Now Mars, the kid bothers me. Went ape-shit in Georgia last week, knocked up a bit of tit-for-tat and what do ya know there’s a war erupting. Hey what is it with countries they gotta behave like kids in the schoolroom. Now America tells the Russians to back off, and says war aint the way we fix our problems in the 21st century. Did I hear that right? C’mon you guys, get some brains to go with all that brawn. Hey, I don’t mean to slag off the US or anything like that, hell, they gave us a place to live, free to be worshipped in any manner we please. But c’mon guys, rub your brains together. If you want to protect your energy supplies, just say it. This kitchen needs some heat, especially when Apollo is out all day.

You get the feeling from reading Homer’s stuff that a shopping list was something special. A pair of sandals, a couple of arrow-heads, a goblet, some cloth and so on. Each thing treasured, praised to the skies with dignifying epithets. I like that. Everything these days is mass-produced; in Homer’s time they depended on the skills of individual craftsmen: some arrows flew truer than others, some goblets were dikaioteroi than others if you know what I mean. It’s kinda sad and yet inevitable that the surviving relics of these objects linger on in glass cases in musty museums.

Well let me tell you, I still have a sparkling pair of golden sandals from that time, imperishable as the poet said, with which I can fly like the wind over land or sea.

These lines are from a famous comedy sketch written in English, in England:

Peter Cook: Now, Mr Spiggott, you, a one-legged man, are applying for the role of Tarzan - a role which traditionally involved the use of a two-legged actor.

Dudley Moore: Correct.

Peter Cook: Your right leg I like. I like your right leg. A lovely leg for the role. That’s what I said when I saw you come in. I said, ‘A lovely leg for the role.’ I’ve got nothing against your right leg. The trouble is - neither have you.

Okay, so you find it funny? Sure, I do too. Now imagine these English lines are not English at all but taken from some Greek comic play you’ve been told to translate. If you’re lucky you might get some support notes of the kind below which I asked Titan (You met our servant?) to rattle off:

l.1 one-legged, i.e. missing a leg through deformity of birth or an accident or amputation.
the role, i.e. a character in a dramatic performance. Mr Spiggott has arrived for an audition and hopes to be given a part.
l.2 Tarzan, i.e. the part Mr Spiggott hopes to play: a fictional character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, a child who grew up in the African jungle, becoming proverbially strong and athletic.
l.5 Your right leg I like. I like your right leg. The chiasmic repetition sets up the droll irony to follow.
l.6 ‘A lovely leg for the role.’ Clearly the interviewer never actually said this. The irony now gathers momentum.
l.7 I’ve got nothing against … i.e. to have no objection to.
l.8 Neither have you: the interviewer brings the comic exchange to a climax with the sudden juxtaposition of the figurative and the concrete: Mr Spiggott has no left leg adjacent to his one remaining leg.

See where I’m going with this? No kid with semi-knowledge of the language is gonna get the comedy here without the notes, and with the notes any humour will be long dead by the time he’s finished them. Add to that he’s gonna look up in a dictionary every third word. It kind of loses some of the sparkle, don’t ya think? Especially when you have to pen out essays to pass some examination or some such and so you repeat things from books about how wickedly hilarious it all is.

Reception. Now there’s a fine thing. I kinda felt when the post-modern thing started a few decades ago it was a licence to waffle. Now it’s official. I mean, sure, some of you professors have gotta spin out a yarn or two to justify your funds, and don’t get me wrong I’m with you and Athena on this rather than spend it on more missiles for Mars. And sure, the interpretation by the receiver of any piece of work is kinda essential if it’s gonna stay with us: meaning has its variables if you know what I mean.

But look, you need to ask yourselves, where are you going with all this? Do your students wanna know more about the ancient world or the people who took it over, like those medieval guys with their monastic inhibitions and shady secrets or those showy renaissance people or the humanists - don’t get me going on humanists - and then 20^th century classicists, losing out to all the new sciences and arts and subjects like that. I been watching for centuries how we Olympians get written up, painted, phenomenised. I tell you, it’s an absorbing thing, how all the different eras respond to what we do. But primary thinking has gotta be about you and your time: where in the world today is my boy Aeneas, the refugee, carrying the seed of a new empire, and what of the indigenous fellas, reactionaries for sure, ready to fight for modern-day Turnus? And your liberal obliging King Latinus - today he’s all around us.

Okay so cultural studies can embrace how some of that stuff went down in other eras, but you classical students you gotta decide if you wanna spend your time on the classics or on those other eras. Time is precious and the college timetable aint spacious.

Maybe the same advice doesn’t apply to the profs and dons and longterm wiseguys. Every discipline has its fad, maybe derivative of other studies or sharing a widespread cultural thing. There was a time when just about everyone was paid to dream up a PhD in mother-studies, a cosmetic piece of gender-balancing that never did much for family values. Then it was grants for gay studies, and homo-erotic stuff was all the rage for a while - ok so I pick on some that are easy to mock, but you get the gist here, fashionable topics that a funding source throws money at for some cheap political gain.

I’m not saying Reception is that shallow. I think for sure there’s an air of apology about it, a drift into relativism, a failure to look me in the eye. No one said the classical world was perfect, but then I aint no Medusa.

Then again I gotta concede there’s some lively debate flying around Reception and some valuable stuff exposed. Sure there are times when it’s gotten something to say for itself. You can thank Reception for sparking up discussions between the profs, which lit up the philosophy behind all this cultural exploration stuff.

Take the philosopher-classicist who wants to know what such and such a thinker actually meant. He wants to strip away all our assumptions, say, about Socrates and what he or we mean by virtue, and concentrate his gaze on what the ancient sage himself meant by what he said. He’s working in an anti-Reception process, a search for the original meaning, to purify it from any interference by the receiver who in his thinking muddies this meaning with inappropriate assumptions and values.

Then you got the literary-classicist, more ephemeral in his judgement, more arresting to the reader, who waves the Reception flag all over the debate. The ancient context is not reproducible in any sufficiently valid way he’ll argue, so any notion of a pure and original meaning is beyond us. This fella takes the line that we are more likely to authenticate our understanding if we push for insights into how the original under the spotlight has been interpreted in all kinds of different epochs with all their artistic, political and judgmental flavours. If we look into a range of other responses our interpretation aint gonna get warped by our own whims and assumptions, or at least less so.

I may not be known as a philosophical goddess, but this is healthy discussion, with more than a dime’s worth of Platonic ideology. That kid kicked off the whole thing of whether there’s a pure, essential idea behind a set of individual similars or whether ultimately a generalisation is anything more than speculative inference from those particulars in varying shades of vagueness. Maybe you could ask me to answer that question for you, but I don’t wanna become the subject of the debate.

I kinda take to the variety in types of guys who study the ancients: the step-by-step philosopher, thorough, plodding and dedicated, and the more literary types dipping in and out like bees amongst the flowers.

You gotta hand it to classicists. Sure it’s a narrow field of study, but the closer you inspect you see a breadth of style, of interest, of opportunity that you mortals won’t see in many other places.

The classics today? I guess there’s been so much reworking, responses, interpretations, reactions against (that’s implicit respect) that even if all the Greek language had given you was the word ‘paedophile’ the classics would still be all the rage.

I’ve been spending time in England. I can tell you there are some enthusiasts out and about. That guy Boris chortles a lot about Latin. I’m told he’s gonna be mayor of London. Maybe we can expect a temple or two and an amphitheatre there before too long. I don’t care for the killing and butchering, do you? I don’t do cruelty, well, not that kind of cruelty. My sister Diana and brother Mars, they’re more into that.

Then there’s the Sharpley kid. His boy-meets-girl story he put in one of his Latin books may be fetching in its way, but why a monastery? Why not classical? I could go on. His stuff is hot in New York, ok, but I can’t find it in England. Maybe he should join the Friends of Peter Jones Society or some such. Now there’s a fella who knows how to put other people’s ideas into the public domain and isn’t ashamed to push himself into the spotlight. Maybe that’s where we gods missed an opportunity. Get a good PR man.

There are some good dames on the scene in England. There’s a lady called Jenny March who does a lot of work on some classical newspaper; but they say she’s gonna retire soon. And another dame called Beard, serves up plenty of articulate stuff. And Paula James who keeps the University open all hours, and the kid called Charlotte Higgins, she’s inventive even though she’s gotta write trashy stuff for some newsheet. She says Latin told her the difference between an English gerund and a gerundive. Is that some big deal? And doesn’t she mean a gerund and a participle?

That brings me to one my headaches. What is it with you guys that makes you think you write good English because you speak Latin. Hell, I speak Latin, sure, and my English, well, it kinda proves my point. But, jeez, the first rule of writing is get yourself something to say. There’s an English dame who’s written some minimalist stuff for kids, I heard, a mouse or some such. Teaches you English, she says. I tell you, she’s all hockey sticks without the jolly. But I’m told this lady has put bums on seats, and you gotta respect that.

Some of you classics guys are so wound up over your participles and textual minutiae it’s no wonder you got nothing to say. Breathe a little, huh? Just once go out and hang your participles. I’m not saying you people are prigs - you like to read about me and my Family for heaven’s sakes. But take my brother Mars - he says some of you remind him of those stuffed shirts who can only laugh at a fart joke if it’s in some Shacklespeare play. Ok, so Mars’ fart jokes aint always hilarious, but I know what he means. Trying too hard to get with it, you know what I’m saying, like one of your modern vicar tea parties where they make risqué comments to show how trendy they just become. Let me tell you by the by, sex aint funny in England, only in France. Now Scotland, that’s a bit different, when I come over to England I sometimes stop in Scotland. It’s cold and misty, sure, but they have respect for me and the family. I like what they do. A bit old school, maybe. But it takes all sorts.

It’s a fussy crowd, these classical carers; but you humans, you need guys like this. You need your doctors, your gravediggers, your refuse collectors. Well hell’s dammit, you need your classicists too.

So what am I doing, talking to you? You seen a lot of me in the pictures, the storybooks, the scandals, the sex. Like the Queen of England we gods never have our say. I guess that’s gonna change now.

Life was good for us once, in those days you people call ‘classical’. Of course we’ve been around long before and long since. But in those days, when Athens wasn’t cloaked in pollution and Rome was the world city we had your prayers, your offerings, your respect. Then came the Judaean kid, and we were thrown out the temples. Hell, we were banned I’m telling you. Not for long maybe, but by the time those monks started to think about me and my family we were kinda in a glass case, as pretty ornaments, a metaphor for f**k’s sake.