The Department of Classics

‘ResNovae’ was the Classical Term for revolution. The two words as you will recall actually mean ‘new things.’ Things indeed will be new first teaching in September but first let me reminisce on ‘mos maiores’, the way of our ancestors. Very sadly last year Rosemary Lukas died. Many of the older readers will remember her given that she taught at the school for many years and was one of the very few female members of staff in the early days at the Goddington Lane site. She was an outstanding teacher of both Latin and Greek whose results year in year out were impeccable. When I joined the school on a full time basis in 1989 bringing the department up to team of three, Latin was still compulsory for all boys up to the end of Year Nine. She fought ferociously for a subject she valued most highly. She was a specialist in grammar and to be fair to her she did not express a great deal of interest in the Classical Civilisation course which today is so enthusiastically embraced. She was not an innovator but a traditionalist and she could do the one thing was required of all us .She could teach. Her reputation for teaching was second to none and she did not restrict herself to Classics. Generations of boys will have been coached by her and her diary was always full. She did not advertise since her reputation for excellence was known. She will be both remembered and missed.

One can gauge one’s longevity when a number of staff in the common room are ex-pupils and indeed some who have been taught by you right through to A level. There are now three in my case and I gather the number will be rising next year. One of these is Mr Lake, who has been the Head of RE now for a year and has joined forces with me to start a new initiative of taking Year Nine to Saint Paul’s and the City of London Museum. In the latter we taught the boys a great deal about Roman London, its layout and its cult religions. One of the problems faced by teachers is finding suitable places for enrichment locally which can house whole year groups. While for example the British Museum is entirely wonderful it is always very crowded. This is not the case with the Year Seven visit to Portchester which as ever was very successful and we had the whole site to ourselves. The trip which I believe must be in its tenth year now has taken on a new dynamic with the Maths Department doing some excellent work on trajectories and for this I have to thank Mr Gyford. The big trip continues to be the one to Greece of which you can read a full report below. This will be run for as long as possible given the nature of the Art and Architecture Module taught in the Lower Sixth.

Numbers at both GCSE and A level continue to be strong with many students continuing to go to the best universities to read Classics. I hear excellent reports of past achievements notably Mark Darling’s First at Cambridge and George Jenkyns’ on- going success at the same university. The department faces new challenges in the coming years with the new arrangements of language options and the new configuration of the Key Stages. We will rise to these challenges with determination. Already new enrichment material has been produced and the department has been working on new in-house booklets on the Iliad and the Art and Architecture of Classical Greece. My colleague Mrs Latcham has been totally superlative and in the tradition of Classics department has naturally coached and umpired cricket. She has also taught Greek, spent some of her weekends on DoE and attended the Chapel Weekend in Carroty Wood. We are very blessed to have her here in the school.

David Craig S___Head of Classics

Year 7 visit to the British Museum

As part of a creative writing project Mrs Latcham and Mr Craig took a group of year seven boys to the British Museum. The idea was that by looking at the mythology behind artistic objects the pupils would be inspired to compose a story of their own imagination. While Mrs Latcham concentrated on the myth surrounding Theseus through the medium of pithoi, Mr Craig explored the notion of the ‘other’ through the study of the Parthenon metopes.

The 2013 Classics Trip to Greece

At the time of writing an opportunity for jingoism has occurred. In the past few weeks a Scotsman has won Wimbledon, a combined British Lions team has beaten the Australians, the English have so far won two test matches against the Australians and an Englishman has won the Tour de France. Not naturally given to displays of enthusiasm for banner- waving and indeed in its extreme form a detester thereof, I mention these victories by way of introducing the reader into the Classical world of agon

I want to explain what this means from the outset. It is a term that implies that in every walk of life a man must be competitively better than anyone else and it is an idea that appears in the earliest Greek epic that of the Iliad. To not be better than anyone else brings shame to the individual, to his family and the community or deme in which he or she was raised. By contrast to win is to bring glory to that individual, to his family and to his community. That glory will be taken to his grave and he or she will be spoken of with honour for ages to come. We are a great deal different today. We will of course remember Andy Murray winning Wimbledon in 2013 but will he be remembered in the Greek sense. I think perhaps not. Will he be remembered in Dunblane? The possibility is more likely especially if some statue is erected in his honour. But will Andy Murray be remembered in the same way as Leonidas the Spartan general at Thermopylae who died fighting the Persians in 480BC and fell in the very place in which Heracles his ancestor was born or Miltiades the Athenian general who fought and defeated the Persians at Marathon in 490C. The Greeks seem to have an ability which is alien to us to allow such memories to drench the psyche and permeate their aesthetic.

The students on this trip saw much evidence of the aesthetic ‘agon’ especially in Athens , a city of statues carved out of marble or in some cases bronze. The ancient Greek city is the city of monuments which permanently engage the viewer with the need to reflect on past achievements. They are to be seen in the round, viewed at different times of the day and to be a source of encouragement to greater things. The students also saw the replicas of the Parthenon frieze in the New Parthenon Museum and the stunning exhibition displaying to what extent the figures on the pediments were painted as were the korai that forested the Acropolis. The buildings on the Acropolis, the Propylaea, and the Temple to Athene Nike, the Parthenon itself and the Erechtheum were not pure pentellic marble but highly painted in vivid, almost gaudy colours; they were in modern parlance rather ‘bling’. All these sites in Athens were explored by the students and some others too notably the theatre of Dionysus.

Each year we go Greece I try to slip in something new which by my own confession is somewhat worrying and has not always paid off as in the case of Tegea last year. This time however we did extremely well with our first visit outside Athens to Rhamnous, an Athenian fort overlooking the straits of Euboea. It had two ports which were vital during the Spartan occupation of Attica during the Peloponnesian War of 431-404. Given that the ancient fort of Decelea had fallen into Spartan hands and the slaves had been freed from the silver mines in Laurion, the fort overlooked the corn routes from the east. Rhamnous has two small temples, one to Nemesis and one to Themis but descending over a very hazardous and rocky glen the valley opens up with the remains of a superlative fort complex with massive gates and wall. Nine towers exist alongside a theatre, a gymnasium and a shrine to Aphrodite. We had the whole site to ourselves and indeed the attendant looked somewhat bemused by the idea of a coach full of English pupils wanting to see the remains. From there we drove up the coast past the site of Marathon and onto Orchomenos, the capital of the Minyans. The site was excavated by the ubiquitous Schliemann betwee1880-1886. Here there is a huge bee-hive tomb comparable with the so-called ‘Treasury of Atreus’ at Mycenae .Although the roof has largely disappeared the stones are impressively enormous especially the lintel of Levadeia marble on the entrance. Off the main room there is also a small square chamber made from green schist decorated on its ceiling with beautiful floral motifs. Adjacent to the tomb there were the remains of a rather dilapidated 4th century theatre.

From Orchomenos we drove through the mountains up to Delphi on the day of the Wimbledon final. Under the auspices of my wife, a very keen tennis fan, a small group of boys went to watch the final in a local inn with Skye sport while I kept watch at the hotel. How many boys will be able to say that they saw a Wimbledon final in the shadow of Mont Parnassos at Delphi won by Andy Murray! The heat at Delphi was as ever extreme drawing to attention to the boys the horrors of travelling there, the dust, the unmade roads, the hazards of sea voyages and the sense of pilgrimage. The Roman section has been closed now to visitors though we were able to visit the tholos and the treasury of the Greeks from Marseille. In our minds we bathed like Byron in the Castalian spring, ritually purifying ourselves like the ancient traveller before entrance to the sanctuary itself. We saw the evidence of ‘agones’ with the various treasuries, the theatre and the dromos at the top of the hill. In the museum we delighted in the friezes from the Siphnian treasury and of course the Delphic charioteer. Delphi never fails to impress.

The journey to Olympia from Delphi is long and I would welcome any feedback from a reader who has any suggestion where we could visit. Olympia itself was as wonderful as ever and I perhaps begin to understand more each year about the site. There was a good deal of excavation work in progress around the palaestra and perhaps next year we will be able to see the results. The site was not busy and this gave us more time to linger especially at the Roman sections and the remarkable Leonidaion. The pupils particularly enjoyed the workshop of Pheidias and its position in relation to the Temple of Zeus. For any enthusiast of the Classical World a visit to the site museum is essential and not to have seen the pediments from the temple of Zeus, Praxiteles’ Hermes and Dionysus and Militiades’ war helmet from Marathon would be a travesty.

We went up to Bassae the following day to see Iktinos’ experimental temple of Apollo Epikourios. The coach driver said that he had never been there before and indeed became lost but the scenery in the area is so magnificent that we gained rather than lost. This year we had a talk in situ from an archaeologist who seemed delighted that any school party would visit. He explained that the thinking about the position of the temple was that its elevation was in part due to its relative proximity to Sparta. He believed that the outlying community of the Phigalians gradually planted their small communities in the ‘Bassai’ or ravines further up the hills to protect themselves from Spartan attack and descended into the valleys to farm. Although interesting I am not sure how far this helped in explaining the curious orientation of the temple, it’s odd side walls and the anionic Corinthian column in the ‘cella’. Its bronze statue to Apollo was removed to Megalopolis and later replaced with an acrolithic statue. This visit was as ever marked by some spectacular beetles, bugs and grasshoppers.

We stopped at Andritsaina a ramshackle village on the way down for lunch. This was not to everyone’s taste but it had a remarkable village square where water from the mountains was channelled through plane trees. It also had a rather splendid folk museum with a great deal of traditional Greek costumes and photographs of the current queen of Spain.

Between Olympia and Napflion there is very little archaeological which can be visited though we did try to see Megalopolis which boasts the largest theatre in Greece but as with last year the sites was closed. The final few days of the trip revolved around the sites of Mycenae, Tiryns, Argos and Epidauros. At Argos Seb Cook, a member of the National Youth Choir gave a stunning recital of an aria by Pergolesi, thus following in the tradition of Peter Leigh and James Robinson.

The trip went perfectly and the girls and boys who accompanied me and my wife were absolutely delightful. Their behaviour was immaculate and never at any moment did they give cause for concern. Some amused me especially with their enormously expensive ward robes, some confounded me with a vastly complicated card game, some had my wife in hysterics with a rendition of a song outlining my teaching practise with the refrain of irregular Latin imperatives and all made the visit a complete delight.

David Craig

The Charioteers

Kαλημέρα. Beautiful and good, how Do we begin to be Beautiful and good?

So it goes

Through gates whiter than ivory, or horn, And the passages passed together (Are these ivory or horn?)

Where the two do meet

The spear of Pisa, Hippodamia’s brazen gaze Only the centre of the universe

For a week’s voyage.

The breeze that carries in Mycenae

Exactly as we heard it.

Kαλησπέρα. A fine evening

To chase the echoes of the old days’ heat Towards a modern love.

Pierced by those

Two crossed knives

Hidden for seven years: Build. Sail. Revelation.

The distant battle

The patient love

Stretched across the horizon; Hold still, Atlas. Hold. Still.

So I straddle two lands

Mixing memory and pouring Pleasure into the cruel glass of summer Pausing in the palaestra.

And the breeze that carried in Mycenae

Exactly as we heard it.

So I say

Goodnight. In the morning. The weak heat of the morning Good night.

A week’s goodnight.