How to Teach Classics to Your Dog

A Quirky Introduction to the Ancient Greeks and Romans

Philip Womack

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786078155
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

'Immensely informative, wrapped in an engagingly casual tone, complemented by more than a dash of the bizarre. You'd be barking to miss it.' Professor Michael Scott Can you tell your Odysseus from your Oedipus? In this unique introduction, Philip Womack leads his beloved lurcher Una (and us) on a fleet-footed odyssey through the classical world. From Aeneas to Cerberus to Polydorus, you'll learn about the world of the Ancient Greeks and Romans and, with a bit of luck, you'll be able to pass it on to your dog. But maybe best leave out that story of the hounds who tore their very own master limb from limb…

Chapter 1

THESE ARE THE DOG DAYS

An Introdogtion

It was the dog days of early August, and it should, by rights, have been blazingly hot.

There was one slight problem, however. I was not luxuriating on a Greek island, sunning myself by the wine-dark sea, or inhaling cocktails in the purview of a Roman ruin.

The only thing that bore even the slightest resemblance to wine-dark was the raincloud looming above me. I was, of course, in England.

A rainstorm had been in unrepentant swing for quite some time, as Una and I huddled miserably under a tree near the bottom of Parliament Hill, on Hampstead Heath, which is the closest thing to the countryside you’ll find in London.

Some dogs were grappling with each other a few feet away: a ball of fur and heads, they resembled Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Hades, and were certainly making enough noise to trouble the dead. I said as much to Una.

She regarded me with a very particular expression that she brings out maybe three or four times a day. It registers mild disdain.

Cerberus? she said.

Earlier that morning, Una had shoved me out of the house, all but exploding with energy. Now, she couldn’t see why a tiny spot of rain should stop us.

If one got wet, it was possible to dry oneself by shaking one’s entire body from nose to tail, and, failing that, to use the base of the sofa at home. Why couldn’t we carry on?

Una, I should mention, is an elegant black-and-white lurcher.

She huffed. A glimpse of a squirrel was making her twitch.

‘Cerberus,’ I said to Una. ‘You know, the monstrous guard dog of Hades? Heracles had to drag him up from the Underworld?’ My thin shirt was already soaked through.

Una sighed.

I was wondering how much longer we might have to wait, and was even thinking about braving the rest of it, when, at last, the torrent gave way to a fine mizzle, and the black rainclouds rolled apart.

A ray of sunshine pierced, spear-like, through the sky, and then the gorgeous bow of Iris, one of the messengers of the gods, appeared.

Una blinked at me, her long, fine lashes quivering in a way that means only one thing.

That I’ve made yet another classical reference.

Around us, the Heath relaxed. The joggers, plugged into their little musical pods, continued on their rounds. The school-children in fluorescent tabards, hunting for tiny, brightly coloured flags. Teenagers doing tricks on bicycles.

And everyone else staring down at their phones, waiting for their next message to appear.

I turned to Una.

Iris? she suggested, with a flick of her tail, which waves, flag-like, when she is interested in something, although that is usually a decomposing vole.

‘Iris, the rainbow, was a messenger god, along with Hermes. The ancient world, much like ours, was powered by messages. People prayed to the gods, and sent curses. Heralds and embassies brought offers of peace or threats of war. In Athenian drama, the speech given by a messenger is one of the dramatic cruxes of the play.’

The sun was now fully out, the rainbow fading, the dark clouds pushing off to water the more distant suburbs. Iris, having done her duty, was heading back to Mount Olympus for a well-earned rest, a cup of ambrosia and a gossip with her fellow immortals.

‘Our idea of the rainbow as the kitsch preserve of fluffy unicorns is not at all the same as the ancients’. For Homer, Iris is “storm-footed”; she’s also the sister of the Harpies, vicious half-birds half-women.’

We pottered up Parliament Hill, beginning to dry off a little. Una took the opportunity to rub herself on a bit of grass; she only succeeded in making herself look more bedraggled.

‘It’s all about messengers,’ I continued. ‘The rainbow is a celestial phenomenon, marvelled at by generations. We’ve been trained to think of it as light refracted into seven distinct colours. But look at how Virgil describes Iris, in his epic poem the Aeneid.’ I pulled the quote up on the SPQR app.

Ergo Iris croceis per caelum roscida pennis

mille trahens varios adverso sole colores

And dewy Iris, on rosy wings, through the sky

Came pulling a thousand colours…

At this point the goddess is zooming to Earth, on a heavenly mission. She is described as ‘roscida’ – dewy; on ‘croceis pennis’ – rosy wings; and she drags with her ‘mille colores’ – a thousand colours.

A thousand?

Una can’t really see colours, but she was still a bit confused.

In Homer’s Iliad, Iris is ‘porphureen’.

Does that mean ‘purple’?

It does, Una. But that’s not what Homer was thinking of.

Let’s look up the word in Liddell and Scott. This is an Ancient Greek dictionary, first published as recently as 1889, and still essentially in the same form. Things used by classicists are none of your shoddy flat-pack stuff: they are built to last, which is more than can be said for dishwashers.

This Liddell, incidentally, was the father of the Alice Liddell who inspired Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (which has been translated into Latin as Alicia in Terra Mirabilis^*). I have had my Liddell for over twenty years. There even used to be jokes in it.

Really? In a dictionary?

Yes. If you looked up sykophantes in the first edition, you’d find the meaning ‘false accuser’; then that it referred to people who accused others of stealing their figs. ‘This,’ says Liddell, ‘is probably a figment.’

Tumbleweed, said Una.

Ahem. They removed it from subsequent editions. Rather than lugging about a heavy volume, I have it all on my phone.

I looked up ‘porphureos’, and read it out for Una:

‘of the swoln [sic]…’

Sick?

No, sic. It means ‘thus’. It’s Latin. It’s when something looks odd, or is a mistake, and you put it there to show that it’s what was actually written down.

I continued with the definition: ‘swoln sea, dark-gleaming, dark; of blood; of death in battle; of stuff, cloths, etc., dark, russet; of the rainbow, prob. bright, lustrous; and of serpents glittering. Homer seems not to have known the porphura, so that the word does not imply any definite colour.’

The ‘porphura’ is the murex, a shellfish that, when crushed, produced purple dye – an expensive process, which is why it was the colour associated with wealth and emperors.

Note, though, that ‘the word does not imply any definite colour’. The rainbow is not purple; Iris is certainly not entirely purple.

Iris shows us quite how different the ancients were. To us, a rainbow is a process of physics. To them, it had a sense of movement, and of brightness, that ‘rainbow’ does not even begin to convey.

Look at the rainbow and you might see just seven colours, because you’ve been trained to do so. Perhaps now you’ll see a thousand.

Una was tugging at her lead. A squirrel, grown bold, had appeared a mere few feet away. It paused, bright-eyed, and glanced at us.

You, it seemed to be saying to Una, can’t catch me. Then, just in case, it scampered up a tree trunk to safety.

Deflated, Una turned to me. You’re always banging on about Classics. So what is it? And why is it called Classics? Is it like my favourite books?

What are your favourite books? I asked.

Una considered. She was about, I could tell, to say Dog Quixote. But then she thought better of it.

The Latin word ‘classis’ meant, amongst other things, a group of Romans who had reached a particular level of wealth – in other words, a class. It then spawned the adjective ‘classicus’.

What does that mean?

Excellent. A1. Top-hole. The bee’s knees.

The dog’s pyjamas?

Exactly. Classics is the study of what, over time, readers, writers and critics came to know as the Top Drawer of Literature from the Greco-Roman era. Specifically, the many surviving texts from fifth-century-BC Athens, and the first centuries BC and AD in Rome.

We have enough poetry, prose, plays, philosophical treatises, histories and other texts to fill the Colosseum many times over. One day you could be reading a light-hearted poem about a battle between frogs and mice; the next, a disquisition on ethics; the day after, an early effort at science fiction in which someone visits the moon. Most students will begin with the literature, with a dash of philosophy thrown in to add some spice.

There is also a joke book, the Philogelos.

Tell me a joke from it?

‘A pupil asks an incompetent teacher the name of Priam’s mother. At a loss, he answers, “Well, out of politeness we call her Ma’am.”’

I can see that one going down well.

You couldn’t hope to read every single text in one lifetime. You’d have to be immortal. And only jellyfish are immorta...