St Thecla’s Well

It has been a very long time since I last wrote here. Many things have happened, not the least a pandemic. I have often thought of returning to this blog, but things got in the way. Over the last couple of months, however, my fingers have been itching more. So here I am.

While I have not blogged for several years, I have certainly been very busily writing. One area in which I have become interested is early Christianity, and its attitudes towards healing, motherhood, and children (sometimes all at once). While working on an article on lactation cessation (which you can access in full here), I encountered the story of a little child who cried so much after being weaned off the breast that he risked losing his sight. His nurse brought him to the church of Saint Thecla in Seleucia, where he was healed (Life and Miracles of Saint Thecla 2.24). Who then was this Saint Thecla who could achieve the miracle of calming a toddler?

Thecla was a very early Christian, a follower of Paul of Tarsus. Her life is told in the early Acts of Paul and Thecla and expanded on in the later Life and Miracles of Saint Thecla (the link is to the edition of the text, with a French translation). She was a noble and wealthy young woman from Iconium (now Konya, in modern Turkey), betrothed to Thamyris. One day, Paul came to the city and stayed in the house next to hers. From her window, she listened to the noble Christian and decided to devote her life to Paul and to Christ. For perverting the young girl, Paul was thrown in prison. Thecla, under the cover of darkness, went to find him, having bribed the prison guard. When her subterfuge was discovered, Thecla was condemned to death by burning. She was saved by rains, which conveniently killed many in Iconium.

Altar and glass window in the church of Saint Thecla in Llandegla

Thecla then followed Paul to Antioch (of Syria), where she stayed with a woman named Tryphaena who had lost her only daughter. There, a man named Alexander tried to seduce the holy woman, to no avail. He managed, however, to convince a local magistrate to condemn Thecla to death – again. This time, she was attacked by wild beasts. One of the lionesses sent to kill her laid at her feet; other beasts killed each other. The story is rather wild (in more senses than one), and Thecla also threw herself into a pool of bloodthirsty seals (I know, this makes no sense!), to seek death while auto-baptizing. Nothing worked. She survived.

Thecla eventually settled in Seleucia (now Silifke), where she disappeared – alive – under the earth. Thence she offered healing, as if it came from springs, both during her long life and once she had departed this earth. The site became one of pilgrimage for those who sought healing.

Saint Thecla may not be particularly known, but she has several shrines. One, it happens, not far from Wrexham, where I often go to visit family. For the first time today, I visited Llandegla (literally, Thecla’s village). It is a lovely little village with a church devoted to Saint Thecla (the current church is Victorian), and a healing well. The well was particularly reputed for healing epileptics, who had to visit the well, then sleep in the church, in the company of a cockerel. If that cockerel died during the night, the person would be freed from their epilepsy. To anyone familiar with the cult of Asclepius, much of this will sound very familiar – healing cults can be rather formulaic.

Saint Thecla’s Well at Llandegla.

It is possible that Roman soldiers brought the cult of Saint Thecla to Wales. Some Roman artefacts were indeed found at Llandegla, including in the well itself. You will find information on some of the artefacts in the Portable Antiquities Scheme database. I’m particularly interested in this copper alloy cosmetic pestle.

Copper alloy miniature mortar and pestle, Roman

Today, visitors are more likely to visit Llandegla while walking on Offa’s Dyke path, but if you are interested at all in healing sites, do pay the well and church a visit.

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A labour of love: Strike diary 18

As university teachers, we are encouraged to embrace ‘innovation’. ‘Innovation’ often boils down to adopting new technologies. I’m very much a nerd, and I love to try out new software and gadgets. But at the end of the day, in my opinion, the most effective teaching methods remain the oldest: the ‘learning-through-doing-and-imitating’ method, and the so-called Socratic method, which consists in gently questioning preconceptions, and reaching knowledge through dialogue.

The Socratic method is also known as maieutics, a word that derives from the Greek word maia, the midwife. It is a method which assists in birthing ideas, and is described as such in Plato’s Theaetetus, where Socrates is presented as the son of the midwife Phaenarete (149a). Midwives in the Theaetetus are said to be great matchmakers, to be able to tell when someone is pregnant, to speed up birth by means of incantations and drugs, to promote fertility, and to cause miscarriages.

A Hellenistic statuette representing a birth scene. The Metropolitan Museum.

Far less known than the description of maieutics in the Theaetetus is this take on the method by Plutarch (or Pseudo-Plutarch) in The Cleverness of Animals:

We certainly must not allow philosophers, as though they were women in difficult labour, to put about their necks a charm for speedy delivery so that they may bring justice to birth for us easily and without hard labour. (Plutarch, De sollertia animalium 7)

I really like this reference to birthing amulets, examples of which have survived in the archaeological record.

To this day, scholars do still at times compare their work to babies that they have birthed through hard labour. I know that there are very reasonable objections to the use of this metaphor – not the least that it can be upsetting to people who have lost or cannot have children – but there is one aspect of the metaphor that I still find useful: the acknowledgement that we are not supposed to love the process of birthing ideas.

A uterine amulet, which might have been used, among other things, to speed up birth. Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Transfer from the Alice Corinne McDaniel Collection, Department of the Classics, Harvard University

It is very common for academics (myself included) to preface any complaint about our work with ‘I love my teaching and my research but…’; ‘I’m so privileged to do a job that is rewarding and that I love…’. We love our job, so we put our heart and soul into it. We love our job, so we accept to work over our contracted hours, and over the 48 hours beyond which work becomes detrimental to our health; we skip meals; we stop exercising; we sacrifice personal relationships. And then we model that behaviour to more junior scholars – after all that is what was modelled to us – all in the name of love.

In the name of love, we often cross into the territory of abuse. Well, I love many aspects of my job, but I refuse to be abused by it. A couple of years ago, I started to measure my time. This was very revealing. I have realised (an embodied realisation because I already knew there was lots of research on this) that working around 35-40 hours a week is definitely the most productive way of working. I have realised that, when I cannot, for a reason or another, fit my work into 35-40 hours a week, anything beyond 50 hours is very detrimental, both to the quality of my work and to my health.

This has led me to make choices, which at times were tough. I have had to say no. I have had to work on my negotiating skills so that I would get my time acknowledged. Will this be detrimental to my career? Honestly, I don’t think so. And if it is, so be it.

I love my job, but it is hard labour at times, and most importantly: it is a job!

I swear by Apollo: Strike diary 17

It’s day three of our strike. The weather is wet and generally miserable. This is where things are starting to get tough, and resolve can be dampened.

For various reasons, I find it hard to stand still on a picket, so I have asked our strike committee whether it would be OK for me to tour various pickets on our multiple campuses. This was granted, and it has been lovely to meet colleagues from all over the university.

My first stop this morning was in Physics, which is located in the Queen’s Building, which used to be the location of the medical school. I have written about the building before (see here and here): it has very nice statues of Hippocrates and Asclepius, complete with inscriptions in Greek.

Asclepius and Hippocrates on the Queen’s Building, Cardiff.

As I was preparing to take a photo, my phone buzzed. This was my electronic diary ‘helpfully’ reminding me that I was supposed to give a lecture on the Hippocratic Oath. This was a rather cruel trick on the part of fate. For I love giving that particular lecture (which is for a first-year survey course on important ancient texts and objects) on one of the most important texts written in the western world.

The Oath is well-known for its clauses dealing with deadly drugs (the so-called euthanasia clause), with abortive drugs (the so-called abortion clause), and with surgery:

And I will not give a drug that is deadly to anyone if asked for it, nor will I suggest the way to such a counsel. And likewise I will not give a woman a destructive pessary. And in a pure and holy way I will guard my life and my art. I will not cut, and certainly not those suffering from stone, but I will cede this to men who are practitioners of this activity. (Translation: Heinrich von Staden)

Greek inscription on a scroll held by Hippocrates on the Queen’s building: ‘Life is short, the art is long’

In my lecture, I focus on the ‘abortion clause’, the different ways in which it can be interpreted, and it impact on the modern history of reproductive rights.

One part of the Oath I discuss less, and which is in fact far less known (among the general public and physicians – historians of ancient medicine will know this well), is the covenant part of the Oath. This is the section where the person who swears the Oath promises to treat his (this is all definitely about men) master as he would his father:

To regard him who has taught me this art as equal to my parents, and to share, in partnership, my livelihood with him and to give him a share when he is in need of necessities, and to judge the offspring coming from him equal to my male siblings, and to teach them this art, should they desire to learn it, without fee and written covenant, and to give a share both of rules and of lectures, and of all the rest of learning, to my sons and to the sons of him who has taught me and to the pupils who have both made a written contract and sworn by a medical convention but by no other.

To the modern reader, this is all rather strange. I think of some of my teachers as my academic parents, but that ‘family’ is entirely symbolic – this symbolic kinship does not extend to my teachers’ actual children (however much I might respect those children). And I certainly do not expect any of my students to ever feel any sort of financial obligation towards me.

And yet, in many ways, my students are very much responsible for my financial security. This was true before sky-high fees were introduced, but it is even more immediately the case now that students pay those fees. I cannot blame students for thinking that they pay for my time and are therefore entitled to it. I sincerely hope that I’m supportive to my students, and I feel terrible for letting them down during the strike. I do feel, very deeply, that I am breaking a covenant, but that I have little choice but to fight for better working conditions.

But there is a big difference between this strike and the last one. Our Student Union has voted in support of the strike. Students have spoken at rallies. They have stood in the rain with us. This means the world.

Our working conditions are students’ learning conditions. Marketization has led to massive increases in student mental ill health and poverty. It must stop. So I swear by Apollo the Physician, by Asclepius, by Hygeia, by Panacea and by all the gods and goddesses, making them witnesses, that I will continue this fight, beyond this strike, to promote education as a common good.

 

 

 

 

Back where it all began: strike diary 16

On this second day of our strike, I have done something that pushed me entirely out of my comfort zone: I MCed (was the Master of Ceremony) for our daily rally. While we have had many women speakers at rallies during our recent strikes, I think I have been the first woman MC.

I may sound like I’m boasting. I’ll take that. While our union has had women general secretaries for a while, individual branches (which are to a large extent autonomous) can have gender imbalances. These need to be addressed, lest we replicate the issues in the Higher Education system, where the gender pay gap is shocking (more on that in a minute) and women are critically underrepresented in senior roles.

So I got myself out of my comfort zone. It was hard; and at times I felt like handing over to someone else. The microphones didn’t work properly; there was a constant stream of cars entering the main building at the entrance of which we are holding our rallies; and then there was The Pneumatic Drill (which deserves capital letters).

My institution is acquiring a new shiny building of extraordinary proportions. This building has already required the demolition of several other buildings, and is now requiring the demolition of parts of our Student Union building. Hence The Pneumatic Drill.

Speakers had to shout to get their voices heard. But at times, the noise would stop, and the building site would act as an echo chamber. As I was listening to one of my wonderful colleagues, her voice echoing in the near-empty building site, I was reminded of where my academic journey started.

In my final year of secondary school (the one that experienced long strikes), we went on a school trip to Greece around Easter time. It was our ‘voyage de rhéto’ (the final year of school is called ‘The Rhetoric’ in the Francophone Belgian system). It was a wonderful experience: it was the first time I took a plane and the first time I encountered some of the sites I had come to love through my Greek and Latin classes (before you ask: this was still relatively common in Belgium at the time – I didn’t go to private school).

Athens, Delphi, Olympia were all amazing. But the site that really made its mark on me was Epidaurus. I will never forget visiting the theatre there (we only visited the theatre – it would be several years before I came to think of Epidaurus as the home of Asclepius, the god of healing). The magnificent theatre, with the stunning mountain backdrop, left an indelible impression. And that acoustics! Guides will all play the trick of asking people to seat as far as possible, and then drop a coin. And you will hear the echo of that tiny coin reverberate in the theatre.

The theatre at Epidaurus. Photo taken in 2015 when I visited the site with Tween T (then big Boy T)

At the time of my visit, I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to study at university (but I knew I wanted to go to university). The Belgian system does not require us to make those decisions until very late. I was still toying with the idea of studying mathematics. But as that coin dropped (a metaphor that does not exist in French by the way), all became clear, and I knew what I wanted to do.

And today, at our rally, for short moments, the acoustics was beautiful. I was fortunate to talk during one of those moments. As I closed our meeting, I reminded the group that the mean gender pay gap at our institution is 21.6 percent. I said that, as a woman, I could not accept this situation, and that I wanted management to explain how this could be. And I knew I could not give up trying to get my voice heard in my work, as an academic and in the union. And the echo carried my voice. And I found myself back where it all began.

You can watch a short video featuring The Pneumatic Drill on Twitter (with thanks to Rowan for allowing me to share).

The theatre at Epidaurus. Photo taken in 2015, when I visited the site with Tween T (then Big Boy T)

Bled dry: strike diary 15

Content warning: blood

So here we are again: we are back on strike. We are on strike over pensions, pay devaluation, pay inequality, job insecurity and rising workloads. We will be out for eight days, but the union is talking in terms of ‘waves’ – so we’ll see.

When I last wrote, our union, the UCU (University and College Union) had come to the end of a historic strike over pensions. Lasting fourteen days, it had been the longest university strike in the UK. It ended with the establishment of a Joint Expert Panel (JEP) which would look over the future of our pensions.

The JEP has since made recommendations, which have mostly been ignored by our pension scheme, the USS (Universities Superannuation Scheme). We are now facing rises in our contributions that most can ill afford. Add to this the constant erosion of our salaries over the last ten years, and it is fair to say that choosing a career in academia is not particularly attractive financially. That is especially the case when we consider that getting a permanent (or rather ‘open-ended’) job in academia is extremely difficult, and that many face years of short-term contracts. Job insecurity is at an all-time high in British academia.

Students offering their solidarity in the strikes.

And there is more! There are massive gender and ethnicity pay gaps in British academia. These make me particularly angry, I have to say. How is it acceptable that a supposedly enlightened sector should perpetuate social inequalities in this way? I will address those further in this diary.

The cherry on the cake: ever-increasing workloads, caused by ever-changing and ever-rising expectations. An academic these days must be an excellent – and the expectation is one of excellence – researcher, teacher, student adviser, public communicator, administrator, and generally leader (whatever this last word might mean). Some might thrive in this hyper-competitive environment, but most will suffer from impostor syndrome – the constant feeling of not being good enough.

Often, I feel like every drop of goodwill is sucked out of me. I feel I’m almost bled dry. Readers of this diary might remember that, as a child in Belgium, I experienced three long periods of strike (during my last year of primary; during my first year of secondary; and during my last year of secondary). Now, the teachers’ slogan was ‘j’en saigne’ (roughly: I’m bleeding from it), a pun on ‘j’enseigne’ (I teach).

There is a difference, however, between saying ‘j’en saigne’, which implies that one has been wounded by a system, and ‘I’m bled dry’. For the expression ‘to bleed dry’ refers to the historical practice of bloodletting, which would allegedly have rid a patient of some bad humours. A skilled physician was able to bleed patients sufficiently without depleting them of all their energy.

In Greek and Roman antiquity, the bleeding cup (or cupping vessel) was one of the symbols of the physician. Witness for instance, the funerary stele of the Athenian physician Jason (second century CE). In the right hand corner is an enormous cupping vessel, a symbol of his skill.

Stele of the physician Jason, Attica, second century CE., London, British Museum. Credit: Wikimedia

Or observe this small vase, so-called Peytel aryballos (beginning of the fifth century BCE), where a doctor is represented scalpel in hand, ready to bleed his anxious looking patient – a cupping vessel hanging between the two protagonists.

The Peytel aryballos, fifth century BCE, Paris, Le Louvre. Credit: Wikimedia.

The thing with cupping vessels is that, unless you know what they are, you won’t think much of them. Their appearance is rather innocuous. Unlike a scalpel, which looks dangerous, they are not obviously threatening – their purpose is not obvious. Shown in a museum, hanging on a little tree as in the example below, they won’t evoke anxiety in most visitors.

Roman bleeding cups hanging from their display tree. Basel, Pharmacy Museum.

I feel that I never saw the metaphorical scalpel in my career. Often the threat did not feel extremely acute (I acknowledge that I might be very privileged in this respect). I only saw cupping vessels, and at first I wasn’t able to recognise their function. But I have learnt, and I know that I won’t allow myself to be bled dry. We won’t allow ourselves to be bled dry!

 

 

 

Fighting the multi-headed hydra: Strike diary 14

I last wrote on the final day of our strike action to save our pensions. Since then, I have been on ‘action short of a strike’. What that means is open to debate, but I have simply decided to work 35 hours per week, as per my contract. I have also decided that weekends are weekends and vacations are vacations. This sounds absurd doesn’t it? Being on action short of a strike means that I’m working the way I’m supposed to be working. But such is the culture of overwork in academia that even this takes effort and commitment. It is, however, liberating. I feel I may continue working like this beyond the period of industrial action.

A copy of the Farnese Hercules at Chirk Castle, North Wales. Photo taken this Monday – yes it was snowing.

Much has happened in our industrial dispute over the last three weeks. Two weeks ago, late on a Friday afternoon, we were informed that our employers (UUK, Universities UK) had made an offer. That offer consisted mainly in promising the constitution of a joint panel of experts who would work on future plans for our pensions. In the opinion of many (me included), that offer was extremely vague but somewhat promising. Our Cardiff union branch, like many others, passed a motion to ask the employers to ‘revise and resubmit’ (to use a phrase that is familiar to anyone who has published in an academic journal) their offer. Unfortunately, and for reasons that remain unclear, these motions were ignored by the union leadership, and we are now faced with a vote on whether we want to accept the UUK proposal or not. I have voted ‘no’.

The issue is that, whatever the result of the vote, we don’t know what comes next. This is very unnerving. What is clear, on the other hand, is that our fight is not solely against our employers; it is also against a legal system that seems entirely in favour of ‘de-risking’ pensions, that is, moving risk away from employers and onto individual employees. I use quotation marks for ‘de-risking’ because to me this seems a most risky strategy: some employees will make ‘good’ investment choices (and note the quotation marks here too because a profitable investment is not necessarily an ethical one); others will not.

Heracles fighting the Hydra. Source: Wikipedia.

What has become clear to me, then, is that we are fighting a multi-headed monster, like the Hydra that Heracles/Hercules defeated. Ancient authors, however, debated as to whether the Hydra truly had many heads. Here is what Pausanias, the second-century CE author of a sort of travelling guide, the Description of Greece, had to say:

By the source of the Amymone [a river in Argolis], there grows a plane tree under which, they say, the Hydra, was born. I’m convinced that this beast was different from other water-snakes in its size, and that its poison was so dangerous that Heracles used its bile to treat the points of his arrows. It seems to me, however, that it had one head – not many. It was Peisander of Camirus [a seventh century BCE poet] who gave the Hydra its many heads, in order that the beast might appear more terrifying, and thereby that his poetry might become more noteworthy. Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.37.4

Touchè Pausanias! My Hydra may indeed only have one head, and I may be exaggerating for literary effect. But where exactly is my Hydra’s head located?  Where exactly do we need to concentrate our efforts? Answers will come soon, I hope. In the meantime, I choose to remain somewhat positive, since I know that the poison of the slain Hydra also has healing properties. Indeed, the geographer Strabo (first century BCE – first century CE) reported that the poison of the Hydra may have conferred healing power to a river in Elis:

Near the cave of the Anigrides Nymphs [the Nymphs of the Anigrus river], there is a source that makes the region downhill marshy and waterlogged. Most of its water flows into the Anigrus river, which is deep but slow and therefore forms stagnant pools. This boggy place emits an offensive smell over a distance of twenty stadia and makes the fish unfit to eat. There are various stories about this: some say that some wounded Centaurs washed off the poison from the Hydra there [after the battle with Heracles]; others that Melampus used the waters of the Anigrus as means to purify the daughter of Proetus [these daughters had been stricken with madness]. The bathing water there cures white spots, lichen and other skin diseases. Strabo, Geography 8.3.19.

If you wish to learn more about the industrial dispute from experts, I recommend the USSbriefs.

Bella Ciao: Strike diary 13

This extraordinary month of strikes has come to an end. We had a great rally at Cardiff University today, with rousing speeches and rallying songs. Then many of us who are involved with the union retired to the pub.

In British universities, strike songs tend to be pastiches of well-known pop songs. Super-talented colleagues treated us to new versions of, among others, Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”; Oasis’ “Wonderwall”; and The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californication”. But best of all, was Steven Stanley’s original rap “Get your paws off our pensions” (which you can watch here).

Busy gathering this morning in Alexandra gardens

I am sure Britain must have a tradition of workers’ songs, but I do not know them, which is rather sad. For I do like good workers’, partisans’ and revolutionary songs (see also here). This I have learnt from my father. I remember watching Dr Zhivago with him, and he would put the sound to full when the Internationale came on. As a teenager, I expressed my complete embarrassment, but secretly found this quite cool.

But there is no better workers’ song than the traditional Italian Bella Ciao, which is now best known in its anti-fascist version (see the Wikipedia page for the Italian text and English translation), but started its life as a song of the female rice-weeders in the Po valley, who were hoping for decent working conditions (see here for the Italian text).

Where the original version stresses the hardship of toiling in the rice fields of the Po Valley, among the mosquitoes and other insects, the anti-fascist version paints nature in a rather more bucolic fashion. The partisan asks to be buried on the mountain under the shade of a beautiful flower, by which s/he will be remembered.

I wanted to close this strike diary (for now – we may be back) with flowers: the flowers of Bella Ciao; the flowers that have started to spring everywhere in the last few days after a spell of very cold weather; and the roses in this epigram by Meleager (first century BCE) which celebrates hard work and the beginning of Spring:

A Cardiff crocus

Windy winter has left the skies,
The purple season of flower-bearing spring smiles.
The dark earth crowns herself with green grass,
And the blooming plants wave their new leaves.
The meadows, drinking the delicate dew of plant-feeding Dawn,
Laugh as the rose opens.
The shepherd on the hills rejoices in playing the pipes,
And the goatherd delights in his white kids.
Already the sailors travel on the wide sea,
Their sails swollen by the gentle breath of Zephyrus.
Already, covering their hair with the bloom of berried ivy,
people shout in honour of Dionysus, bearer of grapes.
The bees that are generated from the ox’s carcass
Consider their artful labours, and seated on the hive they build
The fresh white beauty of their porous comb.

A beautiful flower-shaped incense burner from Roman Belgium, Royal Museums of Art and History

The races of birds sing sweetly everywhere:
The kingfisher by the waves, the swallow on the roof,
The swan on the bank of the river, and the nightingale in the grove.
If the tresses of plants rejoice, and the earth blooms,
And the shepherd plays the pipes, and the fleecy sheep cheer,
And the sailors sail, and Dionysus dances,
And the birds chirp, and the bees labour,
How should a singer not sing beautifully in the spring?
Greek Anthology 9.363

Ciao for now!

 

 

 

Take heart, sailors: Strike diary 12

We are now nearing the end of our planned strikes. Tomorrow will be our last day. There will probably be further strikes in April, May or June if negotiations fail to bring resolution to this dispute, but we will return to work on Monday.

To be honest, I worry about this return to work. Apart from my maternity leaves, this is the longest time I have been away from my desk since I finished my PhD in September 2005. For I have fully withheld my labour. I feel that if, as a lecturer in relatively secure employment, I disrupt students’ learning and delay administrative work, it is only fair that I should not seek to develop my own career by working on my research. I present my sincere apologies to colleagues in other countries to whom I owe pieces of work – I promise they will be ready very soon.

That is not to say that striking was a break. This has not been restful at all. We have stood outside in all weather. We have spent hours on social media trying to rally people to our cause. We have attended teach-out events, open meetings and committees. In many ways, it feels as if we swapped one job for another one.

We also allowed ourselves to dream about better universities. Universities that are not driven by metrics and audit exercises. Universities that are communities of scholars, of people passionate about education.

So it is with some sadness that I will attend our last rally tomorrow, and with mixed feelings that I will return to work on Monday. I know that I am not alone in feeling this way, and perhaps we need some poetic encouragement.

Mosaic with ships, lighthouse and dolphin, Ostia. Photo: Patrick Denker, Wikipedia

Book 10 of the Greek Anthology (a collection of Greek poems put together in the Byzantine period) is devoted to hortatory and admonitory epigrams, poems that exhort and warn various people. I particularly like the following epigram, by a certain Satyrus (perhaps active in the first century BCE), which encourages sailors to take to the sea in the spring:

Already, the moist wind of Zephyr, who gives birth to grass,
Falls softly on the flowery meadows,
The daughters of Cecrops sing, the calm sea
smiles, undisturbed by the chilly winds.
Take heart sailors, loosen your mooring cables,
and spread out the delicate folds of your ships’ wings.
Go to trade, trusting in kind Priapus.
Go trusting in the god of harbours.
(Greek Anthology 10.6)

May we be of good courage!

This post is dedicated to the memory of Piero Tassinari, my friend and colleague, who passed away on the fourth of October 2017. He loved poetry and sailing and considered education to be a public good. Here is an extract from a film he made with Italian reporter Paolo Rumiz. It is stunning.

 

Cross-pollination on the pickets: Strike diary 11

Strikes are unnerving and unsettling. It is perhaps for that very reason that they are also sites of great creativity. There is so much art in making placards, creating slogans,  and writing strike songs. Our Cardiff rallies are becoming more entertaining and more cathartic by the day.

Another positive aspect of the strikes is that we get to meet people we would not meet otherwise. While universities praise interdisciplinary research on paper, it is fair to say that they do relatively little to facilitate that interdisciplinarity. Most British universities have lost their senior common rooms; staff are too busy to take their lunch hours; budgets for seminar series are dwindling. And when people from various departments meet, it is usually for administrative reasons, not to engage in “blue sky thinking”. So, quite strangely, striking can allow us to grow our academic circles.

If I were to use a botanical metaphor, I would say that strikes offer unexpected opportunities for cross-pollination of ideas. I touched upon the history of pollination yesterday, and I return to it today. The Greeks and Roman described processes that we would call pollination processes (in particular in the case of the fructification of the date palm; see here), but they did not understand pollination: they did not understand the ways in which plants reproduce sexually. This is why they could come to the conclusion – rather absurd in our eyes – that bees could damage flowers.

Gold plaques with bee-goddess, Camiros, Rhodes, 7th century BCE. The British Museum. Source: Wikimedia

We find that conclusion in an oration attributed to Quintilian (first century CE), on which I have written a few years ago (see here): a poor man and a rich man are neighbours; the poor man has bees; the rich man has flowers; the rich man accuses the poor man’s bees of damaging his flowers; the rich man sprinkles his flowers with poison; the bees die; the rich man is accused of wrongdoing. Then follows the long defence of the poor man (Pseudo-Quintilian, Orations 13).

This oration is well-known among classicists. Far less-known is the poetic reinterpretation of the case by Jean-Jacques Porchat-Bressenel, a professor of law, rhetoric and Latin literature at the Academy of Lausanne in the nineteenth century. His “Les abeilles du pauvre” was published in 1837 in his Glanures d’Esope (p. 295-6). By then, the role of insects in plant pollination was known (it was discovered around the mid eighteenth century). That fact is reflected in Porchat-Bressenel’s fable, which I translate here – rather freely:

Once there was a fellow, named Peter,
He only possessed a small plot;
Two goats he there struggled to maintain.
However, a great hive, bigger than his hut
Chez Peter flourished.
The neighbourhood whispered:
“His flies constantly on our flowers feed.
How dare he believe he has the right
To exact a toll on our meadows?
And to boast about his harvest!
I am in the tax collector’s good books,
And I do not need to pay more dues.
Against such pilfering, there must be a law;
By Jove, such a headache!
I want, when I have paid parliament and king,
To be sole master of my land.”
To that, what did the bee respond?
The bee, buzzing, kept to its labour,
Collecting up hill and down dale,
Never asking to whom the crimson flower,
To whom the plentiful pollen belongs:
They are the spoils of the hive or the wind.
And, in winter, when from the north the barbarian breaths
Spread in the neighbourhood colds and catarrhs,
The poor Peter with his honey,
Without asking a fee for his prescription
Came to heal his neighbours or alleviate their pains –
He even managed to sweeten their bile.

The story is clearly inspired by pseudo-Quintilian’s oration, but with some twists. The poor man’s neighbour is not presented as particularly rich, but rather as a narrow-minded, avaricious bootlicker, who has no understanding of new advances in science: he does not know what pollen is. The story is also given a moral ending: when the winter sends diseases to Peter’s neighbours, it is his honey that heals them for free.

There is a lesson here for modern universities!

 

 

 

 

You’ve got the butterflies all tied up: Strike diary 10

The last 24 hours have been filled with drama. At 8 pm yesterday, a tweet by the Financial Times pensions correspondent, Josephine Cumbo (who has been doing excellent work throughout this dispute), announced that an agreement had been reached between employers and our union. As the details of the “agreement” came in, most of us realised that it was entirely unacceptable: we were still being promised poverty in old age. Within 30 minutes, #NoCapitulation was trending on Twitter. By 10 pm, an open-letter asking to reject this deal had around 5000 signatures. We live in the digital age!

This morning, union branches throughout the country met to vote on the “agreement”. At Cardiff, we had to assemble in a local park because the community hall that had been booked was too small to host everyone. After a great exercise in direct democracy, we voted to reject the agreement. Nationwide, one branch after the other did exactly the same – unanimously. We sent our negotiators back to the table. Groups of students in many universities occupied buildings.

At Cardiff, a meeting at the Welsh Assembly had also been scheduled today. We travelled by buses to the Senedd and listened to speeches by several Assembly Members and trade unionists.

I won’t lie. I’m exhausted. I want to go back to the class room. This afternoon, I felt like giving up this diary. I felt so depleted. However, the beautiful weather – and a nap – gave me a boost of energy; and here we are for my thoughts for the day.

Colin the Caterpillar Cake. Photo by Ben Sutherland available on Wikimedia.

In fact, the following thoughts have been with me since the beginning of the strikes. I have found myself thinking about butterflies a lot over the last month. You see, our local strike slogan is #HelloColin, after our Vice-Chancellor’s first name, Colin. “Colin” is also the name of a Marks & Spencer’s caterpillar-shaped cake. (Wikipedia informs me that more than 7 millions Colin the caterpillars have been sold since it was introduced in 1990.) Picketers at Cardiff have of course exploited to the full, and in good humour, the association between our V-C and the caterpillar.

So I’ve been racking my brains and tried to think about Greek and Latin botanical texts referring to pretty butterflies flying over beautiful flowers. I could not recall any, and a look at a few works on animals in the ancient world confirmed this. The Greeks and Romans wrote very little about adult butterflies. Instead, they concentrated on the – far more pesky, from a farmer’s point of view – larvae and pupae. This is partly because the ancients had no understanding of the process of pollination (see here for more detail), and could not therefore appreciate the important role butterflies and other animals play in the propagation of plants.

Coin from Rhodes with Helios on the obverse and a rose bud with butterfly on the reverse. Source: https://www.cngcoins.com/Coin.aspx?CoinID=328690

Greek and Latin authors considered the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly alongside phenomena of spontaneous generation. I leave you with the verses of Ovid allegedly recording the teaching of the philosopher Pythagoras on the matter. For Pythagoras, butterflies are the souls of the departed:

If trust is given to things proven by experience,
Can’t you see that, due to time or melting heat,
Whenever corpses putrefy, they are transformed into tiny animals? […]
And those that are used to cover leaves with their white threads:
The wild caterpillars (a thing observed by farmers)
Change their form to become funeral butterflies.
Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.361-374.

May my butterfly mind rest tonight!

PS: some of you will have recognised the title of this blog as one line in Prince’s ‘When doves cry‘ – a beautiful piece of poetry.