Sphinx

I’m writing this on the train back from London on May 10th, after recording an episode of In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg and wonderful colleagues Katharine Earnshaw and Diana Spencer, on the subject of Vergil’s Georgics – yes, there was a reason why I responded to thunderstorms and flooding in the South-West last week with quotes from the storm section of Book 1. I’m posting this on the morning of broadcast – the programme is no longer recorded live on Thursday mornings, which sadly takes away a little of the high-wire thrill of over-caffeinated improvisation, but they can now do wonderful things with editing – so as not to spoil the surprise, and to reduce the amount of time people have to get worked up about quite how far out of my lane I’m wandering this time. With a bit of luck they will now be too busy laughing at my increasingly mannered delivery…

There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for how I ended up in this position which does not involve the suggestion that I am now trying to claim authority in every field of classical studies, honest. The theme which I’d suggested to the IoT team years ago was Roman agronomy more generally, with the idea that I could chat happily about Cato and Varro while others could do the heavy literary lifting on matters Vergilian. The team’s research and planning process did then turn out to involve more questions about the Georgics than I’d expected, but I explained that they’d need to find an actual Vergil expert or two for those, and just talked more about Cato and Varro (and Hesiod). And then the plan for the discussion – yes, there is a plan – gave all those questions to someone else.

To be honest, by this stage I was just relieved no one was asking me to talk about dactylic hexameters; providing a bit of general historical context, summarising the structure of the poem and getting over-excited about bees (as usual) felt like a manageable task. However, the one thing anyone who’s done the programme knows – and I think it’s also detectable in at least some episodes to the casual listener – is that that Melvyn Bragg regularly decides to ignore the plan, redistribute questions or indeed ask new ones, and so I’ve had a fascinating couple of days hastily cramming an assortment of recent scholarship, just in case I was asked about something else. Though I would have drawn the line at Lucretius.

The hilarious thing is that, although Katharine Earnshaw is my colleague at Exeter, this was the first time we’d met in person for at least a year (plague, broken leg, broken foot, more plague) – and almost certainly the longest conversation we’ve actually had on matters agronomical, since I arrived here, despite sharing these interests. Given how much I’ve enjoyed reacquainting myself with the Georgics – to the point of frustration that we really needed another hour for a proper discussion of their complexities and ambiguities – I’m now very much hoping that Katharine and I can build on the experience, and perhaps even retrospectively justify my being involved in the programme.

Just as Vergil’s future ploughman will uncover the rusted weapons and heroic bones of past civil wars and wonder at them, future listeners will puzzle over the question of why so many prominent Latinists got quite so cross about Morley’s inclusion….