of not knowing? - I think two diametrically opposed things, though. I think, partly from what I was saying last time, I mean, I called it thumatic, but I can see that this is, you know, there is a kind of mystery, for me when I say don't know all the time, I think that's really interesting. We don't know this, you

know? And so I see it as, I do see it as a bit of an allure. I suppose what goes opposite, the opposite direction, and it goes, refers the kind of ownership. I said that nobody owns the ancient world now. That's what's good fun about it. That's why we can share it. But I think one thing is absolutely clear, the Romans don't own it. I don't feel a responsibility to them. I think the past is mine, you know, or ours, it's not mine individually. I think that the past is something that we commonly ow

n. And I don't think they have the kind of rights to any secrets. It's not like your granny dying and deciding not to open her love letters. They're ours, and I'm quite happy that they're ours. I'll try to think about how they might have told their story, but ultimately the story's mine. And when I talk about having a conversation with them, it's a funny conversation because I'm talking on both sides. I'm afraid, so that makes it strangely solipsistic. - All righty, well we're at the appointed h

our. Thank you so much for listening so attentively and for asking questions tonight. Please join us tomorrow, April 26th, when Mary Beard discusses Fear and Loathing, which digs into how we judge the ancient world, and how far the crimes of antiquity implicate the modern world. - The bloody bits, it's going to be. - And perhaps we could thank Mary one more time. (audience applauding)