Sphinx

Folks, the tone for 2022 has already been set, and I think it’s a pretty clear indication that we should simply go back to bed for the next 362 days: two British newspapers, which still to the best of my knowledge claim a degree of seriousness of purpose, have published articles claiming that the University of Reading has cancelled Semonides. You can imagine the furore: an author whose work has defined and shaped Western Civilization for millennia, beloved by every British schoolchild who first encountered his enchanting imaginative world in primary school, essential for a true understanding of philosophy, politics and cosmology – and they DARE not to assess students on every single line? They’ll be coming for Anacreon next, mark my words.

Honestly, if this is the best they can manage from a broad trawl of UK Classics departments – I assume we all got that “have you ever used trigger warnings or adjusted your course content to reflect woke values, you subversive cultural Marxist scum?” Freedom Of Information request at the beginning of December – then they should really give up muck-raking journalism and start picking sprouts in Lincolnshire instead. Of course we give students some warning about problematic and controversial content, and think carefully about how to handle some material, and it’s very easy to imagine the stories that could be spun if we didn’t – and they go with violence towards women, and Semonides? No offense to lovers of Semonides, but if I was writing a parody of outrage at the cancellation of an author scarcely anyone has ever heard of, he’d be on the list of possibilities.

Actually it now occurs to me that the whole thing is probably a put-up job by the Semonides specialists – I assume there is more than one of them out there – to get their boy a bit of publicity: profile in the Spectator on the newest victim of the woke mob, GB News offering special discounts on West’s Greek Lyric Poetry etc. They will already have lined up someone to declare that he will teach all of fragment 7, in every class, as a matter of principle!

Of course it’s possible that this is the first instalment of a long series, and at some point they will get round to colleagues giving warnings about rape in Ovid and the use of Spartan imagery by alt-right racists and the like – but the general idea, I would imagine, is that you start with your best story. And if that’s Semonides, well, that’s a basic failure in reading comprehension, as frankly I could have spun at least a couple of stories just out of my own response to the FOI request. Especially given the way that my Thucydides seminar seems drawn to controversial topics like Brexit and hapless populist leadership.

And, come to think of it, the problems of a society where public discourse becomes driven by partisan shit-stirring without regard to truth or integrity. Thucydides 3.82 trigger warning: may remind you of the British right-wing media.